"—But I liked those colors very much, brother. The red one, especially. Can you teach me to do that?" Aurelia asked, her eyelids struggling to stay open.

“Of course, little one,” Tercius said as he glanced at his mother, who was bent over Portia’s crib, making sure that the baby was properly dressed to sleep.

From personal experience, he knew how difficult it was for a baby to have a steady sleeping temperature during the night. Most nights had been pleasant, but every once in a while an anomaly was known to strike. When he had been a small lump of quivering baby flesh, there were times when he had had to cry for help for someone to cover him as the temperature experienced a sudden plummet and times when he had been so hot that he woke up soaking wet and had to wait for people to wash the sticky filth off of him.

The worst part was the time of the year seemingly never mattered in Sogea. There were summer-hot days and nights during what was supposed to be winter, and it was not uncommon to shiver in summer when storm clouds from the Sky Rending Mountains descend and bring with them the coldest of rains…

“When?” Aurelia said in a low voice.

Tercius smiled. “How about we talk about it tomorrow when you aren’t half-asleep?”

“Sounds good to me,” she whispered.

"Then it sounds good to me too," he whispered and kissed her on the top of her head. "Now sleep well,"

From her bed to check on Leo in his crib. The three-year-old was fast asleep, completely naked, legs and arms akimbo. His tiny hands were closed into fists and his face was frowning, sour pinched as Penelope called it. Tercius checked if the toddler's hair was sweaty and it was not, so he left Leo as he was. For now, the night was just right.

“They are both asleep,” he whispered to Petra as he came near Portia’s crib.

"She's just about to," his mother whispered back as she waved a finger over the barely open eyes of the baby. A minute later Tercius and his mother left the room, extinguishing all candles and leaving Amber to be there with the kids. The little creature was pleased with him after she started eating her favorite food, and did everything he asked without question.

“A long day,” Tercius said as they walked down the hallway.

Hundreds of silver circles fell onto the floor, as starlight passed through the numerous rows and columns of holes on the wall to his right. At his insistence, even the windows to the inner garden were now a mirror of the windows of the outer walls. The house had a more cave-like atmosphere now, which gave Tercius a strange image of the insides of a beehive. Only the doors were left normal, but every door had a barring mechanism with three wooden poles that were easily lowered at any time necessary.

"Too long," Petra sighed, as she used one hand to keep the candle flame safe. "I hate to say it, but Kriti has a deft hand around the house. I'm not sure that I would be able to handle so many people in the house by myself,"

“I would help, but—”

“No, no. You need to study,” Petra said. “But is your teacher a mage or a musician? She seems to know how to play every kind of instrument there is…”

“She… had a lot of free time on her hands,” Tercius said.

Petra hummed. “So how is the oud going? From what I heard, it sounds good. Did you remember anything Mother taught you?”

“I… well… I can string a few familiar sounds, but… it won’t be anywhere near what grandmother can do…” Tercius said.

His mother waved a hand. “Did you know that Father asked me to sing some verses? I haven’t sung in ages… and certainly not what he is asking me to sing…”

“What did he ask— oh it’s a prayer, isn’t it?” Tercius said.

Petra nodded. “He gave me Mother's prayer book. He was very persistent about it, as well. Are you sure that that Spirit thing can’t influence people? Father seems downright possessed these past few days… always running around, searching for things. Hells, I even saw him talking to a neighbor over the gate a few days ago…”

"The only source about Spirits that I have claimed that it's impossible, so…" Tercius shrugged. Maybe Perdinar had something about Spirits in his private collection? He really should visit that man sometime soon. "But I do see what you mean. I don't know, but it might be an aftereffect of the potion…"

“What? Do you think that something went wrong with it?” Petra's voice dipped low as she stopped walking mid-stairs, the flame of the candle making their shadows dance on the walls.

“No, no,” Tercius said with haste as he stopped near her. “No. But… think about it… after being in pain, deaf and tired all the time, he’s suddenly vital and spry and can hear again perfectly… It’s like… he’s shed a cocoon off of himself. His perspective of the world had a radical change in a matter of a few hours, just a few days ago, and I can’t imagine what kind of aftereffects that might have left…”

“Oh,” Petra nodded as she resumed walking. “Oh. I didn’t think of that. Yes… Should I… talk to him?”

