“He’s just so… infuriating.” Uriah complained as Katrin danced through the movements of her “wind steps” exercise. Bernt had left moments after they’d finished the enormous rune circle, saying something about going down to the scryers to send a message to Halfbridge. “How can we make any reliable progress if he keeps jumping five steps ahead before we can even be sure we have the right way forward?”

  Katrin finished the sequence and looked up at the diffuse human-shaped cloud of blue light that followed her movements above her head, as if expecting the projection of her spirit to tell her how she did. A character in one of her books learned this exercise early in the story, and later used it as a technique to run up walls.

  Uriah found the story fascinating, though he couldn’t figure out how that could possibly work. It was an odd sequence of movements, with rapid, crisscrossing steps, a twisting turn combined with a strange sort of pivot, followed by an awkward sort of lunge at the end. Someone with the right alchemical augmentations could do something similar, but they didn’t rely on choreographed movements.

  “You worry too much about what Bernt is doing,” she said, meeting his eyes. “We can test the ideas ourselves. If he keeps having them, so much the better. Anything that sounds like concrete progress is worth any amount of annoyance. The temple of Noruk already sent my father a formal letter of inquiry about ‘the Underkeeper’, and the king has asked about the project as well – he thinks it’s undermining his political messaging. We need to show results, or we’re not going to last very long.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Uriah grumbled, “I just don’t like how improvisational it all is.”

  “Why?” She snorted delicately and covered her mouth. “Wait, are you jealous because he’s been right?”

  He gritted his teeth. “I’m not jealous! I just don’t like the idea of being reckless with something that’s going to involve messing with my spirit.” He gestured toward the projection above her head. “Or yours, for that matter.”

  “Oh?” She smiled, affected what she considered to be a demure pose and batted her eyes at him coyly. “You worry for the corruption of my soul? Will you save this jade beauty from the foul experiments of the demon-touched prodigy?”

  Uriah coughed and glanced at the door, heat rising in his cheeks. “I… ahem. Well, I certainly wouldn’t call him a prodigy. Demon-touched, though – that much is true. Those rumors didn’t come from nowhere, you know.”

  “That wasn’t the part you were supposed to fixate on,” she said, now visibly annoyed. “Come on, Uriah, what is it going to take for you to make a move? We’ve spent every day together for a month! Do you think I don’t see you looking?”

  “I… no. I just… you’re a noblewoman,” Uriah stammered and hesitated as Katrin’s eyes narrowed dangerously. He took a breath and continued, choosing his words carefully. “If your father heard that I… that we… well, I don’t think he’d be very happy. I’m an underkeeper – and not the underkeeper either. A cripple. I don’t know that I’m ready to be volunteered for the front lines of whatever war is brewing – especially not before we figure this out.”

  Katrin stood there and stared at him for a few seconds, her head cocked to the side as her expression warred with itself before finally settling into a determined frown. She marched over to him and, for a second, Uriah thought she was going to hit him. Instead, she plopped down in his lap, grabbed his face and planted a kiss on his lips. She was warm and smelled like fresh sweat and lavender.

  “You’re far too careful,” she said while Uriah tried to recover his breath. Then she slapped him, hard. “And that’s for being a coward. My father wouldn’t have you killed – he’d probably just arrange for you to get a lucrative job offer somewhere far away.”

  Then she kissed him again.

  “What if he’s not as… merciful as you think?” he asked when the two came up for air again. Duke Rehnhild was, by all accounts, a practical-minded military man. Uriah couldn’t imagine he was squeamish, or especially merciful to people who got in his way.

  She shrugged, eyes alight with reckless confidence as she rose and stepped back into the large rune circle. “Then you should probably help me figure this out. We would both be in a much better position to determine our own fates as two of the kingdom’s first sorcerers.”

  “You, especially,” he agreed. That seemed like a thin thread to hang his life on, but… he wasn’t so sure he cared, anymore. “And if it goes the other way? Aren’t you worried I just want you for the job offer, then?”

  “Well…” She grinned at him. “Maybe I can arrange for it to be in Miria. We could go together.”

  ***

  Bernt returned to the laboratory still thinking about what it might mean if a sorcerer could really “condense” their spirit down into a core in a sort of analogue to a proper augmentation. He had no idea how such a sorcerer would actually cast spells – much less how they’d do it without understanding the principles behind spellforms and runecraft, which, as far as he knew, neither natural sorcerers nor cultivators did. Hopefully, Pollock would have some ideas about it. They weren’t going to get there anytime soon, but if he kept his spirit growing, he knew he’d find out eventually.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  If possible, he wanted to avoid being blindsided by new discoveries the way he had been after his encounter with the great fire elemental. It had been two months and he still didn’t really understand what was going on in his own spirit. That just wasn’t acceptable for a mage, much less someone who considered himself a proper wizard.

  When he opened the door to the laboratory and stepped inside, he could immediately tell that something had changed. For one, Uriah wasn’t sitting down in his chair anymore – he was standing in the circle they’d made, shuffling through some kind of movement exercise. That was unusual, but not what made him pause. The hydromancer’s hand was resting on Katrin’s hip, guiding her along the same movements while he pointed up at the projection over his own head.

  “ – way the technique is described, the motions are supposed to help you guide the flow. I think you’re supposed to push the mana out of your feet – like this.”

