After Gardening he moved on to Stone Shaping, a skill that shared a commonality with his previous test subject that he was curious to learn more about— both skills functioned as a 'hand-bound field of effect' and since both skills were at [40] Tercius was excited to make some comparisons and then comb through any similarities and differences he could find.

The low-density mana cloud that accompanied active use of Gardening was also present with Stone Shaping, he was able to note. The cloud was even of similar proportions as the one from Gardening and he wished that he had a way to accurately measure the volume that it occupied, and compare it with the other.

“I wish I didn’t spend my Mathematics second barrier on faster mental calculations… such a waste…” Tercius murmured, his eyes narrowing. If he had only known then what he knew now, he could have made Mathematics into a more powerful tool of active accurate measurement. But… that was in the past, the opportunity wasted and there was no need to waste time on wishing it was otherwise. Learn as much as you can from it and move on.

“But that reminds me. I should first hone my tools of examination some more. Mana Sight is a powerful aide now… it will only be more powerful after I break the second barrier,” Tercius murmured, as he closed his eyes.

A zoom function, an overload function, a function that would give him the ability to mute the pesky brightness of mana colors while the dark mode was on, then a function that would give him the ability to see a wider range of mana colors, and many more.

He had had time to think about it. For some functions that he came up with he was not even sure if they would work, for others he worried that they would work. Skills could hurt their users, he knew. Corrupted skills, the mages called them. What if his choice messed up his skill and he would have to stop using it?

Mana Sight was an essential tool of diagnosis for all things mana. He could not make a mess out of it. Therefore, there were two ways he saw this going forward. He had three sight skills, Mana Sight, Energy Sight, and Stone Sight. The first two were off the table, but he didn’t want to mess up with Stone Sight either. A little bit was fine, but…

Stone Sight was a skill that he got after he heard his grandfather talk of his skill to somehow feel the stone’s structure through his fingers and Tercius remembered thinking that something like an x-ray vision would be a more useful tool to have and that was that. Stone Sight was also one of the two easiest skills he ever got, the other being Stone Shaping. Considering that one of his mana affinities was stone, he had a pretty good guess what was going on there. Mana Affinity. Out of the multitude of crystals that he had seen growing in his skill garden most were colored, but the rare few were white. Vividly he remembered that once the mature Dexterity skill crystal left after he accepted it, the remaining little patch of crystal moss where the crystal grew initially had turned white. Did that mean that the grown white crystals were like storage?

From personal experience, he knew that Mana had colors while Energy was white. Therefore, Tercius postulated that all skills were made of Mana and Energy and since his Mana was naturally inclined towards stone and crystal, skill of these two types should be relatively easy, or somewhat easier than any of the rest.

Then, maybe the white ones were his crystal affinity skills?

It also didn’t escape his attention how similar Energy seemed to white light and Mana to dispersed light… which led to some interesting lines of thought, but…

Now is not the time to wander around… Focus Tercius, he thought.

If he was going in with no breaks at all… then the function that expanded his range of perceptible mana colors would be his first choice, a function that he imagined as means of deciphering and decoding complex mana morphs more easily. But that manner of complexity for a function seemed ill-advised and simply far more suitable to a skill of its own. Worth a shot.

The second on his list was a function that he called ‘movable point of view’ function. The premise for this function was a bit out there, but after he initially thought of it, it just kept coming back. His Mana Sight was a powerful skill, no two minds about it, but ironically it had a glaring blind spot. Tercius realized a while back that with his mana-sensing skill he wouldn't be able to examine his brain, part of his spine, back, neck, and everything else to which his eyes were naturally oriented against, including the eyes themselves.

He would need to lean on someone else to do any examination work on any of those, but… It wasn’t like he could go to any mage with Mana Sight and ask for an examination. Big secrets aside, mages with his level of mana-sensing skill were rare. Probably only someone of Mistress Kalina's caliber had a sensing skill on par with him…

A better name for this function might be ‘floating eyes’, Tercius mused. Or something similar… Wandering eyes maybe?

As partial proof of the success of a function like this, he took his uncle's new skill Sphere of Cognisance. With the skill on, Lux became a center of a spherical domain which registered the speed of movement of objects inside the domain and transformed that speed mostly into a visual representation, but also auditory, olfactory, and even weak tactile feedback. Initially, Lux had been overwhelmed with the magnitude of the input of information provided, but within hours of gaining it, he had learned to make do.

