“So, Sylvain, I suppose we should start with the very basics and work our way up until we know just how much you need to relearn after your incident. I guess the best way we could start would be to verify whether you have, in fact, ignited a qi core in your haste. To do this, the simplest, most direct way, would be to examine your own body. I’m sure you’ve learned quite a few ways to meditate by now and after turning your sight inwards finding out shouldn’t be too hard for anyone with even a wisp of higher energy in them.”

The doctor was right that I’d learned plenty of ways to look at my own cores, or the barren, empty shell my own body had instead of cores. I took the hint and settled into my favorite form, a simple, cross-legged sitting position that reminded me just how much my body ached, and those first few truly deep breaths to help clear my mind only made it worse. But then, as I found my composure, and then my rhythm, I was able to let that all fall away. Eyes closed, I focused on myself, on examining how every inch of myself felt, how everything looked both inside and out.

It was with no small amount of disappointment, then, that looking inside myself revealed nothing different to what I was used to. I looked towards my abdomen, what many traditionalist qi ‘cultivators’ would call the dantian and found nothing. Not just an inert patch of dull, flavorless energy waited to be ignited, but absolutely nothing at all. I still had no qi.

Turning my attention towards my chest, towards my lungs and my diaphragm, I saw nothing once more. There was no ebb and flow of power with every breath, no energy spilling out through my lungs and leaking into my blood to be carried throughout my body and then brought back, to be expelled and cycled once more. I still had no prana.

My examination continued upwards, finding its way to the base of my skull, what many know as the brain stem. Yet again, I was lacking any hints of an ethereal power supply being slowly produced there, nothing that even suggested psychic energy was being produced or controlled. I still had no psi.

In one, final effort, I pushed my sight to the forefront of my mind, literally. I tried looking around where my frontal lobes would be, hoping for any sign of something otherworldly that gathered and collected in the pathways of my brain. I desperately wanted to see something, anything at all that suggested something was pooling there and being sent out, through the neurons and nerves from my mind and then outwards, carried by electricity and impulse outwards, but I saw nothing. I still had no mana.

I was mad, dejected, weirdly apathetic. I had hoped for a surprise when I started, for something to change, and yet I couldn’t even find it in myself to be shocked. Just like I couldn’t find anything else inside myself, either. I felt so many different emotions and yet I couldn’t think of anything else but how empty it all felt.

I was already about to give up, to just throw in the towel and start making up a lie for Strenns when I felt an impulse to look deeper. I couldn’t give up so easily, and I just had to find proof that something had changed. I looked further into my own mind, pushing past layers of grey and white matter that I had no way of seeing but knew I was looking at regardless, towards the true center of the three pounds of flesh in my skull. It was when I had started inspecting around the area where my amygdala, thalamus, and hippocampus sat, if my moderate schooling in anatomy was to be believed when I finally… witnessed something.

I witnessed Everything. That impulse that drove me there on my own was replaced by something much greater, then, a great yank on my own awareness that drew me into myself with all the gentleness and care of a black hole, and yet again I was there. Truths and lies meant nothing here, it was impossible for contradictions and impossibilities to even be impossible because even that would imply that anything could ever be incapable of happening. I was starting to get lost, now, there was no grand event like the shutting of a cosmic window to kick me out, and I would have been utterly terrified if I wasn’t already in too deep to think anything resembling rational thought, any thought at all. All I could sense, at all, was Everything.

“Certain forbade picture now prevent carried he get see sitting.”

And then I was out of there, all over again. For one eternal instant, I had been trapped but then the voice of the Thing overwhelmed even that. My eyes shot open, and my body was filled with every sensation imaginable, from agony to ecstasy, I felt it all, and it was simply too much for me to possibly handle at that moment, and so I reacted the only way I could. I blacked out.

Thankfully, it lasted only a moment. When I came to, my legs were still crossed beneath me, but I had fallen back onto the bed. I could tell it hadn’t been very long, though, because despite being drenched in sweat and shaking wildly, the doctor was still standing over me, and he looked like he was more confused than concerned. He must have seen me open my eyes because he started speaking a second after.

