Caen got back to the commune, sore from his sparring session with Vensha and the weightlifting that had followed. Even though the weather was still only slightly warm, he was sweating profusely.

Most buildings in the commune were wide and cylindrical, each one housing several families. Some teenagers went about their morning chores, wiping down windows, raking leaves, and sweeping the cobblestone pathways. He waved back at an elderly couple drinking tea on their porch. A group of laughing children ran past him, tendrils of their spirits brutishly grazing his. He unfolded tendrils of his own to lightly graze theirs in turn.

Spirit-healers—especially those of the Ereshta'al line—were fond of interacting with the spirits of everyone around them; a habit instilled from early childhood.

His family home was a two-story house surrounded by a cluster of shorter, unoccupied buildings.

Caen opened the sliding door and walked into the house. He was greeted by a gentle wave of cold air that caused gooseflesh to spread all over his skin. Ever since an… accident years ago, the old Wards in the building had been stuck on one configuration—chilly—and Caen wasn't even remotely skilled enough at Scripting to service them.

Shivering, he took off his boots before parting the bead curtains of the foyer and found his cousin, Zeris, hunched over the dining table with a blanket draped loosely around her shoulders. She was a wiry eighteen-year-old with shoulder-length black hair that sat in disarray, in contrast to Caen's silvery white hair, which he'd tied in a messy bun.

Every square inch of the table was covered with open books and scrunched-up pieces of paper. Three empty vials of Rien stimulants lay on the floor by her feet. She was scribbling furiously into her grimoire while using her fingers to track the symbols in a reference book.

She glanced at him with crazed, sleep-deprived eyes. “Caen, you need to come and take a look at this.”

There were some fruits on the counter, but he opted for some cold ones. “When was the last time you slept or even ate?” he asked, walking over to the cooling box.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Zeris asked.

He grabbed two apples from within the cooling box, tossed one to her, and she caught it by reflex.

She reluctantly bit into the fruit and tapped an open tome in front of her with her free hand. “You'll love this,” she said, chewing, “I've found an equation that amplifies apertive-distortion, but I need you to double-check the math for me. At this rate, I'll be opening portals within the month. My genius is unfathomable.”

Caen rolled his eyes. “You said the exact same thing last month. Almost word for word. You should go and get some sleep.”

“Sheh,” she said, waving a hand and returning her attention to the table. “Sleep is for babies. And I'm closer this time than I was back then. I'm so close. Like really close, literally inches.”

He felt her spirit graze his as he walked over to look at her notes. He frowned. Zeris's scribblings were an indecipherable scrawl. He gave her a flat look. “And how am I supposed to read any of this?”

“Oh! Sorry.” She began patting around the table. “It's a cipher I made last night. The key is somewhere around here.”

Caen sighed, smiling. “When you find it, I'll take a look. Need to freshen up.” He climbed the stairs two steps at a time.

“No, wait, don't go!” Zeris's chair scraped the floor as she stood up to search the table more thoroughly. “It's right here. I'm sure I—where’s that blasted thing?”

Caen's room was slightly less cold than the rest of the house due to the aforementioned accident. The room was shaped like a semicircle. A good third of it was taken up by his reading table and shelves crammed with tomes and all sorts of paraphernalia. It was a mess, but there was a system to it. Sort of. His bed was a dainty straw mattress on a wooden frame pushed against one corner to make space for the low-tiered and incredibly crude gathering array that he'd inscribed onto the smooth stone floor. At the center of the room was a blue contemplation cushion.

He placed his glaive on the rack along with the other weapons there.

Stripping out of his clothes, he grabbed a towel and went to the bathing chamber to freshen up with hot water. He got dressed, grabbed his bag, which had been prepacked the night before, and clambered down the stairs.

Zeris was snoring softly on the table, a half-finished apple lying beside her. After scanning her equations for a moment, Caen memorized them, but he saw no sign of a cipher key anywhere, which made him shake his head fondly. He pushed aside the book she was drooling on, then grabbed the quilt, which had fallen partway to the floor, and draped it over her shoulders.

It was an extremely warm morning outside. The sun was hidden behind white clouds, yet that did little for the rising heat. He wore a weighted coat today, as he often did, not just because he could get away with sewing more pockets onto a coat than he could with a shirt or trousers. Every moment spent exercising his physical body was to his benefit. Caen had taken a pill to help regulate his temperature before leaving the house. He took two every morning since he was incredibly susceptible to the weather. When he was much younger, he’d needed to wear a hat and very free clothing when outside, but exposing himself gradually to the harsh climate had eventually accustomed him to it.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He hustled through Beslin and took the stone steps that led down to the tracks. The newly arrived train had begun blaring its air horn, but there was still time before it left.

At a food stall by the train stop, he bought a beef wrap for two chits; button-sized, pseudo-metal disks, each one with a hole in its center.

“Add extra pepper cumin, please,” Caen said to the vendor.

