“I just can’t believe you’re so happy about this.” he said, looking at the crystal floating next to him. They were now returning to the city, seeing its walls rising in the distance.

  Before they left, Orion tried somehow to activate the Spatial Ring to check its contents but failed. Zaiah told him then that the beginnings of personal mana control can be difficult, and since he had previously soaked his body with eliko mana to remove impurities, he had to wait until further attempts to fully excrete it.

  Noticing how his companion came excited when he spoke of mana, Orion decided to ask him if he would like to tell him a little bit about this energy. He could have sworn that he saw Zaiah blush at the sound of that question.

  “Oh, no one just wants to talk about it. You must remember that for us, mana is something that exists from our birth. It’s as though you’re trying to find someone who’s open to discussing various aspects of air with you. Yes, there are people who study mana, but good luck finding one. If anything, you’ll most often meet people who want to talk, but only about aspects that are relevant to them.”

  “I understand. I guess. So the fire mage won’t be too interested in hearing about water mana?” he asked, inspired by the stories he had once read.

  “I mean at a slightly more fundamental level, but yes, generally speaking, that’s right. Hmm. I’m wondering where to start. I need to remember that you’ve never witnessed magic earlier, and what you know now is probably mostly assumptions. How would you put it into words so that someone who hasn’t encountered mana before would understand it… Do you prefer a general description or a more detailed one?”

  “Hmm, it’s always been easier for me to understand if I knew how something works from, like you said, a fundamental level. The more detail, the better the picture.”

  “Perfect!” Zaiah sang. “Alright. Oh, I have an idea where to start.”

  Then he began to explain something that Orion understood to be radiation.

  Zaiah was talking about the effect of something being emitted by a unit. The farther away from the center, the weaker the effect is. As an example, he gave the glowing crystal that floated in the cell in which Orion woke up and then the lights of the lantern-statues in the city. Another example was a fire and the heat it gave off.

  “The difference between these examples and what I’m trying to explain is that even though the effect is getting weaker, it never really goes away completely.” continued Zaiah, adding some description to clarify the situation.

  What he was describing sounded a bit like a kind of curve that Orion could barely remember from mathematics. What was it called… Exponential decay? No, something else, or maybe the opposite. The higher the value, the faster it decreases, then the lower it gets, the more it slows down. Ante… Antinomy? Aseptic? Asymptote of a curve! Probably… or perhaps just a curve in the shape of a children’s slide? Well, any example you can imagine may be helpful in understanding. In any case, the main thing was that even though the value was always falling, it never reached zero.

  “Ok, I got it. You don’t mean that I’m going to have to learn algebraic formulas, do you?” Orion certainly didn’t expect his first lesson in magic to be about mathematical curves.

  “It depends on what you want to achieve eventually, but not at the moment. You’ll soon understand why the concept of what I’m talking about is so important. Now imagine there’s a campfire right in front of us, warming everything up in just this way. That would mean that, even in your universe, you would have some of the heat that this fire emits. So subtle that no one would ever know about it, but it would still be there.”

  “And I’m guessing it’s not a damn hot fire.”

  “No. It’s a normal fire, and its temperature is nothing extraordinary. In fact, for a better example, we could even say it’s barely a warm little flame. However, the heat emitted by this flame never completely disappears, and what’s more, it encounters no obstacles. Remember, the heat here is just an example. Now imagine that you’re the one emitting light from your body, just like this. Like I said, it encounters no obstacles, thus it casts no shadows. The light itself around you isn’t exactly incredibly bright, either. It just keeps getting fainter, but it’s fainting more slowly. Have you imagined it?”

  “Mhm, yeah, I think so.”

  “Then imagine that I also emit like this. And then this rock. And then the stream that we left. And now this stone. And that one. And another one. And now this bush. And finally, really everything that exists in the multiverse.”

  “Alright. At first, I imagined the light from myself in one color, then came your light in another, and now all of that has turned into one big soup in my imagination.”

  “Very well, keep that imagination, remembering what caused it. We’ll use it later. What I mean is that radiation really exists. It has many names, but I think it’s most commonly referred to as a presence. The thing is, literally everything emits its presence, and what’s more, every possible aspect you can imagine is emitted. Whether it’s physical, etheric, symbolic, or even imaginary.”

