Caen's limbs were shaking from mana exhaustion as he stepped into the helpers’ lounge, coat in hand. He'd long since grown accustomed to the very unpleasant sensation of depleting his reserves. When he was younger, he couldn't even move under the effects of mana exhaustion. The tri-clinic was quite cold, but nowhere as cold as his house was, and even though he would have preferred to put on his coat, it helped keep some troublemakers in line when they remembered just how big he was compared to them. His physique wasn’t all that notable by the standards of Body-enhancers, but at first glance, anyone else would easily assume that he was one himself.

A small table sat at the center of the lounge with trays of fruits and baked foods on it. A few younger auxiliaries were sitting on sofas around the lounge, chatting. He walked to the table, picking a fruit and a pastry.

“Oh, if it isn't our resident ritualist,” Rimich said, sitting on one of the sofas. “Did you exhaust your mana already? You must've been hard at work, considering how long it takes you to cast any spells.”

A few people laughed at that. Rimich often made snide remarks at Caen. Caen just usually ignored him. Verbal insults were awful, but he could tune those out easily. Where Caen drew the line was in physical brutality. And his reputation, coupled with his large frame, deterred most bullies.

Rimich was saying something, but Caen simply took a bite from the fruit in his hand before turning around and heading for the door.

“Honestly, I'm surprised he's able to work here at all,” someone else said in a low voice. “Can't decide if it's inspiring, or just sad.”

“Shush! Brother Nabik says that he knows a spell that can turn the skins of his detractors blue.”

Caen snorted.

A back room connected the tri-clinic to the temple, which was a spectacle in its own right. The floor and walls were silver marble with white streaks. There was an atrium in the building, letting in light through a skylight above. And despite having no windows, the whole temple was well lit by convex mirrors hanging from wall brackets that somehow reflected the light of the sun.

Caen made his way to the top floor, where the meditation chamber was located. The sliding doors of the chamber were made of stone, and within was a small, square room with thin cubicles lining the walls. Light curtains provided their inhabitants with some privacy. The room was illuminated by a single convex mirror. There were two other people here. An Edict acolyte and an older Spirit-healer from a neighboring town.

Caen headed over to the nearest empty stall, sitting cross-legged and taking out some books. He liked to combine his mana restoration time with a study session, as he could neither practice magic nor use the whorl-gem while he refilled his reserves.

Caen's mana reserves were nearly two times larger than average. This phenomenon was known as mana bloat and was a result of his abjection. Everyone's spirit produced attuned mana incredibly slowly, but passive augmentations served to keep one's mana reserves in check, thus preventing the mana reserves from bloating. Without any passive augmentations to keep a damper on his mana regeneration, Caen's reserves continued to bloat beyond the norm. If he didn't spend a lot of time expending mana through spellcasting and using his whorl-gem, his reserves would be larger still, which negatively affected his spirit and mana control.

Using a breathing sequence and basic spirit pattern, he began drawing ambient mana into his spirit. Active attunement of ambient mana involved grinding it against one's spirit and tainting it with the resulting particles, thus marking that mana as one's own.

He stabilized the working enough to turn his attention to the books in front of him.

Caen spent the next ten minutes decoding Zeris’s cipher. She preferred to use ciphers not for secrecy but as shorthand. Occasionally, when the fancy struck her, she made up a new one on the spot to better achieve whatever she was working on.

Once Caen was done, he was able to make sense of her calculations and equations. Carefully, he went over the math and the logic behind some of her solutions, making a few notes of his own. The math was mostly airtight, but he saw a few errors, which offset her precision by a minuscule degree. But precision was everything in Spatial magic. It wasn't a mistake she'd normally make, but Zeris hadn't been sleeping recently.

In about an hour, Caen's reserves weren't even a third of the way full. Still, he took out his whorl-gem and began emptying his mana into it in an intricate configuration. Once his reserves were close to empty, his spirit felt exhausted, and he felt feverish, his limbs shaking. The symptoms faded the instant he started drawing mana back from the gem into his spirit.

Most people preferred to avoid expending their mana completely, due to the side effects of mana exhaustion. Caen did this often and had built up quite some tolerance.

Doesn't make it feel any better, though, he mused.

As he refilled his reserves again, he perused a hand-drawn map of the world. He scanned the continents, noting regions he'd marked already as places of interest. In a few months from now, Caen would be traveling the world in search of alternative answers. He had made no headway in discovering his third bloodline, so he needed options.

After his break was up, he made his way down to the Blood-healing section of the tri-clinic. He was disappointed to find that Healer naMoon was not present.

Brother Nabik, an elderly Edict acolyte who had been at the temple since Caen's childhood, was already seated with two Blood-healing auxiliaries as they examined a patient lying on a bed. One of the auxiliaries was Rimich, the mouthy boy. His expression darkened when he saw Caen.

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“Brother Caen,” Nabik said. “It’s good that you're here. I want you and Rimich to help interview the patients outside. I need them further sorted in order of severity.”

Rimich, fuming, went with Caen to the waiting room. Everyone who wasn’t an abject had, at the very least, a basic resistance to sickness and infection due to their affinities in Blood-healing magic. Blood-healers, in particular, had even stronger resistance to illness and disease. Working as a healing auxiliary often put Caen at risk of illness, but he’d built up quite some immunity after years of working here and receiving healing himself.

