The morning greeted him with fluffy reddish clouds in his windowed sky. The breeze that had blown nearly constantly had slackened, leaving the temperature mild and the canopy, for once, still. Ulric was busying himself hauling water from his pool into the tanning pit. Things were going well, the basket was holding up, only a minor drip from the bottom. He'd need at least twenty trips to get enough water, estimating his basket at around five liters. The "pit" wasn't so deep, more a shallow crack about five meters long by a couple meters wide. But it would be just big enough to hold the hide submerged, once filled.
After completing the water transfer, which had not observably diminished his rock pool, a sign that it was, indeed, a spring, he lunched. Grilled Giga-bear was as good a second time as a first. The Smoker was re-smoked. Now he spent a tedious few hours scraping the flesh from the hide. His progress was relatively swift, his athletic form moving easily despite the awkward positions hunched over, working arms and shoulders and core vigorously as he scraped.
Were it not for the lurking knowledge that he was potentially going to have to encounter more creatures like the one he was working, on he'd be happy.
"No." Ulric paused as he thought about that last impression.
That was a shit attitude. He was doing well. Things that needed doing were getting done, to the best of his ability. He was full, he was dry, he was warm. He was bare-assed naked in the middle of the most wonderous grove of trees he'd ever laid eyes on and, he was, godsdamnit, happy about it.
Magic might still be a mystery, but it had taught him one thing: Your will was all. If you want happy, be happy. Things didn't have to be perfect to be good enough. He wasn't living his old life, beholden to the opinions or expectations of people he didn't give a damn about and worrying that he'd, somehow, failed at being a person by not meeting their ridiculous requirements of him. All that mattered was that he was living as he felt was right. That he was doing as he felt was best.
"Never again for a job will I lose hope. Never will I ever be so convinced that there are no options, that I can’t simply walk away. Fuck slaving myself to some cause or course I don’t wish to run. I won’t hide myself, or be less, or serve beneath the weight of another's will unless I damned well choose to, or drive myself into a corner from fear of change. I’ll do this life how I want to, my way." Ulric swore, the ancient grove witnessed.
Thus fortified, the work continued. The scraped hide was immersed in a fresh brain puree soup. It should soak for another couple of days. Then it would need to be stretched. He wouldn't even need to build a frame, just make some stakes and nail it to the fallen tree trunk to dry.
Dark saw Ulric returned to his shelter, huddled cozily beneath a furred hide segment to watch his fireplace dance, to listen to the night songs of the glade, their mysterious music his only company. He'd remembered earlier that day a documentary on Vietnamese rice farmers, particularly their large baskets hung from opposite ends of a pole. That would be the trick for hauling materials around. It meant a hell of a lot of weaving. Which was fine, he had the time. The low flame crackled while he made larger basket frames. Barrel shaped, half a meter in diameter by a meter deep, these would let him forage even bulky materials without overloading himself. For a second he almost set himself down to sleep, but the whisper of “Why wait?” stopped him. To be honest, he wasn’t truly tired. And those baskets did need weaving, he’d stored the materials within the shelter so they were right here to hand.
Without further commentary, Ulric began his task, lashing whippy, willowish branches into hooped frames, into which the thick longish fronds of some palm bush plant would form the basket.
He worked long into the night, absorbed by the task and feeling none of the exhaustion that had plagued him during the mana sickness. It would seem his body had acclimated, the push of mana through it having stabilized it. The status had said his core was tempered. It sounded about right. He felt reinforced. A quick status check found his core saturated and the slight soul bonus was back. This weaving was a nice way to keep his hands busy, freeing his mind to engage in its favorite activity: wandering, at seeming random, through the various paths in and around the events that had recently occurred. He took up and then, without obvious connection, transitioned between at least five different trains of thought. Magic. Tools to improve his condition. Possible confrontations with the fauna of this land. Clothing design patterns and half-remembered sewing patterns. Climbing down the escarpment. Magic. And on, and on.
Sunrise caught him by absolute surprise. Ulric had woven through the night in near trance. He'd never felt even a hint of tiredness.
"Huh, guess peak human is pretty amazing." he said to no one.
He remembered being able to do this in his twenties, just grind through for thirty hours, when a project of interest held his imagination thrall. It had been almost twenty years since he'd been found reason motivating enough to do it though, and such a thing was completely unimaginable in those last few trips around Sol.
As a result, here he sat, and, at his feet, the barrel shaped hauling baskets were finished. A vine loop handle tied to the top of the frame would allow the baskets to be supported by a pole. He'd be able to forage hardcore now. Maybe some digging would allow him to find clay. Maybe firing some of the rocks would lead to the potential for a Roman concrete mix. Also, lastly, though certainly not leastly, there would have to come a time to start investigating magic with more emphasis. Magic wouldn’t fill his belly, but maybe, if he developed proficiency enough, it would solve some of the impending problems that lurked in winter’s grip. Being able to conjure a fire at will, for example, in the deepest, coldest nights, was sure to be a worthwhile endeavor. Not yet, the immediate needs held priority, but soon.
Somewhere at the edge of awareness, Ulric suspected that he was experiencing a strangely accelerated, but clear thought process. Perhaps the effect of that mana saturation absent the debilitation of his manasickness to offset it. Was this the effect of mental stats receiving a bump, a sort of Adderall-esque bit of additional mental quickness and focus? Whatever, absent coffee he decided better than to look a gift horse in the mouth, this bonus acuity could run its course while he completed camp chores. Those were endless, it seemed; harvesting more wood, removing smoked meat, reloading the smoker from a meat pile barely diminished, peeling inner bark fibers from a particular kind of sapling that produced long straight fibers he could twine to make cordage, basket weaving, it went on and on. Lists of tasks to do and to be done later filled his mind while he stirred the Forest Lord hide with a long branch.
