“Tovar!” Felton called after me, panting desperately as he tried to keep up. “Wait for me!”

  I slowed my pace as my best friend caught up, gasping for air. This felt... familiar.

  After an impassioned plea, I decided to help Felton get into shape. The twig of a boy was incredibly unused to physical exertion, so we were starting with some of the basics. I put off any talk of him learning the sword until he could do a single push-up, for starters.

  “What is the point of this,” Felton whined between bellowing breaths.

  “Stamina. Endurance,” I said, thinking. “Mental fortitude, even. Have you seen how long those high level grimoires are? You’ve got to be able to memorize and recite those things. That takes willpower. If you can do that, you can put one foot in front of the other.”

  “Completely... different... things,” he wheezed, before chugging some water from a flask I handed him.

  We were meeting up for running after I finished up with Byron’s morning training, and we planned to do that a few times per week moving forward. It wouldn’t leave much time to prepare before school once classes started back up, but then again, Felton couldn’t run for very long. I was also teaching him some bodyweight exercises, which he was going to do on his own while waiting for me to get through my sword training and run over to his place. On days of worship, we’d meet up and do a full workout, and I’d teach him new progressions as needed.

  Although, looking at his red faced exertion just from a short run, I wasn’t expecting much. I wouldn’t hold it against him if he couldn’t commit, especially once he learned to infuse his invocations and started seeing real progress with his magic.

  Still, I was proud of him, and his determination helped me strengthen my own. In the few days off that remained before school resumed, I had started working on doing everything with my left hand. Practicing writing my letters again might have been embarrassing in other circumstances, but really, I had only just learned them a few months prior, and my handwriting hadn’t been great to begin with yet.

  The more difficult things to re-learn was stuff that needed two hands in the first place. With my injury healed, I could at least use the end of my severed arm to brace things without pain, though some things still caused mild discomfort. With Byron’s help and the Great Sage’s backing, I was able to get a custom prosthetic made. It was mostly just an end-cap for my stump which evened out my arm length, allowing me to do things like push-ups again, and it had an attachment point for a few tools like a small hook that made dressing myself much easier. It was imperfect, but it was a small quality of life improvement.

  After parting ways with Felton, I focused my attention to my other concern.

  The way I understood and used magic was slightly different from other humans. I was keenly aware of my internal mana circuit, rather than seeing magic use as something purely intellectual and spoken. While my mana circuit wasn’t physical like my blood vessels, it was still a real thing, and part of that circuit had existed in my hand.

  My mana circuit was fractal, and theoretically infinite, though. If part of that was removed, the remainder was still infinite. I already knew I could still cast spells, and my Will hadn’t diminished when I lost a portion of my body. Somehow, naturally, the part of my circuit that extended into my missing hand and the part which returned back from my missing hand had automatically bridged, keeping my mana circuit intact.

  But something still felt off.

  I found myself walking past the temple, and with a shrug, I headed inside. It was a weekday, so it wasn’t busy, and I made my way to the front so I could kneel in prayer before the statues of the Guardians.

  “Hey, Tovar,” the administrator greeted me as I materialized in the metaversal borderland. “Tough break about the hand.”

  “My own fault,” I said with a shrug. “I got greedy.”

  Talking about the accident wasn’t what I was really there for. It wasn’t like the admin could do anything about it, really.

  I glanced down at my metaversal form. It always mirrored my in-universe form, though it felt much closer to how I felt when I was in between worlds. It was an image of my body, not my real body. In a way, it was more of a representation of my soul. I clenched my left fist… and then I clenched my right fist.

  When I looked back up, the administrator grinned back at me. “Get what you need?” I nodded, and he winked. “See you later, then.”

  My eyes opened back up in the temple, and I raced back to the manor.

  * * *

  The feather sat atop my desk, and my prosthetic was off, laying on the bed. I reached forward with my stump, and concentrated.

  At its core, [Mana Manipulation] was about bridging and extension. When I lost part of my body, my mana circuit defensively bridged the gap. But as I saw in the borderlands, my soul retained a certain shape, and it was whole.

  If I was right, my mana circuit might also be whole.

  I already knew I could extend mana outside of my body with extension. All I wanted to do was extend my mana into the space my body used to be, using its original shape. It wasn’t even technically extension if my mana circuit remained intact, just semi-external.

  Carefully, focusing on my Will, I bypassed the defensive bridge that had formed when I lost my hand.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  My control immediately lapsed, and I started bleeding out mana into the air. I concentrated hard on it, forcing it back into a natural flow.

  Slowly, mote by mote, the bleeding mana started to correct itself, and followed the fractal path through the space where my hand used to be.

  The process was imperfect. I was still losing mana from my reserves, and it would take practice and focus to rein in the loss and keep my mana circulating through my missing hand without dispersing into the atmosphere.

  But this was real. I wasn’t extending my mana circuit from my wrist into the form of a fake hand. The mana was flowing through the original circuit. This was still my hand.

  I took a shuddering breath, reached out, and tried to lift the feather.

  It failed, of course. But the feather shifted ever so slightly.

  I grinned, and closed the bridge in my wrist, then settled in to restore my lost mana.

  * * *

  Classes resumed, and the rumor mill was hard at work. I shuffled past whispering students, ignoring the stares.

  I was already a weird outlier in the academy. I was a complete commoner, not even from a wealthy plebeian family. If my family were at least wealthy merchants, there would be business reasons to interact with me.

