Running a hand through the fuzz of hair that had grown in the past two weeks, Tercius smiled as he looked at the description of his new skill.

"Finally," he murmured, as his hands clenched— grasping at all previously unattainable things.

A pleasant warmth came in a wave from his toes to the top of his head and transformed his smile into a full-blown grin. He basked in the feeling and let it wash away the last of his erratic heartbeats. Problems new and old left him alone, if only for a moment, and he was thankful for the gift.

Glancing at Amber with white-green eyes he saw that her outline was still visible when under the revealing gaze of Energy Sight, and he worried how much longer it would take her to spend it all.

Amber was sitting on her back legs, her front paws placed on the edge of the basin as the water swirled and then leaped in a large arc, only to return to the basin.

“Amber, do you have a … stronger skill than that one?” he asked.

The water arc fell and watered the tree roots, as Amber turned to face him, a curious glint in her eye. Stronger how? Amber sent.

"Well…" Tercius paused, not sure how he should respond. They never talked about her skills before, and he abruptly smiled as he realized that maybe even animals had off-limits topics. "It is a skill that… Oh, Hells. Can you tell me your skills?"

Amber ran to him and leaped onto his lap, demanding a pet and a scratch in return— thrilled to take a break. She complained a bit at him for making her use her water manipulation skill over and over again, but she started explaining the rest of her skills as soon as he prompted her.

If he was right in his interpretations, Amber had three skills before she met him right from the moment she was born. One skill that made her scales more sturdier, yet lighter at the same time, another skill that made her nose more sensitive to smells, particularly to the pollen of some river flowers he knew from Sogea, and then a third skill that made her harder to spot when she was not moving in foliage. Two new skills came her way since they met, one for moving water, and the newest skill that made her experience strange things.

“And how do you … how do you observe these skills?” he asked, interested in her unique perspective.

I just do, she answered, as she purred.

“Do you see them with your eyes?” he asked.

No, she answered. I just know that they are there.

A bit more of back and forth, and he was sure that she should focus either on her ability to hide better or to toughen up her scales. She seemed a bit bored from spending the last half an hour on moving water, and the change would do her good. He told her, and she opened her amber eyes to look at him. Scales, she said as she stretched.

“So how does that skill improve?”

Time and damage, she sent.

Tercius smiled. "Well, until I master time, the damage is all we are left with. What kind of damage do you have in mind?"

Amber sent a very strange sensation of an experience she had, one that Tercius couldn't quite parse though. He kept wracking his mind over and over again, but to him, it only seemed like rough scratching, yet it was most certainly something else.

“Who did that to you?” he asked.

The pretty-eyed one, she answered and Tercius smiled. Euria. With a laugh, he realized what he had to do to help Amber level her skill. But how do I go about it? Tercius asked himself as he looked around himself. One solution came to mind when he spotted the basin he made earlier. Stretching his arm from his seated position, he grabbed the basin and tipped the water out of it, only to bring it to his lap just near the protesting Amber.

Taking some measurements on Amber directly, while using his Stone Shaping to actually make the thing, Tercius refined his creation until he was sure that it would work.

"Let's test it, little one," Tercius said and plopped Amber onto the adjusted basin. She seemed confused until he instructed her how to actually use it.

“Does it work?” he asked as he saw the little creature move her stomach back and forth, left and right. Her answer was that she was in heaven, as she rubbed her stomach all over the multitude of the relatively sharp spikes of the porcupine basin's outer shell.

Oh yes, she sent as she wiggled her spread-out body like a snake.

Tercius knew that Euria had often made use of her metal-made comb to scratch Amber, and the little creature loved her for it. Now he knew why. The sensation Amber sent over, of how that comb felt on her scales, made Tercius briefly feel the same thing all over his stomach and chest. It was … quite pleasant.

Maybe I should make myself one of these do-it-yourself porcupine scratchers, Tercius thought and then snorted. He could just imagine how that would look to someone passing by.

A minute later, Amber lost a portion of the Energy and Tercius smiled at the absurdity of what he saw. Like a dog in heat, Amber jumped and wiggled all over the porcupine, as the stone tips made a weird dull noise while they scratched her scales. The noise Amber made during all of that was… indescribable.

