Alex couldn’t sleep.

  The others did, eventually.

  Jay went first, because of course he did. The guy could run obstacle courses until his lungs cried and then just… power down. He was on his cot, one arm flopped over the side, fingers twitching now and then like he was still trying to grip that new axe of his.

  Danny was next and he talked more in his sleep than he did when he was awake. Alex caught fragments now and then – half-formed sentences, sounds that weren’t even English. None of it made any sense, the words all broken and soft.

  Above the floor creaked as someone in Class B got out of their cot and walked across the floor.

  Alex glanced out one of the windows, marvelling again at how quiet this village was at night. There was no hum of traffic, no electric buzz from streetlights and home appliances. No TV’s or radios on. Just the occasional creak of timber and the far-off rush of the river that wound around the north side of the village.

  Back at the university residence, even surrounded as it was by forest, there had always been sound – the soft thrum of ventilation, people laughing through thin walls, phones buzzing at all hours. By comparison this place felt primeval.

  He sat cross-legged on his cot, back to the wall, blanket pooled around his waist. The half-shuttered windows let in strips of moonlight that fell across the floor in silver bands and reflected up onto the rafters overhead accentuating the deep shadows behind the beams.

  Alex didn’t notice any of that. Instead he was staring at his hand. At nothing.

  No glow. No lightning. No halo of fire. And definitely no obvious “congratulations, you are a wizard now” visuals on his HUD. Just skin. And faint bruises around the knuckles from weapons drills, and a line on his wrist where Connor’s sword hilt had caught him during sparring. It had been violently purple earlier in the day. Now it was barely visible.

  He turned his hand over, slowly, palm up, fingers curling and uncurling like he could summon forth magic with just a gesture. But his hand looked… normal.

  He thought about what had happened at the tavern. The memory of the heat, the sudden pain. The explosion of energy that had ripped through the tavern table.

  There was something wrong with how it had played out. He felt like HE had done something wrong. There was no way that it was supposed to work like that. He thought through the event again and again.

  How he had reached out to the energy in the room. How the mana collected on his hand. How it had burned him. How everything had jumped tracks after that. The boom and the table smashing and everyone in the place staring at him. Even that foreigner on the balcony with his angry eyes and quiet intensity. For a split second their eyes had met and Alex could feel the man’s power like a pressure that closed the distance between them.

  He exhaled slowly.

  “Okay,” he whispered to the dark. “Let’s troubleshoot this.”

  Because when something broke, you debugged it. That was how he approached everything. You don’t panic, you don’t get frustrated. You isolate the problem and break it down. You make a hypothesis and test it. You refine and repeat. Until eventually you had your solution.

  Magic – mana, qi, the pattern, divine spark, breath of the world, whatever term the locals used – was nothing more than a type of energy. And energy was, ultimately, something that had to follow a set of rules. Maybe they weren’t rules that could be explained by Earth physics, but there had to be rules. And if there were rules, he could learn them, bend them, use them.

  He straightened a little on his cot, rolling his shoulders a few times and stretching his neck. He took a deep breath.

  “Step one,” he murmured. “Define the system.”

  He replayed the events of the tavern in his head – the way the air had thickened, the shimmer of pressure that he could feel. He had definitely felt the mana around him even before he could see it.

  That feeling came back now: a weightless pressure, like being submerged deep in a pool. At the tavern he had reached out and tried to grab hold of that energy, and it had been like opening a floodgate.

  Mei Lin had said that being able to see mana was uncommon, rare even. Most magic users, she’d said, had to rely purely on the sensation of the mana around them to cast their spells.

  If that was true, then he definitely had an advantage over most other magic users. He could both feel and see it.

  He drew in a slow breath through his nose, exhaling through pursed lips, the way Mei Lin had shown him. She hadn’t given it a name, but it was basically the same as the Still Water technique that Reach had taught him. A method to calm your own mind and align your inner flow. Whatever that meant.

  Inhale – hold – exhale.

  Again.

  And again.

  The rhythm steadied him. The air in the room grew denser, heavier. The small sounds, like Danny’s soft murmurs, the creaking of the floor above, faded until they were just background noise.

  At the Tavern, it had started with a feeling of the energy surrounding him, like a loose blanket. A pressure in the air. He thought, maybe, that he could even hear it. He remembered an electric buzz, subtle but there.

  He pushed away thoughts and just breathed.

  For a time nothing happened. Then, something shifted around him.

  The pressure he was looking for returned.

