I woke up, and that was confirmation enough of success. It was time to get to work. My entire purpose, now, was to make my friends and fellow captives powerful enough to escape. The first step to doing would be to make myself more powerful. I wished I still had knuckles to crack.

Then I tried to see. It wasn’t disorienting since I had no body to experience nausea, but the feeling of sensory overload was vaguely unpleasant. And that was just my soulstone; I couldn’t actually see any place that I didn’t have mana at, but where I did I could see everything. Each facet of my distasteful yellow gem, every ridge, whorl, every inner fracture. Mana—my whole life, it was a deadly fog that rained from the sky when you got too close to a Hellmouth. It corrupted and killed and it made tenebrium, and now—now it was mine. It pulsed throughout my crystal mind, my now-vulnerable soul, a small thread of it emerging out of nowhere at some point inside me.

If I could, I would have cackled.

I had demonfuel under my control. Not enough though. A small excess that I could grab on to and swirl around. I could even poke it out of the edge of my soulstone and get a peek at air, which was so much less empty than I’d thought. Then it fell from my grip mental, caught in the inexorable force of gravity. If I tried to grab the mana that raced through my soulstone, I knew Bad Things would happen. I knew it more surely than I knew the twin moons would rise.

Alright. I had some mana, but not enough to do anything useful. I needed more and had no idea how to do that. Senz might be able to help, but just as I couldn’t see anything outside the mana I had under my control, I couldn’t hear anything else either. It was a paradoxical situation: I couldn’t learn how to get more mana without getting more mana.

I tried experimenting. I didn’t dare move the automatic flow of mana within my soulstone, but I examined it from every angle I could. Eventually, I found out that the mana wasn’t simply created out of nothing. It came from somewhere. Where that was, I had no idea. But I had a tiny gate inside my soulstone that let it flow within, where it was immediately … purified. It was as if there were little tiny tags attached to each spark of mana saying EVIL in big letters. Something inside me took those tags off, and I got the feeling I could handle way more at a time. The gate was the block.

At least I knew the problem. That was the first step to a solution. The next was more complicated. It took a lot of giving up and retrying over and over until I just got bored and started swirling mana around. That felt right, somehow, and by then I had enough to push the circling mana outside of my soulstone like an intangible shell. When that happened, I knew just how I was going to get more mana. I added to my mana shell until it thickened, solidified, and then … then, I sort of blacked out. Instincts I didn’t know I had completely took over. My soulstone expanded, leaving more space for my mana gate. The rush of extra mana seemed like a flood compared to before. I felt almost giddy.

I recreated my shell much faster than before until it solidified, then did it again and again, quadrupling my flow of mana each time. Then I think I hit some sort of fundamental limit because while the mana still became solid, it no longer became part of my soulstone. Oh well, I still had plenty to play with. I packed a ton of mana into a loop and sent it outside of my crystalline surface, swirling in the air.

I finally found out where I was. I could have figured it out from the small glimpses I’d had earlier of the air, but with nothing to compare it to I hadn’t known what to make of it. But now I did. Somehow, Senz had arranged for me to be put in a cave in the Nightetch Woods. How she managed that I had no idea. I was even on top of some naturally formed pedestal. Not that I thought my soulstone deserved it—the off yellow along with all the flaws made for quite an ugly sight. I appreciated the thought all the same. My questing loop of mana expanded to fill the entire cave, feeling out every bit of moss and lichen and all the bones and dirt. When I tried to see outside, though, I got quite a shock. Natural light pretty much killed my control over mana, even through the thick shield the corrupted forest made. It all fell to the ground, which reabsorbed every last spark.

I needed to go deeper. I knew that with certainty, the source my new instincts. It was time to learn how to change the world. In small, controlled doses.

The key, which I learned after countless hours of practice and stress, was to just not focus on it too much. I just needed to put a bunch of mana into the rock until it was almost overflowing, think about it vanishing, and I was done.

As it turned out, putting that much mana into the rock allowed me to memorize its structure completely, and with an equivalent amount of mana, I could just as easily create more rock. I acquired a sample of every inorganic substance within reach, and then when I acquired a bit of moss I devoured each plant as well. Then I smoothed over my cave, creating a completely circular chamber with a tunnel toward the outside which went perpendicular to my chamber for a bit before leading in. It shielded me from the light outside, so anyone who came in could just deal with it. I didn’t want to have to struggle with my instincts every second of the day when they were so easily quieted.

“This is new.”

Senz! Finally, she was back. Now she could tell me how to improve my Domain. It was small and I was weak, but she definitely knew more than she was letting on. She’d brought an unfamiliar face with her (I checked—it turned out that privacy didn’t really exist anymore within my Domain) but if she really didn’t want to share her secrets with just anyone she could tell him to leave.

I hesitated, then realized there was a small flaw with that idea.

I didn’t know how to speak.