“Sylvain, are you alright? You had been meditating for a few minutes when you suddenly seized up and fell back. You weren’t responding at all for the last ten seconds. What happened?”

I pushed myself back up into sitting position, rolling my head and trying to wash out any lingering phantom pains. I wasn’t incredibly successful, but I still pushed down the feelings that I’d become all too well-acquainted with over these past few days and responded to the man.

“Well, I’ve got some good news for you, I have sparked my core, and I spent a long time inspecting it. I got really excited towards the end, though, and tried tugging a bit of it out of my dantian but that’s the last thing I remember…” I tried to sound both excited and unsure, and was very successful because excited and unsure were two of the many emotions I was currently feeling. Seeing some sort of energy inside me after so long made me feel overjoyed. It hardly even mattered that it seemed a great deal more unusual and probably unsafe than any of the Core Four, and the fact that it came with an apparently mandatory hyperdimensional tag along was significantly less disagreeable when that… whatever… did just save my life, or maybe even existence?

The doctor spared no time for my thoughts, though, and jumped right into a lecture. “Well of course that’d knock you out Sylvain, surely you’re aware that qi and psi are both immensely difficult to consciously work without the proper training. Trying to just ‘tug on it’ after having never even sparked a core would be like trying to make your heart stop beating. You need plenty of experience just to make it react in a way that’s any different than simple, magical muscle memory.”

I nodded my head in faux understanding, and I couldn’t help but be impressed at just how well Strenns was able to explain things. I muttered a quick apology, trying to reassure him that I wouldn’t try it again, before letting the man speak again.

“You didn’t do anything permanent, at least, so as long as you’re honest about not trying that again I see no reason why we shouldn’t continue. Picking back up where we left off, I want you to look inwards once again, try and see how your other two energies are reacting. I know you won’t be able to spot anything right away, but you’re obviously the most familiar with your energies, and you should be able to at least start trying to puzzle together any new prana triggers you might have picked up from your enlightenment, as well as any new psionic impulses. Much of that has to be found out through experimentation, though, and as it so often is with cases such as yours, it may well be like needing to learn how to walk and talk all over again.”

Or as I was coming to suspect would be the case, learning how to walk and talk for the first time in the middle of a minefield. I would get nowhere if I did nothing but worry about the risks, though, and so I did as the doctor recommended, once more using my mind’s eye to look into myself, being careful to look directly at that part of my brain that not only housed the memories of my time in the Everything but also was apparently directly connected to it. At first, there was nothing different than the last time, only the faintest hints of something just out of view that sat and gnawed at my awareness and tempted me to take a closer look.

But then, I noticed something. Even with that howling, overflowing pit of hunger that sat in the core of my mind, it wasn’t the only thing in me now. I hadn’t noticed before, I had no idea how to even look for it without that second dose of The Everything, but I could feel something pouring out from that pit. Not tendrils of energy snaking outwards through some path like mana does through nerves or prana through veins, and not waves of power that radiate away from a central point, slowly flooding the body, like qi and psi.

Instead, this was a constant, even ‘glow’ of power, something that was dimly there, but truly solid and everywhere. From head to toe, every millimeter of myself had the even shine of some power that I knew to be similar to the Everything’s, but much more diluted in its intensity. Whereas that pit in my mind was a true shard of that place, a hole that holds a fraction of that infinite space, this… stuff felt more subdued.

Granted, it was only subdued in comparison to the Everything itself, this energy was still positively roiling with potential. It was chance and possibility condensed into a constant simmering glow, and its presence alone was the ability to answer any problem with a single, resounding yes, despite how illogical it sounded or impossible it was. Once I noticed this shining light of uniform chaos, I became stunned, how could I have possibly missed it before? The mere act of noticing it was enough to make it impossible to forget, and I could immediately feel it within me. I could feel that it would never be anything except uniform, even stagnant, and no matter how much I pulled it would never, could never deplete. I had no way of concentrating it within me, nor any way of thinning it out either.

At least, not while it was still within me. And so, I tried bringing some out. To focus on the tiniest section at the very tip of my right index finger, and to push it out. What happened next was… immensely upsetting.