Tercius shrugged. “You know how he is. You can try, but he won’t tell if he thinks that we might not like it. Which, judging by the way he’s been acting, is most surely the case,”

"So wait and see," Petra sighed. "Oh, I wish that Mother was here. She would have known exactly what to do…"

“And if she was here, we wouldn’t be forced to sing and play…” Tercius complained.

“That too…” Petra said. “You know, I can almost hear her sweet chants, sometimes. Or smell that incense that she makes,”

“Yea…” Tercius took a breath. There were times when those things happened to him too. “Wait… Yea… that’s not an imaginary smell… that’s—”

Tercius took faster steps, his Running almost coming alive to aid him, as he followed his nose. Petra hurried after him and soon they went down the basement stairs, only to stop on the first door that they encountered.

The small shrine his grandmother had made was behind that door.

Tercius and Petra shared a look and he saw the worry on her face. His eyes lit up like torches as he looked inside. A mana silhouette of a large man was inside, kneeling with his head bowed.

“It’s grandfather,” Tercius said and inclined his head to the door. “He’s praying… I think,”

“What are you two doing?” a deep voice said from the other side of the door, making his spine tense. His mother suddenly grabbing his arm didn’t help at all.

“Holy shit,” she whispered. “I almost dropped the candle,”

The two of them opened the door and the smell of incense that came out of the well-lit room reminded them of old times. His grandmother usually carried a stick of incense with her around the house on major holidays, to ward off 'bad Spirits'…

At the far end of the small room, a small cat made of gray stone appeared and disappeared from the darkness. His grandfather had lit a lot of candles from many different angles and the shadows had come to play. His grandmother insisted on the room being half underground and half above ground, a symbolism that was prevalent in her faith, and his grandfather had obliged.

"Go to sleep you two. I will stay up tonight," Ciron said, not even lifting his head. The voice that Tercius heard was thick as if clogged by something.

"We decided to stay up tonight," Petra answered. "Mother always kept the nightly vigil around this time of the cycle, and this is the first time that she's absent so…"

“Oh, about that,” Tercius said. “I will stay up with you, but I do need to work on something,”

“I don’t mind. I have some work to do for tomorrow, so I might as well do it tonight,” Petra said. “And Father, you should go and stay with the children. They are all asleep so do be careful of waking them. I think that the guests are asleep as well, so…”

“And Amber is napping on your chair, so please don’t sit on her,” Tercius added. He wisely chose to leave out the again part. Only one leg was caught by the elder’s backside, and Amber already had issues with the old man. There was no need to escalate things.

“I will be up soon,” Ciron said. “Now leave me be for a few quiet moments,”

Tercius nodded. "Then let me help you stay awake," From his Well he drew a sizable Energy quantity and transferred it straight into the old man's upper arm. Ciron grunted but did not say another word.

As soon as the door was closed behind him, he sighed.

"A cup of late-night tea?" His mother asked and Tercius nodded.

The window in their kitchen was closed with a pair of wooden window shutters, but Tercius used his newly risen Stone Shaping to move a small layer of stone over the holes and close it completely. His grandfather’s example had given him a lot of inspiration for the function to add to the skill.

Petra hummed as she touched the light-orb that he had embedded into the wall and white daylight flooded the room. His mother liked to use the light-orbs he brought, but all of them were very conscious that those lights were not something people around here had access to.

Tercius drew Energy from his Well and circulated it throughout his whole body, to rid himself of any notion of sleep. After that he went ahead and recharged his stores of Energy, only to leave the quiet space of Meditation.

Willpower would not come to people who had it easy, he figured.

Standing up, he started pacing. From the well-lit kitchen area to the darkness of the dining room, he used the contrast of the route to help his mind work better. His Visualization was helping him remember all the pages that he wrote and subsequently destroyed, in the past few days.

After he brought his Mana Sight to [41], a few days back, he had examined his grandfather's Stone Shaping in use, while marking down all differences that he spotted.

Then Tercius had a conversation with the man about the skill. He asked if Ciron's grandfather had been an Expert of Stone Shaping and the answer was yes. Then he focused on Ciron’s knowledge of the skill, and what the old man knew about how it should work. Apparently, the grandfather of his grandfather had also gained the ability to move stone by mere thought after he overcame the third barrier, and that prompted Tercius to wonder about how foreknowledge influenced the outcome of broken barriers of skills for people who used the ‘normal’ method of sacrificing skills.

