The Fourth Path
Joe had been watching with a crease pinched across the bridge of his nose. At last he turned to Tom and spoke, grave and deliberate.
“So. What do you intend to do now?”
Tom had no easy answer.
“Helping him as far as Spirit Awakening is acceptable. The Lapunian breathing method is a bit much, I’ll grant you, but you left out the true core and only let him taste the shell. That much can be tolerated. Anything beyond it, though, is going to be a problem.”
“……”
“Can you teach a secret art to a disciple of a rival tower?”
“……”
“Nothing to say, is there?”
Tom pulled the blanket over his head and turned his back.
Not a word of it reached Chris. Like a child lost in a brand-new toy, he was sunk entirely in the work of circulating mana. What had slipped in on his breath wandered his whole body, drifting along the blood vessels and sinking into the muscle.
An hour might have passed when he suddenly convulsed. He toppled over still locked in his cross-legged seat, arms twisting, foam bubbling at his mouth. His head moved on its own, and the back of his skull beat the floor—thud, thud, thud.
“Stop the breathing!” Tom shouted.
Chris could not stop.
“I said stop!”
The back of his head kept hammering. The seizure climbed, his neck snapping harder with every jolt, until one last crack knocked him out cold.
“Passing out is what ended it,” Joe said. “Keep that up and he’d have been left a cripple. Lucky. But luck doesn’t hold forever. What are you going to do?”
“……”
“Still no answer.”
“……”
“Is it go? Or is it stop?”
Joe bellowed it, then broke into a coarse laugh.
Half a day went by.
“Guh—!”
Chris’s eyes flew open on a choked gasp, breath dammed up and then bursting free.
“Ugh.”
His throat burned as if stomach acid had surged back up it, and his mind was muddled from cracking his skull. He coughed himself upright. Clinging to the iron bars, he found his legs shaking under him.
“What happened to me?”
Tom, lying in the corner, said nothing.
“Sir? Why am I like this?”
Still nothing. Tom kept his face turned away.
“Sir!”
Joe grinned.
“Because you weren’t taught properly.”
“What wasn’t I taught?”
“Tom should have stopped at correcting your spell.”
“Don’t change the subject. Answer what I asked.”
“The Lapunian breathing method is too much for you.”
“You’re saying the method is wrong?”
“It isn’t wrong.”
“If it isn’t wrong, then why am I like this?”
“Because something was left out.”
“Left out? What?”
“The core.”
“No core means everything that matters was left out. Tom, please. Say something.”
Tom only kept lying there.
“Heh heh heh.”
Joe’s laugh was thin and nasty.
“Can’t you feel how much he regrets it? Stop pushing him.”
“Regrets what?”
“That he was bored enough to cross the line.”
Chris’s temper snapped.
“Stop talking in circles and say it straight.”
“You felt mana. That’s the beginning of Spirit Awakening. The beginning—not the end!”
He licked his lips up and down, needling him on purpose.
“What you do with the mana once you’ve taken it in—that’s what actually matters. Spin it wild through your body just because you’re excited, the way you did, and something has to give. Nick a vessel in the brain and it bursts: a hemorrhage. Disturb the heart and you drop from cardiac arrest. Disturb the spine and your whole body goes paralyzed. Disturb the nerves and you seize, exactly as you did.”
Chris’s hand tightened on the bars.
“There’s mana mixed into the air.”
“There is.”
“Breathe, and mana comes into the body. Whether you use a breathing method or not, that always happens. Even before I could feel mana, I must have been inhaling it. Right?”
“Right.”
“Then why was I fine? Why was I fine five years ago? Ten?”
“Because feeling the mana is what matters.”
“How is that any different?”
“It’s completely different.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then let me give you an example. Suppose you’re working as a slave on an estate. You could slack off. You could drag your feet just to kill the hours. Or you could throw yourself into the work with everything you have. But the overseer is watching you with a whip in his hand. What do you do?”
Slacking off isn’t an option.
“I’d have to work.”
“Right. You might not give it your all, but you can’t refuse the work itself. That’s the point.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“You sensed that the mana was there, and you moved it by your own will. Its nature changed.”
“It’s the same mana, isn’t it?”
“The same mana, and not the same. You don’t work the same way when the overseer is driving you with a whip as you do when you’re left alone. Mana’s nature and its behavior change just like that. It can hand you power past anything you can imagine, or it can do you harm.”
“So I swung the whip wrong, and that made the mana turn on me?”
“Yes. Think of it as driving them so hard the slaves revolted.”
“Then how am I supposed to move it?”
“There are four paths in front of you.”
“Four? That’s more choices than I expected.”
“First, you can build a mana warehouse in the lower abdomen and train the body. Take that road, and you become a knight.”
“A knight!”
“Knights begin by sensing mana, too.”
“And the second?”
“You form a circle around the heart and walk the path of an Old Mage.”
“An Old Mage?”
“That’s what we call a mage who uses the traditional methods. ‘Traditional’ is the flattering word their side prefers. We call it the hidebound method. The worn-out method. The wrong method.”
He added it with open contempt.
“Old Mages are a lost cause.”
“The way you sneer at them, we must be New Mages.”
“We are. And not only us. Every other magic tower is New Mages as well. New Mages are the ones who rule the world. Old Mages cling to the royal house or to lords and scrape by.”
