The First Ring of Wood
The auctioneer looked at the skinny man and asked.
"Don't you have twelve?"
The skinny man glared at Chris, then raised his paddle.
The auctioneer pumped a fist and turned to Chris.
"Twelve."
Come back with thirteen, that meant.
Chris beckoned the mage standing guard. When the man approached, Chris stripped off his robe, piled his staff and his high-grade and mid-grade mana stones on top of it, and set his spatial pouch on the heap as well. The eleven supreme-grade stones he had set aside were already in the box.
"Can you change all this into supreme-grade mana stones?"
The mage looked the lot over carefully, then nodded.
"I'll give you two."
Chris handed it over, robe and all.
"Thirteen!"
The auctioneer lit up.
"Thirteen! Do I hear fourteen?"
Chris spoke up.
"I'm the last one in. I've shaken out everything but my underwear, so if someone here still has money to spare, take it."
He bought a single defensive magic tool and let every other lot go. The fat man and the skinny man, though, walked away with a great many things. Whether their mana stones had run dry, neither of them raised another bid.
The auctioneer made his declaration.
"The magic safe is sold to the adventurous mage in the very back row. May there be something worthy inside it. With that, the auction is concluded."
He closed the session, then added:
"Anyone who desires protection, come find me."
In the world of mages, they say the greatest crime is the crime of owning treasure. Anyone who wins a precious lot stands a fine chance of being ambushed on the road home, and with that in mind the Black Hand Guild offered protection as well. Not for free, of course.
Chris paid his winning bid, clutched the magic safe he received to his chest, and hurried over to the auctioneer.
"I want protection."
Jabril led him to a reception room.
"Seeing you safely out of the city will cost a single mana stone."
"High-grade?"
"You do tell dull jokes. Supreme-grade, obviously."
Chris made a show of rummaging through his pockets, then smiled.
"I'm out of money."
Jabril's face went hard.
"Sir. Are you joking?"
"Does the auction house have a back door?"
Jabril shot him a thoroughly displeased look, but he showed him out the back. Chris stepped through and cast stealth and flight together, shooting up into the sky. He didn't take the road. He dropped straight down the cliff.
He crossed the sea and approached a ship moored in the harbor — a passenger vessel he had reserved through the Black Hand Guild's branch chief.
He was about to leap aboard when he felt magical power wrapped around the ship. Some kind of alarm spell, by the look of it.
Chris released his stealth and cleared his throat. No response. He worked the cough louder and louder until the lookout in the crow's nest spotted him and came down. The man leaned his belly on the rail.
"Who are you?"
"A passenger."
Chris held out his ticket.
"Hang on a minute."
He fetched the ship's mage. The man had clearly been asleep; a crease was pressed into his face, and being woken in the middle of it seemed to have put him in a foul mood.
He stuck his lip out and looked Chris up and down. Floating in midair, the newcomer was plainly a mage, and yet he had no robe and no staff. Having concluded that he was a nobody, the ship's mage said curtly:
"Boarding starts at seven in the morning."
Chris smiled, all good nature.
"Couldn't you make an exception?"
"Start making exceptions for every sob story and order falls apart."
"It's a special cabin. Isn't there something you can do?"
The mage grumbled, then lifted the alarm over part of the ship. Had Chris not chartered the special cabin outright, he would never have gotten the courtesy.
Chris watched closely how the magical power moved.
"Come in this way."
He hurried through and set his feet on the deck. The ship's mage restored the alarm in full, then went down to his cabin. The sailor on watch showed Chris to the special cabin and returned to the crow's nest.
Meanwhile the fat man and the skinny man lay in ambush by the roadside, waiting for that unlucky bastard from the back row to come out. They had no intention of attacking the Black Hand Guild's escort. Once the escorts finished their work and left, they meant to hit the man left on his own and take the defensive magic tool and the magic safe.
An hour later the escort passed, and the man they were hunting was not among them.
"Where the hell did that bastard go? Did the auction house sneak him out?"
"Special protection costs ten times as much, I hear, and that bastard doesn't have the money."
"Exactly."
Just then the auctioneer, leaving late, pointed straight at the spot where the two of them were hiding.
"You don't get along on an ordinary day, and yet when it's time for dirty work you fit together like a charm."
Sheepish, the fat man and the skinny man stepped out onto the road.
The auctioneer went on.
"If you're after the mage from the back row, just go home."
The fat man said:
"We mean to go after him once the protection's finished, so the Black Hand Guild can keep its nose out."
"There's been a misunderstanding. He never asked us for protection."
"He didn't? He didn't even get in a carriage."
"He walked to the auction house, and when it ended he left by the back door. They say he flew straight out to sea."
The skinny man swore.
"Damn it!"
Jabril warned them.
"Attacking auction participants is not advisable."
The skinny man ignored him.
"What's that guy's name?"
"I can't tell you."
"I'll pay you in mana stones."
"The name we have is a false one anyway. Knowing it won't help you much."
Chris shut himself in the cabin and recited the Acrian Magic Book. He had recited it and studied it more than a thousand times, and still the road to Ring Binding would not show itself.
How to absorb mana efficiently. How to circulate it so it stimulated the cells, and how to store it in the body. How to convert mana into magical power, how to accumulate that power in the Mind Space, how to store it in a ring and how to use it well. There was a great deal of useful material, and even a brief account of how to wield Willpower.
But the thing Chris wanted most — the method of weaving a ring — was written in the vaguest terms imaginable. Leave it to the Klpandi, the book said, and he could not begin to understand what leaving it was supposed to mean. All it told him was that when the Klpandi tried to weave a ring, he should help it with a mental image.