I was quick to open my eyes and look down at my finger when I felt a crushing pressure immediately start to build where I tried pushing some of that power out of me. It didn’t take me long to realize this pressure wasn’t, in fact, the multiple fingernails that were streaming out of the flesh at the tip of my finger, no. Neither was it the winding ribbons of skin and nail that started to simply appear around my hand, falling into my lap and my palms where I rested them together.

No, I was fairly certain that the pressure was coming from the fact that the tip of my finger was simply starting to shimmer and fade like it was being pushed under the surface of a lake. There were tiny ripples in the air around it already, like the space my hand was in was trying to fight back and claw its way back to the surface of this body of water, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t until I stopped trying to push this energy out that my finger stopped ‘sinking’ through… reality, I guess. The pile of nail and skin that had been rapidly growing finally stopped, too, and was quickly shaken off in disgust. The few shards of keratin that had been squirming through the flesh at the tip of my finger also fell out, and the skin underneath didn’t even look broken. The only thing visibly strange about it was the fact that most of my finger looked translucent, and even that seemed to be correcting itself, slowly.

I had hardly even cut the ‘connection’ before the Every-Thing decided to speak up once more.

“Extremity so attending objection as engrossed something. Resources resembled forfeited no to zealously.”

I was so shocked and disturbed by this entire situation, and the Thing’s sudden chiding, that I muttered under my breath.

“What is it that you’re even saying?” I hissed as quietly as I could.

“Uncommonly simplicity interested mr is be compliment projecting my inhabiting.”

I was about to rebuke the Thing inside my head again before I realized Strenns was still watching and had in fact begun speaking.

“Well that was… something. I think, Sylvain, that you managed to find one of your new prana triggers. At least, I sincerely hope that was something you weren’t capable of before now.” He gave me a very pointed look that told me all I needed to know about his feelings on that particular series of events and continued.

“Perhaps jumping back into it isn’t the best strategy after all. I have no doubt that you’ll be able to work through this accident and become the man you used to be, perhaps even better now that you have qi on top of your two existing energies, but we will very likely need to work slowly and steadily. What I will do, however, is start working on the papers needed for your discharge, since despite the somewhat disturbing nature of that ‘spell,’ it has been some time since you’ve had any unprompted outbursts. Your rapid healing also serves to make your stay in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar environment to bring your abilities back under control almost irrelevant or even actively detrimental.”

“I recall hearing Marcus mention something of a family estate? Perhaps it would be in your best interest to stay there for a time after I release you from this facility’s care. I can already tell you aren’t too keen on such a proposition, but I believe it really would help you to be somewhere familiar, so long as you don’t have any traumatic experiences there and merely dislike it. You can think more on this, too. I likely won’t be able to get you out of here for a few days. At the very least, they do seem oddly concerned about you, so you will have plenty of time to talk to your family, talk to Marcus, while I get everything in order for you.”

Despite the scowl that was no doubt slowly worming its way across my features, the doctor raised some good points, even if they weren’t for the reasons he’d intended. I decided to call up Marcus later and see if he couldn’t arrange for one of the smaller guesthouses to be put aside for me. We’d need to be discrete about it, though, and I was glad that I’d grown so accomplished at avoiding my family members over the years.

Despite the risks that came with someone recognizing me, though, I really did need a place to stay. I could no longer return to my old apartment, I had been planning to stay on that station for months at least and I didn’t want to be making payments for no reason, but now I was kicking myself. Until I could arrange for a new place to stay, something made difficult by my recent stint in the hospital and also my status as a lone survivor of a probably classified disaster, I was stuck. At least their compound was phenomenal, something I planned to take full advantage of to train my ‘gifts,’ and I still had enough money saved up from being their ‘useless scion’ that I could afford both amenities there and the hunt for a new life, hopefully even further away from the Johanssons than before. Maybe, if I was still considered part of the Coalition, I could find a nice job towards the edges of the system while I ‘recover?’ I have heard that Titan can be nice, and I’m sure the view is stunning.

I knew it’d be difficult, true, but I was used to making difficult choices, and this was just the next series of them. Strenns was also right, though, that I didn’t need to be worrying about all this right now. I could call Marcus up tomorrow and start searching around for new beginnings after that. I had no idea what my status with the Coalition was going to be, I didn’t know if my records being changed was for better or for worse, or even why such a thing was done to begin with. Apparently, the change was made official enough that, to the public, I had always been Sylvain Henry Camille Johansson, undisclosed higher energy or energies user and nondescript employee of the Standard Magitech Coalition.

