“We should take some time to analyze my spirit,” Bernt said as they entered the Mages’ Guild again. “I didn’t realize the structure of my spiritual sea was going to be this important.”

  “It might still not be.” Uriah hedged. “You only have an idea, so far, and even if you’re right, there’s no reason to think they would all follow the same patterns. Any sort of configuration should work as long as it can be used to absorb new magical potential. These other channels, loops, meridians or whatever we want to call them might just be something they invented to help pass more of their power down to their descendants. Twelve might be a natural maximum, or it’s just a traditional number for cultivators. Maybe elementals do something else.”

  “Yes, maybe,” Bernt waved a hand at him impatiently. “You’re getting lost in the details, man. We’ll figure it out. Let’s work out how many I have exactly, first.”

  The laboratory, when they arrived, was occupied by Katrin who was performing the movement exercises Bernt had been trying before. She was considerably more graceful than he had been, and Uriah suspected she’d been practicing them on her own already. She broke off when they arrived and flashed them a smile.

  “How did it go?”

  “Oh, you know,” Bernt said, sighing as he pulled a piece of chalk from his pocket and bent down to start drawing runes on the ground, “Alchemists.”

  “Master Alchemist Verene was polite, but didn’t seem very impressed by the recipe,” Uriah explained. “And she didn’t think much of Bernt’s insight that the twelve meridians might actually be the spiritual sea—or at least the main parts that make it up. It means that the obstructions that the body cleansing pill is supposed to clear are probably created by the spiritual manifestation pill’s interaction with the new cultivator’s native spirit.”

  “Oh?" She cocked her head to the side for a moment, thinking. "You mean it causes a deviation? Spiritual damage that they have to clear up before they can begin to pursue their path to immortality?”

  Uriah shrugged and sat down on a chair set against the wall with a little sigh. “No idea, but it means, even if we can get a body cleansing pill, we won’t be able to test it. We don’t have anyone who can use it.”

  Katrin’s eyebrows rose and she looked over at Bernt. “Oh?... Oh! So, that means you’re an energy storage cultivator, already?”

  Bernt grunted in acknowledgement, working his way around in a circle as he kept chalking down runes in sequence in a circle about two paces across. “It would make sense, since I can absorb magical potential and incorporate it into new growth in my mana network.”

  “Right. Okay, so what are you doing now?”

  “He wants help examining his spiritual sea. We’re going to see if there really are twelve component meridians, and if there are, we’ll want to see if their functions match up to anything from your stories, even in very general, thematic terms. Anything we can learn about how a spiritual sea is put together might help us when it comes to making new sorcerers, however we end up doing it.”

  Finishing with the chalk, Bernt pocketed it, stepped into the circle and lay down on his back, his entire torso resting inside it. As he did, his mana network manifested above him in blue light.

  The difference between the normal mage’s mana network and the sorcerous channels was obvious. A normal mage’s channels were, except for their investitures, a simple clean loop that wound once through the extremities and traditionally coursing up and down the spine on the way to the head. Investitures were essentially just highly complex knots of runes in that singular channel, three of which could collapse into an even more tangled knot when an augmentation formed.

  Most of the left side of Bernt’s body was mostly just like that—one investiture and a single, looping channel. The right side of his body was, by comparison, a mess.

  The spiritual sea was centered around his belly, extending upward a bit along his spine where several other small formations lay. It looked disorganized, to say the least. It looked charitably like a knot, or maybe a snarl of curly hair with a few looser and a few lumpier bits. The fact that the entire thing was twisted into runes and glyphs only made it more confusing. Many different channels looped out, connecting up to his head and to his right shoulder. Smaller veins spidered outward from the entire system into his flesh, including over to the left side, which lent the whole thing a strange invasive sort of organic quality.

  It was a far cry from the neat, almost geometric diagrams that mages used to map and study spellforms. At a glance, Uriah had no idea how they were supposed to even begin to untangle it.

  “That’s your spirit?!” Katrin asked, horrified. “How does it even work?”

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  Bernt shrugged. “That’s sorcery. It doesn’t feel this crazy from the inside, but the visual still helps me make sense of it.”

  She hummed skeptically. “And what have you figured out so far? How many meridians did you find?”

  “Eight, though I only know what four of them do. See this one? It starts at this tangent here…” he pointed to one channel that descended down into the mass, and traced it through to another bit of channel that looped out and back in, “... and ends at this other one here.” Uriah peered at it, squinting until eventually, finally, he found the spot where one channel terminated directly into another one in an odd sort of three-pronged intersection—a bizarre sight for any mage who knew what they were looking at.