  “Okay,” he whispered. “You’re not crazy. You’re just… perceiving this new world.”

  The sensation grew more defined. Then there was a faint buzzing hum just at the edge of his perception, like a thousand insect wings vibrating together.

  He focused. Waited. Not reaching out, just existing within the space. He didn’t want to rush it again. He just… breathed. And tried to sense everything.

  After a while, he couldn’t have said how long, something else clicked. It felt like a connection. Like being a part of the system around him. Like the boundaries between his body and the space around him was thinning until he could feel both the energy flowing into him, and the flow of energy moving throughout the room.

  It wasn’t uniform. It pooled around solid things: the beds, the beams, the bodies of his teammates. He could sense faint distortions in the pattern around each of them, each different, thicker around Jay.

  The whole world, it seemed, was swimming in an invisible ocean. Mei Lins description, calling this The World’s Breath, suddenly made sense to Alex. This was everything in a way. A base layer that connected everything. Invisible to most people.

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  He leaned into that awareness, expanding it until he could feel not just the blanket of energy around him, but the texture within it – the individual motes that he had been seeing all weekend.

  He focused tighter, tuning his mind like a lens. Paying attention to everything. He started to get frustrated but forced himself to clear his mind.

  There.

  Tiny points of brightness flickered across his skin, invisible to most eyes, but vibrant and powerful. Each mote hummed with its own note, a faint tone that merged into the larger buzz in the room. When they struck surfaces they didn’t stop, but their pitch changed slightly, forming an intricate, living symphony. Individually it was a little like hearing rain patter against different surfaces around him. As a whole it was a wash of background noise at the edge of hearing.

  It was mesmerizing.

  He reached for them again. Gently. Carefully.

  This time, a thin thread of warmth responded instantly. It slid along his skin and curled around his fingers like smoke. His pulse jumped, instinctively. He fought down the panic, forcing his shoulders to stay relaxed, trying to stay calm.

  He lost the connection.

  He sighed. “Okay. Too tense. I’m not going to be able to do this if I’m afraid of hurting myself everytime.”

  He rubbed his palms together, staring at the empty air between them. “Mei Lin said fire was the easiest. ‘Just pull a little of the world’s breath and give it purpose.’”

  He gave a small laugh. “Sure. Totally normal sentence.”

  He closed his eyes again and resumed his breathing. The Still Water rhythm came more naturally now than it had even the day before. He breathed until he felt that soft pressure again, like standing in a sunbeam.

  This time he didn’t try to grab it, or pull it in like he did in the tavern. He extended his will gently, the way you’d hold your hand out to a skittish animal, willing, but not making the first move.

  After a few moments the response came as warmth at the edge of his awareness, like a faint breath on his hand. It was fragile. Slippery even, like trying to cup water in your hands. Every stray thought made it waver and drift away again. He focused on the rhythm of his breath, on the space between his hands.

  When he finally opened his eyes motes of light flickered between his fingers like dim fireflies vibrating in place.

  “Right,” he whispered. “Gentle now.”

  He framed the process in familiar terms, the way his brain understood problems: input, process, output.

  In this case, mana was the input – the raw material.

  His focus and by extension, his will, was the process. He needed to use that to shape the mana, or convince the mana to be what he wanted.

  And in this case he wanted to create a flame, so fire was the output.

  He just needed to find the right ratios.

  Too much input and he would zap himself like he did in the tavern. Too little and nothing would happen.

  Heat began to collect between his palms. For an instant, light bloomed, then disappeared.

  He imagined the shape of a flame – a small one, something simple, like the soft yellow flame of a zippo lighter. He could already feel the heat between his hands, he ‘knew’ that heat was from a flame. He tried to picture it.

  Another flicker.

  He tried again: A spark, orange and wild, licked the air. And then vanished.

  Stutters of fire that refused to catch, like trying to start a zippo on a windy night.

  Alex exhaled, shoulders dropping. “Okay. Half a miracle. Half a failure.”

  The warmth faded from his hands, leaving only the echo of it behind.

  He wiped sweat from his brow and leaned back against the wall, staring at his palms. Nothing scorched. No burns. Just a faint hum that he could feel in the skin, like too much friction.

  His thoughts drifted to the foreigner at the Tavern who had looked down at him with so much anger. The aura of the man had been calm and immense. He thought about how the mana in the room had bent towards him, drawn in, absorbed.

  He didn’t even look like he was paying the process any mind at all. He was just passively absorbing the mana around him. Like a battery.

