Chương 40: Conversion

Enzo closed his eyes and found his heartbeat again. It came faster this time. The external world receded without the struggle of before. It felt like his mind remembered the path and simply walked it. Murph's breathing. The house settling. The distant voices. All of it folded into silence within seconds, leaving only the steady pulse in his chest. The mana was still there. Still full. Had been since the blood rain ended, probably, passive absorption filling it drop by drop without his knowledge.

Which meant he couldn't test conversion even if he wanted to. He had to learn to use it first. The question was how. Everything he knew about mana control was external. Threads. Spell forms. Shaping it outside his body and directing it with geometric abstraction and intent. This was different. The mana was inside him, woven through tissue and blood. It didn't even feel like the arcane mana in his mind. That reservoir was still and responsive to his will, the way a graver responded to his trained hand.

The mana in his heart had a quality to it. Something he wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't spent weeks working with arcane. It was patient. Unhurried. But also… alive. It wanted to move, to flow, to dance to the beat of his life. When he reached for it with the same firm intent used to shape a thread, it didn't resist. But it also didn't respond. It just waited, as if curious to see if he'd figure out the right way to ask. He tried pushing it. The way he'd push mana into a spell form, applying will and direction.

The mana rippled, then settled, resuming its rhythm as if nothing had happened. Not like that, then. He sat with it for a while. Let the pulse continue on its own. Listened to the way it moved, the cadence of it. Outward, reaching, returning. Over and over. Like breathing. Like tides. Like blood. Of course. This wasn't manipulation. It was circulation. He didn't need to push or pull or shape the mana. He needed to pump it. Enzo focused on the pulse itself. The rhythm following the beat of his heart.

Let his awareness settle into it, matching it, breathing with it. Then, carefully, he began to accelerate it. Not through control, but by encouraging it. It felt like convincing his record player to turn up the volume, gradually, from the couch, and without a remote. The mana responded. It quickened, pushing further with each beat. His actual heart followed, thumping harder in his chest, syncing to the new rhythm. Faster. Mana surged outward from his chest, and he felt it move across his body. Lungs. Shoulders.

Arms. Upward to his head and downward to his legs. It flowed, filling the space between muscle and bone. He could feel it in his hands. And with it came absolute certainty that if he wanted it to pour free, pushing beyond the limitations of his flesh, taking shape as force and resistance, encasing fingers and knuckles in a barrier of power, it would. It wanted to. Then the rhythm stuttered. Somewhere in his body, the circulating flow had reached a blockage. His awareness traced the cycle, but he already knew.

The answer was too obvious to be denied. Right leg. Knee. Where the rest of his body had welcomed the circulation like water filling a channel, the damaged tissue around the joint resisted. The mana pressed against something dense and tangled, old scar tissue and calcified damage that had been part of him so long he'd begun to forget what the joint felt like without it. The mana didn't force its way through. But it didn't stop completely either.

It lapped at the edges, patient, testing, finding gaps and trickling through them. His knee ached. No longer did the pain come and go, managed by medication and careful tending of the injury. It was a permanent dull throb running through his day. That was the price of forcing it to work harder and faster than it could these past two weeks. Magic could fix it. He was certain of that. But not now, not even with the accumulated knowledge and skills they had.

Because he was equally certain they'd barely scratched the surface of what mana could do when shaped as magic. Every step forward in their understanding uncovered something new. Even the latest Guide entry, while it had answered some of his burning questions, had revealed even more to replace them. Such as 'spellforging.' Another crafting discipline. Something directly linked to being a Magus. The mana passed through the knee area and flowed down his calf, reaching his foot, before completing the circuit.

Enzo let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. The circulation was running. Both arms, both legs, chest to extremities and back. Each cycle came a little easier, the mana moving with increasing confidence through pathways it was finding for the first time. His body hummed with it, a low vibration of energy he could feel everywhere. No wonder Kenzo and Val were always so excited to spar. To use their abilities. The mana wanted to burst forth.

It was like a hungry wolf inside him, prowling at the edges of its cage. He opened his eyes. Murph was sitting up on the bed, watching him with her head tilted to one side.