Judging by the position of the sun, Tercius still had a couple of hours before he had to be back at Seliana’s. Hopefully, by then, Amber manages to spend all of that.

Tercius was itching to try the spell, but that was something he could do anywhere in the whole world, and instead, he focused on things he couldn't do back at the Pyramid.

Namely, use Energy.

While he did believe Mistress Kalina when she said that only external use of Energy was observable, and he now knew that all of the Energy he harvested from Flu was contained in his Well, he wasn’t comfortable with Energy use at the Pyramid— especially now that Amber could tap into their bond and take that Energy before he claimed it. The risk was simply too great.

First, he listed his skills, one by one.

1. Language Acquisition [40]

2. Visualization [40]

3. Meditation [60]

4. Stone Shaping [40]

5. Gardening [40]

6. Mathematics [45]

7. Running [45]

8. Precision [38]

9. Stone Sight [20]

10. Teaching [20]

11. Mana Manipulation [21]

12. Mana Sight [21]

13. Sword Mastery [21]

14. Shield Mastery [21]

15. Energy Manipulation [25]

16. Energy Sight [21]

17. Quick Learner [4]

18. Small Blade Mastery [1]

19. Dexterity [4]

20. Stealth [2]

21. Acting [4]

22. Familiar Bond

23. Mana Metamorphosis [1]

Barrier-bound skills were the first thing he wanted to deal with, but he wasn't sure how good of an idea it was to rush into things. After all, presumably, he had a limited number of barriers to overcome. The pressure to rapidly improve, Tercius resisted. He would take his time and think things through— years even if need be. Haste makes waste, his first teacher had said often. Thinking about the old man, Tercius remembered another thing.

“Memorization doesn’t matter much, little one. Oh sure, it's useful, but any fool with a brain can remember things. More important, in my opinion, is that we can discover it and understand it by ourselves. Even if you forget, you can simply do it again. Are your views of the world and your senses sharp enough to do it, though?” Mr. Sullivan had said, in a deep and resonant voice. “If not— and, by the way, the answer is always no— then both need to be sharpened to the best of your ability, repeatedly,”

The old man's gray long wild hair and bushy beard, mustache, and eyebrows were the first thing people noticed, a general air of homelessness and wilderness, yet it was the sharp but calm eyes that made the elder stand out, at least for a young Tercius. Usually unflappable, calm, and collected, if crossed or in any way annoyed by someone, Mr. Sullivan had been able to cut anyone with a single piercing gaze. Tercius's parents had avoided the old man with a zeal that had been religious, to say nothing of Tercius's siblings, their neighbors, and, once, Tercius had seen grown policemen cower and turn small beneath that gaze.

The old man had been the only person Tercius ever looked up to, in his old life.

Thinking about the old grump, long dead and cremated, brought a sad smile to Tercius.

While Tercius never quite managed to get the same threatening gaze, lacking that suppressed but smoldering fire and brimstone the old man had, through the old man's teachings Tercius had managed to overcome his aversion from making eye contact and turn it into a repellent and a mirror of his convictions.

The view of the world was a very broad subject, an ever-shifting amalgam of beliefs, codes of conduct, etc, and it required careful study to see if a new addition should be made or an old one reformed, but it boiled down to how we choose to interpret the world we perceive. But to perceive something, in the first place, senses are needed and Tercius could improve his senses quite quickly, here.

Our senses give us the ability to perceive, little one, and arguably that is the most important part of any work, the word echoed in Tercius’s mind, parroted in the bass voice of the old man. They are the foundation upon which all work is built, and by now you should know how important foundations are.

Mana Sight was a very important skill for him. Tercius knew that without it, his practice with mana would have been a lot harder and time-consuming.

He could understand why mages left sensory skills for third place, and why they often used these skills as fuel for overcoming barriers, but he had no such compulsions. Mana Sight and Energy Sight would pave a sturdier foundation for him and enable him to perceive a world hidden from most eyes and so, he turned to them.

***

“Evening everyone,” Tercius said, as he took off his footwear and wiggled his toes.

“You’re late, young man,” Seliana’s voice thundered from somewhere in the house. “Did I have to send J’ro to get you?”

