Ever since Tercius came back home, with exactly five dozen light-orbs in his amulet, the previously dark basement was awash in bright light. The light zone started with the stairs, went through the straight hallway, and ended with the big rectangular space at the back, which was the main storage of the house. Of the four small rooms situated just at the start of the hallway, near the stairs, three rooms had light-orbs embedded into the stone walls.

The only exception was the room that his grandmother used as a shrine; that one still had good old-fashioned candles.

Tercius stood in front of the door to the shrine and looked at it with a complicated expression, as all the cheer that the new skill brought was erased with a single glance.

Rona was out there somewhere, suffering a pain that he knew well and hopefully enduring and surviving each day, hour and second as it came. If he just hadn't given her the Energy, she would have been here, chanting, lighting incense, singing, playing her oud, and gardening. She wouldn't have been separated from her family. Nor would Septimus.

Listening to Neiran’s slow plucking of the oud strings, an image was painted before his eyes.

An old lady wrapped in a long yellowing cloth was sitting cross-legged in the dirt of her garden, cradling a dark-colored pear-shaped oud between her bent legs; one hand was moving up and down the neck of the fretless instrument, as the fingers cut the vibrating strings as short or as long as she wanted them. Her other hand had a hand-crafted pick made of a horn, something that Rona insisted on calling "risha", which she used to tease the warm sounds out of the bloated belly of the wooden instrument.

Her black, yet visibly graying hair spilled itself from the sides of the white shawl that covered her head, as she raised her closed eyes to the sky and the sun to sing. The plants around her came to sway—

Tercius shook his head and the painting vanished. Someone— Petra, he realized— was singing, but her voice carried only a part of that flow and continuity to which he was used to hearing from Rona. The pronunciation… She was butchering those strange words which just rolled off Rona's tongue. But that was just his ear for the language being nitpicky, he knew. If he didn't remember how the words should be sung, then he would have no fault with the interpretation because Petra's voice had a quality that made it pleasant to the ear, just like Rona's, and that quality only became enhanced as she sang.

Tercius sighed.

If he could go back in time with his current knowledge…

But the past was long gone and he had no power to reverse it. As things stood, he could only interact with the present along with the plan he made for the future and reflect on the past.

“I shouldn't linger,” he murmured as he turned to go, only to stop before he took the first step up.

Fifteen stairs.

Assuming that each one was stepped on, that’s how many stairs a person had to take to go down to the basement or go back up to the ground floor.

Tercius hummed to himself. He raised a hand in front of himself, palm down, and imagined a solid surface forming right beneath it. Then he pressed his palm on that imaginary surface.

If he had tried this an hour ago he would have made a fool of himself, yet now his hand found resistance, smooth and cold, just like he imagined a polished surface of a gigantic crystal would be. He raised his other hand and repeated the previous step. No matter how much he pushed down with either of his hands there was no change. It was as if he was trying to push the stone wall of Nurium. His hands were stopped dead and there was no pressure in his mind, none that he could feel at least.

With a jump, he stood on his hands on the telekinetic platforms. His feet dangled in the air as he tried to test how these platforms performed under the stress of his weight.

Spring of Crystal Thoughts [1] is now Spring of Crystal Thoughts [2]

Weight and distance, the two points which Mistress Helfira mentioned as supremely important to take into account when dealing with telekinesis. The platforms placed under his hands seemed no different from before and he experienced no instability whatsoever.

Spring of Crystal Thoughts [2] is now Spring of Crystal Thoughts [3]

Another part of his Energy went away, feeding the growth of the skill. Tercius jumped down and imagined the flat platforms transforming into a circular tube-like object. As soon as he grabbed the telekinetic object, he imagined it slowly moving up. The ascent of his hands was steady, as was his intent, and soon his hands went above shoulder level, then above his head, and finally, Tercius' feet were lifted off the ground.

