With Uncle Vai's Astral locus occupying one half of his mind, Caen held complex visualizations in the other half.

He could feel the dream around him breaking apart, but there was no reciprocation from Uncle Vai's domain. He cut off the working quickly.

Usually, Vai maintained enough presence to handle the bulk of Caen's transportation to his domain. But at times, he was completely unavailable due to work. Which made accessing his domain all but impossible.

Caen glanced around him. He was back at Ser-gwu Island's general library, sitting at a table with Zeris, her mom, and a group of faceless cousins. Beyond the large, arched windows, a thick fog roiled. This was the Seam, the layer of reality between the Deep Astral and the Sub-astral.

Without the necessary precautions, lucidity was a dangerous thing, as it very often attracted specters: astral monstrosities of varying penchants and proclivities. Caen had only been lucid for a very short while, so he wasn't too worried.

An experienced Dream-guardian would be able to protect and hide themselves while conscious in their dreams, but Caen wasn't yet at that level of skill. It was much safer to lose himself to his dream. So he did just that. The next moment, the dream embraced him.

* * *

On the rooftop of his family home, daybreak met Caen meditating. Even with his eyes closed, he could still see the sky brightening. He could no longer shut off his vision. Whenever he closed his eyes now, he replaced his mundane sight with a clearer, sharper vision from his speculon. From what he knew about the Edict bloodline, it could not be turned off, though he could always simply place a piece of cloth over it if he wanted to.

He'd woken up by 4 this morning, dead set on returning back to routine. He spent the first half of his time on the roof carefully executing magical exercises, giving his spirit and mind a workout.

These exercises today mostly involved modifiers and precasting.

As the name implied, modifiers modified spell constructs, imbuing them with desirable qualities and properties. By themselves, they did nothing, but only when stacked on a spell base did they add value. Modifiers were difficult, requiring not only those anomalous shapes to be held in his mind, but also quick Interactance calculations and micro-patterns of his spirit.

Despite being an involved and strenuous process, modifiers were worth the extra versatility they lent to spell constructs.

Precasting entailed going through the basic components of a spell right before the final step. Every spell culminated in the spell construct pulsing into reality. Precasting included delaying this last step. After each precast, he would then deconstruct the spell, unraveling it safely.

Afterwards, he contemplated his speculon: a marker of his mother's people—proof that they were descended from the same trio of progenitors who all served the Entity known as the Speculant Eye.

The Edict of the Speculant Eye was the religion his parents subscribed to. All his life, Caen had been told that the Edict, the command, of the Entity was for others to see. Understanding, insight, and wisdom were valued virtues. He'd been born with a dud manifestation of the bloodline, which, while rare, did happen sometimes. He had never been able to see through his speculon. And now that he could, he couldn't help wondering why.

For the longest time, discovering his third bloodline had been his ultimate goal, his identity. He’d needed to know, needed to find it… but couldn't. Couldn't identify it. Couldn't… see.

Which was unaligned with the Entity's command. The Edict was to see, and no matter how hard he'd tried, he hadn't been able to.

Thinking about it now, Caen wondered whether the Edict bloodline was a conceptual one. Magister Fermien had described conceptual bloodlines as those that were aligned to a specific truth.

What specific truth was the Edict bloodline aligned to? Was it sight or personal insight in the same manner that Ardor aligned to personal passion? For all he knew, the Ereshta'al bloodline was not conceptual in the slightest, and his fourth bloodline remained a mystery.

These thoughts led him to contemplate his other bloodlines and why Mimicry even existed at all. Were there other people like him who had four bloodlines and… gestalts of their own? Did gestalts even require four bloodlines?

When next Caen glanced at his pocket watch, it was almost 7 in the morning. It was a little inconvenient having to always keep an eye on the time this way. Even though Uncle Vai was trapped in the Astral Realm, the man made use of a second elevation Dream-guarding spell that displayed time zones around the world. He'd shown Caen a much less complex version of this, but Caen had never been able to even cast the spell. He smiled. He was going to start adapting that spell today.

* * *

Throwing on a weighted vest, he ran all the way to the workout area in Beslin. Other people were here already, using the equipment. Caen took the time to Mimic a Body-enhancer’s affinity and then proceeded to impart life-changing soreness onto his future self.

* * *

Once he was back home, Caen slowly tackled all the chores he'd been putting off. He did his laundry, dusted the house with some help from Zeris, cleaned out his armor and Valiant gear, serviced his guns, and finally got around to writing a list of what Chymical reagents and reactants he needed to replace.

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Depending on who you asked, practicing Chymistry was just as expensive as Scripting. He didn't have the money to spend on buying more crafting materials yet, but he wanted to get this out of the way now.

After Mimicking Zeris's Dream-guarding affinity, Caen went about running through some Dream-guarding exercises that he'd never been able to execute before. After a few hours of not pushing himself too hard, he stopped to eat a very hefty meal.

After this, he opened his bulky grimoire and found the time display spell. Grimoires were a personal codex, a private logbook often used to copy down spells that hadn't yet been memorized or fully adapted. Caen's had been a gift from his great-grandmother, and he hardly carried it anywhere with him due to its size. He was incapable of casting the overwhelming majority of all the spells in it, but that was going to change. He spent a few hours adapting the spell before he could cast it.

