“Your goal in cultivation is to capture part of the world, the natural manna that flows from the very disc to the void beyond, and make it a part of your blood, bones, and soul.”

Tudor’s voice had a hypnotic twang to it. He did not speak too slow or too fast. Not too loud or too quiet.

It was just perfect.

It guided Elrhain as he tried to reach out a filament of his mind towards one of the thousands of particles of manna that drifted past in his inner vision.

However, the manna refused his invitation. It was repulsed, afraid, or shy even.

He failed, and failed some more.

But with every try, his grasp crept closer. A part of the repulsion changed to attraction, and some of the manna seemed to almost… warm up to him.

“Every person has their own talent, and no two are perfectly identical. It is the bloodline, the spirits, and for most, it is a sort of unseen luck.

Us Earthlochs, for example, excel in the ways of water, whether it is actually using water or melding the concept of water into other manners of magic. Almost every child, noble or servant born to us, has at least a morsel of ability to grasp concepts relating to water with their manna.

The flow, the wave, the flood. The cold, the cascade, the evaporation, and so many more that even the ancestors dare not claim they know. But water, as grand as it is, is not always at the forefront of our magic. Some use the knowledge of water to control ice. For some, even the wind, the shadows, and the enemy's blood are not out of the question.

I want you to concentrate on the tiny nodes of stars inside your Totemic Soul. They will give you a thirsty manna-starved feeling.”

Elrhain moved his inner vision to the him-shaped void. The static constellation of dim stars within that void was as clear as diamonds to him, even if most of them were fainter than the manna outside.

“Nodes.” Tudor said, “They are where you will store, refine, and produce your own flavour of manna. They are the projection of your physical body’s acupoints into the astral plane, and vice versa.”

Elrhain noticed that not all nodes were of the same hue, saturation, or value.

The vast majority were various shades of blue, brown, and green, with some nasty fleshy red, pink, and violet nodes shining almost a translucent light mixed in here and there.

Yet, there was never an utterly pure colour. Some were lighter, some were darker. Some had just enough saturation to look cartoony. Some were so washed out that the node’s mix of colours was impossible to tell with a casual glance.

“The nodes in your Totemic Soul correspond to the diverse, infinite aspects of manna found throughout the vast Fanas Diosca and beyond, whether they be singular aspects like pure water, or combinations like steam and ice.

They can be the natural aspects such as fire and wind, or they can be so mystical that even the scrolls cannot correctly explain them, such as the power of mind or the passing of time.

Magic that includes thought-reading, truth scrying, and the change of seasons falls into these categories. Even if you can notice the influence of natural elements within the latter, such as winter ice or summer heat, their make differs vastly from simple ice and fire magic.

Manna is complex like that.

Aspects can also be spiritual, divine, demonic, and so on. Perhaps one day after the collapse ends, you will have the fortune to visit discs far outside our own.

You will witness unimaginably strange and varied uses of manna in magic unique to those foreign lands. It will make you suspect if manna should even be classified into aspects like we do here. In some discs, in fact, they regard manna as nothing more than the food one eats to do magic.

For example, on certain discs, every dead object can grow a living spirit with its own particular aspect of magic, which in our disc rarely happens. But similar to this phenomenon, the nodes within your Totemic Soul, too, can lead to never-before-seen magic if you pair it with never-before-seen combinations of manna, cultivation method, ichor, and Spirit Totem.

Before utilising the manna, the only real clue we have is their colour and a gut feeling that can come only with experience.”

‘Mind, time, demonic….’

Elrhain didn’t know what colour these weird magic concepts straight out of a fantasy book would have, but the closer he looked, the more bizarre the colours of his own nodes got.

The brightest of the lot, about sixty at a cursory glance, numbering perhaps less than one-tenth of the total, gave off mainly a water-logged impression. As if he was wandering in the forest without shoes, his bare feet dipped into the damp soil—the chirps of critters all around and a primal sense of belonging rising from deep within his chest.

It wasn’t uncomfortable, just out of place.

The feeling wasn’t of pure water. In Elrhain’s magical senses, they appeared like a combination of water with softwood and moist earth. Like a forest or a swamp, maybe even a flooded lowland.

And that was only when he tried to feel the brightest of nodes. When he took in all of them, one thousand nodes if Tudor was to be believed, together, the feeling changed into something completely unknown. Something he could not put his finger on at all, even disregarding the slight headache.

The overall ‘aspect’ was changing. The current untrained Elrhain could not set it into a clear image.

Malleable, never absolute, with infinite permutations.

Depending on which order he concentrated on the nodes, Elrhain could make out forests, oceans, a little bonsai tree, or even a broccoli breakfast.

“Every dhionne starts cultivation by first observing their Totemic Soul for long periods, and capturing which path of aspects most suit them judging by the colours.