Tercius breathed out. “That’s…”

Spring of Crystal Thoughts [3] is now Spring of Crystal Thoughts [4]

“Alright… Mana, check. Energy, check. This should be fine…”

He willed the telekinetic tube to move forwards and upwards, his feet dangling as he flew over the stairs. Every moment that went by was a moment where he expected to fall and yet also a moment where he hoped that this would last a little bit more. His heart was pounding in his chest and his breath was rapid and he could feel his cheeks aching from a smile that refused to leave.

The journey was over far too soon.

As soon as his feet touched the ground floor Tercius imagined another set of instructions and raised his left foot upwards. As soon as the foot started coming down, it felt as if he stepped on a solid surface. After a brief test, the other foot followed and he found himself standing about ten centimeters off the floor. Then he took a step forward. Then another and then he was walking normally.

Spring of Crystal Thoughts [4] is now Spring of Crystal Thoughts [5]

Each new level of the skill took a bit of Energy from him, the quantity required growing with each level, but he would just go and harvest more. The mana spent was quite remarkable as well, but his Energy boosted regeneration was more than capable of keeping his mana pool topped.

With a thought he sank down, his bare feet separated from the floor by less than half a centimeter.

“There,” he murmured as he took a few steps around the place. No discomfort, no pressure at the back of his mind or behind his eyes… nothing. “Excellent,”

Even at low levels, the skill was more than capable of holding his mass without any kind of negative feedback. He could only imagine that as it gained more levels, that feedback would be pushed further and further back.

As for the additional barriers… Well, he had no idea if his idea worked or not. In any case, he had a dozen or so ideas to try.

Spring of Crystal Thoughts [5] is now Spring of Crystal Thoughts [6]

But he knew one thing. The sooner the skill gained more levels, the sooner he would start Step Two of his plan.

It was what he had been waiting for.

*** *** ***

It was bound to happen at some point, Kalina reflected as Tercius' grandfather gave her the hundredth strange glance of the day. The same questioning glance that Tercius's mother gave her, just before she started singing in a language that was vaguely familiar to Kalina. Even mages tended to react poorly when seeing for the first time just how powerful people could become, to say nothing of non-mages. In fact, Tercius' family had one of the most subdued reactions she ever received, but then again she had only shown a tiny bit of what she was capable of. Then again, Trecius himself had had one of the most subdued reactions she had ever received.

This morning, by the time Kalina flew over the street to land near Tercius’ home, Tercius’s mother Petra, who had been working around the garden, had already seen and ran to the paralyzed older boy. When the spell took a hold of him, the boy had fallen straight on his face and broken his nose, spilling copious amounts of blood.

Probably thinking him dead or dying, the panicked Petra had started hollering for Ciron and that was when Kalina brought up a bubble of silence and stepped in to handle the rapidly escalating situation. For a change, she had known exactly what to do.

Levitating the boy’s body horizontally, she cut off any pain he might have felt, only to examine him and find him a bit beaten up. There was a minor concussion which she made sure passed swiftly and safely with a few spells and a potion, then set the bent nose back properly, and helped with the blood clotting. Kalina had continued with an examination of the rest of the body and did some minor repairs where needed, mostly helping the body to grow more skin. After she was sure he was well and in no further need of help, she used a spell to pull all the dried blood off of his face, along with the occasional dirt and grass blade. All in all, a very minor issue that she could have solved in her sleep.

It had relieved her of the stress that had accumulated in the previous hours.

Kalina glanced at the young man in question who was currently playing the oud, Neiran, and found his face without blood or blemish. The boy didn’t even remember a thing happening, passing out as soon as he stepped into the Web.

The reasons that Tercius’ adult family members were glancing at her were multiple. One of them was probably because Petra had seen Kalina do things in a minute that took normal healers hours of work and shared that with Ciron. Then there was the fact that other than a brief part of a scream at the beginning, not one of the neighbors or the passersby on the street nor anyone inside the house had heard Petra's screams for help. The final reason for those glances was probably when she stepped in to stop anyone from disturbing Tercius and she had been quite firm about it once people started getting pushy.

The boy was creating a skill and they wanted to get him to come and participate in a religious ritual of some kind?