  My sponsorship from the Great Sage was a valuable asset to some, and I did navigate some hangers-on in my first term, but mostly it was an even greater barrier. The Sage was too famous, in a way, and his power in society was very different from the nobles. Somnial often disagreed with nobles and made no attempts to ingratiate himself into their social circles, nor did he care about their interests. Most nobles respectfully disliked him and kept their distance, and the noble children saw very little reason to befriend his plebeian ward.

  Now, I was also considered a cripple. It came as no surprise to me that the nobles and rich kids of this world were, largely, quite ableist. They made no concessions for someone who needed special care. I had only lost a hand, and I managed quite well, but now that I was looking for it I realized how poorly someone who couldn’t walk would fare. The first year classrooms were on the second floor of the academy, after all, and this world definitely did not have elevators.

  People were telling all sorts of stories about my summer vacation and how I lost my hand, but the truth was strange enough that the rumors retained the general shape of what actually happened. Some kids were concerned about the risks of a dungeon break in Obdorn, but since there hadn’t been any real monster-based disasters in the lifetime of any academy-goer, it was a little too abstract for them to really fear it.

  I managed to get through the first day mostly without issue, until Somnius held me back at the end of class. The lecture had been a review of the invocation for [Create Water] and then an introduction to infusion, so I had an idea of what he wanted to talk about.

  “Rumor is you can already cast,” he grunted at me once the class was emptied out. “Did Somnial teach you that?”

  “No sir,” I said. “I learned from another student in an emergency situation.”

  “Felris, right?” the old professor nodded. “She’s a decent student. What did she tell you?”

  I repeated her lesson, which was in turn a repeated lesson from the academy, and hoped I wasn’t mangling the message too much like a game of broken telephone. Somnius grunted again.

  “And you figured it out from just that?”

  “Uh, well,” I said, frowning. “Mostly. I… you know about my revelation, right?”

  Somnius scowled slightly, but nodded. “Heard about it. That’s why Somnial sponsored you.”

  “Right. So, I kind of had an idea of how it should feel from that. I’m not sure I could have applied what Felris said so quickly if not for that.”

  “So it wasn’t some sort of sage nonsense, then?” he asked, glaring at me.

  “No, sir. Somnial hasn’t actually taught me anything, really, just paid my way and given me access to his library. He, uh, wanted me to learn it from you.”

  “Hmm,” Somnius said, somewhat appeased about that. “Fine. Dismissed.”

  I walked out of the classroom, biting my tongue to stop myself from asking questions that might get me in trouble. I was really curious what bothered Somnius so much, but I knew better than to just ask. Particularly when the man was still responsible for my education.

  * * *

  Slowly but surely I got back into the flow of things, down one hand but with some newly added elements to my days. My southpaw sword training with Byron saw improvements, as did Felton’s fitness as we continued to run together. My left-handed writing was increasingly legible, and learning to do things one-handed started to feel less strange and new and more like the norm.

  As the first year students in the academy learned infusion, I worked on my own magic in private, specifically my [Mana Manipulation]. I continued to experiment with using my internal mana outside of my natural body, and as I increased the efficiency and decreased the atmospheric losses, something finally clicked into place.

  With that change, it was much easier to keep mana flowing through the shape of my lost right hand, though I still couldn’t do much with that and had no idea if it would ever amount to anything.

  Considering my state of mind when I returned from summer break, the post-break term actually went pretty well. My classmates almost all picked up infusion, with only one straggler. Felton picked it up quickly, as did Ramius, neither of which surprised me, though neither of which was the first to succeed. That honor went to a girl named Pellia, who was from a larger barony in Ivarnel. She was quite friendly with Ramius, so I didn’t know her very well, and they started spending even more time together when she displayed so much aptitude for casting. I wasn’t sure if that was friendship, early teen romance, or a purely political positioning.

  By the end of the term, Somnius’s harsh teaching style drove the straggling student to withdraw from the academy. I felt pretty bad for him, but it wasn’t like a student could continue in a school that trained magic if they couldn’t cast. Overall, our class had a pretty low drop-out rate, according to what I learned about the usual number of graduates from first year, though there was still a half of a year of study to get through.

  As the oppressive heat of summer began to let up, the term ended, granting us a short break before the fall term.

  Back in Redding, this would mark the beginning of the harvest season. Only the earliest crops could be harvested, and harvests would continue through until the start of winter, by which point all of the latest crops should be in. A short break wasn’t enough time to head home to visit, let alone help. Felton confirmed that his father had forwarded the income from the Nightmare Ant soldier’s corpse to Redding for my family, so they should be able to hire some laborer aid for the year, since Tomas was still too young to help and Berrel likely still had her hands full with Tomellia. I hoped it would work out.

  I considered looking for work in Ivarnel so I could send home more funds for my family, since they’d need more raab to buy meat from other hunters and so my siblings could grow up strong, but with one hand my options were limited. Maybe once I had more magic under my belt I could make some money that way. With this year’s funding covered, I’d focus on my magic studies and the advancement of my stats and skills, but it was something to think about for second year and beyond.

  When it came to magic, the spring term had been about invocation and the summer term had been about infusion. The upcoming fall term was going to focus on intention, and in order to learn that, we would begin practicing actual casting. I couldn’t wait.