Martin had just left, and Kael, looking up at the reddening sky, decided there was not much else but returning home to do today. Making his way back home, moments from their conversation flashed through his head. There was much he would have to think about.

Even without considering his mess of personal life, Martin had answered quite a few of his questions about magic. While he had a somewhat shaky grasp of the first of the three steps, the second would probably still take him some time.

The walk back home was boring. Doubts, memories, and questions pressed his mood down. While the elation of finally having a friend, of all the fun he had just talking with Martin, served as a counterweight to balance him somewhere in the middle.

Kael got back to his hideout without much trouble, but, as if in a daze, remembered nothing of the journey there. Suddenly finding himself on the familiar roof, a cold shower ran down his back. While not difficult, the way up was not without its dangers, and falling from that height would not be healthy. Shaking the imaginary scenarios of his broken body from his mind, he vowed to do better in the future.

Finding a comfortable way to sit on the hard ground was not easy, but he did not need much to find peace to meditate. Once he found a position, he closed his eyes and began to meditate again. He had meant to ask Martin about meditation as an aid to sensing ambient mana, but the topic had never come up.

Somehow their conversations always turned away from the original topic, going off on long and mostly funny tangents. Not that he could blame Martin for that. It was, in fact, often him that suddenly thought of something funny, derailing the conversation from there. Shaking his head with a smile at the very recent memory, he refocused on the task at hand. Now was not the time to delve into his relationship with Marin. It was the time to delve into the ambient mana.

Eyes still closed, he focused inwards first. Slowly he felt himself slip into the state that he had come to know as meditation. Before his imaginary eyes, he began to delve inside himself to his mana pool. It might have taken him days to figure out how to do it, but he had only failed a few times since then, making the method somewhat reliable. The process began with building an imaginary version of himself.

How did his eyebrows look? How was his body shaped? The process became easier with practice, and it only took him a few minutes to establish a complete image. Well, a decently complete image anyway. There were simply too many details. Deciding on what to focus his shaping was still an ongoing process, but this was not the time for that.

After establishing a connection to his mana pool, he turned his attention outwards. Using the image of himself and his mana pool as some sort of anchor, he tried to feel the ambient mana. Nothing worked. Imagining a fog of mana swirling around his image only made it harder to keep it intact. One by one, Kael went through every idea he had. As expected, all of them failed to produce results.

Only slightly demotivated by his failure, Kael got ready for bed after hours of meditation. Today he failed. Tomorrow he might also fail. But one day, he would not fail. That was a day worth waiting for.

~~~~~~~~~~

It was in this manner that day after day passed in demoralizing training. Aside from the pleasures of food, only the regular messages from Martin kept Kael motivated enough to stick with his schedule. Sadly Martin did not have much time to meet with Kael at the moment. There was a lot of schoolwork, and his parents were still angry at him for staying out so late. With his limited funds, finding new and exciting things to try was a challenge that he welcomed with pleasure.

His conversations with Martin had also fallen into a comfortable rhythm. There was still some awkwardness thanks to his long time without social contact but his apprehension towards others diminished a little every day. Magic was only rarely a topic of their discussions. There was just not much to talk about until Kael finally managed to complete the task of connecting his mana pool to the ambient mana.

At least on that front, his efforts had not been without success. His work on holding the image of himself while he meditated had increased his mental fortitude a lot. Not only did this help him find his mana pool faster, but it also made the second step easier. Just three days after his last face-to-face with Martin, he had finally felt the ambient mana that surrounded him.

Since then, he had been working on the last step. In theory, this should be the easiest part of the process. He would only have to somehow get the ambient mana to move through a funnel into his mana pool. How to get the mana to move had turned out to be... challenging. For the first time, his mental image seemed to fail him. After begrudgingly admitting that he did not know how to move forward, he asked Martin for help.

In the end, it turned out that he needed something to influence the mana with. Everything else was just about his perception, but here he would have to affect something outside of his own body. Thankfully the answer was simple. To interact with mana, you needed just one thing: mana of your own. How to do that though... Well, that was the question he had been trying to answer for the last two days.

Opening his eyes again after another failed attempt, he let out a sigh and stood up to walk around a little. He came to a halt by the wall where, oh so long ago, the old man shot his fireball into. Touching the ragged edges of the hole, he felt the strange texture of the area. All around the point of impact the concrete was rough and hard, while what he felt under his fingertips was smooth, almost like a sheet of glass.

What had the old man said about the spell? He had only talked about how it was done. What his magic was doing in the equation that produced this much destruction. Shouldn't he have been focused on the explosion itself? Or the fireball? Its size or temperature? Why was he so focused on the process? The motion? "Haa, maybe you could explain it to me, old man." The sheer potential for destruction that the Archmage had shown him and the healing he had seen Martin perform represented two different sides of the same coin. While certainly terrifying, the sheer potential that magic offered made Kael excited for the future.

Quickly getting back to his meditation spot, he sat down and closed his eyes. The image came to him quickly. No time was wasted, and after a few moments of work, he had the connection established. Next, he turned his attention to the outside. Wisps of energy were swirling all around him and, represented by colorful balls, around his image. Now came the hard part.

Keeping the already established image alive, he focused on his mana pool. Since he needed his own mana to start the process, it was only logical to begin with the font of mana he had seen when he first awakened. Recalling everything he remembered about that experience, he began to form the bowl and strange contraption hovering over it.

The complex form was hard to grasp, and he knew that he needed to let go of part of his self-image to not be overwhelmed. One by one, he removed details, eventually only keeping the abstract notion of the connection to the outside and a few of the balls representing the ambient mana. Even with all of that, it took him nearly an hour, and all of his concentration, to produce something roughly resembling what he had seen. Happy with his own achievement, he almost lost control of his creation. The image in his mind had turned fuzzy, and it took some effort from Kael to make it snap back into place.

Now he just needed to connect the three different images. Then he could make balls of mana of his own and use them to nudge the ambient balls into the tunnel. He already had experience connecting the tunnel and the ambient mana, so he did that first. Next, he moved the tunnel towards his mana pool and, without any involvement of his own, the two connected.

The entire construct of three parts suddenly snapped together. Like puzzle pieces that fit perfectly together, they stabilized each other, reducing the strain on his mind to almost zero. Now that the heavy burden had been lifted from his mind, he took a small break. Once he regained some of his concentration, he began to experiment with the new construct.

Almost instinctively, he willed his mana pool to emit mana into the tunnel. They, too, took the form of small balls. These, however, were grey. Kael watched in anticipation as the grey balls traveled through the tunnel. Once they were in the same space that the ambient mana was in, he felt a weak connection to his grey balls of mana. Weak as it was, controlling them took some time to get used to.

In the end, he only managed to maneuver one of the bright, colorful whisps of ambient mana into the tunnel and subsequently into his mana pool. Once it entered the mana pool, he felt as if he had just had a too big meal. The feeling was not uncomfortable per se, but it was enough to disrupt his meditation, leaving him utterly exhausted.

Crawling back below his tarp, Kael found a decent position to lay down in. Closing his eyes, it did not take long for him to drift off to the land of dreams, a big smile still visible on his face.