Chương 6: Steamy Meditation

Ch 6: Steamy Meditation

"No, no, no, Eric. You promised her you wouldn't skip meditation class." Resisting temptation, I pulled my hand away from the data crystal beneath the stool, reminding myself that I had to be a man of my word. It sucked balls that I'd have to wait before checking all the data my system had collected, but I was the adult in the room as always, not an impatient toddler. Letting out a sigh, I stared at the floating orb.

"You'll be fine if I leave you here alone, won't you?" I was slightly worried someone might deliberately destroy my work, though I was fairly confident my reclusive behavior had ensured I hadn't offended anyone enough to seek revenge. There was also the possibility of the little kids wandering into the cleaning room, breaking something by accident, and getting hurt. Fortunately, Sahirah had assured me they were all on a field trip to the city with their Grey teacher.

So there really wasn't any reason to worry about leaving the orb unsupervised. I took a deep breath and finally admitted I was focusing on the wrong problem. Yeah, I was about to become the meditation partner of the Mana Bomb Girl, and here I was worrying about a glowing ball made of paper. Without looking back, I left the cleaning room, latched the door behind me, and finally forced my thoughts onto the challenge that actually mattered today. The Mana Bomb Girl. And my first meditation class.

It took me a while to reverse-engineer the Grey's visual signs pointing toward the meditation grounds. After accidentally wandering into the kitchens and getting yelled at by a few overweight Grey ladies, I eventually found my way to an open atrium where the class was apparently held. The moment I crossed the threshold, my eyes lit up. The place was breathtaking.

Colorful flowers bloomed everywhere, while four massive boulders marked the corners of a square, separating the winding gardens from a grassy clearing where several groups of students sat cross-legged in their usual cliques. As my eyes searched for Sahirah among the fur, scales, and pointy ears, I noticed something even more interesting. Each of the four boulders had a small waterfall flowing endlessly from its top.

It looked as though tiny riverbeds had been carved into the stone itself, with some kind of spell keeping the water circulating forever. My mind immediately began recalling water spells from Magica Principia, and my overconfident side was already convinced I could replicate the waterfalls by combining the right water spell with Passive Mana Absorption for a continuous mana supply.

"I was starting to think you wouldn't come, human." Before I had the chance to abandon improving my system in favor of another project involving magical plumbing, Sahirah's voice pulled me back to reality, saving me from my own deadly curiosity. Turning to my left, I found her sitting cross-legged by herself near one of the waterfall boulders. Unlike everyone else, who sat facing a partner with their palms pressed together, she was completely alone.

Worse still, the large towel beneath her made it painfully obvious it had been laid out for two people, not one.

"You thought I wouldn't come?" I asked as I slipped off my shoes and claimed the empty spot in front of her.

"When have I ever lied to you for you to have so little faith in me?"

"Twenty days locked in your room without attending a single class while I sat here by myself isn't exactly the track record of someone reliable."

"What?" I muttered as I struggled to fold my legs into a cross-legged position, a genuine challenge for someone who'd spent most of his life sitting in chairs.

"How was I supposed to know you wanted me here? As far as I knew, you were just the girl I got into trouble with on my first day... and the one I'd been eating lunch with ever since." Her mismatched eyes followed my awkward attempts to imitate everyone else's posture. Amused by my struggle, she smiled.

"After what happened in the library, I figured you'd start attending classes sooner or later. But then one day passed... then another... then another. Before I realized it, I had started resenting you a little." My eyes widened under her steady gaze as I realized how unreasonable she sounded. Did she, by any chance, think humans could read minds? Before I could point that out, though, she beat me to it.

"I suppose I can't blame you for failing to meet an expectation that only existed in my head, human." She looked away for a moment, her smile fading.

"But I left my planet behind because of a stupid natural phenomenon, just like everyone else." She looked back at me.

"And a girl is allowed to be a little unreasonable when everything she ever knew about life changes overnight... isn't she?" I said nothing. Only then did I realize that I'd spent so much time thinking about my own situation that I'd completely overlooked the obvious. Everyone here had been forced to leave their homeworld behind because of the Riftstorm. And setting aside all those people with fur, scales, and pointy ears, the Mana Bomb Girl had it worse than any of them.

She was the first Nadiri ever to set foot on Navar. A century might pass before another one of her kind arrived. It was entirely possible she would never meet another Nadiri for the rest of her life. Well... my own situation wasn't much better. But if the average was one human every twenty years, my odds of seeing another human again were still considerably higher than her chances of ever seeing one of her own people.