  Katrin didn’t bother trying to make it out, she just looked expectantly at Bernt to continue, which he did after a moment. “It’s my stomach—the bit I have to activate to incorporate magical potential that’s already inside my body, like when I eat a magical material. It’s actually a pretty simple spellform, compared to the other ones, though I’m still not sure how it works, since it doesn’t really react to my own mana flow. I have to sort of… run my food through it. If I understand it right, that’s all you really need to be a ‘real’ sorcerer.”

  She waved the comment away. “No, a cultivator can’t function without their meridians—they would be crippled, and they’d never reach core formation without them.”

  “What?” Bernt blinked up at her in surprise. “You think that’s real? I assumed they were just confused about the spiritual sea. I mean,” he gestured at his projected spirit, “just look where it is.”

  Uriah winced, but he kept his mouth shut. He agreed with Bernt, but he’d known this would come up eventually. Katrin took her books very literally. According to the stories, cultivators would eventually condense some or all of their spirit down into a single, dense sort of ball—something that would obviously ruin the shaped channels that made it up in the first place. Despite that, it was supposed to make them more powerful, improve their control, give them access to more powerful techniques and, of course, extend their lifespans.

  Eventually, they were supposed to use it to make or house an immortal spirit for themselves that would allow them to ascend to a higher plane. Uriah was prepared to accept a lot when it came to a brand new branch of magic, but there were some things too fantastical to believe. A sorcerous mana network relied on the same familiar rune and glyph shapes that he already knew as a mage. Until he had reason to believe otherwise, he wasn’t going to accept that a mana network could function in such a mangled state.

  “Of course it’s real!” Katrin sniffed, offended. “Your meridians are the inborn part of your power you inherited from your bloodline. If you’re right, that actually means the abilities and affinity that you get from your initial spiritual sea. Then, during the energy storage phase, you are supposed to pursue your own path, which is supposed to lead you to some kind of heavenly truth where, finally, all of your spirit is balanced and in harmony with itself. The core only forms when all the different parts of your spirit become one—it’s nothing like the spiritual sea! There’s a really beautiful romance about this, where two dual cultivators—” She broke off, a blush rising in her cheeks, but her expression remained intense. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it’s real. You can’t just ignore this stuff because it sounds unfamiliar.”

  “When it’s in harmony?” Bernt stared at her and, for a moment, Uriah worried he might say something hurtful. He’d read that book, too, and he hadn’t really thought much of the magical theory in it. It had pretty clearly been meant as… entertainment. Unexpectedly, though, Bernt sat up and looked over at him, a grin spreading across his face.

  “Is it just me, or does that sound like a compatibility thing? Like for augmentations. All of the different investitures have to be compatible with each other—in harmony, right? It’s the same thing!”

  “No it isn’t!” Uriah said, trying and failing to keep his tone calm as his earlier frustration rose in his chest once more. Bernt was jumping to conclusions again, and they hadn’t even begun to test the last thing. “Sorcerers don’t have discrete investitures, and however you want to look at whatever they do have, a core cultivator has a lot more than three of them. It’s nothing like an augmentation!”

  “Eh… maybe.” Bernt allowed, though Uriah could see he’d already made up his mind.

  The hydromancer rubbed at his face, trying to calm himself down and pointed up at the small spellform structures along Bernt’s spine, projected up above his head by his rune circle, to change the subject. “What are those? They weren’t there when you showed me your mana network the first time, back at the inn.”

  Bernt looked up, and his grin widened. “That’s what my spirit grew after the dragon in Kostrom. They’re input modifiers for pyromancy spells. I haven’t had time to try them all out yet, but I recognize the way they’re structured. It’s basically the same design as for cold fire, but they’re all unique. If I’m right, I should be able to use them to burn almost anything.”

  “You gained the ability to… burn more things?” Uriah asked, underwhelmed. “Is that useful? I mean, regular fire can destroy almost anything if it’s hot enough.”

  “Well, yeah, sure…” Bernt said, “but destroying something with fire isn’t really the same thing as burning it. My elemental benefactor didn’t think so, at least, and it’s the one who made my spiritual sea. Fire is transformation and change. So, if I can truly ‘burn’ new things, that means I can transform them. Sort of. I don’t have any control over the outputs, which is unfortunate. I’m working on it, though. Hopefully Magister Pollock will have a few ideas”

  Uriah looked over at Katrin to see if she could make any sense of that, but she was squinting up at the projection of Bernt’s spirit, clearly not listening anymore.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bernt sighed, waving the topic away and lying back again to point at his own projected spirit. “Let’s look at the other meridians. There’s two nested together near the back here—one awakens magical materials to make fire elementals, and the other one lets me infuse my will into my spells along with some of my own magical—.”

  “—Hey, would that rune circle let me see my spirit, too?” Katrin interrupted, getting up to poke at the projection. “And can you make it bigger?”