The late afternoon was warm and the only indication of the storm, from which Everstorm Towers got its name, was a patch of darkness on the horizon to the far west-southwest that was being constantly repelled by the ever pulsing ritual waves. Tercius and Mistress Kalina continued to walk up and down the ring terraces, the topic of Mana Sight and Energy Sight still running strong.

“Another thing that I have to tell you is that your Mana Sight is quite far away from the parameters of what is taken as the norm for that skill,” Mistress Kalina said.

“A norm…” Tercius mulled over the word for a bit. “What exactly do you mean?”

“We, Magi, have collected and kept extensive records of all kinds of skills, and Mana Sight, being one of the five prime mana detection skills, has had more scrutiny than most. Now, the norm of a skill is pulled out of these records and… how shall I explain this…” Mistress Kalina said as she looked up to the blue sky. “That norm is considered to be a rough approximation of what the basic skill would be like if no interference had occurred to alter its shape. We use this rough, basic form of a skill for comparison and in doing so we look for obvious major and minor deviations from the norm.”

Well, now, he just had so many questions to ask.

“I see you have questions,” Mistress Kalina stated.

He nodded. “I’m interested in what counts as this “interference”. If that’s something you can share with me, of course…”

“This is all common knowledge, Tercius. At least it is among us Magi.” Mistress Kalina said. “One major factor is that a new skill is altered, to various minor or major degrees of success, by all skills that preceded it. Interference of precursory skills, we call it, or simply precursory interference. All skills, except the first, come to suffer and benefit from it. It has been cited as the primary reason for most deviations from the skill norms as well as the main reason why certain individuals never develop certain skills.”

Tercius’ eyebrows went up. If something like precursory interference truly existed… but… no… yes… it was possible. So many things suddenly made more sense.

“And what are the deviations from the norm in the case of my skill?” Tercius asked, hoping to later identify where those deviations come from.

“First of all, the norm of Mana Sight does not rob the user of eyesight like yours. The norm of Mana Sight allows for mana to appear overlapped with the objective world like a… sort of fog, you might say. Second, the norm most certainly does not allow a ludicrous ability to see mana that is positioned behind other mana. In the supposed basic form of Mana Sight, you can only observe the first, outermost mana layer. That, Tercius, is the true reason I mention this. With an effect like that to your skill… well, I'm quite sure that only the best visual obscurations will be able to stop you from peering past them." Mistress Kalina said gravely.

Oh, oh. Was that a warning of some kind or something else?

"Yes, but all layers just blend into a single, usually very bright signature that I can't even take a moment to look at, let alone parse it apart," Tercius said. "That was why I created both the dark-less feature and the wandering eyes feature."

Mistress Kalina nodded. "With proper guidance and time the oversensitivity can be molded into a usable tool and I have to commend the effort you dedicated so far. You know, Tercius, the deviations of your skill make me have two minds right now. As a Head Archivist of The Repository, I would like to examine and research your skill in-depth, so that a spell can be made in its likeness. But… doing that would require me to involve my colleagues and, as a Mentor and someone who has come to know you a little, I am feeling quite torn right now…"

“I would honestly prefer it if you were to listen to the Mentor side,”

"I was sure that you would say something like that," Mistress Kalina said, smiling. "And the skill is yours to share or keep secret, but know that I will try to persuade you to do this at some later point. It would be a monumental waste to let such a promising combination of deviations not result in a spell."

Tercius thought about it and nodded. She could certainly try persuading him, but he knew that she was unlikely to change his mind on this.

“Now if we are to continue this conversation, let us find a seat somewhere. My legs are starting to get a little sore,” Mistress Kalina said.

One eyebrow of Tercius went up in surprise.

“Oh don’t look at me like that. I haven’t walked this much without a break in quite a bit of time.”

Tercius didn’t say anything, he just acknowledged to himself that he still kept getting surprised every time that one of these people showed any kind of human-like trait. A part of him, obviously, expected for them to be above something as common as soreness.

“Now that I think about it—” Mistress Kalina suddenly said, a torrent of mana weaving itself around her and him. “We could go for a fly.”

