Book 2, Chapter 32

I received three visitors over the next hour while I finished up my preparations. None of them were as bad off as Karad had been, but each one resulted in another ten-minute break. Karad himself came to the manor with the third one, and not just because the man had needed someone to help him make the walk.

“The Council agrees to your proposal,” he said.

“Obviously they do. You’re sending people to me to treat.”

“On the condition that the rest of the afflicted Garrison and Barrier Wardens be gathered in one place in the village to be treated there. The trip out here is too much for them.”

I paused in the act of grinding a few leaves to powder and considered it. “Fine, but it’ll be a few hours before I’m done here. Anyone who doesn’t want to wait can make the trip, otherwise I’ll take care of it when I head back to my parents’ home for the evening.”

“I would prefer if you attended to them immediately,” Karad said. He gestured at the alchemy tools filling the center table. “Surely this can wait an hour.”

“It could, but it won’t. You burned away any compassion I had for your group months ago, Karad.”

“This attitude right here is exactly why you’re not welcome,” Karad said. “You refuse to abide by anyone else’s authority or work for the betterment of the village as a whole.”

“True. That’s why I won’t be staying long. It was just cheaper for me to use a building that was already set up and which had access to the greenhouses which I helped repair. And besides, it’s not like you’re not getting anything out of it.”

Karad started to say something else, but Shel interrupted him, “Just let it go, Karad. He told you when he’ll be by, and if anyone doesn’t want to wait that long, they can come to him. That’s not unreasonable. He’s not a healer, and nobody is in danger of dying.”

“How sure are you that nobody will die while you play around with your leaves and your flowers?” Karad asked.

“Is anyone worse off than you were?” I asked.

“I don’t think so…”

“Then I’m completely sure. You were nowhere near the threshold for permanent damage. If you find someone who can’t talk or isn’t aware of their surroundings, come let me know. As long as it’s just pain, even if it’s enough to knock them flat, they’ll be fine eventually.”

Karad grumbled, but gave up the argument and left. Once it was just me and Shel, I said, “This next part is where I can’t be interrupted. You can stick around and watch, but I won’t be stopping once the process starts. If anyone does show up before I’m done, keeping them out of the room is your responsibility.”

“Got it. Will you be able to answer questions while you work?”

I hesitated to say yes. I could do it, but I didn’t want to. “Not this time,” I decided. “I’m kind of winging it with a lot of unfamiliar ingredients I’m using as substitutes, so I need to pay close attention to manage the reactions. If everything goes well, I’ll be making a lot more of this stuff.”

Shel took up her position, and I began channeling mana into the various pieces of equipment in front of me.

* * *

“Uh… this looks like mud,” Shel said as she peered down at the clay jar.

“Ointments often do.”

“I guess. What’s it do?”

“If it works right, it’ll make me older,” I explained.

Shel glanced up at me. “Temporarily, you mean? What would be the point?”

“No, permanently. It won’t be by much. A few days, maybe. The ointment is magically charged and should contain everything a body needs to remain healthy. It will force a growth spurt, the same as physically aging. If I do it every day, I could age three or four times faster than normal.”

“Kids these days, always in such a hurry to grow up,” she quipped. Then she narrowed her eyes and looked over at me. “But I can’t see you looking for a job in the fields. It’s something else. Your core?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “How is your training with sensing mana coming along?”

“Harder without direction, but I’m still progressing,” she said. “Why?”

“You’ve noticed the difference between adults and children.”

“Significantly bigger cores.”

“And slightly faster regeneration,” I said. “That might be harder for you to judge since your own core is ignited, but trust me, it’s a measurable difference.”

“So that’s why? All this work so you can become an adult with an adult-sized core faster. No, there’s got to be more to it.”

“You remember what I was working on when you all started your basic mana control exercises?” I asked.

“Something to do with your own core, but I was never quite sure what.”

I used telekinesis on the ointment to swirl it around slowly, making sure that nothing was settling toward the bottom before it finished hardening. The color was darker than I’d expected, but the process was otherwise smooth. In a few minutes, it would be ready for testing.

“Most people here are dulls. That means they have a dormant core. Unignited. A stage zero. You and my father have an ignited core. Stage one.” I pointed at my chest. “Stage two.”

“What does that mean though? And are there more stages past two?”

“It means more than doubling your current mana generation again. And stage three means increasing the amount of mana your core can hold up to ten times over. But if I advance to stage three now, when my core is three times smaller than an adult’s… Well, the modifications don’t really grow with you. My core would stop growing and I’d have to break the stage three changes in order for it to start again, which would leave… I guess you could call it a form of scarring.”

I gave Shel a minute to digest that, then said, “And you’d like to know how to get to stage two.”

“I would.”

“You’re not even close to ready,” I said. “Noctra was trying to figure it out. I’ll point out the books he had on the subject. That will get you halfway there. When you feel like you understand what he recorded in his own notes, come find me and we’ll discuss all the parts he hadn’t figured out yet.

