Chapter 18: Chapter 19: I took the path less travelled. Help. I’m lost.

Indra wasn’t done with me. The cultivation room was quiet, Marv was guarding the entrance so that we were left undisturbed. The nature magicians were all resting today, it was their first day off in a week. That was a lucky break for us.

I’d gone back onto my father’s lap, the hard stone too much for my body to lay on.

“A high mana pool and rare skill doesn’t make you a god.” Indra waved his hand and the dirt I’d created crumbled. “You’ll be busy most of the day when you’re in the inscribing division. At the end of the day, you’ll join me, and I’m going to teach you twice as hard in half the time.”

“Ok-ay.” I struggled with the hard K sound.

“This is more than I was planning to do originally.” Indra frowned. “Make no mistake, I have selfish intentions. Your goodwill will do a lot in the future, and your talent will benefit Zodiac a lot, even if you join another organisation down the road. That is why I am going to train you until you can protect yourself. While you are here, I will do my best to keep you safe. After that you can go out into the real world and blow yourself up for all I care.”

I smiled. He claimed to be selfish, but I don’t think it was all self-motivated.

He gave me the impression of a good guy at heart.

“First?” I asked.

“First, I have to know what skills you have. The ones you’re willing to tell me.” Indra’s fingers tapped nervously against his knees.

He suspected I had a skill I was hiding. Something that would give me a massive mana pool.

He was right.

“Earth manipulation. Earth creation.” I listed out the skills and thankfully he understood my gurgles. “Fear tolerance.”

He frowned.

“Fe-ar to-le-rance.” I said it slowly. “Me-di-ta-tion.”

It took a few tries for him to understand me.

“Meditation and fear tolerance?” Indra finally got them both.

“Yes.” I clapped my hands together happily.

“Meditation is good. Great, actually. That saves me a lot of time trying to get you to learn it. We should focus on that as a staple skill for you.”

I agreed with him. Meditation was the most useful skill I'd gained so far. It helped me regenerate mana to continue using my other skills.

“Anything else?” Indra probed.

I stayed quiet and put my hand up toward him. I didn’t want to reveal my other skill. Not yet.

It was clearly special, but how much did I know about Indra?

Would he do something to me if the skill was rarer than I’d realised?

Marv’s revelation about the dangers of having a high mana pool had spooked me. I was going to tell as few people as possible about that skill. I didn’t want to become a target.

Especially not the target of the only people I trusted.

“Smart.” Despite my worries, Indra wasn’t mad. “That should always be your response to that question from now on. Even when Jackson asks. Knowledge is powerful, and power tempts people to do bad things. Knowledge of skills even more so.”

I nodded, relieved. I didn’t know what I’d do if he’d insisted on knowing the answer to that question.

“So, you’re learning how to become a scriber.” Indra changed the topic. He’d seen my awkwardness. “Do you know any symbols yet?”

“Yes.” I grinned.

My father had been drilling them into me for a week.

“That works out wonderfully for us.” Indra leaned towards me. “Do you know about the measurement test for magicians?”

“Yes.”

That was the test Jackson had talked about with my father and me. In five years, I would have enough mana in my body to test. If I reached a threshold, I would be considered eligible to become a magician.

Oh. I had a lot of mana. My eyes glimmered.

Was I able to take the test?

“Absolutely not.” Indra shut me down. “I can see you thinking about taking the test. You may have a big mana pool, but there is no way your body has fully acclimated to it yet. Not to mention you’d reveal yourself to everyone if you did pass. Let’s not rush things that’ll get us hurt.”

My body had to get used to mana? I didn’t know that.

“What we can do is try and figure out your attunement.” Indra continued. “Every magician is attuned to an element or magical concept. For example, most of the people in this tower are nature magicians, attuned to all things natural, and I assume you’ll be attuned to it too. Or something related to nature.”

He waved his hand and the nearby rocks liquified and rose, warping into a shape in the air. It was an X that had a hook covering it.

“This is the symbol for nature.” Indra moved it around so I could see it from every angle. “If you have [meditation] that means you should be able to discover the element your body is attuned to. It will appear as a symbol within yourself, and it will be bursting with energy.”

Wait. I knew what he was talking about. I've seen it multiple times now. The giant symbol floating in the air whenever I practiced meditation or tried to learn skills.

“Earth.” I spoke. I pointed at my chest. “Earth.”

Indra raised an eyebrow at me. “You already know that too… you’re a little too fast, you know that, right?”

“Good.” I smiled. “How?” I pointed at myself again.

How did it get in there?

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“That’s something I don’t know.” He raised a hand to stop my charades. “I understood your question, but the truth is that nobody knows how we become attuned to elements. Most believe it comes during the first night.” He sighed. “I believe we are born attuned to our elements. Unfortunately, it is impossible to prove or disprove, as nobody knows what happens during the first night. Nor do they have a means of checking their attunement before it.”

