They walked towards the workout area as Caen explained an idea he'd been nursing since his spar with Malo last night. He’d talked it over with Uncle Vai in the Astral—once the man had calmed down—and felt fairly confident about it. A few resources in Vai’s library confirmed that the soul was essentially the body, mind, and spirit taken together as one unit. And since Mimicry allowed him to directly interact with his soul, Caen had been pondering how best to strengthen himself in this regard.

“I think I might be able to squeeze out more gains if I train with a boosted affinity. Like with an empowered body, for example,” Caen said.

Body-enhancers did this all the time. They'd cast spells to enhance themselves while working out, then return to their unempowered state and reap the benefits over time. Caen fully intended to abuse this now that he could do the same thing.

Lacking passive augmentations meant that he would be able to push his body even harder than ever. The mere thought of the results brought a smile to his face.

“It sounds like a good plan,” Vensha said, then chuckled darkly. “The aches and soreness that come after might just kill you, though.”

“I won't push myself too hard,” he said. He would rather not deal with severe backlash.

The workout area was a fairly secluded location in Beslin. It was encircled by short boulders, and the ground had been darkened and scorched as if with fire, making it stand out distinctly from the surrounding green grass. Different bars and poles had been erected deep into the earth to allow for various forms of bodyweight strength training. Free weights of heavy metal lay around as well. Some younger men and women were using the equipment already.

* * *

After nearly an hour working out cautiously, Caen and Vensha raced back home with spell-empowered bodies. Caen had never run so fast in all his life. They'd slowly built up speed, so he didn't trip and break all the bones in his face. The wind in his hair, whistling in his ears, the strength of each step, propelling him forward with great force. Caen was enraptured by all of it.

“Quite the rush, isn't it?” Aunt Vensha asked when they came to a stop.

Caen was panting, hands on his knees, but he nodded in agreement. However, his heart felt like it was being squeezed, as though it would explode any moment. And ancestors, the stitches. He wanted to sink to the ground and claw out his lungs.

Aunt Vensha chuckled. “Yeah, you'll have to watch out for that.”

“Why,” he rasped out, “didn't... you... warn me?”

“Think of it as a rite of passage,” she said. “And besides, pushing yourself too hard with Body-enhancement spells was not something I thought you'd have to concern yourself with for some time yet.”

Caen moved his fingers carefully in the components of a Blood-healing spell. Body-enhancement didn't do very much for actually healing the body, but it was the closest discipline of magic to Blood-healing, a sister discipline even. His spirit labored to execute the requisite patterns, and the spell still fell apart in the end. After trying a few more times, he gave up and just focused on catching his breath. There were certainly Body-enhancement spells for easing exhaustion, but Caen didn't know any.

They walked the rest of the way home. Caen stepped into the house, Aunt Vensha trailing behind him, and was instantly hit by the scent of food. Zeris was seated at the dining table, laughing at something their cousin, Tuni, was saying.

Tuni glanced at them, her shoulder-length pigtails swinging with the motion. She was holding a frying pan with one hand and wearing an apron. “Snow-head!” she greeted gleefully, waving a spatula at him. “Oh, hello, Vensha. Wow, you guys are really sweating.”

“Hello, Tuni,” Caen said, pulling a chair from the table. “Workout. Those smell so good.”

There was a large bowl of batter on the counter beside her, on which sat the heating pads she was cooking over.

“I wanted to fix you and Zeris breakfast,” she said. “My heart is made of rainbows.”

Caen gave her a flat look. “Wasn’t it you and your brothers who raided our house and finished all our food the other day?”

“Shut up. It was a picnic; everyone knows that picnics are a good cause.”

Vensha walked over to the stack of pancakes on the other side of the frying pan and tried to pluck one up.

Tuni smacked her hand with the spatula. “Don't do that.” She waved at the table. “You’ll eat when I'm done, and I'm almost done. I promise.”

Zeris offered Caen a bowl of cherries, which he took gratefully. “Come eat cherries with us, Aunt Vensha,” Zeris said.

“Why do you people always have so many bloody fruits in this house?” Vensha asked, dropping into a chair.

