John wiped sweat from his eyes as he gasped for breath at the summit, drinking sparingly from his last bottle of electrolyte and sugary boosted goodness. With a groan of relief he unstrapped the crude weights on his limbs and torso, then did some limbering stretches. He shivered a bit in the bite of the wind and quickly toweled off before heading inside to change and freshen up.

John stripped out of his track shorts and t-shirt, then sponged off the worst of his funk. He unabashedly admired his cut and toned figure in the small mirror he’d taped to the wall next to his ‘dresser’ (a pile of luggage on a block of wood). The rationing and targeted exercises had melted what little baby fat he’d had left, and the body resistance exercises left corded and rippled muscle standing starkly under his skin. It had been just over two months since he’d traveled through the portal, and one lunar cycle into his deal with the Striker Company. John chuckled to himself, as he always did when he thought that name: though he had learned the proper words, he still thought of them as the Shiny Feather Brigade in his head, which was surprisingly accurate considering how distractible some of them were. Alikir was only the most conspicuously scatterbrained, Garrus and Auriean had their moments too.

It had been a month where John had stretched himself to the limits both scholastically and physically, and the gains were impressive. He was able to speak the modern deviation of Arcane fluently with, what he was told anyway, was a very stuffy accent and choice of words. Of course, by fluently John mostly meant that his grammar no longer reduced the mercenaries to tears. There were still gargantuan vocabulary gaps, but since he had centuries of memories and written accounts around his neck and, by now, a complete mastery of the syllabary, he could always sound out a word he didn’t know to his hapless language tutors.

Still, while it had been a grueling month of effort, it had also been one of wonder and magic. John had learned so much about the strange new world of mana and cultivation just by the casual way that it was manifested in his companions' every day actions. Thirsty? No worries, just a small cantrip will fill a water skin. Need a fire started? No firebow or striker needed, another cantrip summoned a few seconds of some flammable hot burning fuel into existence. Not strong enough to move that boulder that has offended your gaze? Why haven’t you been fusing mana to your muscles, transforming your flesh and blood into strength like unto steel and stone? Hot? Summon a breeze, or use your preternatural control of your body to literally force the heat out of your skin. John saw a thousand miricals a day, and then was told he was looking at the lowest levels of magic.

Speaking of the company, they had decamped yesterday to meet with a trader contact of Kerris’. While the gate and assembly were impressive finds, if they weren’t going to part it for pieces it had reached the end of its usefulness to novice mana cultivators. One thing that had troubled John was the question of if the door and window were taken out, how would the gate facility remain protected and undiscovered? Kerris easily answered this worry by showing him a series of runes by the crystal timer, mentioning it controlled the part of the array that was causing it to gather mana. Without that effect the depleted manastone pillar wouldn’t register to even an Adept’s senses unless they were atop the plateau themselves. And why would they be here? This place was considered almost barren by advanced cultivators, and the loss of access to the rarified mana of the middle and far kingdoms made it doubly unlikely that anyone with real talent would venture there. That she and her team had already siphoned all of the remaining wisps of free mana that had accompanied the gate discharge went unspoken.

Now that he had the basics down, he could ‘thumb’ through his mental index, and there, in bright flashes of bolded letters were the words START HERE. When he focused on the letters with his mental energy he was greeted by a simple preface, “Foundations of the Unsullied Soul School.” What followed was the very basics of the cosmology of the cultivators who had risen in the Empire of Arcane.

Much of it was similar to what he already knew of the universe, and in some places their chemistry and physics wasn’t as unified or as developed as what he had known, but the additional element of mana had significant changes. Mana was a multi-phase substance that seemed to, much like the photon existed as a wave and a particle, interact with the physical and spiritual worlds. The philosophers of the empire had a profound advantage over those of Earth in that they indeed had a way by which to measure the soul. Over the millennia they had found that the more mana that a living being could house, the stronger its vitality; but there were caveats to this rule. Mana was strongly mutagenic, not only to the flesh, but the mind and soul itself. This is where cultivators entered the field. Through discipline and specific imagery and techniques, they were able to shape the raw mana, polluted by interactions with countless psyches and the instincts of plants and beasts, and in this process found that the changes mana wrought could be guided. Furthermore, they discovered that there was a proto-imagery that mana was supremely sensitive too, which became the basis of the common language of the Arcane Empire, to better shape the people’s development and nurture talented mana-sensitives passively.

But where does the mana come from? Why were some deposits seemingly hostile or inimical towards sentient life? Why were their manaless lands or places that acted as natural mana siphons, weakening those who wandered into such a sink unprepared?

These were questions still being probed by the sages, but recently great strides had been made in answering the first. With the rise of the spatial magicians and the network of gates, the Empire had cataloged phenomenon from a thousand worlds, and one thing was always true. Where space was weakened, mana flourished and intruded, where the web of realms was tightly woven, mana faded. What connection did this have to the void steel and other rare minerals that inhabited the space beyond the planes and their profound ability to negate or shape mana? Perhaps none.

Of, course; these thoughts were just John’s synthesis of the pedantic monotony of whatever researcher had written this overview. Seriously, to express ideas that could be summed in minutes over a day’s worth of reading, it made John wonder if these scholars were paid by the word! But after all that tedium John’s heart started to race as he found what he’d been looking for. The cultivation method honed from over twenty thousand years of trial and error, a perfect path to magus and then framework to advance beyond archmage, and it all began here.

“Life is chaos, and mana reflects life in this way. To have mastery over one’s self is to have mastery over the world. The Unsullied Spirit School tempers the mind and body to not passively gorge on mana, but to winnow out the influence of the world. Those who would learn this method must meet stringent criteria and suffer some hardships in their early path, because only through tempering and careful measure can the dross of the world be loosened, and consumed in the refining flame.

First, Sever the heart. Mana links all things, and all souls long to touch and be touched. Deny this to yourself that you may become yourself. Cut all ties that bind you, even within the school, save those with your master who will guard you from outside interference.

Abstain from mana: the less mana that has integrated into your soul and body, the faster you will be able to clear the intentions you’d unknowingly absorbed.

As you gain mastery of yourself and mana these restrictions will loosen, as our purpose is to grow within the world, not apart from it. However it is vitally important to avoid deviation from one tenet until the soul’s foundation is unshakable.

Abstain from sex. Even those fools that deem it as ‘casual’ and ‘without strings’ do in this way sow their own soul with a thousand seeds that will later grow to hinder them. Such mingling of the soul is anathema to the mana forms that are the heart of this technique. Go elsewhere if you cannot rise above physical pleasures and devote yourself to nurturing your perfect self.”

What followed was a meditation and technique and a series of glyph patterns the new initiate was to form inside their consciousness. But John had not made it there as he was screaming in horror that…

“I’M GONNA DIE A VIRGIN IN THIS STRANGE MAGIC WORLD!”

Rule #8- The greater the treasure the higher the cost.