There were a few Flora spells that Caen was interested in. They all had to do with the manipulation of wood and foliage. With a boosted Flora affinity, he began adapting the spells. It was slow and meticulous work, but Caen had always enjoyed preparation of any kind.

  The time construct at the corner of his vision kept him aware of the hours as they rolled by. It was well past noon by the time he left the Plane to go get lunch. He wasn’t so hungry, but it’d been almost twelve hours since he'd last eaten. Just one meal shared with Guinevere's siblings, and he was already missing good food. His time construct was well and truly gone, sadly enough. But on a very uplifting note, he could always just ask what the time was from Zeris or Guinevere. On several occasions throughout the day, Caen had caught himself wishing that he'd had a fifth bloodline exactly like Guiniverere’s. Though even he had to admit that that was a little too greedy. Caen was exceedingly grateful for Mimicry.

  Before he got something to eat, he went round back to say hello to the kitchen staff, and many of them were happy to see him, including the matronly woman who ran the kitchens. The young man whom he often fetched water alongside was the happiest. He said they were working him to the bone. Caen promised to come by to help the next day.

  At the serving counter, Caen's plates were piled with more ‘poats and oats’ than anyone else's, and he gladly wolfed it all down. Guinevere had been right. These were great.

  He went by the healing tents to cleanse his spirit, and also went through another round of a few people greeting him and asking about his health. Tuni and a slightly injured Ganul also expressed how happy they were that he was alive. Caen shared their sentiment. He was happy to be alive; as far as he knew, dead people couldn't practice magic.

  His father, Ergen, very clearly was holding himself back from fussing over Caen. They worked together on a few complicated Spirit-healing procedures. Spiritual injuries required finesse, and Ergen was very skilled. Caen still had so much to learn.

  He moved on to help the Blood-healers a little. Being able to boost his affinity as quickly as he now could made the venture entirely pleasurable.

  He had to peel himself away from the healing tents and head back into the Plane to continue with the rest of his magical training.

  * * *

  Caen sat with his back to a stump in the Plane, very slowly attempting to precast a weak second elevation spell in his abjection. He'd been at this for nearly an hour, and the spell had collapsed more times than he could count. But the fact that he could even attempt this was bizarre. His goal wasn't to actually cast the spell. He was merely—

  Then the spell took.

  His spirit tendrils unfolded violently of their own accord, and only because he was observing it right then did he notice his soul structure change in real time.

  Not just fundamental change. This was… it was permanent.

  A shift so pivotal, so sharp, and yet so soft. Everything in his soul structure felt different, but by an almost imperceptible degree. The sounds of his soul, the sensations, visual representations, and impressions.

  He could taste his meal from hours ago more finely. His vision sharpened. The acidic tang of chymicals, wood, and caustic goop assaulted his nostrils. He felt colder and warmer at the same time. The sounds of chittering ants, chatting combatants, and whirring equipment. He was faintly aware of the surrounding stumps and people walking past him.

  His muscles, his vital organs, the blood pumping through his vessels, his internal condition. All these were brought to his cognizance with such fine detail.

  Blood-healing passive augmentations.

  Caen's eyes were wide with disbelief as he began casting the spell he'd been laboring with just moments ago. Hands trembling, he double-checked to make sure he wasn't connected to any of the stumps. But he already knew that he wasn't.

  The spell took immediately. There was a primal instinct, a raw understanding, that coated his spirit and mind, guiding him.

  Caen tried again, tears blurring his vision. A different spell. It took. And again. Till, he'd cast ten different spells of the first and second elevations. Not a single one of them collapsed.

  He wept quietly and wasn't sure how long he sat there, body wracked by sobs.

  Ancestors, he thought, wiping a forearm across his eyes.

  Caen was, of course, still abject in every other discipline of magic.

  Every other discipline but Blood-healing.

  Passive augmentations were tied to affinities within any discipline of magic. The Peilker Scale rated affinities from 0 to 12. However, anyone with ratings that fell below 1 on the scale didn't possess passive augmentations.

  Even with the sleep abeyance spell he'd cast on himself, Caen felt impossibly well-rested.

  He broke out into crazed laughter, unable to contain his joy. This naturally drew stares, and a trio of combatants sitting nearby stood up and moved away.

  Caen's mind kept returning to the vision he'd received in the mirror-room. This was the first step of many, and it gave him so much strength. He hadn't been entirely certain that any of the boosted exercises would help raise his affinities. Not quickly enough, anyway. But this more than proved it to him.