Finally, hands going rubbery at the incessant labor, he finally stopped for a rest as the partnered suns rose just into his canopy window. Blue skies above, so similar to Earth. Perhaps just the slightest bit of a more marine blue than the azure he was used to. Thin whispy clouds, and accompanying them, heavier, lower clouds, that might portend rain appeared at the edge of his glade, the first of their kind he'd seen since arriving at this place; those heralded weather of some kind, even if not precipitation. The wind had resumed, a stronger bite to it than on previous days, a cold front. As he chewed on a meal of roasted meat and the various tubers he'd tested previously, wrapped in a leaf and buried in coals, Ulric was nearly certain that this season marked the heart of Autumn. Things were going to get cold. The leaves would drop and that would be a hell of a mess if this forest floor leaf litter was any indication.
Ulric smiled. He felt immense gratitude towards the Watcher that had pulled his dying soul from the embers of its previous life and breathed it to life in this wondrous forest. Finally. He was content with the turning of the world.
Those calm few minutes were not wasted, basking in his presence in this world. But. There were things that needed doing so he rose to resume getting them done.
A glance at the sky confirmed he had plenty of time left in the day so the twice born man decided that it was a good opportunity to make a committed investigation of magic. He called up his status briefly, just to confirm his current condition for reference.
Taking a deep breath, Ulric reached into himself for that core of power. He let his mind relive the fight with the Forest Lord, the emotions, the violent motion, the moment when his will had solidified into adamant desire for the death of the monster.
[Voltaic Grip]
Holding his hands out like he was holding a soccer ball between them he felt the rush of heat through his body from chest through shoulders and violet light poured out from his palms like dense glowing steam before it snapped into focused light and lightning began to surge between his finger-tips. It danced wildly, a loud buzzing filling the clearing. Blue white, flickers of flame rising from the surging arcs, it was impressive as hell. He could definitely feel his energy draining, the reserves in his body rapidly depleting as the magic flowed. Ulric felt a pulling now, a sense of strain, like gravity had increased, and the rising arcs began to flicker. A rush of dizzy-ness hit him and he staggered, hands dropping as the power ceased its flow, a tap abruptly closed.
Ulric caught himself, breathing hard. He'd nearly passed out. Gone was that oddly persistent mental high. He felt tired now, but not body tired, more like the tired you got when you'd tried to work math problems beyond your understanding.
"Status", he said aloud, briefly examining the sum total of his existence at a whim of thought. He chuckled briefly at the absurdity before considering what this experiment had revealed.
His status showed his mana at zero. Ok, that made sense, he'd deliberately pushed himself as far as he could, keeping the flow of mystical strength going as long as he was able. He'd felt the strain of it too, like dragging an enormous rock uphill. Easy at the very first but rapidly more difficult. It would seem that it was stressful to his core to run himself down that much, though he had to wonder if the practice might not result in a net gain of magical strength if he repeated the process, sort of like weight lifting required damage to muscle tissue to promote growth. He didn’t think he’d damaged his core by depleting it, but he knew it didn’t feel great to be running on empty. He was whipped.
“Worth it.” Ulric told the glade. He had found his limit, under controlled circumstances. He had also proven that he could do magic on demand, dispelling that nagging fear from his nightmare: that, when the moment came, his magic would fail him, leaving him at the mercy of his enemy.
The spell worked a little like a computer algorithm or well-practiced mathematical problem-solving. It required effort to concentrate his mana and gather it to the form of his intent but it wasn’t particularly hard to do, other than the drain of using up his mana. He felt like he could probably use this or any known spell pretty much on demand, without having to reinvent the magical wheel every time. Ulric had a feeling that the seven or eight seconds of casting that spell was a rather large expenditure of magical potential. The energy required to arc like that had to be huge.
Humming to himself Ulric thought of the applications of brief pulses of high-powered electrical currents. He was probably good for two, maybe three sustained pulses and then he’d be back to the old mundane form of dealing with threats. Maybe not just completely go to zero mana though, a little gas in the tank might come in handy in an emergency.
Not to mention that he wouldn’t care to face anything in the shape he was in right now. Ulric could feel a headache coming on and all the energy he'd had after eating was completely gone. Mana exhaustion was no joke. Nothing for it then, he decided, clearing the status from his mind, it was time for a mid-morning nap.
The suns had dipped below the sky window by the time Ulric rose from his leaf bed, a longer sleep than he’d intended by a couple of hours. He had to piss furiously and went out to do so with gusto. About the time that wrapped up, the wild man discovered he also needed to donate solid mass to the forest floor which he also did, taking a quick bath with his strigil afterward. It was a cold bath, even for him, although the afternoon sun helped.
Now that the necessaries were done Ulric was hungry and thirsty. But the headache had cleared and he didn't have that feeling of brain fog. Neither did he feel the odd almost runner's high he'd been running on the previous night. A quick status revealed his mana exhaustion to be gone, he was sitting at sixty-three percent mana. To judge the daylight, he'd been asleep for a good four hours. If his mathing wasn’t too far off, it would appear that his mana regeneration was two maybe three times higher asleep than awake. If his previous measurement had been correct, he gained around five percent an hour. That he was at over sixty now, about four hours after depleting himself and nearly all of it napping agreed with the estimate. He was half tempted to immediately repeat the experiment to confirm his suppositions but there were other things to do, he'd killed half his day.
Ulric rekindled the smoldering smoke hut fire and his cookfire. He gathered more tubers, a process that went quickly now that he was getting better at identifying them from a distance, and cooked another slab of meat. While the meal was cooling, he drank deeply from his water supply and briefly stirred the tanning pit.
The wind reminded him that, a whole week into his journey, he'd been naked as a jaybird for all but a few hours of it. If there were any hidden watchers around, they'd think he had some kind of fetish. But processing hides takes time damnit!
It was fine, he grinned, let them look. His ass was a thing of beauty. Sculpted and only slightly hairy beauty. Resisting a brief urge to strike a pose for the imagined voyeurs Ulric returned to the matters at hand.
From where they lay in a stately pile, the butchered remains of the Forest lord held a bounty in sinew he'd cut from the meat during the meat processing. If he soaked it, the material should return to its pliable state and he could then twist and braid it into cord. If he did that correctly, he should be able to make a bowstring that would withstand the force of a powerful draw. So long as it didn't degrade substantially, he was pretty sure he couldn't pull a bow with enough force to break that stuff, or find a stave that would, either. It had resisted incredible stresses in the muscles of that monster during its charge. Worst-case scenario he'd simply have a large supply of cordage, which was still a huge win. This half-aloud rambling accompanied one more rich meal of monster.