"How about this?" I said, still struggling to sit cross-legged.

"You can be as unreasonable as you want today, and I promise I won't hold it against you. Say whatever you want, do whatever you want. I'll take it like a man, and you can vent as much as you need." She simply stared at me. Her long black hair rested across her lap as she tried to figure out where that offer had come from.

"That sounds like a good deal, h–" She never finished. A Grey woman appeared behind her as though she'd materialized out of thin air and promptly bonked Sahirah on the head with the tip of an ornate staff.

"The two of you are too loud. This is meditation class, not a place for weird-looking Rift Arrivals to do... whatever it is the two of you are doing." When I looked up at her, I realized I was seeing the first truly elderly Grey since arriving at the academy. And believe me... she was old. For starters, her hunched back bent her into something resembling a giant letter S. Then there were the wrinkles. They covered her face, neck, hands... practically everything.

And even her blue eyes had turned slightly cloudy, proving that age eventually collected its debt even on a world filled with magic.

"And who are you exactly?" I asked. The instant the words left my mouth, I realized how unbelievably stupid that question had been.

"Ah, me?" She pressed the end of her staff against my forehead, forcing my head backward with absolutely no regard for personal space.

"I'm Niori, your teacher. I've been teaching the likes of you ever since that young queen decided killing you invaders was too barbaric." So yeah... I'd known the old hag for less than thirty seconds, and I'd already decided she would earn a very special title in my system. One far less flattering and way more lasting than whatever I'd eventually assign to Principal Dickhead. Apparently sensing the dangerous direction my thoughts were taking, Sahirah quickly changed the subject.

"Do you have any guidance for us, Teacher Niori?" Niori's expression softened just a bit. Without another word, she raised her staff toward Sahirah's forehead again. This time, however, it didn't look like she intended to whack her. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. The countless gemstones embedded throughout the staff flared with brilliant white light the instant they touched Sahirah's skin. Then the staff turned toward me.

The moment it touched my forehead, the glow weakened dramatically, fading from bright white to a pale blue.

"The two of you belong to different species," Niori said.

"Your mana resonates differently with the crystals, and the amount each of you possesses is vastly different." Keeping her eyes on Sahirah, she continued, "You are a wildfire. He is a candle."

"The two of you should switch partners. Convince some of the senior students to help instead. I don't see you accomplishing even the most basic objective of meditation if you insist on training together." I'm not going to lie. I still had absolutely no idea what meditation class was supposed to teach. A few hours ago, I hadn't even wanted to be here. But the moment I heard that old woman tell us we couldn't do it... I suddenly wanted to meditate more than anything.

After she walked away, I leaned toward Sahirah and whispered, "So... you haven't changed your mind about me, have you?" She laughed, quickly lowering the volume when several of the furred students glanced our way.

"The seniors avoid me like the plague after Principal Zorik assigned them to repair some of the training equipment I destroyed." She smiled.

"So of course I still need you, Eric." I laughed too.

"Well, if you still need me..." I scratched the back of my head, a trace of embarrassment escaping into my voice.

"Then let's prove that old hag wrong." I paused.

"But first..." I looked around at everyone sitting perfectly still with their palms pressed together.

"... what exactly is meditation?" Sahirah sighed.

"One month playing with runes, and you never stopped to ask yourself how nearly every Grey can cast magic without paper or ink?" She had a point, but it wasn't that I'd ignored the question. The problem was that Magica Principia claimed it could take years before someone learned to cast a thirty-rune spell using nothing but mana. That little detail had done a wonderful job of killing my immediate interest in the subject. The book's almost religious language hadn't helped either.

Become one with your inner energy and commune with the mana within. Seriously? Who was supposed to understand something that abstract? Whoever wrote that line had to be full of bullshit.

"Well..." I said.

"Let's just say I wisely prioritized short-term gains over long-term goals. So... what exactly is meditation?" Sahirah looked at me as though I were a lost cause.

"Meditation is how you become aware of your own mana. It takes two people because the contrast between what is your mana and what isn't helps you identify it. That alone can save you months of struggling through the first step." She sighed again.

"I don't know why the later stages also require a partner. Niori refused to teach me anything beyond this because I didn't have one." The loneliness in her eyes made it obvious how boring those classes without a partner must have been. And apparently, this wasn't the kind of lesson you could truly participate in by yourself.

"So... how do we do it?" I asked.

