After I dressed up in much more comfortable clothing and robes, I was ready to help Ruman brave his trial. We had gathered quite the crowd inside the temple as Ruman drank his fill of water, and even more. Though I could use my magic to induce a vomit response instead of directly harming him, it would be easier if he was on the verge of nausea first.

He was sat down, and Len supported his back as I handed Ruman the core. The bearded, elderly man looked at it in fear. “A magical beast core is considered highly poisonous because death can set in mere moments after ingestion.”

“It will not come to that,” I said. “I will help you along, as well as I can. I will make sure to supply your body with a steady stream of magic which will prevent the core from extracting all your magic. This could kill you, so I’ll make sure it won’t happen.”

Ruman chuckled at that. “Well, I cannot fault you for your honesty, but if things are, as they say, I don’t really have much of a choice. I have been feeling increasingly ill lately.” He inspected the core one last time. “Well… here goes.”

He plopped the core into his mouth, and a few seconds later, the object did its job. The vortex it created drew in the black sludge unerringly, drawing it all in second after second. After an entire minute, the core was emptied, and the core reached into his meridians, sucking in every impurity along its way. When I detected none, Ruman was already hissing a ‘Now’!

I triggered his vomit response with a swift manipulation of the water in his body. He released a high-pressure stream of black vomit. He coughed out the core, which was now completely black.

The process was completed. I burned away the water and the impurities, making sure to clean Ruman up as well. “How are you feeling?” I asked. The crowd waited in bated breath for his response.

“I feel… good!” He said. “Better, at least.” His body was still very old, but at the very least, the build-up of impurities wouldn’t claim his life just yet.

“I’m afraid we’re not done quite yet,” I grinned. I explained to him as best I could the process of conjuring a vortex of magic to take in as much as possible. He needed to fill his core, after all.

Unlike Len, Ruman seemed especially talented in this, his vortex growing powerful and swirling around us. The crowd seemed almost bored now as the process took so long, though it couldn’t have been more than just an hour.

When he had reached capacity, I told him to condense his magic. In the meanwhile, I was ready for any new takers for core purification.

Though the process they witnessed did seem harrowing, it was better than staying with less personal power. Fern knew this, the carpenter stepping forward to brave this trial.

000

By the time Ruman had gotten around to creating his magic spiral which he used to unlock what I called his stomach meridian, twenty of the eldest people in the tribe had been fully purified. Fern had almost completely condensed his magic as well.

Night fell, but the people cultivating their magic barely seemed to notice as they were hard at work. The temple had soon thinned out as those who were watching began to grow a little bored at the proceedings.

Len returned with another barrel of water which he had fetched from a stream half a mile away, and the girl in line to be purified drank her absolute fill before braving the trial.

At this point, the core had begun to emanate an ominous, foul darkness. After the last person threw it up, the core pulsed with an ethereal, orange light before cracking, the stored energy no longer capable of taking in more magic or impurities.

I took the core and threw it outside before it could detonate. The explosion of magic and impurities, though not physically harmful, could contaminate the air with undue impurities, making it harder for the people around to cultivate.

The girl, Sarina, fell on her knees, crestfallen. “I am so sorry for breaking the core!”

I chuckled in amusement and helped her up. “Think nothing of it, for it was not your fault. Now, take your place around old Ruman and begin your training, brave tribeswoman.”

“Astra,” Len then said. “There are people outside waiting for your direction. The hole has been dug, and they wish to start mining as soon as possible.”

I followed him outside to where a group of young men were gathered. They walked up to the large hole, the size and depth of an entire house. I sharpened my senses and felt for the magically enhanced minerals.

Thousands of years ago, when swathes of the world was covered in ice, this place used to be one giant glacier. The sprites seeped into the ice, which soon melted. The magic remained even as the water evaporated and the water-natured magic seeped once more into rocks and minerals.

The water-natured magic mixed with the magically infused rocks of an earthen nature, mixing to form the basis of a plant-natured magic stone, or Verdant Green. The stones that were exposed to the soil were spent over the centuries of helping plants grow, but the ‘Verdant Green’ stones that were underneath layers of cold, dead earth remained unchanged, waiting.

I marked a spot with magic light, and the youths got to work hacking apart rocks. Others were busy leading the rocks up out of the pit while the hole continued to deepen.

It did not take long for someone to spot something.

“I see green!” One shouted. “It’s right here!”

The youths focused their efforts on that one spot, smashing up the rocks surrounding the green, digging up more and more of it. Eventually, they managed to pry out a head-sized lump of dark green mineral. It was impure, embedded with rocks and other impurities.

I held out my hand, and the person holding the heavy gem gave it to me reverently. With a burst of concentration, I located all the points of the object which wasn’t magically infused, and burned it away.

The gem collapsed into dust.

Panicked, I held it together through sheer force of magic and did my best to meld the disparate crystals together. Surprisingly, with magic surrounding them, they welded almost perfectly, slipping into itself and becoming ever denser, but also smaller.

I reduced it to a fist-sized clump of high purity and regarded it carefully. It was perfectly circular, with the appearance of an oversized magic core. It was now definitely verdant green, shining with an aura of what could only be life.

Len swallowed. “It’s… beautiful!”

“I don’t believe it!” A more erudite fellow with blonde hair, Aaron, clutched the hat on his head in disbelief. “That thing could easily give us four, maybe five full harvests in a single year! If we rationed it and farm as we always have, we could live easy for at least ten years!”

I looked towards the ground once more and located another spot before magically illuminating it. “Let’s not end our efforts so soon,” I said.