  He could raise his affinities out of abjection. Every one of them. And at a much, much faster rate than was usual for anyone else he knew of.

  * * *

  By 8 in the evening, Caen made his way to his parents' room in the officers’ quarters. His father had mentioned that they wanted to have a small family dinner, which sounded like a wonderful idea to Caen, and was, of course, the least Caen could do after making his loved ones worry so much.

  Zeris, Aunt Vensha, his parents, Uncle Teiro, and Aunt Grena were all there. It was a meager cafeteria-purchased spread, but the company was the real reward.

  During a lull in conversation, he told them about how his Blood-healing affinity had risen out of abjection.

  Everyone was silent at that, wearing varying degrees of shock.

  “Are you… are you sure, son?” Ergen asked.

  His mother was frozen in her seat.

  “I'll have to check before I can be entirely sure,” Caen said, surprised at how steady his voice was. “But I have a few passive augmentations now and…” He nodded his head, vision blurring from tears. “I—”

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  Zeris was out of her seat first, wrapping him in a hug. “You idiot, why didn't you say anything?”

  Vensha joined in on the hug with everyone else. Sh’leinu sobbed like she'd just heard bad news, and Ergen almost suffocated him with a crushing embrace.

  They cried, they talked, they ate—not necessarily in that order.

  * * *

  Caen spent the whole night in the Odaton-plane Plane adapting his spells. He'd returned to his favored sitting spot a little tired but far less sore than usual from his boosted workout just hours ago. Guinevere had gone to sleep some time past midnight, but Zeris had stayed up till much later, returning to her atrocious sleeping habits.

  His affinity in Blood-healing wasn't strong enough to cast sleep abeyance, which was a third elevation spell, so Caen used a boosted affinity from a stump to do it. As long as he didn't strain his body too much, he would be fine.

  At dawn, Caen left for his morning workout, helped out in the kitchen, had breakfast, and then it was back to the Plane. He only took breaks to replenish some mana and wolf down lunch. His portions were always more than generous, and he had quite a few meal tokens saved up from before the tunnels, and even yesterday at the healing tents.

  * * *

  Caen spent the next few days cycling through his tasks. Practicing Flora magic was of utmost priority to him. But he also prioritized observing his soul structure and playing with his new Blood-healing affinity.

  Caen was shocked to discover that his newly ‘unabjected’ Blood-healing affinity was nearly as strong as Vensha's. She had a rating of 4 in Blood-healing. Caen wasn't sure what this meant. Had his affinity risen out of abjection and shot all the way up to this? It seemed ridiculous. He would have to check when he returned home.

  Regardless, now that he'd all but confirmed that his new training model worked, he committed more time and effort to it. He alternated between training in abjection and with boosted affinities in the other disciplines he intended to use in the Patronage trials.

  Caen was very quickly learning that there simply wasn't enough time in the day for everything he needed to do.

  He helped out in the kitchen whenever he could spare the time. He marveled at his new Blood-healing affinity as he attended to wounds in the healing tents. He chatted throughout the day with Zeris and Guinevere as they all worked on their different pursuits, then they'd assemble at the aides' hall to share dinner—of course, Zeris never partook, all thanks to Ladia.

  [It's like she's a completely different person,] Zeris said. [I hate it. She's no longer abrupt or stern, and she always has a docile air about her now. It's terrible.]

  They were all sitting on Zeris's bed in the aides' hall. Caen and Guinevere had purchased food from the cafeteria and were sharing it with Zeris, though she'd already had dinner. Ladia, her tutor, had apparently made arrangements for Zeris to get fed twice a day.

  [Poor lady,] Guinevere chuckled as she chewed. [She must have felt responsible for your ‘death’.]

  [Knowing Aunt Grena, she probably gave Ladia a hard time too,] Caen mused. He was going over some magical exercises as he ate and chatted with them.

  [Ancestors. I wish she'd stop! She's become a better tutor in the last twenty-four hours than she's been in the past eight years. It just feels wrong! What am I going to gripe about now?]

  [There's always color-coding the disciplines of magic,] Caen offered.

  [Color-coding what?] Guinevere asked.

  Zeris's grin was feral. [Oh, perfect! Let me tell you all about it. It's so infuriating.]

  * * *

  His time in the tunnels and the weeks that came before that had helped Caen to refine his mana consumption. He was pretty much as efficient with mana with a boosted affinity as he was in abjection. He intended to push that efficiency even further.

  His exercises centered on Flora magic, Fire magic, and the ‘core four’ disciplines, which included Blood-healing, Body-enhancement, Dream-guarding, and Spirit-healing.

