The stack of books that Lucile had offered me were interesting, if heady. I still had basically no understanding of how magic worked here, and so the ones about elemental magic were difficult if not impossible to make sense of; they started off expecting you to understand what Essence was and how to gather it in your Spark, for starters, none of which were terms that made any sense to me. The one volume she had offered of arcane theory was worse, because it included symbological diagrams, with keys and indicies on the sides of the pages that were very clearly intended for people that had read and understood other books first.

So with Curtiss and his men rushing through their work and no ships on the horizon, I cracked open a book on Wind Elemental Magic and tried to just force my way through page by page in hopes it would eventually make sense. The introduction was rough, though:

"With Sky Essence being one of the most intuitive essences to control, many who use Spark Magic fail to study in depth the peculiarities of the Sky Essence Domain Restrictions. Ignorance of these restrictions is one of the most common reasons why a Spark Magician is unable to break through to become an Elementalist, and as such, this preface will be dedicated to explaining in detail (...)"

What?

"With Sky Essence being a fundamentally second-level energy, it contains a mixture of domain restrictions sourced from the component energies within it. Because it is outer-inner type energy, naturally the primary domain restrictions are distance and connection, although the domain restrictions are ameliorated by an affinity for natural energy of the same type. Sky essence necessarily does not contain the raw affinity for connection that Emerald Essence and Sea Essence do, as Wind as an element is too fluid; connections decay too quickly to be usable more than a certain distance from the caster, unless some other method is used (...)"

That didn't tell me anything. Let's skip down to a little bit later.

"...while it is true that Sky Essence is associated with the school of Motion Magic, this author disagrees with the categorization (...) as an Essence steeped in inner energy, Sky Essence is perhaps the single most useful reconnaissance tool, not to mention an astounding flexible defensive construct (...) notwithstanding the accelerated decay of Sky Essence's inner coherence, the mere fact that Sky Essence naturally transfers sensation is proof of its miscategorization (...) Sky Essence exists I suspect entirely to fill the role of Transfer, from which Motion is an entirely understandable if completely unacceptable mistranslation (...)"

Is this guy incapable of staying on topic? This section was supposed to be about domain restrictions, and he just goes back to arguing about what other people have done or said over and over. How about here...

"Sky Essence may be used most effectively when keeping its dual nature in mind (...) it is ineffective to control the essence itself, as one would Red Essence, and it is ineffective to use the essence entirely to apply pressure on the natural world (...) although my recollections of books from the Order are spotty, there is no doubt in my mind that most successful Wind Mentalists prefer to use Sky Essence to alter the patterns of natural energy, and in so doing, encourage the world to change its own. It is, as the void artists like to say, a categorically different type of energy than the others (...)"

Okay, no seriously, stop. This book was giving me a headache. I stopped and paced back and forth for a while, then decided that I should do what I had intended to do from the moment I rebuilt my head: reactivate my ability to see elemental energies. When I had first awoken, I hadn't been able to see straight because my eyes were seeing magic as though it were a part of normal vision, and that... didn't work. So with my new set of buttons and knobs, I flipped on the ability, which I had let lie dormant since then.

It was ...complicated?

I could see right away that the names "Sky Essence" and "Amber Essence" were them describing energy by color, as opposed to some kind of metaphor about where the essence came from or... anything else. The air currents that I had seen were the color of a light-blue sky, and basically every physical thing I saw had light brown energy holding it together. Similarly, the water outside was suffused with far deeper purple-blue. I could barely see it, but there did also seem to be a Essence form of light, which seemed... silver? There was also a bit of red on the wooden floor that might have been heat, but I couldn't convince myself that I was seeing that clearly, even with godly eyes.

Looking at my own flesh showed that there were bands of color running through me, all of various colors, with bits of yellow and green that I had not yet identified. I suppose it was no surprise that living things were complicated and that magic didn't have a single "Life Essence" that described cells--if I had seen that I would probably have gone crazy, because I knew cells themselves to be complicated, and the arrangement of them was even more so. If magic reduced all that to nothing, it would feel... wrong.