***

*****

***

As they resumed the conversation on his skill, Mistress Kalina’s spell took them west, where after what seemed to him as only a few kilometers as the bird flies, Tercius saw a vast expanse of tall waves absolutely covered with massive storm clouds.

Here was the frontline of the fight between the pulses of the ritual and the storm.

On one side were clean sun-covered cliffs of dark and gray stone and on the other was the rage of nature, a storm of tall waves, falling rains, and clouds of tar. That was the Everstorm, Mistress Kalina told him, an anomaly that had been raging for as long as the oldest records and longest memories go back. With Magi, that was a long time indeed. That entire part of the world had not seen sunlight in a long, long time.

They went down the tall cliffs and flew over the thrashing waves as Mistress Kalina gave him the time to experience all of his surroundings before they resumed their conversation.

They spoke of what Magi knew of barriers and how precursory interference was the most likely cause of why the sacrifice of skills existed as a method of crossing the barriers. She spoke to him about how culture was known to seep into skills over time, and why Magi used singing, dancing, and music.

On their way back from the Everstorm Ocean, Mistress Kalina took him back over and then through the Everstorm Lake. Tercius' breath got caught inside his lungs as experienced the great plunge into the lake’s depths. After a dive so deep he thought that they were going to some entrance to the Hells, just as they had reached the bottom of the lake – where large, very flat-looking plateaus waited for them – Mistress Kalina told him the story of a city.

She explained that at one of the highpoints of Magi history, the lake had housed Tholoi, the first and only city ever built almost entirely underwater. The word almost was there because of the giant Citadel of Everstorm – as his Mentor called the enormous structure on top of which the Everstorm Towers were built – which once upon a time had been part physical entrance and part pipeline for air supply into the city itself.

A deep sense of awe was coupled closely with a strange kind of sadness in Mistress Kalina's voice as told him how the Everstorm Lake had been chosen as a city location mostly for its immense depth — it was the deepest natural lake in the world. One by one, domes of enchanted glass and metal grew as a result of largely successful underwater building techniques and materials, which was, in turn, all a part of a bigger plan to refine entirely semi-to-non-magical habitations that would have been suitable and safe for living inside deep oceans.

For a century following its inception, the city prospered and expanded, while generations of Magi collected data and refined their work of the materials and spells and enchantments.

The end of the city came with the latest shrinking of the Magi Society, right after the Temporary Laws of Chaos became what they were today when within a few decades the magical population of the city came to be a fraction of what it used to be. So small the population was, that they alone proved unable to keep up with the maintenance and repair of the materials, the spellwork, and the enchantments that kept the entire thing operable.

It wasn't long after that the city was deemed untenable and then emptied of its remaining population. Rather than let the city flood and be slowly returned to nature, the entire underwater city was dismantled little by little, and all the materials used for its construction were then stored inside the Endless Vaults of The Repository, as was apparently done for all unused structures of the Magi. It was considered part of proper etiquette, Mistress Kalina explained, to dismantle and store all such non-essential structures. Doing that would allow for all the materials to be used again and again at some later point in time.

Excluding everything he came to learn of skills from his Mentor, just learning of that etiquette came to explain some things…

Today, where the city used to be, Tercius saw flat surfaces covered with a thick layer of muck and stone and debris of all kinds. Only one short and fat four-sided monument remained at the bottom of the lake, right where the center of the biggest of the domes of the city used to be, speaking the history of Tholoi in Runic to fishes.

If the stories he read in the Librarium were to be believed, most of which Tercius had counted to be a part of the fantasy genre, then these kinds of monuments to fallen cities could be quite common within the borders of the Empire and even wider.

***

*****

***

Hours later, night had fallen and Tercius found himself alone in his room.

The flight and the long conversation with his Mentor had taken all of the time that he had intended to use up on both her and Perdinar, but he felt that he got even more than what he went for and that was just from his Mentor. In any case, by the time Tercius and Mistress Kalina returned back to the Everstorm Towers, Tercius found himself beyond tired.

The complete draining of his Energy, from earlier in the day, was still demanding a due.

As soon as Tercius touched his bed, he was dead asleep.

