“How long was I out?” I asked as I rubbed my head. It didn’t hurt, this hadn’t been painful. But it was… disoriented. Dusk let out a cheerful raven’s caw as she told me I had only been out for about thirty seconds, maybe less.

  “Huh. It felt a lot longer than that.”

  I hopped to my feet and leaned over to look at my reflection in the lake. Just like I’d felt when I’d been working with the spell directly, there was a flower crown around my head, woven of rainbow morels. It suited me, honestly, especially as I was dressing less like Orykson’s apprentice, and more like the kind of person who might make and wear a flower crown.

  I unbuttoned my shirt and glanced at the new veins, which much appealed to the same part of me that liked the ghost market and ghosts and shades and stuff like that. The veins spread across my chest like dark, corrupting magic was pouring from my heart. I buttoned my shirt back up quickly, still not entirely comfortable with being shirtless. I was incredibly happy about it, but years of social conditioning still took their toll.

  I held up the nails and examined them. The royal blue with flecks of gold was pretty, and the effect made my nails like pear-shaped sapphires, sharp and tough, almost claw-like. Even a few months ago, it might have upset a part of me that was worried it would look too feminine. Instead, I found myself appreciating it in a way that I couldn’t have before.

  It was funny, in a way. Reaching so many of my goals almost felt like I was giving myself permission to have feminine traits – though honestly, gendering colored nails was ridiculous. And stranger still, with my reaction with the shirt, and my conflicting reaction between the two. But was it conflicting at all? I thought I perhaps ought to talk to someone about it.

  “How do you feel?” Meadow asked.

  “Honestly?” I said. “Good. Still getting a handle on my confidence, but I think the modifications suit me well enough.”

  “How about your mana-garden and spirit?” Meadow asked.

  “Let’s see…”

  I reached within myself, and found no pain, and nothing broken – well, except for Temporal Basin, but that had been expected, in all honesty. Even that, though, wasn’t broken so much as it was wiped clean, like removing scum from the surface of a lake.

  My temporal mana was recovering faster than it had in a long time, as if the weight of Testudinal Reserve and Temporal Basin were entirely gone. Some of it was still leaking into the air from my rooted mana channels, but that was the kind of problem I didn’t think I’d ever be able to fix.

  While it was still leagues behind my life mana, with its multiple harvesting spells, and a ways behind death mana or spatial mana, with their respective coalheart and harvest distance, it was still an improvement from where it had been.

  I kept delving in. The Testudinal Reserve spell hummed, changed now, the tree incorporating elements of rainbows, gold, blue, and ink black. I wasn’t sure I could call it the Testudinal Reserve, not after this.

  I spun mana through it, and the spell the world tortoise had given me activated within my spatial gate. I activated the world tortoise’s spell, and it activated the changed reserve spell. They were intricately linked, to the point where I couldn’t cast one without the other. Well, at least that would make mana manipulation easier, since I didn’t have to direct two flows of mana.

  As I activated the spell, though, I felt something… Strange. I flexed my spirit, and felt the crown of morels, the sparkling of my azure nails, and the blackness spreading from my heart all vanish, as they were pulled into the reserve of power. I flexed again, and they reappeared. With a few more flows of power, I made them appear and disappear, until I was eventually able to hide only the parts I wanted to, rather than making it all or nothing. But that was clearly a side effect, rather than the main event.

  I reached for the power in the reserve itself, feeling it out, first in the physical sense.

  The reserve stored itself through the energy and crystalline structures that made up my bones, but also into the marrow in a way that it hadn’t before.

  It rushed through osteonic canals and canaliculi and other parts that I didn’t have names for, out into my blood, flowing from blood into muscle, from muscle into tissue. It spun through every part of my body, running in conjunction with my full-gate spells in a way I didn’t really understand.

  The spinning power flowed through my glimmering multi-coloured tattoo from the beastmark, which had once stored a reserve of excess energy. That had been integrated with the power of the spread-crystal. It had always been rather like a beast core, a knot of excess energy. Now it seemed to have taken on a slightly gimmering sheen, and was growing in on itself, in much the same way that the basin had.

  I was both relieved and disappointed that my bones weren’t growing into their own spatial pocket. On one hand, if they had, it would have been terrifying. But it also would have been kind of cool to have a spatial reserve of my own bones.

  I finished tracing the power that flowed through my body, the expansion and reinfement of my existing abilities, and started delving in on the spiritual side of things. The power the spells – though, given how linked they were, I wasn’t entirely certain that pluralizing it was needed – held in reserve was deeply strange. Protean, shifting, but also deeply personal.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The amount was far, far lower than what I’d been able to hold in my basin, even smaller than what I’d been able to store in my bones before, yet it felt stronger than either one, a seething pool of colorless gray light streaked with rainbow, gold, and black.

  When I drew fungal mana out of the ninelight morels for casting my Fungal Lock, it was stronger than just using my own, as if a new, synergistic ingrained effect was working its way through the mana and resonating with my own spirit, and the small bead of power within the new spell felt as if it had taken on this aspect and shifted it from synergizing with fungal spells to instead synergize with my entire spirit.