As the daylight bled out on the end of the first week since he'd been reforged, Ulric rendered what felt like kilometers of the long, golden strips of dry tendon into thin cords and set them in water. Tomorrow, he'd finally stretch the preserved hide for drying. He'd also be able to braid cordage. Smoke meat. Gather Vegetables. Secure wood. Something almost resembling a routine, all these little tasks that needed doing.
It was a thought that didn't displease him. For all he'd hated the routines of his old life, there was a comfort in knowing what you needed to do. And he had doings for days.
Sleep found Ulric buried in leaves on his bed, a contented smile on his face.
---------------------------------------------One Week Later---------------------------------------
Ulric looked up from the last tuber he’d just finished settling into its place within his hand tilled garden bed. He brushed the sweat from his brow, streaking loamy soil across his forehead. He didn’t worry about it; dirt was as much a part of life out here as air and water. More or less, as long as it wasn’t feces, he didn’t worry about having it on him anymore. It would appear that he’d made it just in time. The weather had been unbelievably mild. Cool, but mild. He’d seen so little rain that he’d wondered if his rock pool might deplete, its source in the water table running dry. His worries were unfounded, there, in the window of his green sky, the hole in the canopy which had allowed the twinned stars to bless his glade with lifegiving light were storm clouds. The wind, ever-present here on the plateau, had a damp cast to it. His senses, refined by orders of magnitude compared to the Before, could actually detect the change in pressure. The crippled engineer had possessed that superpower before, courtesy of a ruined knee and broken bones that picked up low pressure as surely as a barometer. Just with pain, instead of a gauge.
Ah well, the woods hermit trainee leaned backward, fists pressed into the muscles of his lower back, feeling the knots there from Watcher crafted muscled heavily taxed by grueling labors. Yessir, the Reforged man was pretty ready for a break, hand-tilling garden beds with a giga bear rib-bone was some rough work. A little rain would do him some good. The first droplets scattered across him as he retreated to his shelter a few minutes later.
Be careful what you ask for.
What do you do when you have no electricity, no books, no entertainment at all, and it has been raining a steady downpour on and off for the last three days on end? That is a trick question. You don’t do anything. At all. Nothing, all day, unless you want to burn excessive calories on staving off exposure. Ulric estimated that what he was being treated to now was a Twenty-degree Centigrade rain that, partnered with its companion wind, would kill a guy in a couple of hours by hypothermia. People died all the time in weather like this. The foolish, the overconfident, the ill-prepared.
All synonyms, he mused.
Well, Ulric Einar was not going to play the fool, daring the weather to do what the animals had not. He went out for a few minutes, cut up firewood, harvested a few lovely bits of herbs or roots, and got his ass back under shelter. Problem was, what to do in the meantime? He had projects. Crafts. Ideas to explore. Even those had limits to keep him occupied. Ulric had woken this morning with a hankering to explore magic, given that he’d reached something of a stopping point in several projects and it was time to stop running from impossible nonsense, which was what he still subconsciously regarded magic to be.
Sitting cross-legged, Ulric stared into the fireplace, watching the wood char, flare, and generally transform before his eyes. Combustion, the chemical process of converting complex carbohydrates into water vapor and carbon dioxide, plus a few odds and ends gases, depending on the composition of the wood, the completeness of the combustion. It was a form of magic, was fire. Put him in the right mind state to investigate the phenomenal.
His attention fell inwards, towards that mysterious organ that drew mana into his form, holding a type of energy with which he was not versed, had not any form of education with which to understand its processes. The Watcher had plunged a metaphorical dagger into his brain to impart him some basic knowledge regarding types of mana and that was basically all he had to go on.
Familiar with waveforms and harmonics as an engineer in training, Ulric knew what these basic types of mana “sounded” like to his core, and how they were perceived to his sense of Varda’s Field. He was, more or less, trying to figure out what magic was on the fly, similar to learning to play music by ear.
He started with the thing that had come first, by instinct. Ceraun, lightning, electromagnetic discharge, whatever the hell you wanted to call it. He’d called it to slay his enemy, there at the cusp of being destroyed. It had come, drinking his core’s reserves to become an arc of surpassing violence. Lesser arcs could Ulric make, by throttling the flow of mana through the mental construct that had patterned itself on his brain, the spell. Built on core principles regarding charge separation, Ulric was pretty sure he'd done it on accident. Even so, he had control of it now. He could tell that the mana inside his core before he’d used it to do magic was different than the how it felt when it became lightning. They had different feels, a different harmony.
The mana in his core felt like some kind of base note. The lightning magic was distinctly jumpier, wanted to move, to cycle, to separate and come back together. It danced. He could make a bigger arc, visible between his hands so long as he envisioned the poles of charge being concentrated on his hands and concentrated on keeping the energy contained between them. Lapses in concentration made weird shit happen like random arcs to nearby objects, and odd pops of sound that were accompanied by a metallic taste in his mouth.
Moving his mana outside the bounds of the one defined Thaumaturgical formula he possessed caused those things to happen. Miscasts. Experimentation had yet to inform him on particular patterns that yielded precisely repeated miscasting outcomes, once control was lost, some element of random mana movement dominated the event, as near as he could determine.
So, rather than repeat a study that seemed doomed to ever yield determinate outcome, he took a step back to focus on the mana itself, its feel, its harmony in his core.
When one approach led to no progress it was time to try something different.
From his lashed wood chair, with the beat of raindrops steadily thudding outside upon the Ancient Glade, Ulric concentrated again on the flame and concentrated on that base note of his core’s energy. After some quarter hour, a pulsing at the edge of his senses found space in his awareness. Gently, he welcomed this new thing into his conscious focus, and found himself being aware of the fire as more than heat and light. It was both, of course, but something else radiated to his meditative state. A note distinct from his core’s base harmonic, and he was holding both of them in his mind. As he stared into the flickering tongues of fire, it slowly dawned on him that the burning wood held a distinct identity, he could sense its feel, new and wholly different from the lightning or his native mana. He got excited and lost the sensation.
“Focus, fucknuts!” Ulric cursed into his tent.