“Royal mages? Domain mages?”
“Yes. Mostly Old Mages. Wandering mages are a mix of both.”
“Wandering mages?”
“Mages who belong to no one and drift from place to place. A proper education is hard to come by, and no one supplies them with resources for training, so most of them are low-level.”
“Old Mages make a circle in the heart, you said?”
“Yes.”
“Then the third path is becoming a New Mage.”
“That’s right.”
“Do New Mages make a circle in the brain?”
“Why in the world would you make a circle in the brain? You’d go mad.”
“Then what?”
“You hold the mana in the mind.”
In the mind? That couldn’t be right.
Chris was certain it made no sense.
“How do you hold mana in the mind?”
“And building a mana warehouse in the lower belly, or making a circle around the heart—that doesn’t strike you as strange?”
“Those have substance.”
“And why do they have substance?”
Chris thumped his stomach.
“Because there’s a belly right here.”
He laid a hand on his chest.
“And a heart here. Look. It’s beating hard.”
“Be specific. Where in the belly do you build the warehouse?”
“Hmm…”
Chris put a hand to his forehead and thought.
“The intestines?”
“Which part? The large intestine, packed with shit? The small intestine, leaking digestive juices? The bladder full of piss? Or the balls hanging under your gut?”
“Uh… well. I don’t know.”
“And the heart? Around the aorta? In the ribs wrapping it? In the lungs beside it?”
“……”
“In the end, you’re storing it in a mental image. And a mental image has no substance.”
“And that actually holds it?”
“It holds it.”
“With no substance?”
“Can you see mana? No. Even yesterday you couldn’t feel it. You can’t see air either, and air is there. Joy, sorrow, anger—none of them have substance, and they exist. Thoughts are the same.”
Chris had no choice but to nod.
“That’s true.”
“Storing mana in the lower abdomen—building a mana warehouse—doesn’t mean stuffing it into your actual guts. It means forming a mental image there. An Old Mage forms a circle of mental image in the chest. A New Mage forms a mental image in the mind—”
“Wait.”
This was where Chris began to lose the thread.
“So a knight makes a mental image in the lower abdomen, an Old Mage makes one in the heart, and that’s how they store mana?”
“Yes.”
“And a New Mage makes a mental image in the mind.”
“That’s right.”
“A mental image and the mind are the same thing.”
“Similar. Not the same.”
“A mental image is a form drawn in the mind, isn’t it? An image that appears there. An image made out of imagination. That’s practically the mind.”
“You just called it an image realized through imagination. That and the mind are not the same.”
“That is the mind. They look the same to me.”
“Other fields of study might treat them as the same. The world of magic does not. We perceive them differently.”
Chris scratched his head. Understanding hovered just out of reach, and the world went round and round.
Knights and Old Mages store mana in the lower belly and the heart, except it isn’t the real lower belly or the real heart. They make a substanceless mental image in a place that has substance. Substance that isn’t substance… A New Mage’s mind has no substance, and they make a mental image in a place that likewise has none… so it might be substance, and it might not…
At last Tom broke his long silence.
“Chris doesn’t have the background for this. Come at it any way but concretely, and he won’t understand.”
Joe answered, flat and sullen.
“Then you make him understand, Tom.”
“Chris. Don’t make it complicated. Think simply. A knight’s mental image is tied to the belly. An Old Mage’s mental image is tied to the heart. In the end, both are bound to the flesh. You could say they’re bound to reality.”
“And a New Mage is different?”
“A New Mage’s mind—the space of the mental image… to be precise, the Thought Space—is connected to the soul. So unlike knights and Old Mages, who are trapped inside the limits of the body, there is no limit.”
“The soul!”
“For you, it’ll be easier if you imagine building the mana warehouse not in the mind, but in the soul.”
“Mana in the soul!”
“No. You must not actually build a mana warehouse in the soul. Absolutely not. I’m only putting it that way so it’s easier to grasp.”
Joe cut in.
“That’s enough, Tom. You taught him a breathing method before he could even feel mana, and now you’re dragging the soul into it before he’s so much as entered Thought Formulation. Skip the stages like that and the vessel cracks. The same way that one nearly ended up a cripple half a day ago.”
Chris shouted.
“Making a mental image in the mind—that’s Thought Formulation. That’s what it is!”
“Yes. To be precise, it’s the making of a Thought Space.”
Chris’s heart hammered.
“Teach me. Please.”
“Keh heh heh.”
Joe’s laugh was small and mean.
“And that is exactly the problem.”
“What problem?”
“You belong to Mickclonia Magic Tower. Tom over there belongs to Lapunian Magic Tower. You don’t teach secret arts to a man from another tower. That is the heart of it.”
“W-wait—wait—!”
“Let me tell you the fourth path open to you. The last one. Be satisfied that you felt mana, and give it up.”
“I can’t do that.”
He had tasted the world of mana. He could not give it up. He had finally taken a step—one small step, and a great one—and he could not give it up.
Chris dropped flat before Tom.
“Please. I’m begging you.”
Joe sneered.
“Go on, teach him. I’ll learn that famously stable Lapunian breathing method while I’m at it.”
Tom’s voice cracked across the cell.