Five years of effort had let him store more magical power, and his spellcasting had grown surer. That was all. The road to Ring Binding was still a long one.
Five years without progress breeds suspicion.
Did that ogre swindle me?
If so, Chris was the first human in the world to get stabbed in the back by an ogre.
His mouth went bitter, as if he had bitten into a green persimmon.
He was turning the ogre over in his mind when he felt the ship leave the pier.
Finally underway.
Even after they sailed, Chris did not go out on deck. He took his meals in the special cabin and clung to the Acrian. This time he meant to see it through to the end.
One day. No progress.
Two days. Still nothing.
Three days. Nothing but dates slipping uselessly by.
On the fourth day he pushed the Acrian out of his head and dragged up everything he had learned since entering Mick Magic Tower at fifteen, turning it over piece by piece. None of it helped.
The fifth morning dawned. Even so, the only thing he could trust was the Acrian. He ate breakfast and threw himself at it again.
Chris turned his gaze inward and examined the Steel Weeds. The Klpandi was like a child in the terrible fours. It simply would not listen. When he cast, it handed over magical power as if that alone discharged its duty, and beyond that it offered no cooperation at all.
They say a child rebels at four because the self is developing and independence is taking root.
Is the Klpandi trying to become independent? How does a Klpandi inside my own body go independent?
He couldn't make sense of it.
Chris spoke to the Klpandi.
You're me. I'm you. You can't be independent.
Even if it could, he couldn't allow it. One body and two minds — that was what it would come to.
Damn it. I'm not some two-headed snake. This doesn't make any sense.
Frustrated, he muttered aloud.
"How do other mages do it?"
He needed a master to lead him forward. Badly.
Chris recited the Acrian Magic Book and flung its contents at the Klpandi.
It said to leave it to you. Here. This is the secret. Weave a ring. Go on, weave one.
The letters brushed the Klpandi and passed on into nothing. It didn't so much as twitch, and that made it look hateful.
The Klpandi is me. I can't think of it as hateful.
He reasoned with himself. He had to cradle it the way a parent cradles a rebellious child.
Chris drew out the Klpandi's magical power and formed a small sphere of water in the cabin. On the sphere he shaped a boat of metallic mana and set it afloat, then spun a fox out of fire and seated it aboard. When the fox boatman worked the oars, the little boat bobbed across the water.
"It cooperates when I cast..."
Otherwise it sulked like a child told to stop eating candy.
If the Klpandi grows, will we be able to talk? Will I be able to persuade it?
He thought so. But he couldn't grow the Klpandi any further. His magical power was saturated, and storing any more was difficult. In his present state, mana stones were useless too.
He held the sphere, the boat, and the fox in place and threw the book's phrases at it again. The Klpandi still did not change.
You have to know this aching heart of mine. This stifled heart. This desperate heart.
On impulse, he split off a piece of his heart and cast it into the Klpandi. In that instant, something answered.
Thrum.
The Steel Weeds shivered their leaves.
And Chris remembered what the ogre Kanta had said after teaching him the basics of the Heart-Splitting Art. Kanta had regretted it — regretted giving away something too precious to teach.
Could this be it?
Chris split his heart again and gave it to the Klpandi.
The Klpandi reacted violently.
The Klpandi is growing!
The leaves didn't multiply, and it didn't grow any taller. What he felt instead was the inside maturing. The Klpandi was aging.
Ah!
Joy swept through him. A heart is not like a real object. Divide it, and it doesn't disappear. It doesn't wear thin and get used up. Chris kept handing his heart over, and he thought:
The Klpandi comes from the soul. And it grows by eating the heart.
He was about to take that and move on when a question caught him.
I spoke to it with my heart before, didn't I? What's different about what I'm doing now?
He thought it through, and murmured the conclusion inwardly.
The density is different.
Before, he had only been speaking to it. Now he gathered his heart and threw it. What he had sprinkled now and then like a drizzle was pouring down like a waterfall.
And his attitude was different too. Now he gave the heart away completely. He handed over ownership itself.
The Heart-Splitting Art. This is why it matters!
If the heart is one, it is hard to give it away completely. Cut it in two, and giving one half becomes easy.
Time passed, and the Steel Weeds matured until they would absorb no more of his heart. Now, rather, heart was leaking back out from inside them.
Saturated.
The leaves of the Steel Weeds drooped, limp. They seemed unable to grasp what they were supposed to do next. Chris understood that this was the moment that truly mattered.
What now?
There was only one answer.
Weave a ring.
The instant he decided and offered his heart, the Klpandi answered with explosive force. The Steel Weeds trembled down to their roots.
How do I weave a ring?
Passages that had been vague before came suddenly clear. Chris recalled the book's lines and offered them with his heart. The Klpandi asked again.
"What kind of ring should I weave?"
That part he had to decide himself.
"We weave the attribute of our seed into a ring. Wood."
"What kind of tree?"
Chris waited until a thought rose of its own accord.
A tree green through every season. A tree that doesn't shake even in a typhoon.
The image of a tree drew itself in his mind.
In that instant the magical power in his Mind Space broke apart, and wood-attribute mana gathered. Then it was sucked into the Klpandi.
Vooooom.
It poured in without end until the wood-attribute mana in the Mind Space ran dry. The wood-attribute mana stored in his body was drunk down just as fast. When the mana inside was gone, he could draw more from outside.
Chris breathed wood-attribute mana and fed it into the Mind Space. The moment it entered, the Klpandi devoured it. Something like a faint band began to form along the lower part of the Steel Weeds.