Only then must he try to absorb ambient manna of roughly the same colour and feed them into the Totemic Soul, depending on which nodes he wishes to ignite.

This process also happens naturally from the moment of your birth as you eat and drink. That is why many mortals can ignite one, two, or even five hundred nodes by virtue of their environment alone.

Cultivation hastens that process many, many folds. For the sake of learning, we shall initiate you on that very task today, guiding manna into a node.

Fret not; I am here to protect you in case anything goes wrong.

Also, never try to feed fire manna to a node that favours water. Instead, choose manna from nature that gives you the cold of snow, the flow of lakes, the calm of dew-drops, and even the impression of an agile fish if you so wish.

Keep nature in harmony, and your Totemic Soul will not splinter.

To reach the Earthen realm, this step is crucial. Since a harmonious Totemic Soul is much easier to realign using an ichor.

But I digress. Let us return to the matter at hand. The formation array under you will capture manna from all over the Loch Sagathan area for your use. It is something only the main house of Earthloch can enjoy.

So, remember to always be grateful for our plentiful bounty, to the ancestors, to the spirits, and most importantly, to our good fortune.”

Elrhain had been trying to capture manna particles that glowed the brightest, the gold and silver ones, to feed the nodes out of curiosity. It did not go smoothly.

So this time, he snuck part of his grubby little mind hands towards some of the more common, teal coloured particles.

There was still a bit of resistance, yet the flow of manna changed ever so slightly.

Finally, after a few more tries, the first small piece entered his Totemic Soul.

‘So for manna, I can control the particles hued similar to nodes better than the rest. The so-called, twice the result with half the effort….’

He tried to direct the manna towards some of the dimmer nodes. The process was tedious and rigid, and soon sweat started dripping from his forehead.

The manna was prone to randomness. It always tried to interact with the first node it encountered, which often resulted in pricks of either ecstasy or pain, making him positively confused.

Sometimes, the manna would fade away before reaching the destination. Not to even mention what happened when the manna entered nodes of non-similar colours.

‘But that means, while particles of non-teal coloured manna are harder to control, it is much easier to feed into a non-teal coloured node the teal manna I can easily capture. Like the red and purple ones I have…. So bloody confusing, aye!’

To make matters even more baffling, the interaction was wholly different every time manna entered a node. Even if the manna and nodes were of the same colour, sometimes it would feel cold and sometimes slimy.

Cultivation, as it stood, was not so fun at all.

“I am sure you have heard stories of past heroes. When I was your age, my mother and grandmother had sung them to me too.

How they took in rare manna from treasured lands with oh so much hardship! Despite their natural talents being in certain aspects, they excelled in many others.

While it is true that even wholly unrelated aspects of manna and nodes can create epoch-changing results, most of it is undoubtedly because of once-in-a-million-year lucky coincidences.

Very few can successfully replicate them without the hero’s personal guidance, and most die while trying these feats themselves. Even if the hero leaves behind his findings in scrolls, his and his descendants' body and soul will ultimately not be exactly the same.

This is why there are stories of so many great clans descended from such heroes declining millennia after millennia.

The underlying principle of the world is too complex for our feeble souls to comprehend. Sometimes, things can start fantastic when your realm is low. But soon, you realise that you have only wasted your limited talents pursuing dreams of delusions.

Remember this always, the world of cultivation and the act of cultivation itself are full of uncountable dangers both within and without. It is always better to be safe than to be dead. Even we, the Earthlochians, will not tell our sons and daughters to follow the ancestors’ teaching line by line. Learn from them, but recognise that you are not them.”

‘How… progressive?’ Elrhain wowed, reproaching himself mentally for thinking that all dhionne were stuck with monarchical, Palaeolithic views.

Only most of them were.

And he completely agreed with Tudor’s point while writhing in a moment in shame. He forced his lazy mind to stop letting manna do what it wanted within his real estate.

‘Fun or not, better than being dead.’

The interactions felt extraordinarily unique when he initially let the manna flow naturally into his Totemic Soul. But as electrifying as it was when a particle of indigo clashed with a pink-hued node, the dopamine was not worth the long-term harm of what Tudor foreshadowed.

It was still too soon to arrive at any concrete conclusions about any of this, of course. But perhaps experimenting on it would be more complicated than Elrhain had initially assumed. Not when the price of failure was literally death.

Yet, why did he have to swim against the current?

He didn’t want to be such a hero with a ticking time bomb forcing him to act, to get better at a hundred times the speed of a normal dhionne.

He could experiment plenty by simply leading teal manna on a bluish-green node. Then, maybe, maybe the next time, he could lead lime-coloured manna—something significantly harder to control, onto the same node.

By the looks of it, he would have a wealth of time in the future to do so. And he would need that ‘wealth of time’. Judging by how absolutely unchanged the dim nodes' luminosity were, even after thirty minutes worth of cultivation, it would take many cycles of practice to light up all thousand.