He dreamt of dark clouds and rains and high waves crashing at tall, polished cliffs. He dreamt of great depths and things swallowed by sands of time.

As morning arrived and he blinked the sleep out of his eyes to the sunlight that he somehow found strange to see, Tercius realized that his dreams reflected a part of the reality of the previous day. To wake himself up quicker and clear away the fog of dreams, Tercius went for a quick Energy harvest, the pain proving to be quite effective in chasing away all traces of drowsiness.

The first thing he did was to finally break a much-needed barrier.

Precision [40] is now Precision [41]

For the second barrier of Precision, Tercius chose to double down on the accuracy aspect of the skill. Considering that he was messing with passive auxiliary skills – like Language Acquisition, Precision, and Dexterity – he had struggled on finding the best possible solution for a while, and after yesterday's conversation with his Mentor on the topic of skills, this particular path seemed like a good choice.

After all, the skill was working very well already and he had little insight into how to improve it in some grand way.

Precision had never really been a big spender of mana in any case, but with the second broken barrier there came an additional reduction in skill's mana cost, which with his soon-to-be shrunken mana pool would mean something.

Small Blade Mastery [12] is now Small Blade Mastery [13]

Small Blade Mastery [13] is now Small Blade Mastery [14]

Dexterity [13] is now Dexterity [14]

Tercius took an additional hour to completely spend the leftovers of the Energy that he harvested, the tips of the well-crafted throwing knives embedding themselves into the center of a large wooden plate that he brought from home.

Yesterday he had arranged with Mistress Prime’era a three-day postponement on his Well sealing, a timeframe that he thought was a good balance between giving him enough time to grow both his sensory skills and his weapon mastery and auxiliary skills and making his way to Rona and Septimus. While a part of him wanted to leave immediately regardless of anything, another part of him realized that the better prepared he was, the more likely he was to succeed in extracting them.

Now it was time for breakfast and then some more skill training.

***

*****

***

"What do you see now?" Tercius heard Mistress Kalina's voice, the cloud of mana before him morphing.

“It’s almost like thin strips of white clouds on a blue sky,”

“How about this one?”

Tercius’ glowing eyes squinted with intense focus. “I don’t think I saw you change anything to that mana… and yet all the colors just got darker…”

“That’s the effect of partial obscuration. How about now?”

The mana cloud shifted once more, first compressing itself into a spherical shape and then rapidly darkening even more, almost fading into the dark background of his skill.

Mana Sight [49] is now Mana Sight [50]

After a moment, the only traces that the sphere of mana used to be there was this black, silk-smooth presence that Tercius only got glimpses of.

“I see occasional glints of a shape there, but…” Tercius squinted even more. “I don’t think that I would notice it if I wasn’t paying attention to it in the first place…”

There was some movement again and slowly even those glints disappeared.

“What about now?”

“Nothing,”

“Now?”

“Nothing,”

“Now?”

“Still nothing,”

“Now?”

“I… I think I do see something… Some kind of movement… it’s there, if only barely,”

"That's it then. With the current top and bottom limits of your visual mana sense, we can now make a concentrated effort to expand it both ways. Shall we start immediately?"

Tercius smiled. “Of course.”

***

*****

***

Mana Sight [50] is now Mana Sight [51]

Mana Sight [51] is now Mana Sight [52]

The work with his Mentor resulted in three skill levels. Three. Three levels of a skill in its fifties. It was… incredible. At the end of the nine hours long training session, Tercius had another conversation with Mistress Kalina, this one with a strange topic that seemingly came out of nowhere.

“Tell me, Tercius, do you see yourself in any specific magical field in particular?” his Mentor asked.

“You mean like Alchemy and Enchanting?”

“Yes,” she nodded.

“I did not put much thought into that yet,” Tercius said. “And… I thought that…”

The conversation with Perdinar implied that Tercius wouldn’t be finishing the Academy completely, if he were to choose to become this hybrid of a Magos and Xenos. He would finish the education itself, but never the tests of magical craft that awaited at the end.

But even before Perdinar gave him the offer of the Magi, Tercius had known that if he were to pursue a specific magical field with one of the Guilds, he would eventually become a Master. Since becoming a Master was one of the prerequisites for him to unlock the, as of yesterday, locked title, First of His Line, Tercius had had a small idea to obstruct the title from ever coming to effect by never becoming a Master of anything.

