“It’s all right here!” Katrin insisted for the hundredth time, waving her copy of “To Shake the Heavens” at Uriah. “You can open your spiritual sea by cycling and purifying your energies and expelling impurities from your body. Maybe you and Bernt can travel across the country to summon an elemental that can help you eventually, but this is something you can do right now. Just try it!”

  Uriah suppressed a groan and rose from his chair in what was technically Bernt’s office. In actuality, they were the ones who worked here, while Bernt himself spent most of his time in the attached laboratory.

  “There’s nothing there to open!” he said. “I told you, if there were ‘blocked’ channels in my body, I would be able to sense them. All this stuff about blocked meridians and unlocking existing spiritual structures is bunk. There’s no point to it. I need something like the spiritual manifestation pill that the Mirian sects use, or the blessing of a powerful sacred beast or, apparently, something like Bernt’s elemental. Human sorcerers aren’t born, they’re made. I’m sure of it.”

  “It won’t hurt you to try it out. Who knows what sorts of things mages have missed for centuries just because they were so certain they knew everything! Bernt even tried it.”

  “And he didn’t find anything,” Uriah groaned. Besides, Bernt was an actual sorcerer. If these meditation and qi cycling techniques did anything, an actual sorcerer should have noticed. He sighed and put his hands on Katrin’s shoulders – a gesture that would have been far too familiar a few weeks before.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I know you’re just trying to help. But even if you’re right, we don’t know how long it’ll take. The meditation exercise doesn’t give us any feedback, so we can’t even tell if we’re making progress and that means we won’t have anything to record for Zaira. Why don’t we try the alchemy thing again? At least we have some clearer information to work with there, and there are actual alchemists in Norhold who can help us figure out if there’s anything there.”

  “Mmm,” Katrin sighed and sat down on her chair, arranging her dress with practiced hands. “I suppose we have to sooner or later. I just don’t like working with guild people. They’re always so difficult.”

  “We had some trouble with the alchemists in Halfbridge,” Uriah sighed. “They’re awful about proper alchemical waste disposal, whatever they say officially. You wouldn’t believe how much Underkeeper work is just mitigating the damage they do.”

  Katrin blinked. “Really? I was talking more about how aggressively they negotiate. They’re real cutthroats.”

  “Well, we have a budget now, right? We’re not going to solve this without their help. Let’s go get Bernt and talk to Zaira.”

  They found Bernt right next door in the lab, holding a page of notes in front of his face with one hand as he stepped to the side, raising one knee high while making a slow, underhanded throwing motion with his free hand. His movements weren’t fluid – his robes weren’t cut for full range of motion – but Uriah recognized it all the same from the experiments he and Katrin had designed.

  “You need to use both hands,” she admonished the sorcerer, stepping up to snatch the paper away. “And manage your breathing to control the flow of your qi. It’s important! This is foundation stage training, you’re supposed to master it before you even try to become a real cultivator.”

  “I’m trying,” Bernt complained. “It’s not as easy as it sounds on paper, and it’s hard to remember everything. The breathing thing is only making it harder, and I’m not convinced it’s actually necessary. I don’t need my breath to move my mana around, it responds directly to my will.”

  The noblewoman threw up her hands in frustration. “You can’t just pick and choose which parts of the experiments you think are worth trying – it’s a single technique! How can you expect to learn anything if you won’t even follow the instructions? You’re just as bad as Uriah, thinking you already know everything.”

  Bernt flushed, visibly uncomfortable. “No, that's not it. I have a theory!” He pointed at a small stack of papers sitting on the floor nearby. “Look, all of the meditation exercises you gave me start with breathing techniques and trying to sense the energy moving through your spirit – your mana. And the way they control mana flow also focuses heavily on the body and the spirit. The mana manipulation is mostly indirect and where it isn’t, it’s extremely rudimentary. That’s weird – it doesn’t make sense. Sensing mana is supposed to be easy for a mage – we don’t have to try to do it. So… maybe it’s actually just a crutch for cultivators who aren’t mageborn.”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Aren’t… what do you mean?” Katrin looked over at Uriah uncertainly. “What are they, then?”

  “You mean…” Uriah frowned. “Okay, maybe. It makes sense. If sorcery is the result of manifesting the spirit, or sort of implanting a spiritual sea, then you shouldn’t actually need to be a mage to do it.”

  “You do for my rehabilitation method, since you need a proper, shaped mana network to make an investiture using my procedure.” Bernt clarified, “But for cultivators? I don’t think so. We don’t have a way to test it, yet. I think it would make sense, though.”