"Hey, girl. Did you sense it, too?" Murph barked.

"Yeah. Check this out." Enzo held out his hands, fists clenched, and reached inside where the circulation was still running. He set the mana free. He expected it to behave the way Val's did. For the energy to disperse into the air, bleeding away in seconds, maintained only by continually spending more mana for the dramatic effect. That wasn't what happened. Mana spilled from his fists and curled around his hands. Circling. Then his wrists. Then his forearms.

Purple wisps, faint but visible, swirling in lazy arcs that followed the movements of his arms as he turned them over. The mana was breaking down, fading at the edges, returning to the atmosphere the way all mana eventually did. But it was fighting it. Clinging to him. Almost reluctant to leave. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. Enzo unclenched his fingers and spread them wide, watching the wisps flow between them. They moved with him.

When he turned his right hand over, the mana trailed after it. When he raised his left, the wisps drifted upward, maintaining contact. This wasn't the way mana behaved. He frowned. There was an awareness of the mana in his mind. The same sensation he felt when constructing a spell form. Enzo reached for one of the wisps with the same intent he used to shape a thread drawn from his mind's reservoir. It solidified. The purple haze sharpened into something denser, brighter, holding its form instead of dispersing.

It sat in the air over his open palm. He stared at it. Cultivators definitely couldn't do that. Even by threading the mana, it would be difficult to replicate. Enzo reached for a second wisp. It solidified as easily as the first. He shaped them together, bending them with the instinct he'd developed over two weeks of spell work. They responded the way arcane threads did, but the texture and form were different. Warmer. More willing and malleable. Almost shapeless. A shield of arcane energy snapped into existence.

The mana being released by his hands stopped dissipating back into the atmosphere and began feeding into the spell construct instead. Eagerly. Without being directed. He'd cast it using cultivated mana through a constructed spell form, and now it was being maintained with barely a thought on his part. Maintaining a spell usually required constantly directing a thread of mana into it. It wasn't hard, but the process demanded attention and focus. This was almost effortless.

Mana was just bleeding out of him, trying to be useful before returning to its ambient form. Which raised a question. He focused. Willed the spell to end. The mana flow stopped. The spell broke, purple motes of energy sparkling through the air until they too vanished. Enzo allowed the mana inside him to settle, returning to baseline. A brief dip in energy followed, but it faded almost as quickly as it arrived. There were notifications at the edge of his awareness, but they had to wait.

It was time to try conversion. He grinned. His heart was beating faster, but it wasn't because of cultivation this time. Closing his eyes, he… Paused. Manipulating mana was easy enough, and his immediate thought was to manifest the mana from his mind into his heart. Except arcane mana was force and resistance. Push and pull. At least, that's how it seemed to him. When manifested, arcane took on a real physical presence. He stopped smiling and opened his eyes again. Would the mana have complied if he'd tried it?

Manifest force inside his heart, tearing the vital organ to shreds, killing him in the process. Was that a reason why Magi killed themselves? Would a mentor have taught him that? Lectured about the risks, driving home the importance of doing it the correct way or not at all? Enzo shuddered. Then he took a breath and closed his eyes again. No manifestation. No manipulation. Instead, he focused his intent on the mana in his mind moving, slowly, toward his heart. Nothing happened. He sat with the problem for a moment.

Two reservoirs, both with mana, but different. There was a gulf of understanding between where he was and what he knew and those who had written articles for the Guide. Perhaps Beasts and their cores, another new concept to investigate, weren't all the same either. Maybe some breathed fire, while others conjured it. Maybe some affected the weather, while others became part of it. But mana remained mana, even if the interactions changed. Mana was… He didn't know. Yet. It appeared transformative.

Transmutative, even, though in his experience it inevitably returned to ambient. Which meant for it to move from the mind to the heart, or from the heart to the mind, it needed to change en route. Which was exactly what the others did when converting mana into types. Types which behaved differently, were capable of carrying different intents and purpose. Types which, when manifested, sometimes took on the properties of what they represented, like fire and water, while others looked like colored threads or wisps.

