Naturally when faced with such a humongous amount of books that I was going to have to dedicate a decade of my life to, and still possibly not finish reading, I was a little overwhelmed. As a bonus however all side branches followed the same design layout and book organisational plan, so I could easily locate where to find specific books and the area they pertain to.

When I told Kara about my new endeavour she was quite excited and also very supportive. She immediately loaned to me the library book catalogue that was also applicable to all other side branches under the Institute so I could figure out where to begin and navigate my new learning adventure.

Browsing through the catalogue, I found that there were five major areas that all the books in the library primarily fell into. These five being:

Mana: Books pertaining to the nature of mana and all there was to know about it. What this consisted of was all the public knowledge available about the Paths, magic users and warriors, the principles behind their strengths, how they utilised them, specific characteristics and how the Paths originated and developed.

History: The largest of all the categories. An in depth compilation of the recordings of all major historical events that had taken place across the span of all of human history and the individuals that were involved here, in Calzyn.

Geography: The smallest category but still very broad and detailed. It included all the maps of human territory featuring the locations of all human settlements across the world, the borders of the various kingdoms and clans, and what areas were outside of human control and therefore too dangerous for anyone neither Warrior or Sorcerer.

Politics: From what I could gather, a general record of all the information about the major factions in the world including the Coalition and the influences and powers they each hold sway over.

General Knowledge: From what I mentioned earlier, unlike the other categories whose existence is an undisputed necessity for the foundation of Calzyn’s knowledge, the general knowledge category is the primary battleground for the war for academic significance. It includes every topic from ship building to meteorology to glass manufacturing and beyond. It is where the findings of the Institute’s research that has enough importance (though much lesser than) besides mana is deposited.

Deciding where to start for me was very important. I was on something of a clock despite my seemingly endless amount of time. Weighing my options a bit I decided straight away to rule out general knowledge. The category only consisted of independent specialised areas and wasn’t critical to my desperate need to understand the mechanics of this world.

Next to go was geography. Important, but not too crucial for me at the moment as I’m going to be living here in Mellawin for some time and won’t need to travel for some years yet. After the first two categories I next eliminated history because despite its importance to understand the society here at its core, it was a massive amount of reading, and wasn’t what was most urgent for me right now.

No. What was most urgent to me was understanding what I had almost absolutely no information about, what makes the powerful powerful in this world. So, putting aside politics for later as well I started my new journey of self education with the topic of mana, starting by going through all the information this side branch contained.

I had my job, the duties it entailed and the long hours it could put me through, but I had time in the mornings, in the nights and every spare moment in between so I soon started taking books off the shelves and getting down to business.

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I didn’t know what to expect when I first started learning about mana but that initial trepidation fell away quickly when I started seriously delving into the topic.

As to the nature of mana itself and where it came from, there were a lot of commonly held theories but no definitive evidence found to back it all up. Just what was observed and what people had assumed to be the reason behind it all.

The first absolute truth I learned from my reading was that mana was in everything and everyone, and continuously flowed through everyone and everything. But it was also universely believed that mana wasn’t just there. It came and went from somewhere, the Source as it was most commonly referred to as but it was also called the Wellspring, the Heart, or in my personal favourite, the Teat of the Primordial Goddess of the Universe, a specific denotation pertaining to certain religious fanatics.

I chuckled when I read that last one.

Nonetheless though, mana was everywhere and behaved as most Institute scholars suggested, like water. And that like water, mana all came from and flowed to somewhere deep and powerful, like the deepest part of the ocean where you would find water at its most concentrated and pure.

Everyone had mana and due to its, at least from my perspective, otherworldly power, scholars equated mana to the power of the soul. The soul itself being universally believed to be a concentrated manifestation of mana in of itself. Along with this supposition came the conjecture that when one died, they would re enter the flow of mana and their souls would journey back to the Source from whence all souls came.

At least this was what was theorised.

It wasn’t actually theorised at all to be more accurate. It was more a doctrine of belief rather than a proven scientific fact and when I came upon this as a part of the Calzyner culture, the Wizard’s behavior towards me and the others he had stolen away became somewhat understandable.

To have mana was to have a soul, but as foreign beings with no mana he would have obviously thought of us as some sort of empty thing, even less than a bug as even bugs here had some quantity of mana.

I didn’t really know what to do with the thought when it appeared in my head however. In the end, I just put it down to the Wizard still being a sick and twisted fuck regardless of the circumstances and left it at that.