“You aren’t playing around here, you need this. So. Konzentriere dich, Idiot.” Ulric scolded himself, before resuming his meditative study of forces just out of sight.
There. He found it again, that vibrant feeling that surrounded the fireplace. It sounded like it had before, when the Watcher had introduced him to it. Hungry, eager, transformative. Incindere, the essence of flame. Smiling to himself, Ulric, with the utmost caution, began to push at his core to gather mana into the space above the fireplace, imagining a sphere, like a balloon, that he slowly filled. Wonder of wonders, his core actually did it, moving according to his desire. Licking his lips he carefully tried to, shift, that mana, to tune it towards the harmonic of fire.
Using his natural flame as a guide, and the feeling granted by the Impossible, he succeeded, the magic suddenly took form and he observed with a distinct sensation of glee the floating ball of fire. He almost laughed, until the thing started wobbling in place. Firming his will, he kept his shit together and watched the ball begin to shrink, the mana consuming itself and burning out, slowly. When, after a few seconds, it vanished with a final flicker of cinders and smoke, he sat back on his hands and breathed out a disbelieving, “Holy magical horseshit, Batman. I’m a wizard.”
Three days of similar experimentation continued until he was comfortable creating, maintaining, and moving the fireball. He wasn’t tired, that little fireball hadn’t taken much out of him. Today, he was going to try for something a little more aggressive. Sitting beside his bed he tried again, still cautious, but ready for the hovering ball of flame to form to his command. Now that he knew what he was looking for, it came much easier. Ulric could visualize what he wanted to happen and that mental image accelerated things exponentially. Soon the fireball hovered. He pushed it around with his mind, sort of like pulling a balloon around by a string, it followed his will. Ulric Einar was a man of quiet dignity. He did not giggle like a schoolgirl looking at her birthday pony. At all. Holding onto the fire and feeding it a steady trickle from his core to maintain it he slowly walked to the door to his shelter, pulling it open while keeping the drifting little fireball in place over his fireplace. He didn’t want to consider the consequences of a fireball exploding within his shelter. Basically, everything in this joint was flammable. Maybe he should have considered that before playing with literal fire.
“No time to regret, Ulric,” he whispered, trying to remain calm in the face of the giddy joy that burbled beneath the surface.
Steady rain continued to fall, of course. He drew the little fireball out with him, guiding it with his imagination, saw it moving away from him into the rain in his mind and the little flame mirrored the mental image. Now it sat, sputtering and hissing as droplets hit it to turn into steam. Ulric knew what he had to do. Wizards cast fireball. It’s what they did. Now he just had to, figure out how to do that. Fire is the plasma of air, superheated by the excess energy of a runaway combustion reaction, a rapid oxidation of hydrocarbon bonds that exothermically release stored chemical energy, Ulric recited to himself.
By itself it has little to no destructive potential outside of proximity to high-intensity heat. To be dangerous, fire requires explosive potential, the ability to create a pressure wave, a blast front. High explosives rapidly displace gaseous byproducts during the detonation, and this combination of heat and pressure creates the real threat from a bomb, not merely thermal energy, he continued to chant rote knowledge, a hint of an idea coming to him.
Instead of just lobbing a ball of fire, he’d create a cavity inside it that would collapse, pulling the flame inwards, an implosion. That would superheat and compress the air in the cavity, which would generate an outwards pressure wave when energy met and reflected at the center of the fireball. That would create an explosion, carrying the fire along its wave front. Should be relatively unpleasant for anything nearby too, he mused.
Okay Ulric. Here goes nothing. Keeping the physical principles solidly in his mind, Ulric envisioned the ball shifting, emptying its core to create a hollowed sphere the size of a beach ball. The little ball swelled alongside his projected image. So far so good. Now for the touchy part. He had to concentrate to keep the ball from collapsing, or from expanding away from the air heating inside it. It was definitely becoming unstable.
With an effort, he drove hard against the fireball with his will, hurling it as hard as he could towards the stones near his rock pool, and the flame shot towards them, as if tossed by a major league pitcher from the olden days. Roiling flame hit stone and the thing flared brighter before a wave of fire, like a liquid tide crashed outwards, rolling over stones and rising into the air. A blast of heat washed over him from the explosion.
*PING*
“You’re goddamn right, it’s a Flame Crash!” Ulric laughed aloud, pumping his fist.
Wowee. Magic. He was using fucking magic! And, this time, he knew exactly what the bizarre pinging sound in his brain was. A notification of some kind, an update to his connection with the world. Or, you know, some shit like that, he was still figuring it out. Who cares? I’m a damned Wizard! Behold!
Ulric reached out his hand and cast another [Flame Crash]. This time the spell came together in a matter of half a second and launched outwards slightly faster than before, with less mental effort on his part. Like a program, once written, it executed far more efficiently. More efficiently didn’t mean without effort, however, he felt the pull from his mana distinctly this time, as he ate more deeply into his core’s reserves. The result of this second, more formulaic casting was impressively powerful.
Hissing rain hit stones blackened and cracked from heat as his fireball had washed over them and he was pretty sure some of his hairs were singed, like a reckless youth starting a bonfire with a rigorous application of petrol, jug still in hand as he guaranteed his place as last of his line, Darwin Award pending.
Lowering the arms that had covered his face at the not entirely unexpected force of the spell, Ulric conducted a mad dance in the rain, hands waving as he screamed all manner of nonsense at the sky. He had it in him for one more try and this one he gave all he had left, launching it a full twenty meters away before it spontaneously exploded into a fountain of red-orange fire that lifted a dense cloud of steam in the rain storm. Dark had fallen during the engineer turned mage’s study, and the exultant man skipped into his shelter despite his headache, ambling to bed satisfied that magic was pretty nifty.
The next morning, riding momentum from the previous day’s discovery, Ulric had finally been able to ramp up his experiments with magic. He ran several more exhaustion tests, none of them starting from full because, in his eagerness, he couldn’t help but make his attempts at about half capacity. These studies proved using in confirming his initial guess that running his core completely empty was highly stressful on his body, although it seemed to yield a rapid improvement in his overall capacity and skill at manipulating mana. Ulric had no hard data, but he had the feeling that he was improving his ability to shape and hold magic in this process. The time to reach his half way mark was lengthening while his status confirmed that his core regen was constant. Even so, he had to rest for hours between exhausts; going all the way to empty gave him a savage headache.