For the most part, though, what I saw didn't help me understand what the book was saying. About the only thing I could say was that the idea of controlling the flows of 'natural energy' in wind made sense... although given what I knew about physics, you would still need to add energy, not just pattern things, or else it wouldn't be that much stronger than it was. Then again, all he said was that it was more efficient. They were probably already adding energy, and the author was just trying to say to pay attention to the air currents, not just dump energy into it.

Well, whatever. I skipped past the preface in its entierty and started reading the next section.

"While a further description of the Martial Arts of Wind is beyond the scope of this book (...) (...) (...get back on topic...) (...please?) it is worth a brief summarization of their principles (...) (...do you even understand what a summary is...) (...) the Martial Art of Wind is divided into the disciplines of Gale and Stillness, representing the fundamental duality (...) Artists believe that Stillness, in this context, is a truth absolute in nature, that Wind itself cannot be damaged no matter the energy it carries, owing to its nature as a nearly ethereal element, and therefore, Artists let force pass into them without harm, or amplify the force of their own attacks (...) Gale, in this context, is the emergence of endless power as though from nowhere, enough to throw them and their opponents around bodily, and with that power, they can travel freely across a battlefield (...) or with clever use and tactics, reposition themselves and their foes in ways that turn an unwinnable battle into a drawn out series of duels (...) hard on the equipment and the user (...)"

As fascinating as that was, it was not useful right now, but I did put a bookmark there to come back to later. Finally, more than a quarter of the way through the book, I found something actually useful for a beginner:

"...naturally the collection of natural energy into the Essence Spark is accomplished by many means (this author chooses to argue against the use of Magic Gifts for this purpose, as impurities tend to collect in the Spark and may limit the future growth of an elementalist), but fundamentally, the gathering of Sky Essence is a simple matter of focus, especially while breathing. Given that all elementalists have Sparks for each Essence, and that it is therefore possible for even a fledgling elementalist to manipulate all essence sparks (...) the most fundamental and pure method of collection (...) uses the spark manipulation techniques to manipulate natural energy (...) therefore to be recommended that no other method is used (...)"

Well, I didn't entirely trust the author of the book, so I didn't take his nonsense about "no other methods" at face value. Instead, I just sat and tried to focus while breathing, knowing by using my Godly Eyes what the "natural energy" of Wind in the area looked like. However, I quickly discovered that using my Eyes for this put me in the wrong state of mind; I almost ended up using Soulflame in order to gather Sky essence, which would have been a complete waste. So I let the eyes go and just sat there, trying to feel what I had already seen, meditating on it, and generally, trying to draw power into my Spark... whatever that was.

After a while of not feeling like anything had changed, I decided to try to use the Gift of Eyes (as distinct from my godly power), since that was a part of the same system of magic as the essence sparks, while Soulflame was not. After spending a bit of time trying to wrestle with the Gift, I found that it was willing to give me a simple display of what my sparks "looked" like: they were a set of colored points within my soul or body, seemingly in my abdoment, arranged in a sphere. Given the name, I should not have been surprised, but they were really no bigger than sparks; I had mentally thought of them like marbles, but they were much smaller than that. From the looks of it there were ...six? Eight? Nine? I think nine, with one in the center; from the perspective it started with, three of them seemed to be stacked on top of one another. Because they were all empty, they didn't glow at all, so even though they "had color" they were hard to spot.

Still, once I had the image, I could more directly focus on putting the Sky Essence into the Wind Spark, and this helped a lot. Like the book said, it was easiest while breathing; whether that was psychological or technical, though, was beyond me. Either way, the Gift showed that it was working, as the Spark started to flicker and glow as it absorbed energy. I wanted to try it out immediately, but it was pretty clear that it took more than a few minutes worth of work before it was ready.

So I spent that afternoon and much of the evening just gathering energy and checking on it occasionally with the Gift. Even after all that, by the evening I could barely do any of the things that the book of Wind suggested I should be able to.