He paused again. Converting rather than simply moving the mana felt plausible. It would mean absorbing from his own reservoirs instead of the atmosphere, even if the idea was still pure speculation. Experimentation. The leading cause of getting himself killed, according to the Guide. He exhaled. That had never stopped him before. Not until the accident. Had that changed who he was deep down? Or had he just stopped taking risks because the risks left available to him were stupid rather than fun? No.

Magic had reminded him of all the wonder the world offered. Of the itch to climb, so that he might stand atop the peak of a mountain and look down over the most beautiful views, knowing that he never would have seen it if not for overcoming every challenge it took to get there. Magic had returned to him something he'd almost lost. A desire to see what was over the next rise. Even if all he could do so far was throw it around and hold up barriers, it was obviously capable of so much more. The Guide itself was magic.

Sumi and Signe both did things with magic he might never have thought of. Just as he could do things they couldn't. Maybe things nobody else in the world could do yet. There was so much more to see. To do. To experience. And fear wouldn't keep him from it. Not when he could imagine himself flying across the open sky with neither wingsuit nor parachute, touching the clouds and chasing whatever lay just over the horizon.

Maybe even one day crossing beyond, into the space between worlds, where beings fought giant star-eating monsters. The only thing that could keep him from that was death. But it couldn't keep him from trying. Enzo took the cultivator's pose. It hadn't worked before, but that time he'd been trying to draw ambient mana into his heart. A brief experiment that had lasted less than a minute. Uneventful. Now, instead of targeting the mana outside, he imagined pulling from his own mind.

The mana responded, flowing without even the slightest delay. It spiraled downward from his head and into his torso, passing through him without care for his flesh and blood and bones, and settled into the heart reservoir alongside what was already there. Still arcane. He focused on the flow while holding the concept of earth, using the same approach he'd used during every failed conversion attempt, and the mana vibrated as it spiraled. A tremor in the stream, the same stutter he'd felt last time.

Reaching for something. Wanting to change. But it didn't. Enzo frowned. The result was stronger this time. He was closer to success than he'd ever been, but something wasn't right. He thought about what Sumi had said. How body and life mana had come to her naturally. How she hadn't forced them. They'd simply felt right. Like remembering. Val had described fire the same way. The mana wanted to burn before she even asked it to. His mana wanted to become something. Something akin to earth. He could feel that much.

It just didn't want to become earth. So what did earth actually mean? Not to the world. To him. Topsoil and clay. Farmers turned those. Sandstone and granite. Masons shaped those. The volcanic rock of the Headlands, basalt columns along the coast, limestone caverns. A geologist's domain. Slate and shale. Gravel and dust. The earth beneath his fingernails after a hike. None of it resonated. He pictured all of it, but none of it called to him the way fire called to Val or life called to Sumi.

He let the abstractions go. Stopped thinking about what earth was and thought about what he actually worked with. Every day. For years. Silver wire between his fingers. Soft gold. The cold weight of titanium, stubborn under the graver. Steel tools, precise and unyielding. Copper and brass, tarnishing in the salt air. The specific resistance each metal offered when he shaped it. Each one different, each one familiar. And the stones. Always the stones. Smoky quartz and its amber depths. Garnet, dark and dense.

Tourmaline in colors that shouldn't exist outside a sunset. The smoothness of a gem's facets, the sharp edges of unfinished crystals, both raw and geometric. These were what earth meant to him. The mana diverged while being absorbed into the heart. He changed nothing. Forced nothing. Just felt the mana respond to the concepts held in his mind. The first stream hardened and sharpened, taking on a density that carried an edge to it, the way a blade might feel when it found its temper.

Rigid and unyielding, eager to be shaped but unwilling to be broken. The second crystallized. Mana arranged itself into something structured and ordered, faceted and precise, the energy itself locking into a lattice that promised clarity. Both streams ran into his heart reservoir. And for the first time, the mana that settled there wasn't entirely purple. Mixed within was a faint silver-gray light, and another that shimmered prismatically. Enzo laughed. It wasn't earth. Crystal and metal, if he had to guess.

But all that mattered was that it had worked. Arcane. Crystal. Metal. Three types that, according to the Guide, had at least high affinities. Now he needed to test the others they knew about.