  The projection only showed Uriah’s mana network, not the mana flow itself, but it did offer some indirect insight into his use of mana as he moved. As he stepped forward and lunged, the looping channel that marked his leg in the projection brightened briefly and then dimmed when he channeled the mana out of his foot. Bernt could also feel the slight disturbance in the ambient mana as he did so.

  “Okay, but how are you doing that?” she asked. “I’m doing the motions, but nothing’s happening.”

  “It’s sort of like trying to wiggle your ears, at first.” Bernt called as he approached. “Or learning to whistle. It doesn’t work until you get the hang of it.”

  Uriah turned a little too quickly, his eyes wide. Bernt could practically see him start to sweat. Katrin, for her part, only looked at him expectantly. He continued, ignoring the hydromancer.

  “Everyone has a spirit, and spirits channel mana – there’s no reason you can’t figure it out. I’m not sure you can ever really get any fine control if you can’t directly sense what you’re doing, but if we’re right, you should be able to move it around a little, at least. I imagine it’s easier with a spiritual sea, but there has to be a reason cultivators learn this first.”

  Katrin frowned at him and then over at Uriah for a moment. Then she made a shooing motion at him. “Move, I want to try something.”

  He complied and went to sit in his chair to watch, still throwing worried glances toward Bernt. For his part, Bernt continued to ignore him. He didn’t know what was going on between the two of them, but he had enough worries of his own. If Uriah wanted to get involved with a noblewoman, that was his problem.

  She repeated the movements on her own, far more smoothly than Uriah had done a moment before. It was a different exercise than Bernt had tried earlier, without any hand motions and a lot of footwork. Nothing happened, but she continued to repeat the pattern again without stopping the moment she finished.

  Bernt kept an eye on the projection above her head, looking for any evidence that her mana might be moving. As she kept repeating the pattern, though, he noticed something else. The way she moved was as though she was performing a dance, but the movements themselves were… odd. Something about it was familiar.

  He felt his eyes widen in realization as he realized what he was looking at. He cleared his throat.

  “Hey, you know, I always thought of it kind of like painting – when I first learned to move my mana, I mean. The stuff is all throughout your body. You’re just sort of… leaving a little bit out in the world, painting it on with your feet. Just imagine it sticking to the floor.”

  Uriah shook his head at him, scoffing. “What are you talking about? She’s supposed to get it into motion, right? It's like water. It can sit still inside you, flow around, or flow out. You have to sort of pour it.”

  Yes, well, I’m sure it’s much easier if you can feel it,” Katrin growled, launching into the sequence again. Light flickered, and Uriah shot to his feet. Bernt took a step forward as if to verify what he’d just seen. Had that just happened?

  “That was it!” the hydromancer said, pointing up at the projection with visible excitement. “You did something. Do it again!”

  “I didn’t feel – ” she said, but interrupted herself and shook her head. Then she closed her eyes, hesitated and began again. This time, it was more pronounced. The feet of her projection took on a slight glow. It built and dimmed a few times as she moved, but held steady for the most part, brightening near the end. Then, as she reached the last step before the final lunge, something happened. Her foot stopped as if she’d struck an invisible step and shot up, throwing her off balance to send her crashing backward on her rear in an undignified heap.

  Uriah rushed to her side and crouched down to help her sit up. “Are you alright? What happened?”

  “Ow!” she groaned and gathered her feet under her, looking around. “Something kicked me. What was that?”

  Bernt grinned and walked into the circle. Using his left foot, he drew out the pattern he’d noticed – much smaller than Katrin had done. Then he mentally edited out the additional spellform modifiers that he sensed manifesting all around it and stepped on it, activating the spell as he did.

  Knowing what to expect, he kept his leg stiff and shifted his weight forward, but the force spell still launched him up at an imperfect angle. He barely caught himself on the way down, stumbled and turned his ankle. He reeled, wheeling his arms to regain his balance. Then he turned, grinning at Katrin and Uriah’s stunned expressions.

  “It’s a spell!” Bernt laughed and winced as he stepped forward again, eyes watering. He sat and rubbed at his aching ankle. “Just a single glyph, really – force. She drew it out with her feet. The lunge at the end is supposed to help her activate the spell, and probably help make sure she gets thrown forward and not back like she did.”

  “I… cast a spell?” Katrin asked, looking from Bernt to Uriah with wide eyes.

  Uriah frowned resignedly at Bernt, but he smiled at Katrin when she turned to face him and nodded. “Yes. I mean, it looks like – ”

  “I’m a sorceress!” she cheered excitedly, throwing her arms around him.

  “No, not exa…” Bernt trailed off, realizing that the noblewoman was now kissing Uriah, and doing it in a manner that made Bernt want to leave immediately. She wasn’t actually a sorceress, of course, but he supposed this wasn’t the time to argue the point. He cleared his throat. “Ehm. I’m… going to write up our findings for Zaira.”

  He hurried out of the room, unsure if they’d even heard him. It didn’t matter. He’d just witnessed someone with no magical talent of any sort cast a spell. Sort of. It was incredibly rudimentary, and the casting process was absurdly slow, impractical and potentially dangerous to the user. And yet it proved once again that the Mages’ Guild didn’t know everything. More importantly, it validated their research.

  The alchemists could drag their feet all they wanted now – he didn’t need them anymore. He had proof that cultivators – and even Katrin’s fictional novels about cultivators – could be used to discover fundamental truths that the guild had failed to grasp for nearly a thousand years.