“Sorry,” he yelled back, as he glanced at his young friend. J’ro shrugged. Together, they made their way to the living and dining room area.

“Where’s Amber?” Euria asked, curiously peeking at him, her hands smudged with paint from her drawings.

“Amber will sleep outside tonight. She stayed at that tree we had lunch under,”

“What?!” Euria shrieked, the shrill sound clenching Tercius’s spine.

Reeling back while blinking, he used his pinky to see if his ringing ear was still there. It was. They both were. “Blazing Hells, Euria, that left me deaf for a second. Is that a skill of some kind?”

Eunim laughed. “I’ve often asked myself that,”

“You idiot,” Euria looked at Tercius, one blue finger questioning Tercius' sanity. “What if someone hurts her? What if they mistake her for a wild animal and kill her? What if they take her away?”

“I’m kidding, Euria. She’s in the garden,” Tercius said with a small smile.

If Tercius believed in such things, he would say that luck had been with him today. A new skill, Mana Metamorphosis, a broken barrier for Energy Sight, and then finally multiple levels in many different skills, the biggest being Mana Sight [26] with a five level jump, followed by Energy Manipulation [25] and Energy Sight [23] of two levels each. All of that, in a single day!

It was a very good harvest, he thought, as he sat down to eat his dinner. Occasionally he glanced at his fellow students, his mind brimming with strange questions. What would they think if they knew of that? What kind of a reaction would they have?

Finished with his evening meal, he made himself comfortable in one of the two enormous rocking chairs, Seliana’s heirlooms from the previous owners of the house, right near the fireplace. Smooth and polished from years of use, the chairs were beautifully crafted and well preserved and Tercius enjoyed the steady back and forth that could usually make him sleepy in minutes.

Seliana handed a cup of tea to Tercius and sat in the other chair as the kids made themselves comfortable all over the room.

“Are any of you kids looking forward to the second half of your study cycle?” Seliana asked.

“I do! I heard that we will now start with some lessons in the city,” Penelope said, clapping her hands rapidly. “Something about culture,”

Sonia waved her hand dismissively. "The teachers will take smaller groups and circle from place to place. Museum, gallery, concert hall, and colosseum. There are better ways to spend time if you ask me,"

“Like?” J’ro asked.

Sonia swept her brown hair, throwing it back like a cape, a preparation that signaled a lecture. "There's a zoo— a place where mages keep animals they capture and observe— but I'm not sure if lower years are allowed on the premises. My Father took me once, you know…”

While Sonia regaled the company with the tale of all kinds of alien creatures that mages captured and kept for study and, if he understood correctly, sustained harvest, Tercius held onto his warm ceramic teacup and drifted into thinking about the ways he could improve his skills.

From Language Acquisition to Teaching, Tercius made small observations and notes, figuring out new ways forward and then comparing their pros and cons against each other.

In the first few minutes of picking through his brain, a viable path for Language Acquisition appeared. One of the things he noticed in his studies of Magik was how similar the basics of Runes were to the numeral system that had the number three for its base. A dot, a line, and an arc were called primogen Runes in Master Ilio’s book, and they respectfully represented order and stagnation, chaos and movement, and finally the end of everything and eventual renewal of a cycle.

Every Rune ever written could be expressed through a string of these three primogen Runes, and that seemed like a useful thing to know how to do quickly. Not specifically to convert complex Runes to simple, but rather the ability to do the conversion mentally, in any way he needed. He noted that Mathematics would be a much better candidate for such an upgrade, and then moved on. His thoughts hopped away from skill to skill, finally landing on Visualization. If he could upgrade the skill to have some kind of visual aide, like a visual guiding system or something of a similar branch…

Come tomorrow, I might try some of these ideas, but I should focus on my sight skills… Tercius thought.

He felt something pushing his right arm, right around his shoulder. Frowning, his eyes traced a hand up the arm, over the shoulder, dirty blonde hair, neck, only to find Penelope's face right below the hairline.

“I asked, what do you think?” she asked.

“Err…” he said. “I think … that sight should be of the utmost importance,”

Many pairs of confused eyes narrowed and searched for answers around the room, but found none. Most of them shrugged, some of them laughed weakly.

“Why do you ask?”

“Forget it.” Penelope sighed.