Most cases here were emergencies. A boy had fallen and fractured the bones in his arm. A mother held her baby, whose nose and eyes were running profusely. She claimed that he'd ingested something he found lying around, but refused to say what. Two men had come with their friend, who sat drooping and swaying after getting into a fight at work. An age-stricken man who smelled of cheap booze kept insisting that he had a severe headache that just wouldn't go away.

Because so few healers were present in the tri-clinic, the auxiliaries had to pick up the slack. But most of them preferred to take long breaks after exhausting their reserves. This wasn't an actual job, after all.

Caen himself wasn't very fond of the drudge work. He felt most alive when he was actually using magic—granted, he didn't get to do that too often here, but he could at least help out in other ways. It took Caen and Rimich almost an entire hour to sort the patients.

Afterwards, Caen tended to wounds, mostly scrapes and bruises. It took him an embarrassing amount of time to heal even the shallowest cuts. Rimich was moving through patients at a much faster rate than Caen.

They sent the more serious cases to Brother Nabik and another older Blood-healer who'd shown up halfway into their sorting.

An acolyte and an elderly mundane healer helped out with applying poultices and salves. Blood-healing was more mana-consumptive than Spirit-healing, and even with his rather high mana efficiency, Caen was almost gutted out in under two hours. He resorted to mundane healing after that.

* * *

Once he was replaced by a pair of acolytes, Caen cleaned his hands with a very basic disinfection spell that failed a few times, then he proceeded to wipe them down with an antiseptic.

While Caen replenished his reserves in the meditation chamber, he split off a portion of his focus and delved into his spirit. He'd made it a habit to spend hours daily scanning his spirit for signs of the third bloodline. It was an elusive thing. He'd been searching for almost ten years now and hadn't gotten any closer to finding it.

He engaged the visualization technique he'd used earlier that morning, and as always, it collapsed every time. After several failures, Caen moved on.

He had some studying to do today. Two nights ago, he'd borrowed some books on pre-intermediate Spirit-healing techniques from an elder at the commune. Caen had attempted one of the exercises last night and had accidentally burned through over two-thirds of his reserves as a result.

He brought out the first book and opened it to the page he'd stopped at yesterday.

He tried some of the easier exercises and wasn't even able to execute a single one.

The sluggishness of his spirit, its blatant unwillingness to contort into the requisite spirit patterns, the way visualizations collapsed in his mind. Doing this daily, over and over. Sometimes, after a long day in the tri-clinic, it was easy to forget what he was.

Caen stared at his fingers. He didn't know how much time passed. Then he sighed, flipped back to the previous page of the book, and began carefully running through the elements of the first exercise.

When his break was over, he didn't leave. He continued attuning mana and studying the book. Routine was cold comfort, but comfort all the same.

Maybe I'll just sleep in tomorrow, he thought.

It'd been a draining week already, and perhaps all he needed was a full day of neither leaving the house nor having to deal with people. It had been a while since he'd spent an entire day just meditatively scanning his own spirit. Caen nodded to himself. That sounded to him like the break in routine he needed.

Someone walked into the meditation chamber, but even before Caen turned to see who it was, he felt Zeris’ spirit grazing his own.

She was beaming at him. There was no one else in the chamber with them.

He eyed her suspiciously. “Why are you smiling at me like that? Wait, were you actually able to open a portal?”

Her smile faltered. “No. But it's still awesome news.”

“What?”

She kept quiet, seeming like she was going to drag this out, but after tapping her foot on the floor and fidgeting for a few seconds, she gave in. “Alright, I'll tell you! Magister Fermien's in town!”

Caen’s eyebrows rose in surprise. Magister Fermien Aialda was a distinguished figure in academic circles and was as eccentric as he was brilliant. Caen and Zeris had first read his primer about eight years ago, and it had greatly improved their understanding of Fire magic. They had read every available edition of that primer ever since, though Zeris’s proficiency had far outpaced his.

The Magister taught at the Imperial Citadel of Magic all the way in Thermon. It was the very same institution that Zeris was leaving to study at in just under a year. The Citadel was one of the foremost authorities on Filiation magic and the study of bloodlines. If anywhere in the world had answers for Caen's abjection, it would be there, but acceptance into an institution such as this was reserved for the most talented and/or connected of individuals. “What’s he doing here?” Caen asked.

“Just passing through, apparently,” Zeris said. “He's coming to observe the Dalat festival dance rehearsals. Can you believe that? This is so exciting! We need to go now!”

Caen was already scrambling off the floor, shoveling his belongings into his bag.

“Are you going to dance today?” Zeris asked.

“No. Don't feel like it.” Caen had missed the last two rehearsals and had planned to miss today's rehearsal as well.

“Well, I heard rumors that Magister Fermien might even dance. Don't you want to impress him with your moves? He might agree to sign my 5th edition of the Hillian Primer.”

“Wait, you brought yours?” he asked as they walked out of the chamber. “Are you with mine too?”

“It’s a wonder I even remembered to grab mine. I was so excited I almost forgot to come here and get you.” She patted his shoulder. “Don't worry. I'll ask him to sign the front page twice. One for you and one for me.”