Chapter Sixty: Awake…

Greg couldn’t tell how long it took for the fog to clear from his mind. When it finally did, however, he found both his teacher and familiar looking at him with clear concern in their expressions. Looking at them, one might be forgiven for thinking that he would fall apart at the slightest touch. Even Greg found himself worrying that something had gone wrong. With an expression of both confusion and trepidation, Greg finally spoke up. “What’s wrong?” He asked.

“Who are you?” Came the immediate question from the healer.

Rather than alleviate it, his confusion only deepened when he noted just how serious both her tone and expression were. His teacher wasn’t in any way trying to be funny, she was actually waiting for him to answer the question. “I’m Roka,” Greg replied, his tone reflecting the confusion he felt. “Who else would I be?” he couldn’t help but add.

“How old are you?” Came another strange question, this time from Olivia

“I’m eighteen cycles old, I’ll be turning nineteen cycles this coming spring, “ He responded, volunteering more info than asked. “What’s going on?” He asked.

His teacher and familiar looked at each other, a mix of confusion and tentative relief in their expressions. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Another question came his way from the healer. The tension was killing him, but from her tone, Greg could tell that she was trying to figure out where to begin, so he chose to answer. “You gave me the beast-core and I…” his gaze had dropped down as he remembered the beast-core. His words, however, came to a sudden stop as two things caught his attention. The first was the fine dust in the hand that had been holding the beast-core. Given that it was the same color as the beast-core had been, it didn’t require a great leap of logic to figure out what the dust was. Somehow, the beast-core had been reduced to fine dust in his hand. How that was, he couldn’t tell. Greg had nowhere near the strength to do this physically, so something else must have been going on. Greg, however, was barely paying this mystery any mind. His attention was instead directed to his other hand where the Azra’s bead was glowing much brighter than it had been doing before.

Greg turned to look up at Olivia and his familiar, both hopeful and afraid that this was somehow a joke they were playing on him. “What’s going on?” He asked again, this time with more anticipation in his voice.

Mercifully, this time he actually got an answer from his teacher. She went on to explain how they had gotten the formation wrong. It had taken a few minutes but eventually, Olivia had figured out that he wasn’t fighting the fragment of the obsidian earthmover’s soul that had been left behind. Instead, he’d been sucked into some sort of illusion by it. Greg sat in stunned silence as he learned that six whole days had passed since he’d sunk into the Obsidian earthmover’s illusion. When his head turned to the mouth of the cave, not only was it a few minutes to sunset based on the angle of the light coming into the cave, but it was actually snowing! It had been just a little under an hour after sunrise when Greg sunk into the beast-core's illusion. Also, winter had begun almost a week back at the time but it hadn’t yet begun to snow.

Greg didn’t ask why he wasn’t starving or dying of thirst. Having already gone through this when he woke up in this world, he knew that the healer’s life mana could sustain him even without eating or drinking. Instead, his heart hammered in his chest as his teacher and familiar explained how he had been beyond reach, even by their new formation while he was inside the illusion and all the dangers that this situation posed. Contrary to what one might expect, it wasn’t the risks that scared Greg. He already had an inbuilt tether. Though he was still nowhere near close to understanding how it was done, his mind had been partitioned into two by the deity-level being that reincarnated him into this world. There was the open section that held the memories that his familiar and any decent enough mind mage could access. There was, however, a more secure section kept under lock and key that only he could access.

It was this part that held all his most important memories up to and including his concept of self. With this part, no matter how long the illusion was, he was never in any danger of losing himself. As soon as the illusion had run its course, his memories had been a jumble at first. Everything, however, quickly fell into place as Greg’s memories of who he was and what had been going on took their place. Everything that happened inside the illusion, despite having felt completely real, now felt like a lucid dream to him.

The fact that they had been unable to connect to his soul also didn’t come as that much of a surprise to Greg. He’d known his soul was somehow masked and hidden from detection from the moment the deity-level being showed him Olivia’s true self’s first appearance. If his soul had been easily detectable, he doubted that the primordial would have either missed or ignored it. The deity-level being that reincarnated him into this world had told him that enough of Roka’s soul was left to keep the soul seed, aka the system, going. Greg suspected that this had been the bridge connecting him to the familiar. All their attempts to anchor his soul probably failed because, without knowing, they were aiming at this ‘bridge' as opposed to his real soul.