"Is putting our hands together like everyone else enough?"

"That much I know." Instead of answering with words, she reached for my right hand and gently opened my fingers until my palm faced upward. She held her right palm just above mine, close enough that I could feel its warmth without our skin actually touching. Then she reversed the arrangement with our other hands, this time my left palm hovering just above hers. When she was done, she closed her eyes and took a slow breath.

"Close your eyes," she whispered.

"Then try to feel our mana. It's that simple." I raised an eyebrow. Still, I did as she asked and within a minute, I had already started suspecting this would become the most boring class in the academy. To my surprise, boredom wasn't my first enemy, and discomfort quickly revealed itself to be the real big boss. My legs hurt. My back hurt. Even keeping my arms suspended in place was far more exhausting than I'd expected. About four minutes in, I made a mistake.

My left hand drifted down just enough for my palm to brush against hers. Under normal circumstances, touching her hand wouldn't have mattered. The problem was that, unlike me, Sahirah actually seemed to have talent for meditation. And I'd interrupted her concentration at exactly the wrong moment.

"Ahhh!" I jerked backward as a sharp wave of pain shot through my entire body, the glow of mana visible in the air. When I looked around, every student in the garden was staring at us. Oddly enough... Their expressions held more sympathy than annoyance.

"Poor human. I bet my scales she forced him."

"Yeah, and I'll bet all my fur on it. Nobody in their right mind would volunteer to be her partner." Sahirah heard the whispers too. And to my surprise, she didn't blame me for what had been entirely my fault. Instead, she looked at me with an expression that was almost... guilty.

"Did I hurt you, Eric?""' Tis but a scratch." I grinned. There wasn't actually a scratch. I was just quoting an old movie. The only evidence was the faint red outline of her fingers where our hands had touched. Still, judging by her face, the joke had completely missed its mark. She hadn't even considered the possibility that I'd been the one who made the mistake, and she was blaming herself.

For a brief moment, I considered reassuring her with some cheesy line about ignoring what the furballs and lizards were saying. Then I realized there was a better solution. Why comfort her when I could solve the problem?

"Hey, Sahirah. Do you happen to have any mana-conductive ink with you?" She didn't answer. She simply stared at me with an expression I couldn't quite decipher. Disbelief, quite likely. Then, without a word, she reached into her bag, pulled out a small bottle of ink and a quill, and handed both to me.

"Have you noticed," she said, "that every time we meet anywhere except the food court, you ask me for the exact same favor?"

"And somehow you always have it." I smiled.

"Much appreciated." It took me less than a minute to roll up my sleeves and carefully draw a magic circle across the inside of my left wrist. Sahirah seemed too stunned to interrupt. Then I repeated the process on my right wrist, an awkward task with my non-dominant hand. By the time I finished, matching magic circles covered both wrists. Her eyes widened. She clearly wanted to ask what I was doing, yet seemed too bewildered to find the words.

"Such an overreaction," I said.

"This is just a copy-and-paste of the trick I used to make the system Sahirah-proof." I raised both wrists with a grin.

"Guess what? I just made myself Sahirah-proof too." My voice came out louder than I intended, earning us more than a few curious looks. I couldn't tell whether Sahirah was amused or annoyed. And without warning, she grabbed both of my hands and pulled them back into the meditation position. In a low voice that somehow confirmed it was definitely not amusement she was feeling, she whispered, "You'd better hope your trick works. Because if I hurt you this time... I won't feel sorry for you, human." I smiled.

For quite a while, I couldn't bring myself to close my eyes. Instead, I watched the tiny twitches crossing her face as she struggled to regain the concentration I'd broken. Ridiculous as it was... I enjoyed watching her. After all, anger was infinitely better than self-blame. And that victory belonged entirely to me. But as amusing as it was to watch her, I eventually got bored and decided to give this whole meditation thing another honest try. The minutes crawled by.

The position was just as uncomfortable as before, but when my hand accidentally brushed hers again, I wasn't hurt this time. All I felt was a slight tingling sensation. Since I didn't scream, Sahirah's concentration remained unbroken. Good, now I could also relax. And relax I did, struggling through the discomfort, shifting a leg here and there, until somehow I began to perceive a tingling from within. It was as if its source had become a tiny spark flickering in a pitch-black room.