“Keeps your body and mind healthy,” Caen said around a mouthful of cherries.

“Hey, actually,” Zeris said, smiling impishly. “Didn't you teach us that when we were kids?”

“Word for word, in fact,” Caen said.

Aunt Vensha sneered. “Just pass me the bloody bowl.”

* * *

Despite his caution, Caen was incredibly sore once he disconnected from Vensha. The exhaustion alone forced him to sit on the floor of his room and try to regain his breath. He'd lost that intuitive and primal grasp that came with boosted affinities. But he could still sort of hear echoes of it in his mind, like a faint memory.

Climbing the stairs had been one of the hardest things he'd ever done in his life. His entire body was one unified ache that hurt so badly. He lay on the floor for minutes, thankful that he'd had the forethought to bring a bucket of ice up with him. Groaning, he sat up to freshen up.

* * *

Over the train ride to Drenlin, while reabsorbing his mana from his whorl-gem, Caen activated Soul-sense and tried conforming his Spirit-healing affinity to Zeris's. It was the first time he'd used his new abilities while using his whorl-gem. It had taken the entire train ride. Now that he actually stood a chance to participate in the patronage trials, Caen needed to put in more practice with his boosted affinities as well as refine his mimicking ability. The tri-clinic would provide opportunities for this.

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They disembarked at the Drenlin train station and made their way to the tri-clinic as quickly as Caen could move. The recommended entry point for healers was through the temple. It was a significantly longer route that was almost never used by the other healers, and though Caen actually preferred it, he knew Zeris wouldn't.

They passed the queue on their way in, walking through the front door.

“Hey, don't cut the line!” someone yelled at Zeris.

“Shhh,” someone else said. “I recognize the girl; she's a healer here.”

Caen frowned at Zeris. “How does anyone recognize you? You come here like once a week.”

She flipped her hair. “I know how to make an impression. I'm special that way.”

Caen snorted.

He took his temperature regulation pill as they headed for the Spirit-healing section. Healer Dodri, as usual, was surrounded by a gaggle of bright-eyed auxiliaries whom she was issuing instructions to.

When she saw Caen and Zeris, she waved them over. “Tell me I have you for the whole day.”

Caen opened his mouth to answer, but Healer Dodri cut him off.

“Not you, Caen. I know how much you love to move all over the place. And besides, the Blood-healers are even more short-handed than we are today. Zeris, give me good news.”

“I'm here till 3 in the afternoon,” Zeris said.

“I love to hear it. I'll give you some auxiliaries to boss around.”

“I’ll start with some Spirit-healing today,” Caen said.

“Of course, I never say no to more hands or spirit tendrils.” Dodri laughed at her own joke and walked away. “Come with me,” she called back to them.

Healer Dodri divided them into three groups. She led one herself. Another was led by a visiting Spirit-healer whom Caen didn't know. And Zeris led the last group.

Zeris's group was comprised of three auxiliaries and Caen. He didn't know any of them personally, but he'd seen them around a few times before.

Zeris picked an examination room and kept two of her group members with her and had the other one, a boy with a mohawk who didn't look older than fourteen, pair up with Caen. They sat side by side, but Caen had to keep Zeris in the periphery of his vision to maintain their connection.

The first patient to walk in, unfortunately enough, was a woman Caen recognized.

“You!” the woman said, pointing at him.

“Me,” he replied, letting out a tired sigh. She was the woman whose slag he'd helped cleanse the last time he'd been here.

“You told me to come back the next day,” she said, sitting in the chair opposite him. “And you didn't show up for our appointment. I had to be attended to by young teenage children even more inexperienced than you.”

Zeris flickered a tendril in and out of Caen's spirit in Code. Amusement. Have fun.

Shut up, he sent back.

“Please, hold still while I scan your spirit,” Caen said to the woman. “And remember not to make any sounds lest you disrupt the process.”

At that, the younger auxiliary beside Caen looked at him in confusion but thankfully said nothing.

Caen's spirit responded to him quickly and nimbly. He felt as though he could forego the requisite gestures significantly, if not entirely. He'd boosted his affinity in Spirit-healing a few times already, but it was always so jarring how much different, how much simpler, this all was. He worked faster, modifying the spell base with exhilarating ease.

