I took some time basking in the afterglow of having finally achieved my Augmentation. There wasn’t any descriptive text stating exactly what I had accomplished. Typical of the Weave. But in any case, I knew what I was doing. I knew what I had gained.

Of course, my mind soon reminded me that I had four other Attributes who would need the same kind of attention and effort. That didn’t dampen the feeling of triumph, though.

“You going to explain what you just did?” Gutran asked. “Or just stand there looking like you’re going to start drooling any second now.”

I got my expression back under control. “Why don’t we keep sparring? Maybe you’ll figure out what I just did.”

Gutran grunted, then obliged.

My cheekiness earned me several sets of overwhelmingly strong blows from him. I wouldn’t have minded, but sadly, it wasn’t helping my Vitality and I didn’t have specific Attributes towards defensive capabilities like Resilience, an Attribute that Gutran said certain dangerous-occupation-oriented Paths were fond of attaining.

Nevertheless, I managed to get a few counterattacks of my own in between Gutran’s overpowering salvos. With every blow, my Augmentation fired.

I still needed to get used to Mana Injection. But I was pleased by the fact that it wasn’t just moving the remaining external mana threads that had appeared from Sacrificing some of the broken crystals from Xokrist. Instead, there was a sparking sensation at every contact between my fist and Gutran’s body.

A spark that signalled mana leaping from my fist to my target, each strand created by the Power-driven connection.

Gutran’s muscle movement suggested another heavy overhand blow aimed for my skull. I was wearing a thick helmet, so I would go mostly unharmed if it connected, though the ringing sensation would leave me disoriented for a while. The point of the sparring was to get used to such things and find a way to dodge or counter them.

I focused on the latter. The blow never came. Instead, I focused on my Gravity Aspect, without needing it to drive my mana like it normally did. There was no need for it. The mana it required was already at the target location.

So the Aspect just activated. Violet threads seemed to spontaneously appear on Gutran’s vambrace, weighing it down and forcing his arm too low for him to hit a blow with it.

“How do you keep doing—” Gutran’s eyes widened. “The punches. You hit my arm a second ago.” He hissed out a short laugh, shaking his head. His pupils had dilated a bit in… I wasn’t sure what. Enthusiasm? Excitement? Something like that. Wait, pride? “What do you call it?”

“Well, the Weave called it Mana Injection,” I said after a little bit. “Can you assign your own names to things like that or, I don’t know, change them?”

Gutran looked at me like I had stated that surely it would be fine if I didn’t wash my hands after coming out of the bathroom.

“No, no of course not,” I muttered. “Silly me.”

“That’s an intriguing Augmentation. Bypasses one of your biggest weaknesses.”

“Exactly! Now, if I’m fighting against anyone too pesky to use my mana threads directly, I can just bash my mana into them.”

“Pesky, huh?”

I grinned. “No, no, you’re not pesky at all, Gutran.” I tried to be a bit more serious, and I wasn’t sure how to express myself properly, so I just did the salute with the fist to the chest. “Thank you. I mean it. I couldn’t have done this all without you.”

Gutran grunted, though there was definitely a note of pleasure in it. I had spent long enough with the Scalekin smith to start learning his own little language. “Thank yourself. You did the real hard work. I just guided you and showed you how some things are done is all.”

“Right. But you know what I mean.”

Gutran grunted. “Yes, fine. You’re welcome, Ross.”

Aurier beamed at the both of us from where he was peeking from behind a window, though he quickly dashed back to his station when Gutran threw a perceptive glare in his general direction.

“I ought to thank you too,” he said. “Not just for helping my business, but for helping Aurier.”

I turned my smile to where Aurier was now back smithing away at his spot. “I haven’t done much, really. It’s all on him for getting his act together and everything.”

“Sure. But you and your drive has had a pretty positive impact on everyone around you, I’d say. Maybe you don’t see it because you’re too close to everyone. But your accomplishments are inspiring, Ross. Not in and of themselves, perhaps. But when you consider the timeframe, when you understand that all this is surely as new to you as a newborn…” Gutran shook his head. “It is a mite amazing.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way. Well, I had. But not in a way that made me actualize it in my mind. It was better to keep focusing on the next thing I needed to accomplish, on and on. After all, I couldn’t afford to rest on my laurels. Not if I wanted to survive the imminent implosion of my core.