He spent the rest of the day, between exhaustion protocols, working on his crafts, weaving baskets, working out a somewhat experimental method for creating bone and glue and wood laminate for a composite bowstave, and other inventions of more or less use in the life of a woodland subsistence native. Jerked Forest Lord, berries, tubors, and boiled greens sustained him.
“Gods above, what I’d do for some salt.” Ulric lamented to the glade.
No salt was forthcoming. The glade had rain, however, and he rose from his furred blanket and leaf bedding to find a heavy fog over the landscape, which intensified its ethereal mystery. Rolling clouds fat with more precipitation, wallowed across the sky, promising a bounty of water. About the time the light from the coupled stars brought true daylight, the rain began again. Ulric made a charcoal mark on one of the structural rings of his shelter to mark the day and shuffled over to a crude pot he’d tried to fire from a clay-like soil dug from the edge of the glade, out from the bank of a fast-running creek. It didn’t dissolve, but had several cracks and leaked slowly. It served well enough to hold breakfast stew so he hadn’t replaced it yet.
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Today was for hydromancy, Ulric decided, and the Watcher knew he had enough water to work with. Autumnal Monsoon season continued outside with its beating downpours, interspersed with a merely miserable drizzle or a cold mist driven along the winds. An appropriate backdrop for his current efforts.
“Let’s see now,” he muttered, rubbing his face, callousing hands rougher on his skin from his efforts to tame this tiny fraction of wilderness, “When She of the Immaculate Tits drove that knowledge spike into my grey matter, I got an inkling for how some of this magic was supposed to feel. Manasense is more or less a sixth sense, and I’m over here trying to figure out how to use this black box in my chest to use it. But. It responds to the natural world, and, now that I’ve got a better feel for feeling forms of mana between fire and lightning, Incendere and Ceraun, I think I know how to proceed. A bit like tuning guitar strings by listening to the sounds against a tuning fork.”
It was a long speech, but he was already comfortable with having only himself for company. Not so much different from the Before, to be honest, except that he didn’t break up those hours with drinking and daily penitence beneath the lash of his project manager. At that moment, Ulric decided to dive into all the basic manaforms shown him not so long ago by the Impossible. It was as well this testing was conducted outside, where he had better exposure to the elements, literally, in the case of this strange, fae world. His core could discern the harmonies of Varda’s Field better the closer he was to them.
Falling rain made it almost trivial for him to feel his core and match its energies towards the flowing, resilience of Aquae, water. Ulric immediately set to work gathering precipitation into a dense orb of water, noting that it was vastly easier to manipulate this “free mana” the substance of a thing, compared to generating the energy to produce it himself as he’d done with the fire spell and his lightning magic. In this case, his efforts were also aided by a crystal-clear mental image of what he wanted to do with the aetheric Field he was controlling.
Magic was reality responding to will. In a way, that made his will reality, which Ulric Einar found a viewpoint that treaded dangerously close to egomaniacal self-deism. Don’t try to be a god, the Reforged man told himself, tempering power without limit with reason. A niggling instinct said that a mage’s hubris always led to annihilation.
[Flame Crash] and [Voltaic Grip] had taught him the critical importance to visualization, a pristine thought-scape depicting exactly how he wanted to warp reality.
He also knew exactly how, on what physical principals he wanted to direct this hydraulic power.
Ulric lacked precision tooling to work hard materials, such as Forest Lord bone but a high pressure stream of water could carve tool steel with ease. Compared to a big ass explosion, how hard could a little water jet be?
Twenty-seven hours later, lip chewed in frustration, he finally breathed a sigh of relief, looking at the then centimeter deep gouged line, as if someone had used a straightedge and a quickie saw, to cut cleanly through stone outside his shelter. It was the first sign of success since he’d started yesterday, and he only vaguely knew how he’d managed it. In Ulric’s inexperience as a warlock, he had not reckoned with exactly how much pressure was required to make water behave in this manner. Spell casting made multiple demands from the caster to prove successful. In this case, not only the image, and the understanding of physical principal was important, but so too was the will.
Ulric’s focus, his domination of the mana had to be absolute or the compression of the water ball failed and his energies were wasted in random splashes. It had become swiftly an exercise in frustration, from which he’d had to take multiple breaks to label himself a moron in six languages not spoken on this world. As with his initial attempts to effect magic, some things demanded absolute focus, complete conviction to function.
“Goddamnit, I know what to do, so just fucking do it!” He cursed at himself, at the tiny little gouge that had been almost a fluke in his struggling.
There was an element of the power lifter in this, an effort so extreme it couldn’t be attempted without total dedication to completing the task. Any hesitation produced immediate failure. Failed out for the moment, Ulric ducked into his shelter to have a good sit and sulk over a meat stew and pounded tuber flour cakes roasted as a kind of flatbread, until it hit him that he needed to take advantage of water’s incompressibility.
Mid ladle of broth to his lips, still dripping from the last attempt at magic outdoors, he had a thought. Rather than mentally trying to “crush” the spellform down, it was more efficient to just “push” the water through a narrow aperture. Right?
“Fuck it, gotta try.” The single-minded man said, and he left the warm and dry of the teepee to continue to practice aetheric fuckery in the rain.
Reforming the matrix of his spell, Ulric wove a kind of reservoir, filled with falling rain, and directing with all the oomph he could muster through a very small opening in the architecture of his Aquae spellform. From the reservoir of mana inside him he fed the energies, using the combination of will, image, and understanding. The result was a beam of water that pulverized the stone two meters in front of him and dug, spitting water and fine sand from the hole it carved. Using his hands to assist his focus, he turned the jet like a mirror sending a beam of sunlight and the hydraulic jet turned carving anything in its path, cutting stone like a hot knife through butter until the water ball was expended.