He had planned to become a Magos and leave it at that. That way, regardless of Mistress Kalina’s benediction, he would keep the reins in his own hands.

“With what Master Perdinar proposed…” Tercius trailed off meaningfully.

"I suggest you talk to Master Perdin'nar about all that," his Mentor advised. "I know that you are still too young to get in contact with many magical fields and that anything you say now could change with time and further exposure, but it came to me that perhaps you already found something that calls you — a particular path that draws you to itself with a pull that's hard to resist. That was what I was referring to, nothing else,"

"Oh… that," Tercius said as he realized what exactly Mistress Kalina was asking about. A decade ago this would have been a very difficult question to answer, but today he had an inkling. Correction, he had many inklings.

“Well…” Tercius’ eyes clouded as he looked down to the pit of his pleasantly warm stomach. “I’d like to study skills, spells… and I can easily see myself learning enchantments and potions at some point. I don’t know. I feel as if it would be such a terrible waste not to learn everything that I can.”

His Mentor was pleased with that answer. “That’s good to hear,”

“Then I’d like to build a ship by myself.”

“A ship?” Mistress Kalina asked, her voice rising in surprise.

“A ship.” Tercius nodded. “Not a particularly big one, but rather just enough for my own needs. A ship that would be entirely enchanted by my hands.”

Mistress Kalina seemed incredibly amused at that. “Do you even know anything about building ships?”

Tercius shrugged. “No, but there are people around who make them and I’m sure that I will learn eventually. And, from what I understand, you can even buy ship blueprints from The Repository. Maybe there’s even a guide for shipbuilding…”

Mistress Kalina nodded. “Indeed. And what would you do when you make one?”

“Sail the oceans, go deep under waters, and fly far above clouds. Explore the world, one day at a time. I can do all that here, Mistress, and I can do so all by myself,” Tercius said.

Mistress Kalina was silent as she looked at him with a peculiar expression. “That sounds…”

“Free,” Tercius whispered with a content smile.

“Yes.” Mistress Kalina acknowledged with a slow, almost reluctant nod. “And it would seem that you do have a path that’s calling you already. The core of it is there, at least. Only… I wish that it wasn’t this particular path…”

Suddenly Mistress Kalina took a deep breath and held it for a while, seemingly considering something. “Although I can’t say that I like it, I am your Mentor, so I will tell you. The only Guild that doesn’t have a permanent presence at the Pyramid, despite constant generational pleas with their stubborn leadership, is the Guild of Wayfaring – as they are officially recorded. Not that they ever use the name, no.” Mistress Kalina said, snorting derisively.

“Let me tell you something, Tercius. I have not met a Master or Mistress of Wayfaring — Titles which they are never inclined to use, I have to add, not even during obligatory official visits — who hasn’t proven to be a stubborn thorn in my backside. They are easily the reason for half of the work I do as an Enforcer of The Law.”

“What, they break the Laws?”

“It's worse than that. Much worse,” Mistress Kalina said, hints of anger and hopelessness simmering on the low fire of her voice. “They all skirt around the Laws with enough finesse so that it only looks like they do. But a complaint has to be checked. Do you know how many times I, my fellow Enforcers, and the Constables under us have invested time and effort, only for it to amount to nothing in the vast majority of cases?”

“Err… too many times?”

Mistress Kalina nodded her head, slowly exhaling through her flared nostrils. "If there ever comes another time to draft the Temporary Laws, I will be sure to propose one that would make it a crime to intentionally waste the time of any officials of the Repository."

Tercius kept his outward calm, yet the look of Mistress Kalina evoked inside of him a chuckle appropriate to a mischievous kid who had just set up a prank and was rubbing his hands while waiting for the prank to go off, deriving immense pleasure from the imagination of the moment of success.

Even though Mistress Kalina was his chosen Mentor and, from everything he saw so far, a fairly well-intended person, there was something so satisfying in seeing authority figures being frustrated, and he couldn’t help himself but feel that way.

It was stronger than him.