The only problem that persisted even to the end of the training session was that his uncle’s new ‘skill sight’ overlapped heavily with his normal sight, but the issue was settled with just closing his eyes.

With a single skill, his uncle had gained four new senses, albeit four senses tailor-made to spot speed of movement.

I never thought of it that way… Tercius’s mind spun around that interesting thought.

This seemed incredibly important. Right now he was studying skills and skill effects so that he could be better at focused skill making. If he could have a single skill for Mana detection, that would have visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory representation all wrapped in one… would that be too much for his brain to handle? Would having more than one way of 'looking' at Mana have any meaning at all? Of course, it would. But Mana Sight alone had been troublesome without its first function added on. Five Mana senses pasted onto his regular ones.

He was getting ahead of himself, again.

In my defense… I could just coop myself into a hole somewhere and study this for who knows how long… Tercius thought and then almost sighed.

For a few moments there he had almost forgotten completely about his grandfather’s religious revelations. He shook his head. He didn’t want to think about that. It had been difficult enough to know that one grandparent had religious connections, but now he learns that there are two? One Balance, the other Architect… His mind was just tingling that there was something there, but he dearly wished that there was not.

Anyways, the 'floating eye' function. He was fairly confident about it. The function had endured many assaults since he had originally conceived it and he had even taken his time to think through how the skill should work with this function.

With Stone Sight active, the user, him, would imagine his skillful eyes leaving his body and wandering through that space where only darkness and stone existed. He included the words 'skillful eyes' on purpose because the worst-case scenario for this function was that it would literally take his real eyes out…

Tercius imagined that that would be incredibly inconvenient for his blood circulation system…

But even if that unfortunate incident were to occur, which he highly doubted considering the provision he made, he knew that Mistress Kalina was near, relatively speaking, and with the rapid healing potions that he kept in his amulet, he would be able to survive getting his eyes ripped out and then all he had to do was wait for long enough for the elder mage to help him regrow them with a potion.

Besides, Floating Eyes would solve the zoom problem while at the same time allowing him to scout remotely…

The list of considerations for and against was long, but so was for each of his other functions. He was sure that there were far better options for an ocular skill, a safer option, and all he had to do was to wait for the mind to come up with it, but…

It was time to sacrifice the potential of his skills and grow from that sacrifice. Tercius chuckled. That had been a difficult lesson to learn and still there were times where he slipped into that state where he just wanted to keep things as they were indefinitely, but he also knew that to make a good omelet you had to crack a few eggs.

Even if those eggs were his eyes and skills.

Appling Floating Eyes function to Stone Sight first seemed optimal, mostly because he would see the effect on an ocular skill that had no addons added, which would later give him more diverse data to dabble with…

Tercius glanced through the holes that made up his window. The night was still going strong. As his body filled up with renewed vigor and all desire for sleep evaporated, Tercius drew the Runes and pulled out a pyramid-shaped sand clock, a pen and paper, and two small vials from his amulet. After he prepared everything on the physical side, he then visited Flu and harvested enough Energy to fill both his body and Well, only to convert it into his own Energy.

The slippery ease with which that conversion happened still left his mind boggled. One day soon, he would be doing that on his own…

Before he began the arduous process of applying his Energy to add the new function to Stone Sight, Tercius took out all of that Energy and made a cube out of it, for ease of calculation. After he made a note of the visual volume— a highly inaccurate way to do the measurement, but beggars can’t be choosers— he applied himself to how he imagined that the skill should work with the function, explicitly going into details over and over again, time after time.

Keep focus, don't stray with thoughts, and just think the same thing over and over again…

Throughout this he could easily feel that Energy was leaving him, slipping through narrow corridors of his being only to appear in that world of gray fog, right where the core of his Stone Sight was. There they would snake around the Core, integrating their Energy and evolving his skills in different ways, to make his wish come true.

Stone Sight [20] is now Stone Sight [21]

Like a bell chime, quick and concise, the notification appeared and Tercius opened his eyes.

With Energy Manipulation, he collected everything that remained of the Energy in him and pooled it in front of his eyes in a somewhat wobbly cube. With help of Energy Sight he measured the approximate volume, only to store that data on paper for later review. Glancing at the sand clock, he saw that just under an hour had passed since the sand started falling, and he made a small note of that on the paper as well.