He started with another question. What were skills?

On a fundamental level, as his current knowledge suggested, Tercius thought of skill as aggregates of Energy, Mana, knowledge, instinct, and a whole lot of wishful thinking. These aggregates were capable of growth, most likely by amassing more of its components.

So what did sacrificing skills to overcome barriers do in practical terms?

He would answer that the sacrifice was essentially the transfer of a major part of the aggregated collection of all those elements from one skill Core to another skill Core, leaving behind a husk of a skill that could be repaired, given time and Energy.

In that transfer, the donor skill influenced the recipient skill in some ways, and the user probably had some measure of influence there as well. That was probably why his grandfather Stone Shaping gained the ability to use mere thoughts to move stone after he broke the barrier. Ciron knew that that was how the skill should work because he had seen long ago that the skill worked like that and he, in his conscious and subconscious mind, willed it to be so.

This theory gave rise to many interesting questions. For one, does this mean that everyone with a skill, any skill, was able to move Energy and Mana? That would make everyone an Energy and Mana user, right? Tercius didn’t think so, at least not actively and directly, but rather passively and indirectly through that wishful thinking part that made a skill.

It was a stretch, but he was pretty confident about it.

“Your tea is ready,” Petra called for him.

Tercius nodded absentmindedly and continued pacing without pausing.

Drawing on years of experience with multiple types of skills, Tercius had started formulating skills of his own for months now. Looking back, Familiar Bond was probably the first skill that he altered to be different from other skills.

After that whole fiasco in the courtroom in Chameos, Tercius had learned just how many types of bonds existed. He did not want a skill that would rob anyone of their free will like many familiar-type skills did because he would never appreciate such a skill being imposed upon him.

No, he had wanted a Familiar from the stories of his youth, a companion that he could understand and who could understand him. He remembered dreams of a bond that grew slowly over time and that would one day lead to more powerful abilities like linked sight, shapeshifting, and sharing skills…

Well, the linked sight was there.

The skill Familiar Bond had another detail that placed it apart from others. It had no levels.

Why?

“Why?” he murmured.

“Tercius get over here, your tea is getting cold,”

His mind still on the matter of skills, he took the offered tea, draining the cool liquid in one go.

Why did the other skills have levels?

But before that question was answered, he turned to what was a level, practically speaking.

Well… it's the aggregation of further materials and condensation of the older ones, Tercius thought.

He remembered well the Core of the skill Meditation the first time he saw it and the last time he saw it. The first was at level [21] and the last time the skill had been at [60]. In between those, he had had some time to observe the skill grow from inside its Core. Normal levels expanded the Core, little by little. The second barrier at level [40], despite its greater Energy need, had left the Core at the same size.

The same thing was repeated a year ago, way back in Lissea, when he crossed the first barrier while inside the Core of Energy Manipulation. He had been observing the Core with his and had seen the notification for skill growth from [20] to [21], yet the skill did not gain any size at all. It did not claim any more space from the gray fog world like it did just last night when it went from [25] to [26].

Tercius also knew that the cost of Mana use of a skill went down with every level, but it was the barriers that always made a true impact on the cost. In his estimate, the barrier level had as much of an impact as twenty normal levels.

And that led him back to the question. Why did skills have levels?

With Visualization, he leafed over a couple of dozen papers until he found that question written on the top of the page. A note written just below the question said to think about why skills started with small areas of effect, in the vast majority of cases.

An hour later he had a few ideas, the primary of which was mana cost itself.

An average adult at twenty years of age had somewhere close to twenty pulses of mana, and in cases of non-mages, that capacity was mostly because of the physical mana channels. His grandfather had around thirty-eight, which Tercius would attribute mostly to PMCs considering the old man's size. Now, just based on memory, he would place Lux on somewhere around forty pulses of capacity. His uncle was not a small man, but he was nowhere close to Ciron's size and that meant that his uncle's deeper mana pool, compared to Ciron's, was a result of well-developed metaphysical mana channels.

Which also meant that his uncle had a far better mana regeneration rate than Ciron.

Building up metaphysical mana channels was a positive feedback loop, he knew. The more mana you spend, the next time you get to spend a tiny bit more. Over the years these things add up.