The reason his heart was hammering was because he was afraid of what would have happened if they had succeeded. Greg didn’t know if it was because there wasn’t enough of the real Roka’s soul left to anchor to or if it was because of something else that they failed. He, however, didn’t want to imagine what they would do to him if they suspected that he wasn’t really Roka and that he’d somehow taken over Roka’s body. Would he even be able to convince them that this new soul was the one they’d always been interacting with ever since the accident that brought him to the infirmary? Luckily for Greg, the prospect of his soul being corrupted by that of the obsidian earthmover was scary enough that neither his teacher nor his familiar questioned why he looked so horrified.

“My family!” Greg spoke up, as another thought crossed his mind. “They must be worried sick,” Greg said, making to rise to his feet.

His familiar, however, held up a hand, her words stopping Greg in his tracks. “No need to worry,” she said. Greg then got to watch as his familiar morphed into a clone of himself. “On the very first day, I told them that you’d be away for a few days. When you didn’t wake up by the third day, I started to go home in your stead. As far as they are concerned you’ve been going home normally for the past three days,” she informed him.

It felt odd for Greg to see his own face without looking at a mirror and hear his voice when he wasn’t speaking. But other than the strangeness of the situation, Greg was relieved that his family, at least, wasn’t beside themselves with worry over him. “But how would an illusion cause any of this?” Greg asked turning his attention back to the subject at hand, even as he held up both his hands. On the one hand, was the fine dust remains of what had been the beast-core. On the other, was the Azra’s bead that was glowing in his hands. The healer had already explained how she had noticed it on the second day and that the glow had steadily grown from then. He was no longer a bottom-of-the-barrel earth mage but an average one according to her. She’d also explained the strange weight he felt on his head as being the orb that she used to scan her pathways. In an unexpected turn of events, his theory about affinities had been proven correct just a day after he came up with it. His teacher got to watch his mana pathways realign in real-time even as the bead glowed gradually brighter.

“Perhaps if you told us what happened inside the illusion we’d be better able to understand what’s going on?” The healer replied.

Greg could see it in both their expressions that they were really curious about this. Whatever it was that he’d experienced inside the illusion was the other half of the mystery of his transformation. Perhaps with it, they would better be able to understand why a beast-core had left him a better earth mage than he’d been before. Without beating about the bush, Greg launched into an explanation of everything that happened since he went into the illusion. From his time in the cave and how he learned to connect to the earth and get it to move with him. To his time after they left the cave and how he learned to get the earth to work with him rather than just repeat what he was already doing. He also told them about parting ways with his mother, his distress over it, and even the fight that came about as a result of it. “I barely made it out of that fight alive,” he said.

These three periods, the five years in the cave, the years that followed as I moved about with my mother and my first fight with another obsidian earthmover were the clearest of the memories I lived through. The other almost two hundred cycles of its life were a lot of the same thing. Move around, eat, sleep, and fight anything that crosses into its territory. The only other event of significance was that about forty or so cycles later, I came across a set of bones belonging to an obsidian earthmover in the forest on the mountain the town is on. I’m not sure how I knew, but I was certain that they belonged to my mother and so I went on a rampage for about a week in grief. When I finally came down, I buried the bones and sat by the grave for a day or so before moving. Once every few cycles since, I would come back and just sit at that spot,” Greg said then went silent for a while. “That’s probably what it was doing when we came across it,” He mused, finding himself feeling sorry for the beast.

“Also, I figured out why the beast seemed to fixate on me when we encountered it with Niya. Over the many cycles, its earth connection grew stronger, and with several fights against other obsidian earthmovers, it developed a sense of when other creatures with a connection to the earth like itself were close by. When Niya and I unintentionally came by it, it immediately sensed my connection to the earth and judged me to be the greater threat, which was why it came after me first,” He laid out.

There was a questioning look in the healer’s eyes as she regarded him. “How did you manage to retain your sense of self through two hundred cycles of the beast’s life?” She asked, and from Olivia’s expression, she too was interested in the answer to this question.