  If you could do that, then you wouldn’t have to call the mana from the environment to cast a spell. It would be available inside you whenever you needed it. That seemed like a significant improvement.

  With the incident in the Tavern Alex had been trying to grab onto the mana in the air. It hadn’t ended well. He had more success now trying to collect it between his hands. But what if he could absorb it and use the mana internally?

  “Maybe that’s the trick,” he murmured. “Don’t make it do something. Just… take it in.”

  He closed his eyes again and reached out. The current brushed his skin. It was getting easier every time he tried.

  He focused on guiding the energy inward.

  At first it seemed to obey, trickling past the surface of his thought. But then a pressure built, pushing back. His chest tightened. His breath caught. A warmth built in his chest and then turned sharp, biting.

  He released it instinctively. The connection snapped away, leaving him hollow and trembling. His heart hammered in his chest. He held one palm flat against his sternum, waiting for the feeling to fade.

  He laughed once under his breath. “Right. Not a battery. Not yet.”

  Alex flexed his fingers. They tingled.

  He hadn’t made fire. He hadn’t stored or absorbed any mana. But he had touched it, shaped it – even for a moment.

  Progress.

  He leaned his head back against the wall, shoulders relaxing. This world still felt so new and here he was trying to embrace real magic. Boy, had his life taken a crazy turn this week. Him. A mage.

  Not tonight, though.

  He flipped open his HUD and flipped through to his personal stats, mostly out of habit already. There was nothing new. No hidden “mage” class or glowing notifications congratulating him on breaking physics. Just the same fields as before.

  “Figures. Couldn’t just be easy.”

  The glow from the HUD reflected faintly in his tired eyes before he dismissed it.

  Outside, the wind sighed through the eaves.

  Morning was going to come too soon, with more drills and training and aching muscles. Maybe a broken table to pay for.

  And this time tomorrow he would be back in his bed on Earth. Not thinking about magic, or swords, but classes and projects. For a moment that thought felt comforting, but then strangely hollow.

  One of these worlds was already starting to feel like a hazy dream.

  Or maybe a lie.

  For now, Alex let his eyes close and drifted down through threads of light weaving through the dark – certain, deep in his bones, that something inside him had finally clicked.

  Asleep for the night, he didn’t see the way a faint shimmer crawled along his arm, deep under his skin. The ANIP was hard at work, improving his body while he slept. It didn’t have a mind of its own, didn’t really even know what it was doing. It just found stress points in the body and repaired them. Made them stronger. For most people that meant repairing muscles and bruises. Closing cuts.

  But Alex had started stressing a new system in his body. The ANIP didn’t need to understand the system. It simply observed and repaired what was being used. Tonight it started reinforcing neural links. Strengthening pathways it had never been programmed for. It adjusted cellular efficiency to match the pattern of the energy that had been drawn into the body, stressing Alex’s system.

  Alex didn’t know much about cultivation of magic and neither did the ANIP. But they were both adapting quickly.

  ***

  Scholars persist in cataloguing magical ability as though it were a bestiary: pyromancers here, geomancers there, sensitives, shapers, binders, and those rare few whose gifts defy useful classification. Most of these talents differ only in emphasis. They are variations of control, not exceptions to it.

  There are, however, abilities that do not fit cleanly within any discipline.

  Foremost among these is the capacity to perceive mana directly—not by inference, not by ritual distortion or reactive effect, but by sight itself. The ability to see the flows of power as they exist in the world.

  In all my years of study, I have found only two credible references to such a faculty. The first is fragmentary, preserved in a margin note from a pre-Conclave scroll from an otherwise unknown author of no note. The second and more recent reference still dates back more than three centuries, attributed to a wandering adept who vanished shortly after the account was recorded.

  This scarcity troubles me.

  Either the gift is so vanishingly rare as to be nearly mythical—or those who possess it quickly learn that silence is its greatest safeguard. For what advantage could rival the ability to see the very medium in which all magic moves? What mage, having such sight, would willingly surrender it to scrutiny?

  It may be that we have mistaken absence of records for absence of talent. Or maybe this ability doesn’t even exist and what we have are two footnotes of charlatans who pulled the wool over the eyes of these writers.

  Learning the truth of this ability remains near the top of my priority study list.

  A Treatise on Arcane Faculties, Abilities and Their Misclassification

  Archmagus Theren Valcyr,

  Seventh Chair of the Aurelian Conclave