  After drinking a golden soul potion, which was the closest thing to Dawn’s mana I was aware of, my entire mana-garden had become more potent, its mana growing denser and stronger, and collected mana within the new spell felt as if it had been fed many drops of destiny, causing it to grow far denser and more potent than the power that ran through my normal mana. It was as if the burningly bright threads of Dawn’s starsoul mana had adapted to suit me.

  And last, the gift from the hollowvoid tree. It wasn’t as simple as just making the power denser, or synergizing and working as an ingrained effect. Instead it felt almost like the power that flowed when I felt spiritual dominions working their will on the world, or when Kene had held their body together with nothing but their willpower and nascent truth. The power of this mana was more reactive to what I wanted, a hunger that only needed direction before it could endlessly spiral out to perform that task.

  I needed a name for this new reserve spell. It wasn’t a well, actually storing true drops of deep mana, but it was more than just a reserve. It drew from my gestalt body, refining it almost like some sort of internal alchemy.

  I was tempted to go with something silly, like the Bone Vault. After all, it was a vault of mana running through my bones. But no, it ran through my spirit and body more than just bone now.

  The Gestalt Vault? That rhymed a little too much.

  Gestalt Reserve? Gestalt Basin? No, while I liked the general sound of that, it wasn’t quite right.

  Starsoul, Ninelight, and Hollowvoid Enhanced Mana Storage? No, that sounded too much like a name Orykson would give it.

  Testudinal Basin.

  That was it. A combination of spells from a world tortoise, time tortoises, and Ikki, which stored a reserve of far more refined mana than my natural garden could hold, before it ran through my body, refining it and improving it. I wished I could have fit something about that refinement in, but I thought it made the spell sound too clunky.

  I tested with the flexing of each part of the spell in and out of the basin, seeing what effects it had. When a part was within the store of power, it made the effect of the mana within the basin stronger, but slowed the rate at which power from my body and spirit trickled in to fill and expand the stores of power – when I pulled the crown of morels in, for example, I felt the synergy of the mana, the almost ingrained effect, grow stronger, but the fractional growth pushing at the edges of the basin shrank a large amount. When I had everything hidden, the mana was even more absurdly potent, but the growth and restoration of expended power was almost a quarter of what it was with them out.

  I allowed all of them out on my body, then started testing with the power inside the basin.

  I drew mana from it, and restored a touch of life mana. Then hudau. Then space, then time, then death. It restored each of them with equal efficiency, at least as far as I could tell.

  More interesting was the conversion rate. The mana inside my Testudinal Basin was so rich and powerful that only a little bit was needed to restore my gates to full. It was like drawing in power from a mana source plant stronger than me, or when I overcharged my mana, then let it sit in my spirit and break back down.

  That brought up a thought, and I flicked my hand out, drawing power from the basin. Instead of letting it restore my garden, I used it to cast Briarthreads. They exploded out around me, far thicker and stronger than before, almost like I’d run Enhance Forging with it. I applied Enhance Forging, casting it with my hudau mana, and they grew even more impressive. Then I ran Enhance Forging with the Testudinal Basin mana, and my Briarthreads blazed with green light as they spun around me faster than I’d ever managed.

  Then the basin’s mana ran dry, and the spell returned to a normal level – still strong, just not quite as absurd.

  That was good to know, though. I could restore my normal power, probably at least twice over, or I could use the refined power to refine my own casting.

  More interestingly, at least to me, where I’d run the power of the Testudinal Basin, my mana-garden was left… improved. The trees smoothed out, the grass they grew in was healthier, and some of the excess, unneeded twigs simply dissolved. It reminded me ever so slightly of the aftershocks of drinking a drop of deep mana.

  There weren’t the main effects – my spells didn’t surge up in height, gaining years of development in moments, they didn’t suddenly boost their ingrained effects, or get denser. But it was like the after-effects, akin to when so much dross had fallen from the trees of my mana-garden after imbuing in the drops of destiny. Maintenance and refinement.

  “Very impressive,” Meadow complimented, clapping softly.

  “Thank you,” I said, bowing dramatically. “Did you have any idea this would happen?”

  “Yes and no,” Meadow said. “I did tell you that something might happen. But this specifically? No. I do wonder, though – could you cast the world tortoise spell again? This attempt was far from the normal sort of use to give ingrained effects to plants and allow them to grow like spells.”

  My mana roiled out of me in instinctive warning that I couldn’t do it again, at least now, and if I wanted to, I needed to pick some less impressive plants. For right now, though, the second slot in my hudau mana’s early-third gate might be empty, but I should fill it with a normal beast spell, or something of the like.

  I explained those feelings to Meadow, and she nodded.

  “Ah, yes, that makes sense. It’s something we can address if you’ve reached the peak of third gate, and haven’t found enough useful spells to fill your third gate hudau mana.”

  “Sounds good,” I said with a nervous sigh. “Do you have any ideas for a normal beast spell to fill it, by the way?”

  “Oh, I’ve got a few,” Meadow said. “There are some spells used by assorted nine-tailed fox breeds like the h? yêu, huli jing, kitsune, and kumiho that are worth looking at. A few kludde earth magic spells, some denglong, twrch trwyth, kanko, c?n annwn. then there’s… Oh dear, I’m rambling.”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” I said, laughing. “I appreciate it. I’ll see what I can do. For now, though.”

  My stomach rumbled, perfectly on cue.

  “That was a lot of rapid shifting and development, and I’m hungry. Let’s eat."

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