Kalina’s mind almost fried itself right then and there from the amount of disbelief. She had known that non-mages of the Empire had different priorities in life, but this…

She was a bit ashamed of letting her mana flood the surroundings at that moment but better letting them feel the cold bite of foreign mana invading their bodies than letting the boy be disturbed in his work.

It was only a bit later that she figured out that Tercius had not told them what he was doing. They thought that Tercius was ‘lost in thoughts’ or ‘sleeping’, depending on who you asked, something that happened often apparently.

"A cat? I never saw people worshiping a cat. Mother—" Penelope whispered, looking intently at a small stone statue in the middle of the room. Seliana shushed her immediately.

Kalina threw up a small bubble of silence around the three of them, dimming the sounds of the song. “That’s an idol, Penelope, and they are not exactly worshiping it. It is a… representation,” Kalina said. “Actually, almost all the religions that have human-like idols are quite recent, historically speaking. Only a couple of centuries old. The vast majority of the older religions have had animals or plants as idols. Mountains, hills, bodies of water— anything from a spring to any of the oceans— and even artistic representations of celestial bodies themselves had also been fairly common as idols over the ages,”

Her nose twitched and her head turned, as a small smile came to her lips. Crystal and telekinesis.

As her nose parsed the ethereal smells, she realized that the boy had been up for a while. The smells of the skill… they were dulled. Her eyes went wide. The boy had tried to make his skill invisible to other sensing skills, but since he lacked knowledge of how to morph those manas properly he only achieved a bare imitation of the real thing. Yet if that imitation was to grow powerful enough… It might be crude and wasteful, but if it worked and you had the means to pay… Kalina almost barked a laugh, but her bar for disbelief had been constantly raised these past few days.

“Teacher?” Seliana asked.

“It’s nothing,” she said, smelling as the Energy signature kept decreasing rapidly. The amount of Energy that each subsequent level took… even in its infancy the skill was definitely a power to contend with. She knew that she had had no skill that took that much Energy to climb the lower levels.

Kalina sighed. That was both good and bad.

With the potency of the skill that Tercius created, she realized that Energy Metamorphosis would have to be a matter left for a few decades down the line. Maybe not as long as that, she concluded when she took into consideration that he had another source of Energy that would help him overcome ‘the dry period’, but the skill was certainly not something that they would be focusing on within this decade.

You’re getting way ahead of yourself, Kalina shook her head, as she thought. There are a few matters you need to discuss with him beforehand.

*** *** ***

Finding his family members was not difficult. All he had to do was listen and follow the music.

Walking by stepping on telekinetic swarms of wisps left no sounds of his passing, just as if he was using Stealth, so no one heard when he entered the living room. Placing a finger over his lips, Tercius indicated to the house guests his desire.

Tercius leaned his shoulder on the wall and stood there silent, unwilling to interrupt the proceedings.

At the far end of the incense-clouded living room was his grandfather, a giant of a man who had taken quite the pain to look presentable today, Tercius had to say. A nice long white shirt that covered him from neck to his knees along with brown pants that seemed brand new. Ciron’s face was freshly shaved and his hair seemed trimmed and then styled into a proper shape by Petra. Rona would be satisfied with his look.

He shook his head gently as a small smile came to him. Tercius remembered just how much trouble his grandmother had to go through to get Ciron into a ‘presentable’ state every time a major holiday came, and yet when she wasn’t there he was ready on his own.

And it wasn’t only his grandfather who had made his best effort.

The old man held Portia in his giant arms, the little being looking positively tiny in her little white blouse and diaper. Near Ciron's left leg was Leo, wearing a white shirt and small brown pants, holding his cheeks with his palms as giant emerald eyes observed Petra while she sang. A dressed-up Aurelia was no different, with her mouth slightly open in wonder as she seemed to see her mother in a new light.