  “Imponderables…” Orion muttered to himself.

  “Huh?”

  “Ah, no… nothing. I just remembered the word that describes quite well what you’re talking about. At least I think so.”

  There was a moment of comfortable silence as Orion pondered the meaning of what he had heard, and Zaiah wondered if that word itself was not more complicated than anything he had said so far in this conversation.

  “Right now, you’re emitting this way about who you are, what you’re thinking right now, and what you’re seeing. This stone here emanates its durability, its history of where it came from, and its composition. So both your body, every mineral contained in this stone, and every thought that passes through your head, in the same way announce their presence.” Zaiah continued, then paused for a moment to let Orion absorb the information. “By the way, this is why symbolism in rituals is so important. Imagine that a ritual only works if you use as an ingredient a shovel that was used to dig a thousand graves or a shield that was forged by a one-armed blacksmith. Each of these objects has its own meanings and aspects. Oh, I’m getting carried away again. Back to the point, I’ll emphasize this one more time. Everything emits, and emitted is every possible aspect.”

  Then they wandered quietly for a few minutes until Orion finally spoke.

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  “Hey Zaiah, I have a few questions about this. Firstly, what’s the effect of it on reality? And secondly, do these radiations influence each other? Do they interact with each other? Where’s the mana in all of this?”

  “Haha, I’m slowly getting used to you never ending up with one question. Besides, Zai will be fine.”

  “Then, Ori it is.” Orion replied, smiling slightly.

  “Hmm, to make sense of all this, I’ll start a bit in the middle, specifically with whether they interact with each other. This question connects well with the previous one, as it can be said that they don’t interact with each other at all and also that sometimes they do. It’s mana that makes the difference. You see, mana is energy that is the only thing that can resonate with absolutely everything. It’s even said that it’s the only one that can interact with the void itself and thus not disappear.”

  Zaiah started responding, his excitement grew. He stopped, however, realizing that he was straying from the subject, and said.

  “Oh, I think I’m gonna leave the whole mana-resonating-with-void thing for another time, it’ll just complicate things. Back to your questions, I think you can imagine a place where all this radiation exists as a separate dimension, frequency or some other plane. There’s really no confirmation of what this place actually is. In any case, mana can resonate with this omnipresence and absorb it, moving it into the physical plane. The very presence, without the mana, does not touch, so to speak, reality. And now for my question: Neutral mana is considered to be both the easiest and the most difficult to control. Why?”

  Orion once again walked for a moment in silence, thinking. Situations where something is in two opposite states, despite appearances, are quite easy to achieve if you have the right perspective. Let’s take the example stick that has done so well in depicting Spatial Items, alright? You put one end in liquid nitrogen, the other end in the fire. You’ve got a hot stick and a cold stick at the same time, congratulations. But at some point, these states will equalize if you cut off the source. How do you translate that situation into neutral mana, which is unlikely to behave the same? Or maybe what Zaiah was asking about was space? If Orion was closer to the source… no, wait. Since he also emits these things, he’s also, to some extent, the source. However, Zaiah has made it clear that this emitting never completely disappears.

  It’s not a question about conflicting states or space, it’s a question about scale! He just had to think about what he had been through a few moments ago. Zaiah had to insert his personal mana into Orion’s body to move it. If he resisted, Zaiah would have to put in more effort and lose precision. One could say that he could control the mana in someone else’s body, and at the same time he couldn’t if the owner of the body resisted.

  Following this scenario, if Orion was the source and emitted his aspects, it also meant an impact on the neutral mana. It had aspects of him and aspects of everything else. Like the soup mentioned earlier. However, he was missing certain confirmations because, you see, the soup could be oversalted.

  “If I understand correctly, the neutral mana carries with it an infinite number of aspects. Is it possible that some aspects are stronger than others, or that some aspects are more important? I don’t quite know how to put this.” he asked, partly guessing the answer. If it’s a question of all these aspects, then it’s likely that if the water aspect wins, then they would call it the water mana…

  “Yes, definitely. However, if a given aspect sufficiently outweighs others, we don’t call it neutral mana anymore.”