Greg had to school his features so as not to show any panic. This question was coming a little too close to his secrets for his comfort. There was no way of telling the truth without revealing that he had a separate space in his mind that only he could access. Still, knowing that he wasn’t anywhere near smart enough to deceive the two before him,  he didn’t try to come up with some elaborate lie. Instead, he stuck as close to the truth as possible. Allowing a look of incomprehension to show on his face, Greg just shrugged his shoulders and said. “I don’t know. While I was in the illusion, I was fully in it. I was the beast and the beast was me. But once it ended, I… I just came back to myself,” he said.

The answer was unsatisfactory, and Greg could see it in both their expressions. But given that he was still a novice in the magic world and all that it entailed, neither one of them seemed too surprised that he didn’t have an explanation for what they themselves couldn’t explain. In the end, it was his familiar that was first to move on. “Just a word of warning,” She began. “All through your recounting of the illusion, you kept saying ‘I' as if you were talking about yourself. You have to remember that these are not your memories Roka, they were foisted on you from an external source,” Olivia cautioned.

“That’s just the thing,” He said in answer. “I’m clear on the fact that they aren’t my memories, but that doesn’t change the fact that I experienced every single one of them firsthand. I wasn’t being told about it. I wasn’t watching it from the perspective of a bystander or third-person observer. I was right at the center of each of these memories. In a way it even transcended memories as I wasn’t even just remembering, I was experiencing it. I wasn’t remembering the cave, I was inside it. I wasn’t remembering fights, I actually fought,” Greg tried to capture in words just how real the experience had been while he was inside the illusion.

“I’m just trying to caution you that you should not lose the distinction between which part is you and which part is the memories, “ She offered conciliatorily.

“I can’t be too sure given that we are in unexplored territory,” The healer quietly cut in at this point, a contemplative look on her face. “But I suspect that the loss of distinction between him and the beast is the main catalyst for his improved affinity for magic. Think about it. You weren’t shown how the beast casts any of its spells in a demonstration. You weren’t even given a step-by-step explanation of how to do any of what the beast could do. Instead, you were allowed to see, experience, and learn it all firsthand the same way that the beast did. Even more than just a simple illusion, this was a direct, soul to soul, transfer of knowledge.”

“That’s the only thing I can think of that can explain what happened. After all, if knowledge alone was enough to affect one’s mana pathways, every mage out there would have a perfect affinity for the school of their choice. No. Whatever happened inside that illusion, it had to have happened at a deep enough level that your spirit-body where all your mana pathways are would also be affected. By going through the illusion, not just as an observer but as the primary actor, you learned not only how the beast set up its foundation, but also how it moved its mana around to do all that it did. This, I suspect, was then mapped onto your mana pathways through your soul,” She laid out.

There was a stretch of silence as they all considered the healer’s words trying to see if there was any flaw in the reasoning. Or at least, that was probably what Olivia and the healer herself were doing. Greg was just stuck on one thing. “Are you saying that I now have the same mana pathways as the Obsidian earthmover we killed?” He asked, not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, he had gotten to live through its life, and in a way, it felt like they were just as much his own mana pathways as they were the beast's. On the other hand, Greg couldn’t help but feel like they were desecrating what little was left of the obsidian earthmover. Not only had they tortured the poor thing but even after it was dead, they had gone ahead and taken what little remained of it.

“In this particular case, yes,” The healer replied. Something about the way she answered him told Greg that the healer had more to say on the subject so he turned his attention fully to her. “I’m going to test something to see if what I’m thinking is correct,” the healer informed him. “I have a few tier-three beast-cores of the earth element in my possession. I’m going to take them out of my storage space. Please do your best not to try and snatch them from me,” She cautioned him.

“What are you doing? “ Olivia asked with clear displeasure in her voice. She clearly didn’t want a repeat of what they’d just gone through. Greg may have pulled through fine the first time, but there was no need to tempt fate.

“Just trust me,” The healer replied enigmatically.

Greg wasn’t looking to be away from his family any longer than he already had been. As such, even without her saying so, he would have done his best to resist the temptation. Much to his shock, however, when his teacher caused seven different beast-cores of varying shades of brown to appear before him, none of them even remotely drew him in the same way that the obsidian earthmover’s beast-core had the first time he saw it. If anything, two among the seven caused a feeling of revulsion to well up within him. Greg, who had been bracing himself to resist the desire for the cores, was left confused. “I don’t desire any of these,” He reported, his voice reflecting his confusion.