Spring of Crystal Thoughts [6] is now Spring of Crystal Thoughts [7]

He had to agree there. Petra had never looked… quite like today. It was only a shame that Septimus wasn’t here so that Tercius could see him sputter and stutter…

His mother had taken the bolts of cloth he had brought to her as a gift and made herself an emerald green skirt that hugged her hips and flowed down to cover everything to the tips of her bare feet, using a pale white thread to create mostly floral details along the sizable surface. The top part was a white blouse that covered her shoulders and arms to just above her elbows while leaving her caramel skin midriff bare and collarbones and neck exposed. Raven-black hair curled around her ears and fell down the long neck only to find itself falling on her shoulders in a cascade of waves. She was sitting on the floor, using her long arms to hug her knees, as she sang slowly with her eyes closed.

She was turned to the center of the room, where a small stone statue of M’ti’mya, a Deity of Balance, was depicted with a small idol of a cat that imperiously gazed at anyone looking at it.

Near her, sitting cross-legged on the floor as well was Neiran, dressed in white and brown. Older than Tercius by over two and a half years, close to fifteen by now Tercius reckoned, Neiran was a young man in every sense of the word. He had grown taller and his shoulders were wider and with some real muscle on them, Tercius could see even while the boy was folded around the oud. The brown mop of hair on his head was still as wild as Tercius remembered it, seemingly ready to house a flock of birds. Neiran's brownish skin had gotten darker along the arms and the neck, Tercius saw. A stonemason's tan his grandfather called it.

Funnily enough, his grandmother called the same thing farmer’s tan.

Over eight years ago his grandfather took Neiran as a second apprentice, making the younger Tercius the senior apprentice of the two, a fact that never bothered Neiran. Tercius remembered the boy as shy, a rare speaker, and an ever rarer maker of eye contact. The boy had barely spoken in the first week and when he did, he spoke in such a low voice that no one ever understood a word. But as all good things come to an end, so did Neiran's shy shell crumble, leaving behind a talker that had vocal opinions on everything.

Ever since then Neiran had become a semi-adopted child of the household, and yet the boy had his own family. He had lost his father early in life and his paternal grandparents just a few years back, but he had a mother remaining. She had remarried after her in-laws passed away and recently Petra informed him that Neiran's mother had had two girls since then, the younger of whom was just one-year-old.

Tercius knew that Neiran sent some of the money that he earned to his mother and saved what he could from the rest to buy himself a house in the town.

When il'Drusus men started harassing his family, around a month ago, Petra and Ciron had tried to get Neiran to stay away and stop visiting. Then after they saw that the boy just kept coming back, they tried to get him to stay with them, since the other option wasn't working.

But Neiran didn’t accept that either.

Tercius breathed out a deep breath.

For the past few days, Tercius had occasionally debated with himself the pros and cons of going and just making Neiran come back home with him. He then debated the pros and cons of not doing it. Neiran had his mother and sisters and if those people came to find him and he wasn’t there… His grandfather assured Tercius that Neiran was in good and safe hands, surrounded by a hundred men who could break rocks with their foreheads, but still…

He was just glad that nothing happened to the boy.

I'm just glad that nothing happened… that seems to be a theme of its own, he thought and snorted.

The music and singing stopped and heads turned his way.

"There you are, sleepyhead," Aurelia said, quickly bolting up on her feet and running towards him. She stopped just outside of his arms' reach. With her green eyes narrowed at him, a single eyebrow raised and her arms crossed over her chest, she asked, "Do you know what time it is?"

Before he uttered a sound, she answered her own question in a bubbly voice, "It's way past midday. And you can't join us looking like that. Look at us. Now go to your room, change quickly, and then you can join us."

Aurelia pointed a finger at the stairs, her eyes trying to be serious.

Spring of Crystal Thoughts [7] is now Spring of Crystal Thoughts [8]

Tercius' eyes narrowed. Aurelia was too cute when she tried to be bossy. Especially today, all dressed up and looking prim and proper… Suddenly he felt the need to mess with her.

Like an ice skater, Tercius slid across the telekinetic field to get to her, ruffled her hair with an exaggerated evil cackle, and ran away before the consequences of his action got to him.

“Brother!” Aurelia screamed and he heard the rapid thumping of her feet following after him.