Anyway, this universally held theory about the soul and its relationship to ‘The Source’ went further than mere belief as I previously said. It had actually developed to the point that it had surpassed faith and became an absolute truth and fact of existence.

This is where the Paths came into play and the people of Calzyn’s obsession with them.

And it was an obsession. Vastly more than that, it was a devotion. Every person everywhere in Calzyn knew that when you died you returned to the Source. After some time passed the flow would eventually carry you back out of it again, returning you to a pure state and delivering you into a new vessel to become a new lifeform again. It was essentially a system or reincarnation that trapped you in an eternal loop of new lives through mana as the medium, unless of course, you reached the end of one of the Paths.

Though it has never been achieved it was theorised (though it's actually probably closer to divine mandation) that when one reaches the end of their Path one can maintain their egos, their memories, their bodies, everything about themselves, and then travel to the Source to remain there permanently. Now strong enough to resist the current and remain wherever they wished as whoever they are, forever.

Basically, the pursuit of the Paths and its completion was the road to enlightenment and the ascension into heaven all rolled into one.

When I reached this point in my research I naturally wanted to know more about the Paths and how they were meant to achieve this. Going through all the material and books at my fingers I came to find that it can all be summarised like this.

Firstly, everyone is unique and therefore has a unique soul and a unique mana signature. This mana signature is in fact a spectrum of affinities for the different aspects of mana. Everyone has some quantity of every single affinity there is, though in differing amounts. It is this factor that is the main decider of a person’s talent to walk down the Paths because all though there no absolute determinate number on how many affinities there are (experts debate the number being somewhere between hundreds and into the thousands but there is no concise answer) what does matter is what total percentage a specific affinity occupies in your mana signature spectrum. To further explain this, we need to look at the Paths themselves.

The Warrior Path is the oldest and most primordial. What it utilises is resonating the Warrior’s most dominant affinity with the surrounding atmospheric mana and then drawing that specific element of mana into the Warrior. From there, the mana is then merged into one’s own mana but instead of moving into the soul, it soaks into the body, strengthening it and imbuing it with the affinity’s properties.

The success of this is dependent on the amount of effort put in, the available amount of a specific mana element and most critically, one’s specific affinity composition. This is because a person’s soul may be strong in one particular affinity, but the majority of their soul will clash with the new incoming element and hinder the absorption of it into the body.

Furthermore, this absorption has grades and bottlenecks that determine the strength and ability of a warrior. An Initiate (Veena) is when one has just started absorbing mana and it exists in the body in a sort of gaseous state. From there the Warrior would work to keep increasing the quantity of their mana in their specific element until it completely fills every part of the body and reaches a critical mass. This point would be the first bottleneck for the Warrior and it would now be their aim to transform this gaseous mana into a condensed liquid state and thereby become an Adherent (Morra).

Achieving this stage the Warrior would go beyond the mere physical and would also gain some attributable bodily enhancements and would be able to directly incorporate and also manifest affinity related phenomena. An example would be a warrior with a frost affinity being able to merge a freezing nature into their attacks or a wind affinity warrior being able to become exceedingly light and agile.

I think you get the picture.

Now having reached this stage, the Warrior would further progress by assimilating even more mana to further condense the remaining gaseous mana into liquid mana. The goal is the same as the Initiate stage except this time to fill one’s body with liquified mana instead that is denser and more powerful. This progresses against growing resistance from the contradictory affinities of the soul as the Adherent grows closer and approaches the next and final bottleneck, the bottleneck to become a Master (Soofa).

At this point, the mana has become completely liquified and has soaked into every part of the body and is now ready for the next step, crystallisation. Here the mana must solidify and merge with the flesh to become completely fused with it. Once the warrior has achieved this they can be called a Master. From then on they can continue to crystallise their mana throughout their body until finally, if they can, they achieve complete fusion.

At this point the warrior achieves the state of Grand Master (Hi-Soofa). But unfortunately, this is the end for them as far as has been discovered.

Because as I said before, they have already passed their final bottleneck and can no longer continue onwards.

It isn’t so much that they can’t however, but that no Warrior in the entire history of Calzyn has ever managed to overcome this hurdle and progress to a further level of existence.

But this isn’t to say that no one has.

Because there are those who have progressed beyond this point, to become Supreme (Shevani).

These men and women... are Sorcerers.