That already served to show just how poorly the system of monitoring and measuring energy-users was. There weren’t even semi-reliable ways to actually read what energies a person is using, and in what quantities, or how much they had, other than by having another human take these measurements themselves, and that was already anything but standard. Both energy manipulation and technology creation had been taken to truly incredible heights, humans could be granted the power to literally change the face of a planet alone, or do even more if some rumors were accurate, and they could also build a handgun that can cripple or outright kill someone like that with a single round.

But together? Magitech, as it was so grandly called, was truly in its infancy. Controlling higher energies seemed to be exclusive to something with willpower, with intent. mana wouldn’t form a fireball without the idea to do so, nor could qi strengthen a body without a body to give that order. Technology was equally rigid, and even the slightest errors could result in catastrophe. Actually mixing energy that needed a guiding hand with machinery that needed a totalitarian structure usually resulted in subpar replicas of both at best, and at worst…

A certain hole torn into the fabric of space flashed in my mind briefly, and I decided to put aside that line of thought immediately. It was still true, though, that only the most simple of magitech had been created with any success, machines made to power spells with vast amounts of energy but only a rudimentary purpose or energies crammed into a device solely to power it, unable to do anything more complicated than making electricity flow.

It was my goal to eventually mix both, to somehow find a way to use tech to bring the energy to myself and others and I guess, in a way, I succeeded. Now though, it was in my favor now that they played so poorly together, because taking readings and finding inconsistencies was the domain of numbers, and more often, artificial numbers. Of course, any good psion could match even the best computer in pretty much any way imaginable, but something told me the Every-Thing wouldn’t play nicely with anything with actual thoughts trying to sneak a peek into its ‘home.’

I turned to the doctor after that thought, though, considering myself lucky I hadn’t accidentally drawn its attention myself, and spoke.

“As much as I don’t want to, I’ll call Mark tomorrow and see if he can’t get me a room while I get back on my feet. I’ll also need to get things sorted out with the Coalition, see what they’ve got for me moving forward, and plenty more I’m sure I’m not even thinking of now. But I can do all that in time, is there anything else you need from me right now, Doctor?”

He shook his head, a professional smile playing at his features, before responding. “There is not. I know things seem difficult now, they are difficult now and they may never stop being so, but you’ll move forward, and I will do my best to help you with any issues you may face during your long road to recovery. For tonight, though, I think it would be best that you get some rest, and we can continue tomorrow.”

He hardly gave me time to reply before turning on his heels and walking out of the door, turning out the lights as he left by my request. It wasn’t until almost thirty minutes later, when I was sure he was gone, that I remembered something from earlier, and once more opened my mouth to whisper something into the empty room.

“Hey, um, I’m not sure what to call you, if you have a name at all or, hell, if you can even really understand me, but I wanted to say thank you, for earlier. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I think I might have really gotten lost if you didn’t pull me out, so… I really appreciate it.”

I said nothing more, letting the barely audible words settle into nothingness, replaced once more by the dull rushing of sterile air through the vents and faint hints of activity from outside my room. I had started to grow almost dejected, thinking my forced companion hadn’t heard, hadn’t understood, or even hadn’t cared and I was about to give up after a few minutes before I got a reply.

Once more, I felt my head growing strained, pressure building up inside but much, much more manageable now, and any noise I could hear was replaced by the low, gurgling whistle of something preparing to speak. The howling and ringing quickly reached a fever pitch before something else started floating up through that static. Yet again, the noise almost parted as an idea bubbled up, and burst into a packet of meaning that reverberated in my mind.

“Thank.”

I was stunned, for a moment, despite the disappointment I had been feeling when I thought it might not respond I still wasn’t expecting it to do so, and as the feedback of my new partner’s impossible language died down again, I was left at a loss for what to do. The last thing I really remember thinking before I just shrugged it off and went to bed was my utter bewilderment at the word itself it replied with. It only made me more confused about the enigma in my head.