Weak, almost insignificant, yet impossible to ignore after spending enough time in the darkness. And once my mind noticed that spark... I couldn't unsee it. The longer I observed it, the more obvious it became that my thoughts somehow influenced the little point of light. First, I tried to move it. It moved, but never quite the way I wanted. Then I tried compressing it. It wobbled, but refused to change any further. Finally, I tried to erase it. It resisted. More importantly, trying to destroy it felt... wrong.

Like a child tormenting an insect before understanding that living things could suffer. That strange feeling made everything click. The room wasn't dark at all. It was filled with mana. My mana. And that tiny spark that refused to obey me... It wasn't mine. It was Sahirah's. And the reason I couldn't control it directly was suddenly obvious. I could only command my own mana.

The movement I'd managed before had only been indirect, like pushing a rubber duck around a bathtub by making waves with the water, and that water was my mana. The solution to move the spark immediately became obvious. I guided my own mana through my body, letting it carry Sahirah's spark along with it. The little light traveled up my left arm, crossed my chest, then accelerated back toward my right hand before shooting into her body like a tiny glowing bullet wrapped in my own mana.

A small gift in return for the insight she'd unknowingly given me. Maybe, if some of my mana entered her body, I thought, she'd reach the same realization I had. For a brief moment, my body grew quiet. It became the bathtub after the rubber duck had been taken away. There was still plenty of water left to play with, of course. I even had the strange feeling I might eventually be able to shape my mana directly into runes. But that was beyond current me, so instead, I kept playing.

And before long, foreign mana flowed back into my body. This time, it split into dozens of tiny sparks, proving that Sahirah had reached the same realization I had. She was now aware of her own mana as well. Which meant she'd consciously decided to send me dozens of rubber ducks this time. Over the following minutes, I discovered something unexpected. Playing with Sahirah's mana was... fun. I could influence Sahirah's mana indirectly. I could send my own mana to her.

And the tingling sensation, very likely softened by the protective magic circles around my wrists, had become strangely pleasant. I had no idea how much time had passed outside my mental world when a sharp pain exploded across the top of my head. My eyes flew open, the fun over in a horrible way, but I noticed immediately that several things had changed. First, the source of the pain. Teacher Niori had just smacked me with her staff. Second...

At some point, Sahirah and I had abandoned the "close but not touching" part of the exercise. We were now holding hands. And third... Both of us were drenched in sweat... and the entire class was staring at us.

"Why the heck did you interrupt our meditation?" I protested, rubbing my head and pretending the sweating didn't exist.

"Meditation?" Niori replied dryly.

"What the two of you were doing has many names. Meditation is not one of them." Wait... what?

"We were meditating," I insisted.

"I became aware of my own mana. Isn't that the whole point of practicing with a partner?"

"You both became aware of your mana," she said, her sharp gaze shifting between Sahirah and me.

"But you didn't stop there, no. You started exchanging mana, you became so absorbed in the pleasant sensation that you grabbed each other's hands..." She didn't even give us time to process that before continuing.

"... and you did it in public... with someone who isn't even your own species." Sahirah and I exchanged equally bewildered looks. Had we really committed some massive cultural taboo without realizing it? Fuck. Cultural misunderstandings were bound to happen when so many species from different worlds were thrown together. Still, did this old woman really have to make such a spectacle of it instead of pulling us aside for a private conversation?

Judging by the stares from every direction, I couldn't tell what the other species thought. But I was beginning to suspect this might become the first CEO publicly commits an inappropriate cultural faux pas incident in the history of my startup. I swallowed hard. Just when I thought the situation couldn't become any more awkward, heavy footsteps echoed across the atrium. The entire class fell silent. When I turned around, Principal Zorik was standing there. His eyes weren't on Sahirah, or on Niori.

They were fixed entirely on me.

"Oh, come on. Is all of this really about doing something inappropriate in public?" I asked cautiously. His face twisted.

"Is this some kind of joke, human?" he growled.

"Because I'm here to arrest you." My stomach dropped. Had we really done something that serious by accident? I had to admit... My brain was no longer keeping up with how much trouble a simple meditation class could cause.

"Arrest me for what?" I managed to ask.

"The illegal illusion spell you assembled in the storage room," Principal Zorik said.

"It exploded and killed an innocent student." My heart turned to ice, and I froze where I sat. Yeah, it seemed the disaster awaiting me wasn't merely an embarrassing public incident. It was a crisis that threatened my company, my future, and even my faith in myself. Because if his accusation wasn't a steaming pile of bullshit — and I wasn't believing a word out of that dickhead principal's mouth until I checked the data crystal myself — then my invention had just taken a life.