*PING*
Taxing, but not too bad, Ulric permitted himself a moment of smugness over this breakthrough. A second experiment went even better, if he dialed down the aperture, he could control the size and pressure of the water cutting spell. It was an entire day to master that kind of control, though he regretted it not when, midmorning the next day, after an hour of precisely directed [Hydrocutter], the materials engineer beheld a wood cube, carved from the wood of a type of tree found in his glade dubbed Steelwood because its fibers held the tensile strength of stainless steel and it was so hard he needed Forest Lord bone tools to cut it.
Or had.
“Behold!” Ulric cackled, hands relishing the smooth planes of the incredulously hard wooden cube as he turned it in his mitts.
The hedge wizard gazed with tremendous satisfaction at cuts he imagined could one day be refined to micron tolerances, viewing the immaculately smooth faces, the pristine edges of the cube in symmetrical angular geometry with the joy only an engineer with a precision machining schematic could possess. The image of not a cube, but a gear, interlocked with other gears that might turn together to create a flywheel driven engine captivated his thoughts. With just his mind, his core, and some free running water, Ulric Einar could carve nearly any material in this glade! Even the Forest Lord bone yielded to Aquae’s relentless drive, if with great effort and absolute focus on his part. The hard part was holding the piece in place without launching it into the bushes, as he discovered quickly.
Ulric’s dedicated wizardry training had proven promising.
Success bred success, as the rain continued to fall, and, now he was on the thirteenth day in a row of applied sorcery. He was going to use this enforced passivity to learn how to wield his core, to mold Varda’s Field to his whims.
Once he’d gotten past the initial struggles, all was well and he was truly enthralled with experimentation with different elemental forms of magic, leaning heavily on the gifted knowledge of the Watcher, alongside his growing store of personal applied knowledge, alongside a lifetime of advanced education with regards to the natural world and physics.
While it had taken nearly three days of continuous experimentation to get his fire spell to work, it only took two days and change to get his water spell functional. Afterward, the engineer turned wizard realized that, unsurprisingly, there were parallels to between the method to control a flow of electrons and a flow of water, though generating high enough pressures was a bit of a trick. Ulric appreciated the irony that flow equations for electric potentials and pressure driven systems could be parallel mathematical scenarios, much like how mass damped spring oscillators and resistance-capacitance circuits obeyed the same differential equation frameworks.
Mastery of some fundamentals of mana shaping applied to a whole archetype of magical manipulation. After [Hydrocutter] cut his cube as a proof of concept, it took a mere six hours to figure out an earth magic spell.
Terra’s mana impression was so low key it was hard to recognize, even with the Watcher’s hint. Waiting for it to move was the mistake, Terra didn’t move, it vibrated, a low steady hum of patient endurance. Once he finally had the trick of parsing out the stone’s mana signature, tuning his core’s energies to that dynamic stasis, actually manipulating it was little trouble.
Instilling the mana of Terra from Ulric’s core into the stones allowed him to shift them, pulling them around with his will into a simple shape. In this case he wanted a barrier, a fortified position. Visualization really was the key here, rock didn’t like to do anything that wasn’t explicitly well-defined. It was a bit more akin to the function-based programming of manaforms: explicit input in, function does function things, explicit output and if you didn’t like the results, it was your own damned fault don’t hate the machine language compiler, hate your programming skills. Ulric’s programming fundamentals were clean, and this translated into rapid progress fine tuning mana weaving mental constructs that operated akin to algorithms.
*PING*
This otherworldly bell tone accompanied Ulric managing to successfully grab part of the exposed rock near his water hole and turn it into a thin square, like a drywall sheet half his height made of the torn stone that had once held his glade’s giant arbor.
Air magic, Caelum was the easiest manaform to identify, once he started to look for it. Ulric was surrounded by the stuff, and that was why he’d never noticed the almost ephemeral note of that particular manaform before now. You naturally tend to tune out constant background noises and air was sort of everywhere, all the time. He’d just been ignoring it this whole time. That isn’t to say that just because it was all around that he could use it to actually do stuff. Nobody was around to see him embarrassed at himself, so it was fine. Only the trees could watch him make an ass of himself in his flailing tries at forcing air, gases moving under flows of pressure, do anything resembling what he wanted them to.
Ulric's air spell took a whole day, but only because he was being finicky.
At last, he managed to obtain both the shape and the desired effect. His reward, a quarter centimeter thick Caelum blade, curved like a hand scythe, and so sharp its high speed impact with the target had left a deep gouge.
*PING*
The tone of his initial success was just the starting point. Ulric wouldn't stop tinkering with this spell until he'd figured out how to make it fly as fast as it did. The little scythe of hardened cyan air fled like an arrow as soon as he released his mental grip on it, hacking into the massive trunk of the titan tree he was using to backstop his attempts at magic. At the edge of mana exhaustion Ulric finally understood the Thaumaturgic riddle. Turns out that a magical air flow around the blade that created a low-pressure zone in front and a high-pressure zone in the back helped to actually accelerate it while it flew. To the point it shattered itself under the strain about fifty meters away, while moving at approximately subsonic ballistic round velocities.
If a moron falls to the ground in frustration in a forest primeval, does he make a sound? A mystery says the budding bush wizard, scrubbing a beard that had begun to fill in in the, what, three, maybe four weeks since his reforging? Yes, indeed, a mystery. He wobbled into his Forest Lord blanket without supper, too tired to bother stoking fire.
Ulric was losing track of time, despite his efforts to keep an accurate determination. Isolation, long hours of intense focus, an unchanging pall of rain obscured days made his internal clock blend and blur. A man who had once lived by his clocks being adrift in time found this condition unnerving. Soon enough, he stopped caring, obsession finding other outlets. Like magic.
Magic was weird. It was definitely based on an understanding of the natural order of the world. Knowing how the flow of electrons manifested in currents and magnetic fields was almost definitely helping him amplify the strength of the [Voltaic Grip] spell beyond what he should be able to do, given his lack of training, or so he supposed. What did appear to be demonstrable fact was that increased knowledge translated into vastly improved control of mana, by knowing what he wanted, specifically, he could move the mana precisely to enact his will. Physics worked. It just had an extra layer of sponginess to it through Varda’s Field.