  Blood and Flora were easy to train at the front zone. Body and Fire, he trained at the workout field. Spirit-healing, he trained sometimes at the healing tents, and other times with Zeris. Dream-guarding from Guinevere. He snuck in some training for a few other disciplines whenever he could spare the time.

  Caen started to feel stronger as his boosted physical training was beginning to show its worth. He was recovering so much faster due to his Blood-healing passive augmentations. He felt healthier than ever before.

  It was a very small thing, but his spells in the other disciplines he was training were failing less and less. He noted an objectively negligible reduction in his casting time, which would have seemed utterly irrelevant to anyone else. But to Caen, it was a marked sign of improvement that brought tears to his eyes. He hadn't seen any reduction of this caliber in all his years of practicing magic.

  His training regimen was straightforward enough. Magical exercises attempted in abjection and with a boosted affinity, as well as making very slow and existence-befuddling attempts at casting spells in abjection that he'd adapted with a boosted affinity. These he had to do with even more slowness and care than typical spellcasting entailed for him.

  All the while, Caen observed his soul structure, noting differences and changes whenever he cast spells. If he could learn to reliably identify spells within soul structures, it might give him an inroad into determining what represented the magical abilities in the soul structures of Planar creatures. The regeneration abilities of the Odaton awakened trees, for example.

  * * *

  After a late lunch, Caen sat in the Plane, holding a branch he'd been practicing with. He cast a spell, stacking a few modifiers to the spell base. The stiff branch curved backwards impossibly in his hand. This was one of the more advanced of the spells he'd been adapting these past few days. It lent more flexibility and limberness to stalks, stems, and branches.

  He spent a moment longer practicing the rest of the spells. One made plants more rigid. Another allowed vine-like tendrils to wrap around objects with the ease of a prehensile tail. And yet another had basic kinetic effects: he could pull and push plant matter up to a certain weight. Caen spent more time than was necessary just using this spell.

  * * *

  Caen walked up to an awakened tree well away from any of the ones being felled by Cutter teams. He connected to it, then squatted down to touch a portion of its roots jutting out of the ground. He cast the paralysis spell, laden with modifiers. This spell was of the third elevation and was still beyond what he could achieve with his Blood-healing affinity.

  The tree trembled, and the Flora affinity cluster in its soul structure grew very prominent. Several of the tree's whip-like branches began flailing towards him, but a good many of them were as still as stone. Caen retreated far enough away from the branches. A group of ants came at him, and he dispatched them very quickly, taking no risks whatsoever as he flickered Soul-sense. A part of him was pleased to be using his glaive again. No matter what Guinevere said about swords, glaives were just more convenient.

  He cast the paralysis spell on the same tree again. It took longer than it had with the roots in the tunnels because he was covering much more surface area by targeting all the branches on this tree, and he had to dodge some branches. This time, almost all the branches went still, but a handful of them flailed at Caen slowly. Once more, he cut down whatever ants swarmed him. Though there were fewer this time.

  His third try was successful. The tree's soul structure showed that it was actively using that strange affinity that represented its ability to call for help somehow. He killed the ants that responded to the tree's call, then took the time to cast the paralysis spell again.

  Caen returned his glaive to its place at the back of his armor and climbed the tree. It wasn't all that difficult, with there being so many branches granting him leverage. By the time he reached the very top of the tree, he'd finished precasting the paralysis spell. He effected it now, causing the already rousing branches to grow still once more.

  Caen Mimicked the tree's Flora affinity, losing his boosted Blood-healing affinity as a result. He began to practice his adapted spells on the tree's branches. With a spell and an application of his will to bypass the tree's innate resistance, he lifted one branch, then lifted a few others. He couldn't manipulate more than four of them at once. They were quite heavy. With a smile on his face, he worked on his control. He soon needed to Mimic the tree's Blood-healing affinity once more and cast the paralysis spell. Then he switched back to Flora and resumed his training. This was rather mana-intensive, and Caen would never have attempted it if his efficiency wasn't as high as it was.

  The paralysis spell lasted for about five minutes and took just slightly under a minute to cast due to the length and complexity of the spell chain, as well as how many modifiers he stacked to the spell base. This left him with barely four minutes of uninterrupted Flora practice.

  Regularly enough, a group of ants would come to the base of the tree and chitter about in confusion before retreating.

  Every so often, though, one or two of them would climb up the tree. Caen would take out his glaive with unnecessary flair, cut them down literally, and return the glaive to its place at his back.

  Of course, he'd tied himself to a couple of branches just in case. Safety was very important.