There was nothing new to learn here, though. The woman's slag build-up had greatly reduced since the last time.

Caen retracted his probe. “Your treatment has been going well. You've been coming in every day?”

“Of course, I have. But the children who worked on me didn't even spend thirty minutes each time!”

“The auxiliaries, you mean,” Caen corrected. “We will get rid of your slag today. I and my companion here.”

“Is he even qualified for that?”

Caen held back a sigh. Everyone who volunteered here at the tri-clinic was tested by older and more experienced healers to ensure that they at least understood the basics of their discipline. “As I explained to you last time,” Caen said, “there are many other clinics I could recommend—”

“Hold on now, it was just a harmless question. I'm sure you know what you're doing.”

Caen delved into her spirit and began the cleansing procedure. The drudgery of magic had never bored Caen, but somehow it felt so much more interesting now that his spirit wasn't holding him back. He employed spell chains, which involved using modifiers to link related spells within the same discipline of magic. He wasn’t able to do this in his abjection, due to how frequently his spells collapsed.

After fifteen minutes, there was only so little of her slag left. He withdrew his probe and tapped the boy on the shoulder. “Take care of the rest. I've whittled down her build-up by a significant amount.”

The boy nodded and took over. Caen moved over to another pair of seats facing each other. There, he attended to the next patient. And the one after that. Both slag build-ups, which he cleared up in a fraction of his usual time. Caen marveled at that. In two hours, he had used up a great deal of his mana, but in that time, he'd attended to five more patients than Zeris had.

“You probably handled easier cases than me,” she groused, as they walked towards the helpers’ lounge. They'd been replaced by two acolytes and an auxiliary.

“Probably,” Caen conceded. But it didn't matter to him if all his cases were only a quarter as difficult as hers had been. He was just happy to be capable of using his magic for so many hours with this much ease.

When they entered the helpers’ lounge, the chattering went silent. This always happened whenever Zeris walked in. Caen had sat here one time eating, and as soon as she'd come looking for him, several conversations had died, especially among the younger auxiliaries. There was a certain level of apprehension people showed around Spatial mages. A lot of it, as Caen had learned, was founded on bogus stories and spurious accounts about what exactly Spatial magic entailed.

Zeris didn't seem to care, though. Even with Caen's more problematic reputation, she seemed to evoke a stronger reaction from people than he did. Tuni had packed them lunch, so they only refilled their flasks with sweetened water from the dispenser.

At the gathering array, they replenished their mana reserves. He'd stayed connected to Zeris's soul structure all this time, and the boosted Spirit-healing affinity allowed him to attune mana at a much faster rate. The Spirit-healing affinity granted a passive augmentation that pulled ambient mana towards one’s spirit faster, though not fast enough to fill his reserves. Even with a boosted affinity, that would take hours.

Splitting his mind, Caen studied his soul structure. He meditated on the various constituents of his soul structure, getting better acquainted with them.

An hour later, he and Zeris parted as he went off to the Blood-healing section. He helped out with some mundane healing for a while, after which he and a few other auxiliaries worked with Brother Nabik, observing the techniques the older acolyte was using for his spells.

Caen took the time to connect to Nabik and Mimic his affinity. Last night, he'd successfully identified his own Blood-healing thread cluster in preparation for today. Caen gladly cast a few spells to ease the pain in his sore muscles.

He then spent the next few hours helping out with lesser wounds and injuries. More than anything, he was satisfied with the speed and efficiency with which he worked. His control was a bit janky as he'd need time adjusting to the extra punch all his spells now temporarily had. He didn't work too fast, though. He'd always struggled with most kinds of mend spells, but none of that was a problem now.

Hours later, he met Zeris at the public library, which was located on the top floor of the phrontistery. With some help, they found only a few books that concerned fire bloodlines and strains of fire, but nothing on Passion fire. They took a Fire componeum as well. Borrowing books from the public library wasn't technically allowed, but there were certain benefits that came with volunteering as a teaching assistant.

They caught a train back to Beslin before nightfall.