Inhaling, Tercius looked around his room. All of the stone in his room was an earthy yellow color in broad daylight, everything from floor and ceiling to bed frame and table frame, but at night without a light to see under, the room became a palette of colors between dark yellow, brown and dark gray, depending on where the moonlight struck.

He activated Stone Sight.

The natural darkness of the night slipped even deeper into ink to become pitch black as everything but stone erased itself from existence. Stone was represented to him with a glowing gray color, while cracks and weaknesses and impurities in stone became darker shades of gray, gravitating towards the color of darkness that currently surrounded him.

Good. The skill still works as before, Tercius exhaled. Now to see if my experiments with my sight left me sightless…

Nervous for various reasons yet terribly excited to see the result of his work from a different pair of eyes, Tercius imagined his skillful eyes flying out of his physical eyes. Just like he imagined, the skillful eyes detached and gained independence from him, allowing them the ability to roam around. First ‘he’ went through the floor, then through the walls…

Tercius had no idea how long his eyes floated around his house, investigating every nook and cranny of the home.

Stone Sight [21] is now Stone Sight [22]

Stone Sight [22] is now Stone Sight [23]

Stone Sight [23] is now Stone Sight [24]

With a grunt, he ignored the headache that began the same instant that he remembered a wild thought that he had had. What if my eyes were to turn to each other?

He saw two pictures in his mind, that’s what. Both were overlapping pictures of the same thing, only from different points in space. His brain screamed at the impossibility of the arrangement. It was as if he momentarily existed in two worlds at the same time.

He dispelled the skill immediately and started gently massaging his eyeballs, even though the pain was somewhere in the back. His brain had some performance issues, but Tercius was confident that it would adapt in time, just like it did any other time. Everything was a matter of practice.

“Oh Hells,” Tercius murmured as he ground his teeth together.

Tercius gave himself a small break where he went over the data that he collected and added some thoughts around the edges of the papers and made small scribbles of further experiments that should be attempted. The majority of them would be left behind, like always, but hopefully, some would be refined and attempted, like the one he did now.

Once more, he activated the skill, and 'he' floated around the space with no issues through physical barriers. It was only when he passed through a patch of darkness that he knew was Amber, that he felt physically sick.

Violently so.

As he jerked back to his body, he could feel that Amber was wondering why he tickled her.

Unable to respond, he just grunted with pain while keeping his voice down as he folded himself on the floor. The fucking recoil, he thought. The same thing had happened whenever his mana was destroyed while practicing spells.

But this one…

He had never felt a recoil of such strength. It was orders of magnitude more powerful than normal recoils and even more powerful than the pain that he felt while he had formed his Well. Only the pain of harvesting Energy from Flu’s chains compared…

Once he stood up, he took a stack of empty paper from his amulet and began a new page on mana recoil in skills.

—In conclusion: due to mana recoil, it is necessary to arrange a protection of some kind for this, possibly with the creation of a new function that aims to protect the skill usage within foreign mana fields… Tercius wrote down the Runes while using a basic self-devised key to lock the Runes and compress them down. No reason not to practice some language skills while also maintaining some level of secrecy of his writings.

After another small break where he went and collected more Energy from Flu, Tercius tried the last part of his new function— when one eye stayed put inside his head, while the other floated away.

As soon as he saw that it was possible to do it, Tercius stopped with Stone Sight and turned his attention to Mana Sight. His experiment showed that the function was viable, if extremely difficult to handle properly, but Tercius was confident that with a week of constant use, he could manage to handle the headache-inducing disparity of seeing from multiple points at the same time.

He was already used to comparing slightly different images with Visualization, and he had figured that this new function was just a more complex method of that, a jump from two-dimensional images to the observation of three-dimensional representations of Stone, Mana or Energy, but in regards to time as well. From two to four dimensions… It should be doable. If not, then a new skill to process information to help him with interpretation was not out of the question. Maybe even a new function to Language Acquisition…

From his amulet, Tercius took out a wide metal bottle and as he glanced at each of the papers individually, with Quick Learning to aid him, he stuffed the papers down the wide neck of the bottle. After he closed the cap, he shook the bottle with vigor to the sound of sloshing liquid and breathed a sigh of relief.

After he extracted the contents from the bottle he was not disappointed by what he saw. None of his Runic scribbles remained and the paper was ruined beyond repair, turned into a mushy pile.