So the next day I cracked open the book on Fire Elemental Magic instead. This book was written a bit better, clearly by a different author, but it was honestly pretty uninspired. They got down to brass tacks pretty quickly, describing how to gather Red Essence in a way that was very similar to gathering Sky Essence. Unfortunately, the book also didn't go into any details about... anything, really. It had a section on domain restrictions, like the Wind book did, but it seemed to either skip things or be ignorant about it, because it mentioned there were several but it only really went into the main ones.

Fire magic, as it turned out, mostly obeyed two simple rules: line of sight and distance. If you could see heat energy, it was within your domain, and if you couldn't, it wasn't. And that's... pretty much all he said about domain.

The rest of the book was similarly simple and similarly ...uninspired is really the best word I can use. The author seemed to be repeating things by rote, describing what they had seen and what worked for them, but they didn't seem interested in expanding their own horizons, nor interested in giving students the tools needed to surpass them. As a god, that made me a little sad, not because I myself would not surpass him, but because I sort of expected people would work for the greater good of the world, and it hurt a little bit to see people stuck in their ways.

Once I confirmed that it was reasonably easy to gather Red Essence, I spent a good half day doing that, then started reading another book. To give myself a break, I shifted to the martial arts manual that Lucile had given me. Actually learning the art was probably beyond me, but the book on Wind Element had mentioned martial arts, and it had me curious.

The Martial Arts book was not about Wind Arts, however; this was a book on Earth Arts. Like the Wind Arts, the Earth Element Martial Arts school was divided into a pair of opposing disciplines, which were Space and Time. (How Time fit with Earth Element was not immediately clear to me, but apparently they were pretty serious about it?) This book in particular was dedicated to the study of Space Arts, which meant that they studied distance, weapon ranges, and the use of Earth Magic to create force fields, lengthen weapons, adjust the weight of weapons and armor, and similar things.

Which was all, of course, insanely cool.

Alas, the requirements for learning the Space Arts were stiff, including not just having access to Amber Essence but also a degree of physical fitness that my body, even having been repaired when I used up all that Golden Soulflame, simply didn't have. I did look at the section of the manual about using arts, but they channeled the power through the body in specific ways that they cautioned only worked if you had done the exercises. Even if I cheated and used my godly powers to help me along, it would be months if not years before I was able to perform those arts.

Still, the philosophy of the manual interested me. The author seemed to believe that all of creation "contains within itself both Space and Time, for without Space, things could not persist, and without Time, they could not evolve. All physical things jealously guard their own Space, and do not allow transgressions mildly; and Space itself, which is their being as well as their prize, is the tool by which they prevent access. We as martial artists must learn how to prevent access to our bodies, using our bodies, for once an enemy has entered our Space, they have already defeated us. And similarly, we need only find our way into the our enemy's Space in order to defeat them, for therein lay all of their vulnerabilities."

Equally interesting were the many diagrams in the book. They expected artists to practice with a variety of poles of different lengths, mostly poles that were equal in length to their arm from shoulder to fist, or twice that length with the center marked. They also were expected to cut poles that were the length of a step, two steps, a leap, and so on and lay them on the ground to get an instinctive appreciation for distance. Once your movements were consistent (and your steps were always a fixed length) you could make hoops or string circles to demonstrate the same thing. Later on, a dedicated disciple might paint circles, but it was difficult to do that for a whole class of students at once.

Along with the poles, of course, were a variety of diagrams of how joints worked, a number of stances, and descriptions of how your range varied as your arms and legs moved. It was... astonishingly thorough. I guess martial artists in this world were extremely dedicated.

In any event, it wasn't terribly useful for me, because most of the diagrams assumed that you used certain movement techniques and stretches to make sure your steps and joint movements were smooth and even. Still, it all left me hungry to practice such things. And Mel had promised some basic martial arts lessons if I joined up with Bard--except she knew Stillness Arts, which the Wind book said was about directing energy or being unaffected by it or something. Depending on how things went, I would have to try to get in on that.