Right now he had just over fifty mana pulses and he had his ever-expanding Well to thank for close to half of that. The last few days had been especially rewarding with the progress, as he found out that even without using Energy to expand his Well, his ridiculous mana regeneration rate was helping him grow by leaps and bounds. He was cramming a month of Well growth in a two-hour session, all at the price of some minor pain and discomfort.

“Want a bite?” Petra asked and Tercius shook his head slowly, his eyes narrowed at the issue.

The link between the small area of skill effect and mana cost was obvious.

Most people chose two to three skills to focus on during their lifetime and usually, these skills were among those that were acquired in childhood, maybe even close to teenage years.

Would a child gain a skill that he or she can't even use? Probably not.

Tercius could remember his first time with Stone Shaping, back when the skill had been just level [1]. He had barely been able to use it for two minutes. Going even further back, Language Acquisition, Visualization, and Meditation were skills that he had had from an even earlier age when he had even less mana.

Language Acquisition was a skill he got months before his first birthday, wasn’t it? He honestly couldn’t even remember everything with clarity from those years anymore, but didn’t that mean that thought-based skills had dirt cheap initial cost? What about Quick Learning? Why was that different? He had no idea…

Once again. Why do the skills have levels?

Oh, this is… complex, Tercius thought, as a spring came to his step. It has to do with human limitations, mana limitations, and probably even Energy limitations… but a skill needs to start small to even exist. Just like a seed. From a small seed… a great tree can grow… and optimize itself slowly, again based on limitations that were provided to it…

Which meant that having more barriers would be good for a skill. More levels would be good for a skill.

But… if a skill was like a seed and if it grew large enough, would there be land for new skills to grow? Or for the growth of old ones?

Questions for another time.

Feeling giddy with excitement that this was finally happening, Tercius inhaled deeply and slapped his palms together. It was time to start.

“Crystal Shield here I come,” he murmured as he flexed his fingers. It was time to cast a few spells.

*********

Petra held back a sigh.

She could see the first signs of the sunlight creeping into the dining room, which meant that her son had spent around six hours pacing up and down the connecting hallway, murmuring to himself, sometimes frowning, other times wearing a vague hint of a smile.

It was… weird.

She loved him more than anything, but she had secretly hoped that that strange habit would be outgrown by now. Unfortunately, it seemed that the habit had only become more rooted in him as time went by.

A slap drew her attention and she turned Tercius’s way.

“Crystal Shield here I come,” he murmured.

Both of his hands started moving in a circular motion, but it was the fingers that drew her attention. As if they were made from dough, lacking all bones entirely, ten fingers snaked around— each with an agenda of its own. She had seen him do similar things while that teacher of his was instructing him, but he had only used the index and ring fingers then.

Just like before, a circular shield appeared, but this time he had one on each of his arms. The shields were glowing with a low light, and as Tercius’s arms moved the transparent shields followed, each hovering a palm-length above his forearms.

Petra’s hands stopped working, as she dedicated herself to observation only.

Tercius brought the edges of shields close to each other and a chime went out into the early morning. He hummed to himself and nodded, seemingly satisfied with something his glowing eyes saw.

Petra wondered what it was that he saw. What did he call those things? Telekinetic shields? What the Hells does telekinetic even mean?

To her eyes, the shields were beautiful. There were no patterns on them, but the special kind of white that they seemed to glow with was just… pure.

One of the shields disappeared and Tercius used his suddenly free hand to wiggle his fingers again, and to her surprise, a sword appeared directly in his hand.

She recognized the sword as the spare gladius that Septimus kept in the storage room. Tercius dragged the sword on the outer surface of the shield a couple of times, not even leaving a scratch on the shield. He hummed once more and turned to her.

"Mother, can you stab directly towards me," he said, extending the sword to her. "Like really, really hard? Actually, let's go to the basement—"

Petra blinked. “Who told you that you can take that?”

“—We might wake someone up if you hit the shield too hard,” he said, completely ignoring her question.

“Oh I will hit something, boy, but it won't be the shield,” she said in a cool voice. “Someone’s stupid head is just asking for a few correctional slaps and I don’t care if you wake everyone from here to Spheros,” Petra said and lifted her leg to grab a slipper with her dough encrusted fingers. “Come here, you little…”

*********

His mother didn’t opt to help him in his final phase, unfortunately, so he had to do it by himself. Petra had never been overly fond of seeing weapons in his hands, especially without supervision from Septimus or Lux, so he really should have thought that through beforehand. After he escaped, sadly without the confiscated gladius, he had to turn to the throwing knives that his uncle left him.