But while he was confused about it, a small smile appeared on the healer’s lips as if this was the exact result she had been expecting. “And how about this one,” She asked before Greg could say anything. The eighth beast-core didn’t appear in the line before him but in the healer’s hand. This was a good thing as all Greg could remember seeing was something crystalline and amber in color. He didn’t even catch its shape before his hand shot forward fast as lightning. There was no doubt in Greg that he would have forcefully snatched that core from the healer. Luckily for him, the healer was faster than him and had already sent the beast-core back into her storage before Greg could take it from her.

With the disappearance of the core, his rationality returned and Greg couldn’t help but look to the healer for answers. “It’s rather simple if you think about it,” The healer didn’t make him first have to ask before answering. “The clue is in the very fact that your affinity has improved, Before you copied the obsidian earthmover’s mana pathways, your affinity for the earth element was extremely low. I suspect that, at that time, all these cores would have been attractive to you. You, however, have just gone from having a very low affinity for the earth element to having an average one. All these beast-cores before you are from other tier-three beasts with similarly average affinities for the earth element. Two among them are even from beasts with a poor affinity for the earth element,” She revealed. While he didn’t voice it, Greg immediately knew which two those were.

“In other words, you have very little to gain from any of these cores, two of them would even be downgrades of what you currently have. That’s why they hold no allure for you. We had part of the picture when we figured out that you are drawn to cores of the earth element. However, it’s now clear that even more than the fact that it was a core for the earth element, the fact that it could improve your affinity to the element is what drew you to the obsidian earthmover’s beast-core. I suspect that even if we got another obsidian earthmover’s beast-core for you, it wouldn’t elicit that much of a reaction from you,” She said.

“All this still leaves one core question unanswered. And that’s why? You said it yourself that this hasn’t ever happened with any other mage before. Why am I in particular able to improve my affinity using beast-cores when no other mage is capable of doing the same?” Greg asked.

There was some silence as they all considered the question. In the end, it was the healer who came up with a tentative answer. “I'll only be able to test this out once I have an army of other mages awakened through this process. But as I said, and you reminded me when coming up with your theory of affinity, mana affects the mage just as much as the mage affects the mana around him. Perhaps the fact that your mana pathways were entirely made by allowing mana to flow through you and not through your conscious manipulation has made it that they are malleable to a certain degree. Perhaps your naturally formed mana pathways will always be inclined to find better and better ways of conducting the particular type of mana it has the highest affinity with,” She hypothesized.

“To bring it back to the original question you asked. Yes, you’ve copied over the obsidian earthmover’s mana pathways, but that’s only because compared to your original mana pathway layout, the beast’s was much closer to the ideal for an earth element mage. I suspect that in the future, the changes in the layout of your mana pathways won’t be as drastic as it was this time. Instead, you’ll only be picking those elements that will help you improve your affinity for the element, and discarding all other aspects that don’t help you raise your affinity. What I can’t tell at the moment, is whether this refinement process will only work while you are in the awakening stage and not yet a fully-fledged first-tier mage.”

“If it stops once you are past the awakening process, then you’ll have to find the highest affinity tier-three beast-core to help refine your own mana pathways layout and increase your affinity. If, on the other hand, it doesn’t, then we might very well have just discovered a way to increase your affinity to almost perfection,” She said, her tone conveying that she understood just how incredible a feat that would be if she was right. Greg too could understand how epic it would be to be endlessly able to increase his affinity to one’s element of choice. Excitement shone in his eyes as he imagined just how awesome it would be to have his affinity increase endlessly until it reached perfection.

The healer, however, was quick to bring him back down to earth. “That, however, isn’t to say that it’ll be easy, or risk-free,” She warned. “Remember, the higher one’s affinity for a particular element, the easier it is for them to rise through the tiers. That means that, if you keep looking for beast-cores with greater affinity than your own, you will inevitably find yourself looking for cores from beasts higher tiered than yourself. Hunting them down by yourself will carry the risk of losing your life in the process. If you choose to buy them, however, it’ll probably bleed you dry financially to get anything above tier five. And that’s only on the procurement side. We don’t have any guarantees that the cores of higher-tiered monsters are going to be as easy to deal with as those in the third tier are. Remember that the higher the tier of the creature, the more powerful their soul. If you are not careful, higher-tiered cores may do you more harm than good,” She laid out.