But when Gutran put it that way, I did take a few moments just to appreciate myself for a second. Not in a self-fellating way, but rather just recognizing how far I had come in just the month or so I had been in this new world.

Honestly, if I paused to think about it, it was frankly ridiculous how well I was taking it all. I was pretty sure there was a certain level of culture shock going on somewhere in there.

However, the Weave was undoubtedly helping. There was something about being able to focus on magic, on my growing capabilities, in the joy of discovering more and more that I could do, that really hyper-focused my mind on what was within my circle of control. It was a level of concentration that I was pretty sure I had never applied before in my life.

And honestly, it felt good. It felt purposeful.

I didn’t want to keep bothering Gutran, even if the smith was too kind to admit that I was taking up too much of his time. So instead, I returned to the temple and practiced on my own.

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Now that I had another new toy to play with, I wasn’t wasting time discovering its limits. The first test was a tad disappointing. Despite my punches now being able to infect basically whatever I hit with mana, it still didn’t bypass the restriction of not being able to use my mana—and therefore, my Aspects—on living things directly.

At first, when I had punched Sreketh ever so lightly so as not to hurt her, I had thought that my disinclination to hurt her was what had stopped the Augmentation from working. Too little force, not enough use of my inherent Power Attribute.

But no. I tried the exact same level of force on a broken brick and it worked just fine.

Living flesh, it seemed, was still off limits to me. Well, not totally off limits. Field Manipulation affected everything, living or otherwise. Even if I couldn’t create fields on organic matter, I could certainly affect them. But my other Aspects and Affixes were useless against people.

I wondered how true that was for other mages. Was there a different kind of Augmentation, maybe one for an Attribute I didn’t even possess, that allowed mages to affect living bodies that wasn’t their own with their mana threads?

There had to be. How else would healers work? Unless they had Aspects that created external healing effects which then reached inside patients. Or perhaps, it was like when Linak had explained how certain Aspects bypassed the Natural Limit of Existence. Maybe the Aspect of Healing could bypass whatever natural limit stopped—

Well, wait. I had a feeling I could burn people with something like the Aspect of Heat, same way how Cerea’s Lightning had affected the Brillwyrms directly. Unless, she had an Augmentation that bypassed that. Manifestation, or something like that.

If that was the case, then what was the problem with something like Gravity?

Whatever. That wasn’t the main test anyway. What I really wanted to see was how long the threads I imparted with my direct hits lasted.

I was really glad when it turned out that the duration of the threads didn’t depend on the force I hit something with. Regardless of whether I was using my full Power or not, the mana injected by my blows lasted about eighty seconds.

That was good. I didn’t have to worry about how hard I hit someone and wonder if the mana I had imparted was still there or not.

Because that was another thing. There was no visual indicator that I had injected mana with a direct blow. A spark and a flicker of threads at the very moment of contact were all I got and then it was as if there was nothing at all. I could sense it if I concentrated, but it wasn’t easy.

Hmm. That was both good and bad. On the one hand, lack of visual indicators would help me get the upper hand against my opponents. I grinned, remembering how often I had messed with Gutran’s motion. But my grin disappeared as I figured out the drawback. With no visual indicator for me either, I would need to keep the timer in mind and be careful about it too.

That was a pain. Possibly something I could address in the future.

I figured there was some sort of Attribute that allowed one to sense mana levels and the like. Sure, I could see when someone used mana and observe the colour of their threads taking root in the world as tangible effects. But I couldn’t sense anything else about the caster.

Unless, of course, they were overpowered vampires flaunting their auras in an overly aggressive manner.

I sighed. There was probably a lot more about the inner workings of mages and their mana that I needed to learn. How early did the academy teach its students about things like that? I felt like I was lagging behind in terms of general knowledge. It was normal, and I really didn’t want to enroll in the academy itself, but I would need to flesh out my understanding better.

Still, I was satisfied with my new Augmentation. It was fun punching things and watching Gravity take root without any threads leaving my body. There wasn’t the barest trace of mana exhaustion no matter how often my Augmentation flared up.

I discovered a neat little facet of the Augmentation through my experiments too. Some further testing had revealed that I didn’t actually need to hit something for threads of mana to appear. Just using enough force during a punch or a kick caused energetic white threads of magical energy to start buzzing around the limb that had created it.