Infrig, last of the six base manaforms gifted him by the Watcher, proved not so challenging to work with, initially, but he struggled to corral the frozen energies suit his vision. Ice magic, or cold mana, or antiheat, however he wanted to think of it, his ice spell he figured out after a dedicated half day of trial and error, one that proved uncomfortable, for the generation of cold did him no favors with the perpetual wet of the season. Had he been less disgustingly healthy he’d have given himself pneumonia.
The challenge in this case was finding the balance of rigidity and resilience, and confining brutal cold magic to prevent it harming him. A bell tone and impression of Akashic knowledge codifying the spell was just the beginning.
Balance was the trick. Once that balance was held, it required enormous mana control to reinforce the structure of the [Ice Blade] he created or the crystal would shatter, releasing brutal frost all over wherever the shards landed. Ulric had not forgotten the glass-resin lesson on brittle blades, the work continued until he was satisfied. Soon enough, he was able to create a sword of compressed ice along his arm that survived whacking against the rocks near his tanning pit. It left a slick of frosted ground where it hit too.
Somewhere along the way, Ulric had decided that he needed a way to have an improvised melee weapon, and what better option than a razor-sharp blade of ice that not only cut, but froze whatever it came into contact with? Even short durations of interaction with that meter long sliver of living ice could put out a campfire, its heat pulled away to leave it a smoking patch of cooled char. Ulric could imagine that the wounds it created would be exacerbated by frostbitten regions around the places touched. It would also leave metal brittle, perhaps making this spell useful for contesting enemy weapons, which was a potent defensive capability lacking in his other spells. He didn’t know what made him think of the potential for enemies, there was no evidence a sapient creature had ever touched this glade, nor the woods beyond it, woods Ulric had scouted before the eternal rain fall.
Whatever, the Reforged man thought, and he swung the frigid blade hard into a sapling and was rewarded with a clean bisection, the crystalline, nearly diamond edged [Ice Blade] cleaving easily through soft wood without resistance, leaving the thumb thick thing still standing. On inspection, the edges of the cut were encrusted with dense frost and the tree, bound together by ice, stood as if it remained in one piece, a state that persisted several minutes, until the wind pushed the top half over, that frozen wound breaking open with a loud crackle.
It was a satisfied grey eyed stare with which the learning mage regarded the construct of Infrig on his arm. The cold of his spell was trapped in the matrix of his weavings of mana and affected his own flesh hardly at all, beside an uncomfortable chill against his skin, like holding a snowball too long. Such inversion of the magic kept the freezing energies contained by the blade’s structure on the inner side but not the edge of the blade, a nifty trick, if Ulric didn’t say so himself.
He did though. He’d have told the chipmunks about his glory and genius if any had made themselves available. Unfortunately, small mammals were still not to be found, though the wolves and deer were becoming more abundant.
There, under the fall of steady rain, with droplets freezing solid to his Infrig blade, forming icicles as he relished this last success, mastery of all the basic elemental mana forms, he jumped when a sudden sound pulsed in his head, along with a brief script of cryptic babble that faded away almost before his conscious awareness of it.
*PING!*
****DECISION MATRIX SATISFIES CONDITIONS****
****AKASHIC COURSE CONNECTION COMPLETE****
Ulric’s brain short circuited for a few seconds while this information washed through him. It was…kind of vague? He scanned the rest of the information that offered itself to his inquisition.
Yeah, pretty vague. That last one sounded pretty nifty though, Ulric had been playing with jamming different amounts of energy into his spells. Apparently, that wasn’t something that was done by default. Oops.
Beneath the surface of his agitated thoughts there was a pressure building, like a dream that insisted on being remembered. As soon as the Reforged man tried to pry at this bubble of subconscious sensation, it broke.
Without warning, Ulric was awash in images, sounds, tastes, information that combined to create total sensory overload. Lost inside it, the human form stood blankly staring while a roaring in his mind filled his awareness to the exclusion of all else. Somewhere within, someone turned off the tap and the flood subsided as quickly as it had appeared, leaving him teetering on his feet with vertigo.
He’d been going through the process relatively quickly, trying to familiarize himself with the rules of this strange world’s magic as fast as he could, using all the knowledge of that life gone by, a civilization’s worth, to propel his understanding of Varda’s workings. It made sense to explore the basics before he tried to do anything crazy with any particular manaform, to have a deeper understanding of the interplay between magic and reality.
Ulric was a scientist, a practitioner of the scientific method. An engineer. That inclination, followed by his determined investigation and disciplined study in application of magic to the elements had unlocked this akashic class thing, whatever it was. It was as if some kind of repository of knowledge, was the only way Ulric had to describe it, had been downloaded into his brain. Compared to the vagueness of the Akashic information, Ulric felt a rush of knowledge that he had no damned business having. All at once, he felt a kind of familiarity, a comfort, with mana’s forms that he hadn’t had just a few minutes ago.
Granted, he’d probably have come to a similar level of command within a few months of practice, but he’d seemingly fast forwarded past some of that bumbling awkward phase. Intuitively, he knew more now about the strengths and limitations of each manaform than he had before and, in exceedingly spooky fashion, it seemed like he remembered more of his studies from the Before with regards to these elements. Combustion rates, heat flow equations, detonation pressures, things even tangentially related to fire were clearer in his mind than before. Likewise for the other elements. Ulric was now a walking library for mineral classifications and geology. He could look at a rock and tell you what metamorphic properties it had, what its shear pattern would be, and whether it was reactive towards acids or inert. Subtle chemical composition knowledge that required, sans the gifted class knowledge, extensive testing. This Akashic magical link was interacting with his past life’s memories, building bridges in his brain, tying together disparate neurons to create an elemental reference database.
Watcher’s tits! This was more than magic, this was some reality altering divine level fuckery in his book. Equal parts being enthralled by the burgeoning awareness of elemental magic’s interplay with the world and possessed of a budding horror that his brain was being played with by forces outside his understanding, Ulric responded the only way he knew how: he went to bed early. As he lay down, peace disturbed thoroughly, for the first time in a long time the dead man reborn figured he could use a sip of the rotgut right about then. Since that wasn’t going to happen, he slept for twelve hours.