They don’t remember the first night? The image of a sun being consumed crossed my mind.

A single giant eye stared at me.

What was I talking about?

I shook the thoughts out of my head. If the symbol was there from birth, could it have been there when I was alive on earth? That would mean that magic really was real.

I slapped myself in the forehead. Duh. Of course, magic is real. I’m using it right now.

I don’t think I got it during the first night. I would’ve remembered seeing the notification from the system. That lended weight to Indra’s theory that we were born with the symbols.

“Any skills that belong to your attuned element will be easier to learn.” Indra smiled. “Being attuned to earth is good. There are many spells to be learnt, and time for you to learn them.”

“For now, we will focus on building your foundational skills. It’s tempting to go and learn as many skills as possible, and we certainly will be trying, but the core of your studying will always be the two skills of earth manipulation and creation. These two skills help you with learning all of the others.”

“Learn?” I asked. “Skill?”

I was feeling greedy. I wanted more skills.

“Not yet.” Indra rejected my proposal. “There’s a reason we don’t learn skills quickly. You are going to be learning inscribing and magic, that is a tall order. You will have your hands full and adding more skills to level may harm your progress.”

That made an infuriating amount of sense. My father had already explained how hard it was to become a scriber. His hours of practice with me had already given me a peek at how the Zodiac division would treat me.

As long as I could practice my current skills I would be satisfied. The issue was, I couldn’t practice my earth creation without raising suspicions. I had too much mana, and I created too much dirt. We already had a small mountain outside our house.

“I will organise for you to receive a regent that will help you hide your earth creation skill.” Indra nodded at my father. “One that Teral has crafted personally for us. It will help you practice in secret.”

“Oh?” I liked the sound of that.

Magic made things so much easier. I don’t know what kind of regent it is, but if I could hide an entire mountain of dirt then it was perfect. Then there was just the matter of my earth manipulation skill. I asked Indra.

“That skill is fine to use.” Indra nodded. “In fact, it is probably best that you make sure as many people as possible know that you have it. Manipulation skills are common first skills for magicians. It is rarer to find a magician without a manipulation skill than it is with one.”

“You are going to disguise yourself as an ordinary magician. And scriber. You can bring the stone ball you took last time and use that to practice.”

“Dirt?” I asked.

“Yes. And some dirt.” Indra looked at my father and my father nodded.

Indra couldn’t approve everything. When it came to scribers my father was the expert.

“Are you still low on mana?” Indra asked.

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I nodded. I hadn’t meditated and it would take a while for my mana to regenerate naturally. Indra looked pensive. This was my time to ask him a question that had been burning on my mind.

“When. Mana. Run. Out.” I said the words slowly. “Hurt. Die?”

I wanted to use the Mark of the Crijik to increase my maximum mana pool. This was my chance to find out if I was causing any permanent damage to myself.

“Die?” Indra gave me a gentle smile. “No, no. Nothing like that. Think of it like extreme hunger. You will be weak, and pained, and it feels absolutely horrible, but you won’t die from it.” He tilted his head. “Okay, maybe hunger wasn’t the best example.”

It was good enough for me. I clapped my hands happily. I didn’t enjoy the pain, but if I could use the skill freely then that was great.

Indra and I spent the day focusing on meditation and talking about what I could and couldn’t do.

Do: Talk. Being smart isn’t a bad thing. You’re bad at hiding it anyway.

Don’t: Make giant piles of dirt. Keep it discrete.

Do: Tell people my father teaches me inscribing. It’s a believable reason for my presence in Zodiac.

Don’t: Activate any symbols around me. They cost a lot of mana to use, and I could give myself away.

I hadn’t thought of that last point.

My father and I wanted to pass out the moment we got home. He laid me down in my cot and closed the door behind him, my mother entered later, hugging me good night. I waved goodnight to the puffer. Then I paused. It had carved something with its talons into the stone it made its nest on.

Huh. It kind of looked like the symbol for nature.

I yawned and prepared to go to sleep. I had kept my mana low on the way back, discreetly spraying dirt onto the lawns we passed, in preparation for tonight.

I was going to activate the Mark again.

I used earth creation and the familiar prompts of the system greeted me as I ran out of mana. All according to plan. I ignored the warnings and as the last of my mana drained, I was beset by pain. This one started at my shoulders and made its way down to my feet.

Then the air filled with golden light.

My vision went dark as my body returned to normal. The wave of golden mana flew into my body, and I let out a sigh of relief. I wouldn’t practice this too often, but it was good to know that I could.

A second wave of golden lights entered through the crack of my ceiling and neared me as I drifted off. I could feel my maximum mana increasing.

Next stop, the scriber division of Zodiac.

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