Threads that I could then direct with a little bit of concentration.

They were volatile. Unstable. Not a single thread lasted longer than a minute in thin air per my count. Maybe the duration would last longer if I ranked up Power further.

Whatever the case, I’d have to be fast at using the threads.

Dinner was a nice affair. I still wasn’t eating, but the company was good. Aurier—who had finished his job early enough to join us—was more enthusiastic about my progress and my new Augmentation even more so than me.

Escinca and the others all congratulated me. I almost felt embarrassed like Aurier did, because it didn’t feel like a huge thing to me. There was so much more I was looking forward to.

But I reminded myself about what Gutran had said and just basked in it. There was a spectrum between getting complacent and focusing entirely on what came next. It didn’t have to be one or the other.

“I can’t wait to get mine,” Sreketh said, devouring her bug-food like it would give her a new Aspect. “My Path, my Aspects, my everything.”

Honestly, it might. Hadn’t someone, either Kostis or the academy mages, mentioned that proximity with someone who already possessed a unique Path was one of the things that made unique Paths emerge in others?

“We’ll make it happen,” I said.

“But for now, focus on eating, please,” Escinca chided gently.

Sreketh flushed and decided not to talk with her mouth full.

I asked about whether the vampires had sent anything yet, but we had received nothing so far.

At least there hadn’t been any further changes regarding the Thralls either. The guards had started delving into the dungeon tunnels, and aided by the maps that Ugnash had provided, they had begun investigating the Thralls. While they had found evidence of things we had experienced, the Thralls themselves weren’t exactly present.

That was… concerning, to say the least. I figured I needed to catch up with Revayne again because I still suspected there had to be another entrance into the dungeon.

Later that evening, before I retired to bed, I checked in with Escinca about a small detail in Kostis’s letter.

“Elder,” I said, standing at the entrance to his office. He was bustling around inside, cleaning things before he went to sleep. “Sorry for bothering you so late but there was something Master Kostis mentioned that I wanted to talk about. Do you happen to have the Spirit Attribute too?”

Escinca looked back at me, absently dusting the short grey hairs on his head. “I do, yes. Are you concerned about your rate of growth for your Spirit?”

Perceptive as ever, was Escinca.

I nodded. “I am. Master Kostis suggested that since I have two separate Paths, my Spirit needs to perform double the work, especially since Spirit is closely tied with faith-related Paths and Aspects.”

“That’s a good observation, yes. Hmm. I think I see his point.”

All my active efforts had focused almost entirely Path of the Newborn Star. I had concentrated on it to the exclusion of everything else. Sure, I had used Sacrifice a lot, which had helped grow Fervour and my Path of the Acolyte. But to my mind, there was still a mismatch in intended effort compared to my other Path.

For example, almost all my training had been to improve my Gravity Aspect’s various Affixes. For Sacrifice, I had only ever tested what it was capable of at any given time. I hadn’t actually trained it.

Which wasn’t to say I needed to start training Sacrifice. That had happened in the background, such as when I constantly Sacrificed my Gravity threads to improve every subsequent cast. Instead, what I needed to focus on were sides of my Path of the Acolyte that I hadn’t paid enough attention to yet.

“I think I need to be a bit more of a proper cultist,” I said.

Elder Escinca smiled. “I would say you’ve been as proper as I could have hoped. But that isn’t to say your point doesn’t have merit. How about we begin tomorrow? With a prayer that you can lead, Ross?”

I blinked. Weirdly, that made me feel slightly anxious. But I agreed with a nod. “Prayer tomorrow. Got it.”

With a muttered good night, I headed back to my room where Enrico was waiting for me. The sprite bobbed in front of me in greeting, but the light within its orb remained dim. Welcoming for sleep.

I smiled at Enrico softly. “You mind coming with me tomorrow, buddy? I could use some moral support from my friendly glowing orb of light.”

Enrico bobbed harder in enthusiastic agreement.

As I lay in bed, I was at least comforted that I wouldn’t need to think too hard about my next Augmentation when Spirit hit Silver. It would be all my about awakening my core, and to that end, Kostis had already outlined the kind of Augmentation I needed to take up for that to happen.