46th of Season of Fire, 187th year of the 32nd cycle

  Newt entered the town of Risingsmoke. It was a decisively common port town, filled with quiet little people just moving about their daily lives. Also, Newt saw not a hint of rising smoke anywhere.

  There was a mountain in the distance, and it could’ve been a volcano once upon a time, perhaps.

  He walked the streets, and just like years ago for his master, the crowd parted for him. Their dormant danger sense enough to scream in the back of their minds that something dangerous, something different was on the prowl.

  Curious. And Master didn’t even have real danger sense back then, only sharper instincts. Newt frowned. Does she have one now? Did she develop it? Can I ask her without harming her? Why is discussing forbidden topics harmful? Who decided it?

  Newt wondered. Threading was also taboo for those beneath the fifth realm. He had nearly died, so its dangers were obvious, but threading itself if abused the way he did was no less dangerous at the fifth realm. In fact, a fifth realm mage would blow up entirely if they had tried to do what Newt had done.

  Why not make a unified systematic approach to development of awakened? People might reach higher realms on average, would that threaten society in some way? Destabilize it?

  Newt looked around the street. What would happen if everyone here suddenly got a pound of gold?

  The most obvious answer was they would be rich; they would buy land, servants, and stop working themselves.

  What if everyone in the world got a pound of gold?

  Gold would probably become common and lose value. Some would still hoard it, and after enough time, it would once more become a symbol of wealth, back in the hands of more or less the same people that had it before it was distributed.

  No, that’s not right. Some new powers would rise, but they almost certainly would have risen no matter what.

  Newt frowned. Was the same true for awakened? Giving them superior techniques and instruction to those already good would make them great, but the supreme ones would take it in stride, their trajectory unchanged.

  Newt thought and walked, mixing with people, using their lives and their tendencies as a mirror to the awakened.

  If the higher realm ones, awakened at the fifth realm grew more numerous, more would fumble their way across the boundary that had never even appeared for me. More peak mages and knights would mean more mageknights, and the already scarce resources would grow rarer still.

  Some supreme, world-shattering talents would die to numbers and poor luck, while the others would push further.

  But their natural talent would at some point become an obstacle they can’t push through. Meaning they might swell the number of those at the eighth or ninth realm, but the number of exalts would remain the same.

  No! It would drop, since more with the ability would die in the process of ascension.

  Newt approached the problem from every angle, but his reasoning seemed sound. His father, for example, had used the ancestral technique, which their ancestor had used to reach the seventh realm. Newt had read the manuals, and they hid nothing. He gave suggestions on realm sculpting, meditation cycles, everything an awakened would need, and yet Newt’s father fell short at the fourth realm, reaching his peak.

  Why?

  Dandelion delved into it briefly, saying it had to do with the quality of the core one used to awaken. He said he had a whole theory regarding it stashed away in his documents, ready for Newt to read once he had recovered the spatial pouch, but those texts were lost.

  Why does the core’s quality matter?

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The texts Newt had read implied that the maximum speed with which one could gather and unleash mana depended on core quality. Newt had a volcano, and many side vents, each adding a trickle to his passive ability to draw outside mana into his body, but he would never reach that maximum potential. Each step he made towards the ideal was smaller and smaller, no doubt getting him closer, and no doubt proving it was beyond his reach.

  As for ability to channel and manipulate mana, that much was obvious, with Newt outstripping Maelstrom, despite all the advantages she had had from childhood.

  The baptisms in celestial flames also helped his growth, including his ability to manipulate mana as well as its purity.

  Thinking about the nature of mana and society isn’t why I’m here. Newt reminded himself. What he wanted, what he needed, was to learn to accept death and to return to the human he was.

  His first idea was to find dying people. To witness the natural side of the process, the one where lives weren’t cut short with tooth and blade.

  The first person Newt sensed was choking on poorly chewed meat. Newt entered the old man’s home and vaporized the string of dried meat caught in the old man’s throat.

  He’s younger than me. Newt thought as he left without saying a word.

  The next person was a young man bleeding in the back of an alley, stabbed through the lung, drowning in the very liquid that had supported his life for years. There was nothing Newt could do. The potions he had on his person would explode the man. Even if he watered them down, he would probably kill him.

  He shook and stared at the heavens, gasping for air. This too was an unnatural death, nothing enlightening about it, and Newt grabbed the youth and dropped him into the infirmary a minute later.

  Newt had seen too many comrades die like that. As for whether the youth would live or die, that was up to his luck, and had nothing to do with Newt.

  Newt spent the day walking about, stalking death, and found that death is often preventable or caused by a human factor. The third one was a construction worker falling a handful of yards, the man was dead before Newt processed what was happening. The fourth and final death was of old age and disease, of body failing due to decay.

  Newt watched and experienced the death. Even after the old woman’s heart stopped beating, the rest of her struggled for life, but it was an empty shell screaming and protesting as it was abandoned upon outliving its usefulness.

  The brain flashed with lightning, working more furiously than when the woman was alive. Newt guessed it was transcribing the woman’s life.

  Dandelion said reincarnation existed, so Newt guessed the body’s final task was to deliver a report on the soul that had occupied it. Three minutes after the woman’s heart stopped beating, the sudden brain activity stopped, but everything was still alive, her lungs could breathe, her heart beat, her kidneys do whatever it was kidneys did. In fact, the kidneys took the woman’s death the best.

  Newt had explored every single piece of input he got from the experience, and realized he didn’t understand death much better than before. The only thing that surprised him was how diligently the brain worked.

  Failure.

  Newt didn’t know what he had expected, but nothing wasn’t it.

  Wait. That is it. The body moves to nothing, the soul and conscience move somewhere else.

  However, knowing or partially understanding the process didn’t help Newt.

  Life probably isn’t meaningless, otherwise, why would that sudden burst of activity happen at its end? But what is the meaning? Is it even something I can understand?

  Newt kept his mana sense spread out, feeling everyone in the town. All forty-two thousand residents went about their daily lives, most of them unaware that two of their number were no longer with them.

  If they don’t notice the disappearance of their peers, am I really expected to notice it? To mourn?

  And yet he did mourn his teacher. Stronggrow was a man of virtue. A loyal man who placed his task and role above his own wellbeing. With his temperament, he would’ve been a pillar of a much larger clan or even of a royal family, his life longer, his potential greater.

  But would he still be Stronggrow? If he reincarnates as the next emperor, will he still have the same benevolent temperament? The same dedication?

  What about the old lady who had just died? What about the mason?

  Suddenly, as if answering him, a baby’s cry entered Newt’s ear. The child was just born, not twenty houses from the one in which the old woman had died.

  Is that the answer? We live to create more life, so that when we die our souls can experience more lives in which the only thing that matters is that they create more life? Are we really such hollow, self-propagating existences?

  Newt focused on the baby. Its brain moved, grew, and reshaped itself with such speed that even Newt’s mind failed to keep track of all the changes as they happened. The body was a wonderful, incredible mechanism, complex beyond words.

  Newt scanned the child’s mother. She was normal, non-awakened. And yet, her brain reshaped itself as she watched her baby. The process was slower, more subtle, but it happened.

  Even among the non-awakened, evolution happened. Life moved in some direction. Perhaps that was the point, a direction Newt, in his tiny shell, couldn’t comprehend. Movement of life towards some final destination.

  He didn’t believe it, but he decided to try to stay open to it, to that advancement everyone made consciously or not. Perhaps it would let him stay human. Perhaps it would let him see something others had missed.