Greg found himself respecting the healer’s ability to remain calm and think several steps ahead. While he had been drooling at the prospect of achieving a perfect affinity. She had gone ahead and thought through what that would actually entail when put into practice. And she was completely right. First off, all this depended on whether he could still improve his affinity after he was past the awakening stage. If he couldn’t then it was all moot. If he could, then that was just the first of many hurdles. Getting cores from creatures with a high affinity for the earth element would be the next challenge. She hadn’t said anything about it but Greg doubted that such beasts were common.

After finding such beasts, Greg would have to figure out how to obtain their cores. He could either hunt them directly or hire a group to hunt down the beast on his behalf, that is if he didn’t get it in a shop where he could easily buy it. Either way, he’d have to either risk himself or tear a hole through his pocket to obtain the beast-cores he wanted. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, getting the core was only the first part of this whole debacle. Using it to improve his affinity was the second half of this battle and somehow, the consequences were even more dire. With his soul on the line, any mistakes or failures could lead to his soul suffering injuries which in turn could have catastrophic implications!

“Aren’t we ignoring the most important question of all?” Olivia spoke up in a serious tone. A look of confusion crossed Greg’s expression, as he turned in her direction. He couldn’t think of any particular issue that they were purposely ignoring, least of all an important one. But while he was confused, a bitter but resigned smile crossed the healer’s expression. It seemed that while he couldn’t work out what his familiar was referring to, the healer already knew. “Before, when Roka’s affinity for the earth element was barely any better than his other affinities, we could justify his shift to the school of life! The situation, however, has changed completely. With his increased affinity, Greg is almost certain to easily reach the fifth tier, with some effort, he could even cross into the sixth. It’ll be a long shot, but it’s still within the realm of reality that he even climbs to the seventh tier. With that in mind, asking him to ignore the best path before him for a path that he still has next to no affinity with is completely unjustifiable,” She expressed.

Greg sat in silence not having thought about what the implications of this change in his affinity would be. On the one hand, he didn’t want to abandon his teacher in her current state. After all that she had done for him, it would feel like a betrayal for him not to help her start anew as a mage. On the other hand, his familiar was completely correct in more ways than one. It wasn’t just about his affinity, after living through the life of the obsidian earthmover, Greg couldn’t see himself ever abandoning the earth element. It had become just as much a part of him as his very skin was. Even now, Greg could feel the earth below him through his strengthened earth connection. To lose that connection would be akin to losing one of his limbs, or one of his five senses!

“It’s simple, is it not?” Greg finally spoke up, “If I remember right, you said there were only a few minor issues with someone pursuing more than one school of magic, but nothing so major that it can’t be resolved. I see no reason that I can’t be both a healer and an earth mage,” He said with a smile.

“I see a big one!” Olivia immediately countered. “It’s something along the lines of having no fucking affinity for the school! Do not confuse having a good affinity with having a guarantee of rising through the tiers, master. Rising to the higher tiers as a mage of any school is by no means easy. You can’t afford to waste either your time or efforts pursuing a school of magic that you have no affinity with! If you try to pursue both being an earth mage and a healer chances are that rather than going far in both, the opposite happens and you end up mediocre in both!” She informed him.

“I know you want to help your teacher, master. To repay the kindness that she has shown you so far. But I am not her familiar, I am your familiar. And while you are thinking about her, someone has to think about you and your future. One path is already hard enough, trying to walk two paths may be taking a bigger bite than what can fit in your throat!” She cautioned. As unpleasant as it was to hear Olivia’s objections, he could also understand where she was coming from. As great as it would be to have her fully behind him whenever he decided to do something, he knew that he was probably better off having her willing to vocally object when she thought he was doing something wrong that would harm him in the future.