“Too much of that stuff is bad for you,” she said, but still complied, heaping the spice into his wrap.

A sparse crowd moved about as people embarked the train, chattering.

Caen found a seat by one of the entrances. The windows didn't have any glass in them. Tarp coverings at the lintel could be rolled down to keep out rain.

A sprite about the size of a thumbnail and made up of hair particles crawled along the seat beside him. Sprites would form from almost anything left unattended for long enough.

He finished his beef wrap in a few bites, drank from the keg of water in his backpack, and quickly penned down the equations he'd memorized from Zeris's grimoire. He dabbed at the light sheen of sweat on his forehead, then he brought out a whorl-gem from one of the many pockets on his coat. It was a pink orb about the size of his palm. He began pushing mana into it in a very intricate pattern, careful to make sure only a little was wasted in the transfer.

As he did this, he busied a portion of his mind with a piece of literature. Being able to split one's attention between two different tasks was a skill every spellcaster had access to due to the passive augmentations of their affinities. Caen had needed to train extensively for years to achieve this effect that others had been born with.

The novel was a fictional story of a young girl who’d begun as an abject but had, in about a hundred years of rigorous struggle, risen to become renowned as one of the most powerful archmages in history. That much advancement in so little time was woefully unrealistic. Also, many of the details were wrong. The protagonist was described as having just low affinities across the board, but that wasn't a proper portrayal of abjection. People were born with affinity ratings of no less than 1 in every discipline of magic. Along with a weak control of the spirit and a low tendency for the arcane, abjection entailed having not a single affinity rating of up to 1 in every discipline of magic. The difference was stark. There were no passive augmentations for ratings below 1.

A lot of the story was nonsense with jargon words and phrases that didn't have any actual significance, but Caen found it very entertaining.

A little boy placed his hands on the backrest of the seat beside Caen's and peered around his shoulder. “Wow,” the boy said. “Is that a mana crystal?”

Caen glanced back.

The boy was sitting in an older girl's lap, and she pulled him backwards. “Don't bother strangers, Werni,” the girl scolded. “And no, that's not a mana crystal.”

The boy, Werni, gasped, pointing at the speculon on Caen's forehead, which was now in clear view. “You're a priest!” he cried.

Caen's speculon was a Planar mirror on his forehead shaped like a thin, vertical eye. It was a mark of his mother's bloodline and her religion, hence the child's mixup.

The older girl let out an exasperated sigh and smacked the boy's hand down.

“Ow! Why'd you do that?”

“Don't point,” she said. She turned to Caen. “I'm so sorry about that. This troublesome child here is Werni, my little brother. I'm Norna, and the grumpy one's Parno.”

The grumpy one, as she'd called him, was a frowning boy of about fourteen who sat beside her with his arms crossed. He turned a glare on his older sister.

Caen introduced himself politely and began turning back to his novel.

"Why do you have white hair?" the little boy asked. "Are you... are you an old man priest?”

"The oldest," Caen said seriously. His white hair and speculon had always been the most distinctive features about him.

“I've not seen one of these before,” the girl, Norna, said, gesturing at the whorl-gem in his palm. “What is it?”

Caen wasn't in the mood for conversation today, but talking about magic was easy enough. “It’s a… tool for training mana control. It's called a whorl-gem.”

“How does it work, if you don't mind me asking?”

“I have to channel my mana in a specific layout and then withdraw it back into my spirit in the exact same configuration.”

She leaned forward to get a closer look. “Oh. So, it also functions as some kind of… mana storage device?”

“Not really,” Caen said, lifting the gem up for her inspection. “It can store my attuned mana for about twenty minutes before the mana begins to deteriorate.”

“Just twenty minutes?”

“Mana control training,” he said simply.

She nodded sympathetically as if that made perfect sense to her. “I'm apprenticing with a Flora practician in Drenlin. She makes me do all sorts of insane exercises in the name of training. Hang in there.”

Caen nodded politely and returned his attention to his novel. He glanced at the whorl-gem.

About four years ago, he'd read a publication on Ser-gwu Island that discussed how mana control tended to improve notably under specific conditions.

The first condition required eighty years of consistent magical practice, which usually came up to a post-latency tier of 8 in most cases.

The second condition required about two hundred and forty thousand instances of complexly emptying and refilling one's mana reserves.

A whorl-gem allowed him to simulate the latter condition at an accelerated rate. It was a depressingly long shot, but Caen needed every single advantage available to him.

The mana density in the nation of Rialgar was relatively sparse. And this meant that the process of actively attuning ambient mana could take him as many as twenty hours without the aid of gathering arrays. A whorl-gem, however, allowed him to expend and recover his emptied reserves in just thirty minutes. With diligent practice, Caen could hit two hundred and forty thousand repetitions in about sixty years. And even then, it would only give him a slight edge, at best.

He hadn't stopped channeling all this time. He picked up his novel and continued reading.