So, Elrhain decided, slow and steady was the way for him.

“There are ten thousand ways cultivation can go wrong. It can take tens of cycles to light even a hundred nodes for less talented servants with limited resources.

Even lesser nobles cannot consistently produce dhionne of high cultivation every generation. However, we high nobles have the gifts of the spirits and the ancestors.

Our well-studied cultivation techniques, rituals, array formations, and alchemic elixirs will lower the danger, hasten the speed, and compound the power of our manna in spells and magic.

It is enough to bridge the gap in talent and the very reason we stand at the apex of all dhionne, with Sky realmers in every generation and sometimes…. legends that can break through beyond the sky.

But today, you shall cultivate without the help of any such cultivation resources, other than the manna gathering circle.

This is the primal path the ancestors had taken before their enlightened minds produced wondrous cultivation techniques like the [Earthloch’s River of All Seasons] and the [Everlasting Aqua-night Domain]. Know of their sacrifice and the blood and tears they have shed so that we do not have to.”

And so, the cultivation session went on.

Particle after particle of manna entered the nodes within Elrhain’s Totemic Soul. The boy himself grew both fatigued and invigorated at the same time.

Then, something changed at the two-hour mark.

At first, it was a slight prickle on his left chest. Then suddenly, his bloodstreams were on fire. The Totemic Soul, the pathways the manna had travelled in, started leaking light.

It went from blue to purple, then a dark crimson red.

When suddenly,

He opened his eyes and collapsed with a loud shriek.

He felt as if the cavern was devoid of air, and his lungs were plunged into lava. In those horrible few moments of pain, his body almost burnt up from the inside out.

And then, just as abruptly, the pain vanished as fast as it had come. Elrhain’s vision cleared of red, and he could breathe again. It wasn’t until five more minutes later that his mind calmed enough to take in his surroundings and…

…he noticed the anomaly.

Elrhain’s body was covered in a shield of manna connected to Tudor’s outstretched hand. It was the same for Cati and Agwyn, who were still in cultivation.

Tudor stood before them with a slight grin on his face, gesturing Elrhain to sit down in silence.

The boy complied.

Cati broke out of her cultivation about forty minutes afterwards, and Agwyn lasted an hour. Both of them burst into tears and kept wailing in confusion for a few good minutes.

It would take even longer for them to stop pouting at what a bully Tudor was, much to the man’s amusement.

Elrhain had been examining some of the runic carvings on the platform in the meanwhile. Still, he focused back on Tudor as soon as Agwyn had calmed herself.

The girl scuttled up beside him the first chance she sniffed, and this time Tudor didn’t stop her tomfoolery.

The man spoke with no judgement in his voice, only advice.

“Today, I have protected you with my magic. As I will until you successfully reach earthen, when you have ignited all one thousand nodes and integrate the spirit’s ichor in your ichoric heart chamber.

By that time, you would have familiarised yourself with the lattice channels that connect one node in your Totemic Soul to another, and hopefully, learned enough sense not to blindly fumble through cultivation.

But never forget that this blind fumbling is precisely what the servants without our means experience.

Do not waste this privilege.

Let this be your first lesson in cultivation: even when you think all is going well while you mindlessly follow your instincts, hunches, and cryptic tales of heroes creating their own techniques out of thin air and sheer perseverance, nothing is as it seems.

Cultivation, is not for everyone. It is not for the talented yet thoughtless. Even a diligent waste can live longer than a fool chasing grandeur. It is okay if you are unambitious. A measured pace can take you so much further than someone with an unstable foundation. Living is always, always better than dying.”

Tudor sighed as if recalling a terrible memory, then clapped.

The other kids, including Vesiphis and Cadfael, who had perhaps finished their own cultivation as Elrhain was spacing out with the runes on the circle, gathered around from where they sat.

“That is why you have me, the high shaman of initiation, to teach you the ways of cultivation. Cati, Gwyn, and Rhain. This will be a long journey, especially with the coming collapse. I only wish that you can keep your heads calm and wills firm. But,”

The man then walked towards them, picking all three up with his burly arms. He placed Agwyn on his shoulder and hugged Elrhain and Cati to his chest, much to the latter’s glee.

The smile on Tudor’s face could almost rival Dofnald’s, in a more friendly uncle upstairs kind of way.

“That’s enough of cultivation for today. You three did a fantastic job initiating yourselves, especially in your first attempt.

Let us now head to the tranquil pools and wash away all the filth and grime, shall we? Your cousins have been waiting for a while, you know.”

Only then did Elrhain notice the oily impurities covering his body. How had he not noticed that? Was it the dim glow of the cavern or because he didn’t feel any discomfort on his skin?

He didn’t smell funny either.

Elrhain ran a finger on his left arm to smear some of the oily substance and gave it a light sniff…

… before vomiting all over a dumbfounded Tudor and horrified Cati’s faces.