“Excellent,” Tercius murmured. The mush would be going to the compost pile in the garden. Brimming with Energy he collected on the last break he took, Tercius opted to skip taking another break and immediately start adding Floating Eyes to Mana Sight.

*********

It was breakfast and the dining room was crowded with people. Kriti and Petra ran from the table to the kitchen every other minute, filling everyone’s belly with delicious food. Tercius and Mistress Kalina had gone earlier to the local marketplace, under spell cover, and purchased enough food to feed everyone for three days, at the very least.

Before Tercius brought the icebox, most of the fast perishables had been stored in the floor space of the basement, the lowest point of the house as well as the coldest one, what with being almost three meters underground while also surrounded by a meter of stone and shale, but even food stored there didn't keep long. Now the icebox, a large chest with cooling enchantments, could keep things frozen as long as enough mana was inserted daily.

His mother couldn’t stop talking about it.

“Tercius… do you remember anything of what your grandmother taught you about playing that stringed instrument?” Ciron asked.

"The oud?" Tercius said after he swallowed down a wolf-sized bite of the most delicious homemade pie. "I don't really know… maybe a little…"

“Try it out today and see if you can remember at least one melody that she taught you,” Ciron said. “It's important,”

“Grandfather… it’s been what… six, seven cycles since I last touched that instrument,” Tercius said. “Grandmother never got past teaching me the basics… and with how much time has passed… I’m afraid that her lessons had been wasted on me,”

After Kasim, a merchant friend of his father had left a waterlogged instrument at their home back at the village, which Rona then repaired and revealed that she knew how to play it and offered to teach Tercius. Time back then had been available in overwhelming quantities and learning an instrument seemed like a good way to fill an hour or two each day. For a month or two, once every few days, Rona had given him some lessons, but then they had been forced to relocate and he had stopped learning the oud completely after his struggle with harnessing Energy began.

From too much free time to no free time, in very little time.

“We should hear some of these basics, Tercius,” Mistress Kalina said, as she applied jam on a slice of bread with a knife.

Tercius shook his head. “No Mistress. I would say that I… I know how to pluck a string. That’s about it,”

"For some stringed instruments, that's all it takes," Mistress Kalina said with a small laugh. "I know to play three stringed instruments, Tercius, two of which are of the plucking variety, as you said, so we will add two hours of music practice after morphing practice each day. Unfortunately, I don't know oud, but that just means that your personal sound might develop to be… unconventional and somewhat unique,"

Tercius stopped eating. His day was too short already. “Mistress…”

"No, no, there is no discussion about this. Mathematics and music are the tools that develop our mages in all the right ways and playing an instrument is a requirement of finishing the Academy," Mistress Kalina said, pointing at him with a knife. "There is no mage alive who doesn't sing or play at least one instrument. Penelope, do you perhaps have an instrument of choice?"

"No, Mistress, I have chosen to speak as my first discipline of casting magic," Penelope answered.

"I do have some here with me… all of which I can play and teach, but we can browse the markets as well if none are suitable to you. You will join us two for music practice,"

A small polite cough of a certain eight-year-old gathered the attention of the whole table. "Ahhh… Mistress? Can I join as well? I would like to learn to play an instrument,"

Mistress Kalina chuckled at his little sister’s earnest request. “With these two sour faces around, a volunteer is more than welcome,”

Aurelia beamed a blinding smile. “Thank you… Mistress,”

Out of all of his relatives present, Mistress Kalina got along with Aurelia the best. His little sister was polite, a compliment that Mistress Kalina often shared with Petra and she was inquisitive, which was another source of compliments from the elder mage. Aurelia always added that sugar-sweet 'Mistress', probably because she imitated him, and every single time Tercius saw Mistress Kalina melt like chocolate. In the past few days, Aurelia somehow even showed Mistress Kalina just how much math she knew… and he was sure that Mistress Kalina would sooner or later propose for Aurelia to come to the Academy when she aged a bit more.

Tercius shrugged his shoulders, mostly for himself, as he turned to Ciron.

"Why the sudden interest in music?" Tercius asked curiously.

"Don’t you know what’s just a few days away?" Ciron asked back forcing Tercius into thought. "I don’t want the house to be empty of music on that day. Your grandmother wouldn’t want it, especially with everything that’s… anyways, since she isn't here we should all step in."