The time display spell kept a faintly glowing ephemeral construct at the corner of his eye. It was in standard Thermish numerals, and just looking at it made Caen feel so many good feelings in his chest.

Finding himself in such a good mood, he then proceeded to bully Zeris for some money to buy groceries from Drenlin. Her mother and his parents would be returning home any day. Caen wanted to prepare a warm welcome back meal for them. There was only so much he could get from the communal garden.

He took the books he and Zeris had borrowed from the public library and headed out to Drenlin.

* * *

Caen walked into the phrontistery, finishing a sandwich he'd bought on the way there.

He greeted the clerk seated at the entrance and made his way to the stairwell. Caen volunteered at the phrontistery once a week as a teaching assistant, mostly helping with lessons for newly awakened children.

The library was quaint and not even remotely as impressive as Uncle Vai's, though that obviously wasn't a fair comparison. Rows of shelves covered a good two-thirds of the library, with long tables for studying taking up what little space remained.

He waved at the librarian and headed into the shelves. He knew this place, or at least the portions of it that concerned magical topics, like the back of his hand.

Returning the borrowed books to their rightful places on the shelves, soon found him standing by the section that held Componeums: spellbooks of different sizes. Some were thick, fat tomes as wide as his shoulders; others were far smaller. Each one contained carefully outlined spell schemas with all the requisite components of whatever spell they portrayed. They weren't special, and Uncle Vai had explained how anything easily accessible in the public library of a city like Drenlin probably wasn't worth the effort. But magic was magic.

On his way to return the Fire magic componeum he'd borrowed, his eye caught a Gleam magic componeum and he stopped to inspect it. He'd had many thoughts about Gleam magic after Mimicking that shadeling in Redshadow yesterday. He flipped through, checking for shadow-related spells. He began reading over the spell schema of a shadow puppetry spell, which only seemed to extend a shadow by moving the light source that created it. He didn't find anything useful or informative, so he made to return the componeums back to their places.

“I remember you,” someone said quietly from behind him.

Caen turned and saw Norna, the girl he'd met on the train a few days ago. She'd been with her two brothers then. A tight scarf on her head kept her brown hair in place, and she was holding a Liquid magic componeum to her chest.

“Hello, Norna,” he said politely, also keeping his voice down. They were in a library.

She flushed from evident embarrassment. “I'm sorry. I… couldn't remember your name.”

“Caen,” he said, then nodded at the componeum she was holding. “Are you looking to branch out?” She'd mentioned her apprenticeship to a Flora practician here in Drenlin when they'd first met.

She perked up at that question. “Not really, no. But I'm really interested in Nurturing magic. Flora magic is a good foundation for that, but I'm still trying to decide which other discipline I should start looking into.”

Nurturing was a multidisciplinary field of magic that incorporated elements of Flora, Liquid, Clime, Earth, Blood-healing, and even Dream-guarding. Most Nurturing practicians specialized in just one discipline but worked with teams of other experts.

“Anyway, I’m biased to Water magic, but I have a low affinity for it,” she said, letting out a wistful sigh. “What about you? I didn't quite catch what you practiced the other day.”

“Spirit-healing mostly,” he said, sliding the Gleam componeum back into its place.

Smiling, she squinted and pointed at the componeum in his hand. “That's Fire, and this is the Gleam section.”

“I dabble in different disciplines.”

“Are you…” A curious glint passed across her face, and she stopped to make sure no one was close by. She dropped her voice to a sharp whisper. “Are you a Surfeitist?”

Caen raised an eyebrow. “Yes, but why are you acting like we're talking about a dangerous secret?” Surfeitism was the practice of indulging in multiple disciplines of magic. It endured some stigmatization, but not enough that he'd ever felt the need to hide his practice of it. Besides, most young people who dabbled in multiple magical disciplines like he did were usually just seen as excitable and unserious.

“I just thought that with… well…” she glanced at the speculon on his forehead, hesitating. “Are those religions even compatible? I thought you subscribed to Edict doctrine.”

“Oh, I think you might be conflating Surfeitism with something else. It's not a religion, just more of a… personal philosophy.”

She gave him an unconvinced look. “If you say so.” She lowered her voice even more. “I'm a Surfeitist too, by the way. And I'm very religious about it. I actually meet up with a group of like-minded people on Grat very often. We talk about magical theory and its general principles, especially the more esoteric aspects of it.”

“Er that's… nice,” Caen said carefully. “Esoteric aspects?”

“Yeah. You should come by some time. Would you like to exchange Grat coordinates with me?”

“...Of course,” he said, pulling out a small jotter from his bag. Since Caen didn't have Grat implants, he didn't have Grat coordinates of his own, so he often just gave people Uncle Vai's. Doing this was a lot easier than explaining why he didn't have one.

He wrote Vai's Grat coordinates down on a piece of paper for her, and let Norna put hers on the back of his jotter. He said goodbye and left the phrontistery building.

Caen glanced at the time, and he hadn’t even needed to check his pocket watch. The time hung unobtrusively at the edge of his vision.

This construct is really coming in handy.

He headed over to the Southway market square to stock up on groceries. The sooner he got home, the sooner he could be done with chores and get back to giving magic his undivided attention.