His gaze turned to the healer who was regarding him with a carefully neutral gaze. Once again, when it came to major decisions about his future, even when it affected her in such a fundamental way, the healer was trying to keep a neutral expression to keep from influencing him one way or the other. Still, that’s not what he wanted at the moment. He needed to hear her true thoughts on the matter and he communicated as much. A sigh left her lips even as she answered. “Your familiar is right. As my student, I can’t in good conscience recommend that you try to walk two paths, least of all when you have such a poor affinity for one of the two paths. In any other circumstance, I wouldn’t even be willing to entertain the idea.” 

“I, however, can’t pretend to be objective in the present situation. The simple reality is that I don’t think I can trust anyone else to do this. Remember that the first part of this process involves stripping me of what little power I still have. In essence, I’ll have to trust that the one helping me won’t strike me down when I am at my weakest. I’ve been betrayed once, I never thought I would be this trusting of anyone else, but so far you’ve shown yourself to be honorable enough that I am willing to risk it. But just because I am willing to trust you, doesn’t mean that I am willing to trust anyone else with this. If you don’t do this for me, chances are that I’ll be stuck as I am,” She said. Though her voice remained calm and her gaze steady, Greg could see it in her eyes how unwilling she was to see such an outcome.

“Why not just teach me what I’d need to know to dissolve your pathways and leave it at that?” He asked.

A sigh left the healer before she asked a question of her own. “Do you know why there are different schools of magic? For example, why don’t healers try to cast fire spells? Or why don’t necromancers try to learn a summoner’s magic?” It was a strange question to ask at this point, but from the look on her face, Greg could tell that she was entirely serious. “Come on, you came up with the theory, you should be able to come up with an answer.

Given that he’d only come up with one theory of note, Greg didn’t have to ask which theory. With that hint, the answer almost immediately came to him. “Different types of mana follow different pathways,” he said in response.

“And what do you think would happen if the mana flowing along your closed channels decides to take a left turn where there is no left turn?” she asked.

Greg didn’t have to think too hard about that one. “Trying to force mana to flow along pathways not suited for them will lead to injuries?” He said. A frown then crossed Greg’s expression. “But you said that there were no major issues with mixing different schools of magic,” he reminded with a questioning look.

“Think about it, Roka. What kind of mage would pursue two different schools of magic?” She posed.

Once again, Greg could see it in her expression that this wasn’t a rhetorical question so he gave it serious thought. When he did, the answer came to him rather quickly. “One who already has a high affinity in both schools of magic,” He said already understanding how this answered his contention.

“Not just high, but a very high affinity,” The healer corrected. “In other words, based on you’d theory, they already had the architecture to handle the different types of mana from the different schools of magic. This is the only reason there has never been a problem in merging two or more schools. Because the people who did it were already suited to both schools they wished to pursue. To generalize this to everyone would be like seeing a group of exceptionally strong men lift heavy weights and assuming that everyone can do it since they were doing it. In all my years, I have never heard of a mage pursuing two different schools of magic where he only had an average affinity in the second school of magic, let alone a poor one as you do in the school of life,” She revealed.

“If a mage is forced to practice in a school that they don’t have a high affinity in, they might see some improvement in that school of magic. However, the improvement won’t be anywhere near as drastic as the deterioration in their affinity for their primary school of magic. Before your theory, the common consensus was they different schools don’t mix well in those with poor affinity. With your theory, however, it’s easy to understand why. The mana from the school with a worse affinity is trying to modify the mana pathways to make them more compatible with it,” She laid out.

“When all your affinities were mediocre, the cost of shifting you away from the earth element path onto that of a healer was justifiable considering my promise to help you reach the fifth tier. Now, with your increased affinity for the earth element, the cost vs rewards aren’t at all balanced! You’d be losing a lot more by shifting away from the earth element than you’d be gaining by becoming a healer. She explained.

There was a long silence between the three of them. Olivia had made her objections known. The healer had also laid out the reality of the situation and all its implications. Now the decision rested with Greg, whether he would choose to help the healer to his own detriment or to do the smart thing and not jeopardize his future. “You say that trying to make use of life mana as an earth mage will harm my affinity?” he posed looking at the healer. A smile crossed his lips when she nodded “Well, I guess it’s a good thing we have a way for me to increase my affinity endlessly,” he said, his gaze dropping to the seven earth element beast-cores the healer had placed before him…

***