The Third Step: Chapter One

I lifted a silvery shovel and slammed it down into the earth. With one final grunt, I finally ripped out the last scoop of dirt from my mana-garden. Power flooded through my entire garden, and I took a step back, shielding my eyes as dust blew around me and the bricks transformed. 

I let out a sigh and stepped back, examining my mana-garden as I completed my breakthrough into the peak of third gate. My spatial gate had been the last one that I’d finally finished working on stepping through – not especially because it was all that difficult, but rather because Meadow had advised me to capitalize on all of my unfinished work before I advanced again. 

Some of it was simple, standard advancement, namely ingraining the spells that I had yet to complete. The amount of strenuous use I’d put them through in the assault on the desolant supercolony had done a good bit to help me push my skill for some – like Foxfyre – while those I hadn’t used in the fight – like Hiding Spider – took a bit more effort for me to push through and ingrain. 

I hadn’t had much left to do in Crysite other than pick up some spells and do minor jobs for points to trade in for advancement resources. Thus, most that time, as well as the time on the ocean liner, had been the perfect time to push the standard path of advancement. Even if it hadn’t been particularly unique or strange, it was still potent. 

My temporal magic in particular had grown, with the enhancements to my echo magic from ingraining the relevant spells. They in turn synergized with Capture Moment and the existing ingrained echo spells, which was then boosted even further thanks to the Kirin’s spell. As if that weren’t enough, things like Foxswap worked alongside my legacy and some of the other bolstering effects, improving my abilities further. 

Not only that, but the improved fidelity of the illusions through Refine Image had seemed to connect slightly with my ghost magic, helping them seem clearer and more present. That, in turn, cascaded with my Foxfyre – its ingrained effect allowed me to release Foxfyre through any second bodies, illusions, or comparable things. I could now toss balls of the mana-eating flames through Arthur, or through any illusionary, physical, or magical echoes I left around a battlefield. 

I hadn’t had nearly as much work to do with life and death, so I hadn’t seen nearly as much growth there, though finally ingraining Spirit Circle to bring down its frankly absurd casting time had been a nice little bonus. I also hadn’t seen as much of an impact from ingraining Spatial Harvest, mainly since it was little more than an increase to my already fairly decent spatial mana regeneration, but it was definitely another minor element of improvement.

A more potent synergy that I’d managed to develop was the one between the mask I’d be wearing in the tournament, the Hiding Spider spell, and Mold Aura. The mask wasn’t a part of my garden, nor connected to it in any way, so there was no effect from my Kirin’s spell, but still, their combined effect was potent. Hiding Spider’s ingrained effect helped to warp space and time around me, pulling my leaking mana in and making me slightly more veiled, while Mold Aura’s ingrained effect allowed me to adjust the balance of the aura I was already putting off, focusing on certain elements of my mana more than others. I’d personally set it to focus more on releasing my forest-tainted hudau mana, giving me an impression somewhere between a forest spirit and a pure hudau mage like Edgar. 

The mask’s minor similar enchantment meant that the combined effect really made me feel like some sort of mutated version of a Huli Jing – maybe one whose parent had been heavily altered by a forest spirit, and had children with a stronger life and telluric aspect than mental and solar. 

The one difficult part had been Foxthorn. With the incomplete spell, I wasn’t able to ingrain it and launch the spell through my mana senses, rather than through my hand. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it made my organs itch in a weird way for that to be the only spell in my entire spirit that I hadn’t managed to ingrain before advancing. Still, unless I wanted to detour around the entire other side of the planet in an attempt to visit the Heritage Fox’s preserve, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

Of course, with all the advancement, I had to spend a good amount of time trimming down my spells as well. Fungal Armor in particular had been quite something, having taken so many glancing attacks from different desolants that it had developed a variety of new budding mushrooms for me to combine or pluck, and had even developed another tiny kernel of true desolation resistance. Thankfully, the combination of soul mana and my new spiritual tools meant that cleaning up my garden took far less time than it once had, especially for spells I didn’t need to be the most delicate about trimming.

Just because I had mainly focused on my primary, straightforward method of advancement didn’t mean that it was the only method I’d spent time on. Whenever I’d been too low on mana to work on advancing the normal way, I’d turned my attention to the energetic arrays within my body. The power that it could offer me wasn’t much, but it was still worth attention. 

Unwinding the knots of life energy from around my beast core and through the rest of my body had probably been the most noticeable effect, as it allowed Starfish Regeneration to more effectively distribute its regenerative magic through my body. Even the ingrained effect of a minor amount of passive regeneration was improved by it. 