With a feverish rush, the boys began hacking away at the earth with renewed vigor. Less began to toss away the accumulating rock shards, focusing instead on helping their compatriots mine. I helped along as well as I could, clearing the ground.

Another, smaller ore was retrieved. I joined it with the first gem and made it larger. By Aaron’s calculations, that gave us five more years of easy living, but I disagreed internally. We would need a lot more to live comfortably.

After all, we were on the verge of a population boom.

000

Ruman walked up to me, and for the first time, it was completely unassisted. I was sat on the altar in the temple, where all the ambient worship concentrated. There, I had sat for a few days, unmoving if nothing else caught my attention.

With the recent revelations of the veins of magic mineral ores, my popularity had skyrocketed even more. Though my arrival had given them much happiness, the knowledge of food security had shed all their remaining inhibitions.

But alas, whatever wall of power I was approaching, it was leagues away from my current position. Even in a hundred years of continued worship on this level, I wouldn’t even be a single percentage closer to this wall, and I could feel that there were walls even after that; mountains beyond mountains.

The only solution was to increase our population.

The only problem…? A lot of the people here were…

…uhm.

Let’s just say we needed to increase our genetic diversity first. Not doing so would lead to… issues along the way. According to Ruman, there were over a dozen villages near the mountains, all with more or less the same population density. A restriction in resources necessitated such things.

All in all, perhaps a thousand and a half people were living in this region. This was… better. The only problem was how we could convince them to live here, or how we could convince them to not only worship me and me alone, but also not to report us to the nearby City, which could spell our doom.

Long story short, I needed an emissary that would spread my word far and wide.

And I knew just the man.

“You sent for me?” Ruman asked.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “How goes your training?”

Ruman beamed. Though he looked no less ancient outwardly, his body had undergone massive changes. “Most of my pains have almost completely disappeared. I’ve unlocked two meridians, and am on my way to gathering enough magic to unlock another. All in all, I feel twenty years younger!”

I laughed at his glee. “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself, Ruman. Now, I would like to task you with something which I feel you’d be suited for. How would you like to become my emissary?”

At his surprised expression, I explained to him my plans of accruing more power by increasing our population through immigration. All I needed of him was the assurance that he could convince the surrounding tribes to join our community.

He sighed. “This will be difficult, but I know where to start at least. We are very companionable with a nearby village, and they will surely be enticed by the presence of Verdant Green, though I beg leave that you give me more time to accrue power. It will surely convince them that our lives are happy and healthy if they see old me prancing about energetically.”

“I’m sure it will,” I said. “As long as you know what you’re doing, Ruman. I trust you. Now, how are the children?”

“Like you theorized, they have taken to cultivating magic with much ease, though some of the older kids could require cleansing. Unfortunately, the process would be much too painful for them to bear as of yet, so I’ve directed them to simply carry out their breathing exercises before they can form a spiral and refine themselves further. As you’ve commanded, we’ve held off on letting them unlock their meridians because of the backlash they may suffer should they fail.”

I smiled at the news. There were only ten children below the age of twelve in the village. That they could now cultivate would put our numbers up to a tidy thirty-three, not that I would expect them to fight. That only put sixteen people remaining. I needed to requisition more cores.

Fortunately, the release of magic into the air through the mining of magic minerals would surely attract some. Speaking of… “How goes the mining operations?” I had more or less just left them alone to unearth all the raw gems before I’d come in to meld them together. Because the area was so rich with magic minerals, I didn’t need to make the process more efficient by pointing everything out for them.

Besides, the swinging of pickaxes would help them condition their bodies.

“I’m glad you asked,” Len said mere moments after I had asked, dragging in a cart into the temple. Scores of head-sized raw gems laid strewn about, almost filling the cart itself to the brim.

With magic, I carried all the gems out, melted away the impurities, then melding them together into fifty-nine fist-sized gems of high purity. Five hundred years of comfortable living for a population of forty-nine.

Or fifty years for five-hundred, twenty five years for a thousand, and even less as we grew. As incredible as this windfall was in the eyes of my people, we still needed more if we were going to make a living in this mountain.

I put the gems on the cart gently, much to Len’s amazement at my casual display of refined power. “You gotta teach me that!”

Frankly, I didn’t really know how. I knew there was a realm beyond unlocking one’s meridians, but until someone came that far, I would have no inkling of it at all. The magic structures were simply too ephemeral until that point. “Just keep training,” I said. “Or conversely, test yourself against the magical beast whose power I recently felt in the forest this morning.”

“You mean this thing?!”

A white bear with blue, bulging veins pounced into my temple before laying down on the floor, dead to the world. No, it hadn’t pounced. It had been thrown.

Old Kat strode into the temple, a procession of elders in tow. Fern the carpenter, Magne the weaver, and Sylock the farmer.

Len jumped back in fright before turning to see the cocksure grins of the elders. “You killed this thing?!”

“Well,” Kat pointed towards it. “Yeah. It didn’t kill itself, you know.”

“It was fun!” Sylock claimed. “We trapped it, ambushed it and with our experience and newfound strength, it was a near-instant death! Guess we’re having bear-meat tonight!” Everyone cheered at the rare inclusion of protein in their otherwise dreary diets.

While they celebrated, I ripped the core out from its skull in a spray of blood. This one was just a hair larger than the wolf’s, but it would slip down a throat just the same.

A new procession of young hopefuls, the miners who had spent so much effort to unearth the rare gems, strode in to receive their cleansing, to become more than they once were. I welcomed them with open arms.