  Mhm, oh, what a tricky question. Orion thought. All things considered, theoretically, personal mana should actually be the easiest to control, because if it wasn’t, it would be the neutral mana that Zaiah would pour into his body. However, once again, if he understood all this correctly, personal mana was personal only to the possessor… That’s quite logical. In summary, for example, he couldn’t control Zaiah’s personal mana. The question of the ease of controlling neutral mana should be a general one and therefore common to everyone. The answer slowly became clear in his mind.

  “It’s easiest because it contains all aspects, including the aspects of every person. And it’s most difficult... actually for the same reason. It’s about scale. You can control it to a degree, but someone else can compete for that control. Did I guess it right?”

  “Damn close! Instead of pulling your tongue, I’m gonna give you a full answer this time, as you still don’t have all the information. The point is, even without competition, you couldn’t control it completely, as you would have to control aspects of everything. That’s because of the very nature of control. As you can probably guess by now, I’ll refer here to the soup you mentioned.”

  “I was thinking about it when I formed my answer. So I’m getting hungry… Nope, not anymore. All I had to do was remember what leaked out of me moments ago, and I lost my appetite.”

  Although Orion had a pretty good idea where the stuff he had expelled came from, Zaiah had no idea, so naturally he was curious and tempted to ask. But after a moment of uncertainty, the urge to elaborate on mana prevailed.

  “Mana control is divided into three main stages. This division also corresponds to the stages, describing the complexity and quantity of aspects dominant in mana and in phenomena or objects produced or modified by mana. Well, I used the word dominance here because it will be easier to imagine, but it is actually the effect of a given aspect being more active in a targeted manner. I’ll add that when we talk about phenomena and objects, we also include skills. Complexity itself has four stages, three of which we call the same as the corresponding control stage, but the fourth, and also the first, which I’m going to start with, is simply impossible to control.”

  Zaiah stopped, causing Orion to stop as well and look at him. A moment later, between them appeared several small, multicolored lights that looked like rainbow fireflies.

  “Stage one, although I’d rather call it stage zero, is raw mana. Simply put, it’s both an inactive medium and a directionless potential energy.” continued Zaiah, who was apparently responsible for creating this show. “Raw mana is mana without any aspect and can be observed either on a microscopic scale where a particular molecule for some reason refuses to take on aspects or is obtained by distillation. Such mana is used, for example, to make top-quality potions, where any undesirable aspect of presence would diminish its effectiveness. If you tried to control that kind of mana, you just couldn’t get it to absorb your aspect, or you would, but it wouldn’t be categorized as raw mana anymore. We don’t have any soup at this stage. It’s an empty pot, or rather a pot of purified water.”

  While he was speaking, a bubble appeared around the lights, and it began to bounce off other lights that were appearing outside of it. The ones that were enclosed in it faded, most likely visualizing the distillation process. When he was done, the lights went out, and then a bigger one appeared. It was blue, and there were smaller, multicolored ones floating around it. Now, it looked a little bit like a model of the solar system or a blue nucleus of an atom and different colored electrons moving around it.

  “Then we have the stages that we can control. So I’m going to start by describing what this stage is and then by describing the control itself at this stage. The first controllable stage is characterized by mana having one clearly dominant aspect. All the others naturally follow it and obey its orders, like obedient soldiers following their leader, or they stand still, so insignificant that they do not affect anything.” as he spoke, the blue light pulsed and began to magnify. When this change began, some of the smaller, colorful ones flew into the center of the bigger light, and some of those that remained motionless were suppressed, finally disappearing. Then all the light turned into a little floating ball of water. “We generally call this stage single-aspect mana, or simply use the name of the aspect. Now, moving on to the matter of control, you can easily do that with this kind of mana if you’re good at controlling a certain aspect, but you can also bring that neutral mana into this state by elevating your aspects and then commanding them to change according to your will. Most people get stuck at this stage of control, and some only overcome it through the System, working on developing their skills. Control over this stage, we can also explain using the previous analogy. If you’re a salt master, you don’t need to know exactly what the soup is made of to get it to the right salt level.”

  The water ball dispersed, and in its place appeared two big lights, one grayish-green, the other white, and smaller, multicolored lights moving around and between them.

  “The next step is composite. This is the stage of control I’m at. And now, Ori my friend, this is where we really start cooking.”