While focusing around a beast core was incredible effective for a starfish with a beast core in its center, humans were rather differently shaped. I’d considered laying most of the spell’s energy over my heart, lungs, and brain, since those were arguably my most vital areas, but dismissed it in the end. If I was taking an attack that was going to kill me, I’d be relying on my Ephemeral Rebirth to save me, or else I’d just be dying. The regeneration offered by the starfish’s spell wasn’t meant to be life support – it would be better to improve its ability to close wounds. 

The other biggest effect came from wrapping Mantle-Dragonfire around my hands and palms, instead of my throat, where it had been before. It might be second nature for someone with the form of a dragon to fire beams of energy from their throat, but I felt it was much more intuitive to release it from an open palm. 

In the same vein, I’d also placed some of my other spells through my fingers, forearms, biceps, and triceps, namely the ones I tended to use gestures while drawing on, like Briarthreads. 

Some of my spells didn’t need to be moved, like Foxstep, because they were already in the perfect spot. While I might have been able to force it to drain from my entire body equally, rather than mainly draining from my legs, the spell worked based on acting as if I’d actually moved that distance, and at the end of the day, the main way I got places was walking. Getting a less cardio focused workout while using it might help me get slightly stronger, but it would actually make the spell less effective. 

A surprising number of my spells actually fell into that camp: surveyor’s eye, as well as pretty much all of my sensory spells, and Hiding Spider. 

Others still didn’t really matter one way or another, so they got to stay where they were, like spatial tripwire. It was somewhere in my internal organs, in the upper part of my abdomen – I wasn’t good enough at biology to say what exact organ it had imprinted on, let alone why. Sure, there was a minor argument to be made for placing the spell along my fingers, to help me draw with it more effectively, but I had other spells that I wanted in my fingers more. 

I could have unwound it counterclockwise through my body, like Ivy had with his own spatial energy, in an attempt to help me resist foreign teleportation effects, but having it bunched up in a single ultra-dense spot achieved a rather similar effect in a different way. It was like increasing the mass of a stone, rather than the acceleration – either way, the force was going up. Ivy didn’t have any purely spatial spells to take advantage of the strategy, but I did, so I might as well save myself the effort and use it.

Then there was the last, and most esoteric, method that I could use to advance: adorning my roots. 

It wasn’t a method of strength I’d delved much into yet, since up until this point, I’d always been rushing ahead for the next barrier, and the effects were of partially lesser effect as a spellbinder. The roots empowered things through resonance, and Arcanists got a massive increase to resonance, which was where the power of the roots would really shine. Still, it was something that I’d overlooked too long, and with Meadow, Orykson, and Ikki all advising that I focus on finishing things up before pushing ahead again, I’d finally focused on it. 

Ornamenting my full-gate spells had been a strange mix of easy and absurdly difficult. The very first thing I’d done was take my spiritual sickle to some of the excess trimmings from my Quality Lifespan and Improved Sleep spells, chopping them into a sort of spiritual mulch, and then laid the mulch around the enormous oak tree, the massive mushroom, and the intersection point. 

It was the other spells that I started to have trouble with. Since Beast Mage’s Soul created the circuitry through pulling my spirit into my body, I decided to add tiny amounts of each of my existing spells into the mycelial tendrils. It had an effect, but far less of one than I’d hoped. 

That had led me to my next layer of experimentation, and made me start to understand just what Orykson meant by this being much more of an art form than a science. I took small amounts of trimmings from each of my spells and formed them into tiny copies of the spellforms, which I’d placed in a circle around the stalk. 

That had massively increased the amount of resonance that the root had pushed through Beast Mage’s Soul, despite the fact that roughly the same amount of trimmings had been used in both cases. Then, when I’d used the sharpest bits of the mulch to nail the spellforms into the stem of the mushroom in a rough approximation of where they were in my body, the resonance had increased again. When I’d attempted to repeat the feat at the intersection point, nothing had happened at all. 

Since Magister’s Body helped restore my energies, I used some trimmings from my Starfish Regeneration in the shape of the original starfish, which seemed to be fairly effective, and to my surprise, using trimmings from Enhance Plant Life and Mass Enhance had also worked to a small extent when shaped into a replica of the oak tree. 

At least Foxstep had been easy – Harvest Distance, Spatial Harvest, Analyze Space, Foxarmor, and Foxswap were all clearly linked, and when I’d formed them into ornamental wreahes in the branches, as well as mulch, it had worked excellently. I’d also added a small amount of Starfish Regeneration and Quality Lifespan, since Foxstep drew on my energies. If I’d had access to trimmings from my full gates, I would have added them too, but alas there was no need to trim them. 

It was only with all of that work complete that I’d finally been ready to break through to peak third gate, and it had been just in time. The boat would be making its stop in Delitone in just two days, meaning that it would be time to start hunting for the eggs with Edgar before too long. 

I stacked the bricks from the ascension onto my walls, then pulled out of my mana-garden. It was time to see just how far I could get into peak third gate in two days.