He embedded the handles of the knives into a wall in the basement with Stone Shaping [43], at the proper height, and then started pushing the shield into the knives, while making sure that if one accidentally got through, none would end up in any part of him.

According to the spell description, as long as he fed the lost mana into the shield’s central spell construct, the spell should hold off anything— magical or mundane.

And that seemed true. No matter how much he pressed the shield into those knives, it held but it spent mana to do that.

Good, Tercius thought as he removed the knives, stored them into the amulet, and mended the wall. As he sat cross-legged on the floor, Tercius placed his arm into his lap and took a good look at the transparent shield.

He was not exactly interested in the shield part of the spell, but the crystal attuned telekinetic part of the spell seemed a match made in Heavens for him.

With how easy it had been gaining Stone Shaping and Stone Sight, he figured that his crystal affinity would aid him in bridging any gaps that his research might have missed.

So… Active skill creation.

He unfurled the shield's mana constructs as per the instruction of the spell and he took a deep breath before he laid his back on the ground. He was ready.

Tercius had an active Energy source. He had Mana and he could actively use it. He had some knowledge. Instinct… more or less. And wishful thinking was not that hard, once you got the hang of it.

His Well was brimming with claimed Energy, while his body held only neutral Energy. He figured having both for this would not hurt.

Isolating the crystal attuned telekinetics morph was also easy, but without a spell structure to give it a concrete manner of expression, the morph was just white spectral goo made of his mana. He morphed twenty pulses of mana into that white goop, compressed it, and held it like a crystal in his hands, placing it above his bare chest, just where the Well should be.

For the knowledge part, instead of choosing the spell structure of the Crystal Shield spell, he chose something unorthodox. He chose all those instances where he observed Master Lazarus move something with his telekinetic skill, like when he had collected plates of close to two hundred students with a snap of his fingers. All the displays of telekinesis from Mistress Helfira, like when she had lifted herself with telekinesis to reach a particularly tall shelf in her office or enclosed his unstable mana morph in her scarlet spheres just before they exploded. And finally Mistress Kalina. He had seen up close how the woman used telekinesis to create spheres of force that would provide omnidirectional shielding while they flew over to Nurium. He had seen her use telekinesis to operate her boiler and use various forms of telekinesis to interact with the ingredients while she had been making a potion…

From his observations around the Academy grounds, most senior mages of the Pyramid used telekinesis as non-mages used hands or feet.

All of those mages had a way that the telekinesis was expressed.

Some had telekinetic hands, others strings, but he imagined his telekinesis as an ocean of wisps, wisps that could form and dissolve bonds with each other, changing shapes to anything that his needs required. His telekinesis was water and he would give it the container it would fill. He would just give input of what he needed and the wisps would do the rest. They would be his impregnable shield against skills, spells, and arrows, and they would be his hands and swords.

That was what telekinesis was to him.

The next part was instinct… or maybe the better word was feeling… Tercius closed his eyes for this. He had no idea how to explain it, but he knew the feel of it. The awe and the majesty of an ocean of wisps, their gentle caress, and their even more powerful push… They could be an immovable wall of stone and metal and the softest of silken hammocks…

He imagined how the skill should feel while it worked. He imagined the skill as thoughts and emotions that became physical, just like wild magic felt but firmly under his control. Tercius felt a resonance chime deep inside of him.

Something was stirring.

He paid no attention to Energy or Mana, for he knew that those would either be spent in skill formation or not. He went over the knowledge, feeling, and simple desire. From these resources a skill would form.

He needed the skill.

He needed it with a scalable area of effect, just like his Stone Shaping and Gardening were now capable of with their newly added function.

He needed the sea of atom-sized telekinetic wisps to understand him and his demands and desires and carry them out as if they were a limb that he had used since the moment he had been born.

He needed the skill to never rise against him, as wild magic could through Mana Metamorphosis.

He needed the skill to have more barriers, so that—

Like a puppet whose strings were abruptly cut, Tercius’s body went slack and his head just turned to the side, his eyes closed and mouth slightly open. His arms fell to the side the next moment, each hitting the floor with a fleshy thump.