“And now, I’ll need a little privacy.”

“You will?” Shel asked. “For what?”

“Because I’m about to take off my clothes and smear this all over my body.”

Shel’s mouth formed into an ‘O’ of surprise. “Well, I suppose I will go explore the library. Can you point me toward what books I’m looking for?”

“Check his private study, the book shelf on the left side. I believe there were three volumes. The ones talking about dust jackals are what you’re looking for.”

Shel left, leaving me to peel off my clothes and sweep my body with elemental manipulation to remove as much dirt and grime as possible. It was important for the ointment to be slathered directly onto the skin.

I scooped up two fingers of the ointment and rubbed it into my chest. “Cold,” I muttered. Maybe if I tweaked the ratios a bit, I could get something that was a bit warmer.

* * *

After half an hour of letting the magic soak into my body, I scraped the ointment off and got dressed. I was in need of a bath, but otherwise ready to move on with my evening. Other than collecting Shel, who was busy flitting around Noctra’s old office, it was time to go home and try to convince my parents to move out of this village before it became a deathtrap.

I’d always been wary of leaving them here. Even with the scrying mirror and doing my best to keep my mana crystal at least half full, there was a chance an attack would come and I’d never know. Maybe my father would die in the opening strike. Maybe the scrying mirror would malfunction or an enemy mage would destroy it. I would have felt much better if my family wasn’t here.

I’d done my best to keep the Wolf Pack’s attention in Derro, up to and including killing one of what I hoped was one of their inner circle and a few dozen of their enforcers. If that wasn’t enough chaos to keep the cabal’s interest firmly in their own city for a few days, I’d have to start breaking buildings.

“Did it work?” Shel asked, drawing me out of my thoughts as we walked together.

“Too soon to tell,” I said. “It doesn’t seem to have had any adverse effects, but I’m not sure how it’ll do at actually aging me up. If it worked as well as I think it did, I’ve advanced four days of growth. It’ll take another few weeks of daily treatments to see a noticeable physical change.”

I’d see the difference in my mana core, something I had much better awareness of, long before I grew taller. A month’s growth there was significant enough to tell if it was working. If so, I’d push myself up to about nine years of physical age as quickly as possible, then stop. Puberty was full of all sorts of delicate hormones that this simplified version of the ointment of aging would have difficulties with.

By that point, I hoped to have this whole Derro problem taken care of so I could devote a lengthy stretch of uninterrupted time to finding the edge of this mana desert and figuring out what happened while I was reincarnating. It was obvious that some number of years had passed and that something catastrophic had occurred. The fact that one of the moons was missing from the sky and no one seemed to even realize it was gone told me it had probably been at least a few hundred years.

A lot could happen in that length of time. Kingdoms had risen and fallen faster than that. If it wasn’t for the five remaining moons, the similar language—though it had enough differences that I was beginning to suspect I couldn’t blame it all on regional variances—spoken as my previous life, and the soul invocations I’d cast myself before my reincarnation, I would have given some serious thought to whether I was even on the same planet.

Shel and I parted ways when I reached the edge of town. She went back to her home in the arbor, and I reported to the Garrison barracks to remove fraying mind enchantments for two hours. I finished just in time to see people gathering for nightly tithing. Rather than find my family in the lines, I slunk off through the shadows.

I hadn’t expected my parents to be home, but Mother and Senica were there. Seeing my surprised look when I walked in, Mother said, “Your father donates enough mana for the whole family now, and it’s not mandatory anymore.”

Senica looked up and saw me. “Gravin!” she yelled as she launched herself off her pallet, a doll going flying into the air. I strongly considered leaving my shield ward up to protect me from what looked like it was sure to be a teeth-rattling tackle, but I opted to let her pass through and reinforced my muscles with mana instead.

The hug hit every bit as hard as I expected, but Senica didn’t seem to notice or care. “You’re back,” she said. “Where did you go? What did you do? Did you have any adventures? Did you use magic? Can you show me?”

I pushed Senica back to arm’s length and said, “I’ll tell you all about them soon, okay? I promise. I need to talk to Mother and Father first.”

“Dad won’t be home for a while,” Senica whined. “Want to play while we wait?”

I smiled softly and said, “How about a quick story then?”

Senica practically dragged me to the table, which had three chairs now. With me not around, I supposed they didn’t need a fourth anymore and hadn’t bothered to try to replace it. I briefly wondered what had happened to the furnishings in the hut I’d used at the arbor, but Senica quickly distracted me. I told her a few stories of hunting monsters out in the wastes, heavily altered to make it seem like I cleverly used terrain and long-range spells instead of just casually annihilating them with brute force. It was more entertaining that way.

The curtain swished as Father pulled it aside. We made eye contact and he nodded. “Welcome home, Gravin.”