  “So, what about the ones who are? Wouldn’t they know this? I mean, a mageborn cultivator would probably have a huge advantage, right?” Katrin slapped Uriah’s shoulder so hard it stung, They would be a genius, a rare talent! It’s all over the stories.” Her breathing hitched and turned to face him, her eyes growing wide. “Everyone else would have been born normal. That means… I…” she looked down at the page in her hands and then back up at the two spellcasters. She turned and scurried for the door.

  “I’m taking this!”

  Uriah stared after her in bemusement. He loved her enthusiasm, but sometimes, she worried him. Could a normal person really learn to manipulate mana? And what would happen if she failed? He sighed. Bernt raised an eyebrow at him.

  “What’s going on with you two, anyway?” he asked. “I understand why she’s part of the project. Her father is the duke and her books are what we’re working from, so she’s sort of an expert. But… are you together?”

  “What?” Uriah flushed. “Don’t be an idiot. She’s a noblewoman!”

  Of course, there was something there. When Olias had first brought him to the Duke’s library, she’d just seemed pleased to find someone interested in her books, whatever the reason. If anything, the fact that he wanted to study them to learn real information about magic only excited her more. She’d helped him, finding recipes, detailed technique descriptions, and even writing up explanations of cultural norms that might offer hints at the nature of a cultivator’s magics.

  He’d maintained his distance at first, wary of disrespecting someone in her position, but she’d worn him down almost immediately. While Katrin had a forceful, assertive personality, she was also warm and enthusiastic. Within the first week, she started scheduling study sessions for the two of them at the Duke’s residence, using her influence to get him into the private libraries of her friends and introducing him to her favorite book sellers for additional source material. Uriah couldn’t have refused if he wanted to, and he didn’t. She was smart, driven and competent, despite the exasperated comment her father had dropped when he’d seen them reading in his library a few weeks ago that she was living in a dream world.

  A dream world that, just maybe, she could make real.

  “Do you think she can really do it?” Uriah asked, still looking at the door through which she’d disappeared.

  Bernt shrugged. “Maybe? I mean, she was right, wasn’t she? We’re making a lot of assumptions. We don’t know that only a mage can manipulate mana. It’s just not practical to try if you can’t sense it.”

  Uriah grunted in agreement. “Not normally, no. What could she even do with it?”

  It was tricky to shape mana, and some novices took months to shape their first spell. If you couldn't even sense what you were doing... where would you even start?

  Experimentally, he circulated mana through his mana network, focusing on his tangent as he did so. He had to actively manage the flow in his own body with his mind to smooth out the turbulence caused by his disability, which caused mana to flow back on itself in his botched investiture. It had taken him weeks to master after his accident, and if his concentration slipped, he couldn’t manifest a spellform at all. It took considerable concentration and slowed his spellcasting.

  Of course, the tangent would also appear in his spellforms, forcing him to manually modify them when he laboriously did manage to manifest it. Still, it had become second nature in the years since his botched investiture. This time, instead of casting a spell, Uriah tried to feel if simply moving his mana around had an effect on his body. He stretched out his fingers and then, feeling a bit silly, punched at the air.

  Nothing happened.

  He stopped and looked up to see Bernt hopping up and down, frowning down at himself in concentration with his eyes closed. Uriah could sense the whisper of mana moving in the sorcerer’s vicinity. Apparently, they’d been thinking much the same thing.

  Bernt opened his eyes, saw that Uriah was looking and shrugged, chuckling.

  “I don’t know, man. Maybe it’s just to prepare them for having a sorcerous mana network? They have to move mana through it, somehow. I never thought about how natural sorcerers do it. There has to be a way, otherwise they would need some kind of spiritual organ, like a heart, to push it around. We would have seen that, I think.”

  “Do you think I should go and get her?” Uriah asked. “We were going to go talk to Zaira about the alchemy stuff we told you about. I thought maybe we could commission an alchemist to try to make a body cleansing pill. Katrin found an entire recipe in a book we found at the market last week, and I thought we might at least be able to figure out if it sounds like real alchemy or if the author was just taking liberties.”

  Bernt shook his head. “It’s fine. I mean, the exercise is probably meant for people who can’t sense mana, right? I’m tired of messing with it for now, anyway. Let’s just go talk to Zaira. Do you have that recipe?”

  Uriah grunted in confirmation and headed for the door, trying to untangle his feelings. He was happy for Katrin on the one hand – she wanted very badly to be a part of the world in her stories. If it really was accessible to people born without the talent to become a mage, then she might get her wish. On the other hand, he worried that the reality of magic would leave her disappointed. If mageborn cultivators really were the geniuses of that world, where did that leave everyone else? In Uriah’s own experience, nothing could kill a dream quite like living it and finding that you didn’t measure up.