When he woke, he put the concerns about gods level nonsense behind him. Firstly, there was nothing he could do about it. Secondly, he had an ace in the hole now regarding magic. Suddenly, the fumbling around he’d been doing to generate his elemental spells sharpened. Already, he was certain he could rework those spellforms, could tighten up the architecture to make them more efficient, more potent. Secondly, the class imparted a skill that allowed him to actively parse out the types of mana around him using his core. He didn’t exactly know how that was going to be useful, but the former scientist had faith that it would prove a boon. Think of it like having a mana-based mass spectrometer, Ulric told himself. Knowing the composition of the world is all kinds of relevant. You just need to figure out how to take advantage of it.
Now that he had the fundamentals of sorcery sort of nailed down, Ulric spent the upcoming days working out his core’s meta magic abilities. Rapidly, it became clear that the Watcher’s reforging had been next level. [Core Capacitor] was undoubtedly the reason he'd killed the Forest Lord. It allowed him to turbocharge his [Voltaic Grip].
A mental list of discoveries he reviewed this afternoon following a hectic week of frantic investigation. While he reminisced over his discoveries, he took a moment to call up the spooky Status that bore his Akashic imprint. Here was the measure of his growth since being dropped in the middle of the heart of darkness. That and the extra couple of kilos on his waste as he actively ate his fill whenever he could to pack on weight for the inevitable winter.
Much to be discovered, much to learn. Not all steps were distinctly forward, but any motion was good.
For instance, he'd held a branch in his hands and tested the full powered Ceraunic spell on a wrist thick piece of wood. Char scrolled instantly from his hands toward the middle of the branch, feathery patterns burned in a Lichtenberg mark, the electricity forcing its way through the material. The two black scorchmarks crawled swiftly closer until they touched, then the branch then burst into flame, briefly, before exploding into shards many of which pelted hands, arms, chest, abdomen and face. A few splinters were a small price to pay to learn not to try that technique on glass-resin or anything he didn't want dead.
The caveat to [Core Capacitor] was that it was truly all or nothing. It wouldn't activate unless his core was saturated. He'd sat looking at his status for an hour waiting for the notification. He'd been at one hundred percent mana the entire time and hadn't been able to initiate the discharge. Saturation status ticked and in the same moment vanished as all the mana in his core pulsed, that incredible flow of heat and power every bit as much of a rush as the first time. [Hydrocutter] bored a hole a meter deep through solid rock in half a second. A later test obliterated a chunk of Forest Lord bone glass-resin'd to a boulder face. Ulric could have killed the Forest Lord with that spell, if he'd hit the skull directly, and it held still long enough.
Magic was awesome!
Continuous mana-channeling experiments had led to Ulric's discovery that he could stream mana from his core while condensing it with his will, all the while channeling a spell. It felt like holding your breath and tightening all your muscles at the same time but inside your nerves. The supercharged [Flame Crash] had vaporized a sizable pool of rain water and nearly inflicted third degree steam burns on both his hands. Being slow on the uptake, he'd immediately tried using the overcharge on his [Voltaic Grip].
Still recovering from the previous attempt, his concentration slipped and the charge of compressed mana slipped loose from his core and rebounded. It felt like a sledgehammer to the heart. Ulric immediately vomited and passed out and woke up a quarter hour later in a pool of his own fluids. His status had not indicated that the [Overcharge] had a backlash. In yet another interesting fact, he hadn’t known it would and, therefore, the Akashic record hadn’t reflected it. After his accident, it had added the line about backlash, so it was possible that he’d done something so stupid that nobody had done it and survived to add that nugget to the Akashic record. He was pioneering in the art of being a nincompoop!
Another lesson learned. This world was full of lessons. Ulric was determined to be an excellent student. See? He’d already learned not to try a [Core Capacitor] discharge alongside an [Overcharge] as the resulting backlash would scatter him across the clearing. Such a smart lad, he was.
While he nursed his bruised feeling core, and ego, he sat in the shelter. It was still raining, because why wouldn’t it be? Over a week without pause, and he had to at least consider the possibility of relocating to the tree tops to escape being drowned. Surely not, the Plateau would shed the water off its sides. Shaking off the oddly negative thought, he resumed his magery. With a slight effort of will, Ulric experimented by concentrating on the fireplace, activating the [Core Pulse]. The pulse of mana from his own core, still indeed tender, into the fire, had produced an interaction not unlike striking a tuning fork. He’d detected a signal from that fire that he could interpret to be the mana signature of fire. There were other, quieter ones. He thought one of them might be related to ash, but it was hard to pry loose from the overwhelming presence of all that flame. Being able to identify fire in the surroundings didn’t seem all that ground breaking. At least, it didn’t seem important, until Ulric had put that mana signature into his thoughts while channeling a [Flame Crash] and nearly doubled the efficiency of that spell, amplifying its power substantially.
Further experimentation confirmed his suspicions and revealed a heavy synergy between Ulric’s own knowledge of the physical nature of fire and the metaphysical truth of fire mana. It was as if there were two completely divergent aspects to magic, what was and what could be. Ulric didn’t have any better way to think about it but the results spoke for themselves. Most of his spells had benefited from a [Core Pulsed] image of the magical signature from each element. He’d also gotten substantially more efficient at casting thanks to the [Elemental Refinement] skill, which meant he could practice more than previously, wasting less of his own mana and mental effort.
These experiments, alongside his other projects, had consumed the waking hours of Ulric's life. Time fell away, losing most of its meaning. Daylight, Dark, and the needs of the moment or the moment's inbred cousin tomorrow, were all that existed. Ulric's old friend anxiety was gone.
This world was one of action and reaction.
You did or did not.
Worrying was calories spent not figuring out how to mold mana into a hammer of light with which to crush a viper that could melt concrete with its breath. Or make hollow arrowheads out of a Giga-bear's tooth to deliver a neurotoxic plant juice so potent grinding it required a two-meter long stick to avoid getting a paralyzing dose while you did so.
Ahh well. The devils in the details, he told himself the day he learned about inhaled microdoses of paralytic roots, oddly at peace about being unable to move his frozen limbs.
Days rattled onwards, the man lost track of them, no new charcoal strokes appeared on his shelter’s supports.
