The Shape of the Seed
Catherine answered him in earnest.
"First, get yourself evaluated at the Evaluation Office, then find a mage who matches your attribute and ask for help. They'll draw up an overall plan for your training. Take your classes according to that, and if there's something you don't understand, go look it up in the library. That's far better than learning it from some other Gyesin stuck in the same place you are."
"The evaluation's a lost cause. That bastard Harvey cares more about experimenting on living bodies than he does about teaching."
"Boo. Harvey."
Alice jeered and turned her thumb down. She and Catherine both loathed Harvey, but Alice had gone past loathing into fear. She had nearly been made a test subject for his memory-extraction magic.
"Maybe we wait until they replace the office head," she muttered, almost to herself.
Chris shook his head.
"We'd be waiting forever."
"Don't be so grim. Take Alex. Word is he still doesn't know his attribute."
"What? Isn't he Jenyeom? He reached Jenyeom without even knowing his attribute?"
"If the rumor's true, then yes. Chris, did you know the tower only supplies four Evaluation Papers a person?"
"I didn't."
"Alex's family is rich. He got backing from the main house, used seven more, and still failed."
"I heard he even burned through special-attribute Evaluation Papers," Catherine put in. "Three hundred, four hundred gold a sheet."
"But later he caught a high mage's eye and rose to the Jenyeom realm," Alice said. "Which means that if an outstanding master latches onto you and pours mana stones in, you can raise your realm without ever knowing your attribute."
Chris gave a wry smile.
"I'm not getting any high mage's support. Doesn't apply to me."
"You never know."
"Between special attributes and ordinary ones, which is better?"
"The seniors can't agree. Some say special is better precisely because it's special. Others run them down, claiming that very specialness makes it harder to climb."
Chris steered the talk elsewhere.
"Do you remember the incantation you memorized when you had your attributes read?"
"Of course."
"Teach it to me."
"What do you need an incantation for?"
What he wanted was the original wording in the Divine Language, so he lied.
"I'm going to earn the money and buy Evaluation Papers. Buy the papers, find out my attribute."
"Found a decent job?"
"No."
"Then how are you going to earn it?"
"Other Gyesin earn money, don't they?"
"They earn it by carrying out missions. No mage is going to hand a mission to someone stuck at the seed-evaluation stage."
"Chris might manage it anyway," Catherine said.
"How?"
"Back in our Lion Pavilion days he made money running laundry errands. He'll come up with some clever scheme."
Chris grinned.
"No clever scheme."
He dropped his voice.
"There's money the knight commander owes me."
"Ah. The Mana Helmet."
"I'd completely forgotten," Alice said.
She stroked his head the way one might a child's.
"Our Chris is a rich man."
"So teach me the incantation."
The two of them taught him the incantations they knew. Chris set the Divine Language they recited against the translation Donna had drilled into him, and the two lined up cleanly enough.
So what I learned from Donna wasn't nonsense.
He committed the original to memory. Then a discrepancy turned up in the wood incantation. The phrase about wood burning in fire was nowhere in the original.
No wonder it felt off.
Even thinking about it now, the burning doesn't sit right.
"What do you learn after that?"
"A new mana breathing method," Alice said.
"So from then on you only absorb mana of your own attribute?"
"No. You absorb all of it."
"How's that different from the Mick method?"
"It's more efficient. Think of the Mick method as the foundation, and the next one as the advanced course."
"So you really do absorb mana of every attribute?"
"Obviously. There's far more mana of other attributes in the world than there is of any single one."
"Same as what I thought."
"You'd already thought that?"
"Yeah. Now I'm sure of it."
"It's a different story if you've got mana stones."
"I've heard mana stones raise your realm faster."
Chris looked at Catherine.
"People at the Gyesin stage hardly ever use them, from what I heard. But you're rich, so I figured you might."
"No. I haven't used any yet. I did get a letter promising they'll support me as much as I want once I enter Jenyeom."
He was honestly envious.
"Must be nice."
"It's a burden, too."
"How?"
"You have to pay back everything you receive."
She sighed.
"My father's a greedy man."
"I wish I had a father at all," Alice said. "Even a greedy one."
The mood slid suddenly toward something tender. Chris wanted none of that, and he threw out a question before it could settle.
"So much for the basic breathing. Once you get into practical use, do you only learn magic of your own attribute line?"
"People usually lean on their own line. It's easier to manifest, and it hits harder. But they don't ignore the others. The tower encourages that."
"Wouldn't it be better to dig into only your own line?"
"They say the higher your realm climbs, the more you need the other lines. They were very firm about not neglecting them."
"Why?"
"Say you're fighting another mage. Fire-line magic on its own is weaker than fire with wind-line magic laid over it."
"Is it?"
"When the wind blows, fire burns hotter. Same idea."
"Ah. Right."
"And if you've got fuel—wood, or oil—the fire catches even better," Catherine added.
"Even when you're growing the seed at Sikbae, you need help from other attributes," Alice said. "Never mind Chukhwan."
"You grow the seed at Sikbae?"
"Think about what Sikbae means. You plant it, and you raise it."
"Chris, your fundamentals really are a mess," Catherine said. "You need the stages straight."
Chris rubbed his earlobe as he answered.
"Ears are wide open."
"The stage where you feel mana is called Gyesin. There you learn the breathing method and determine your seed's attribute. You don't store mana in the body the way knights or traditional mages do. You only build the body. A mage's body."
Alice cut in.
"There's a way to forge a mage's body quickly, too, through a mana shower. From what I heard, Alex got an absurd number of them from a high mage."
Chris thought of Tom.
Instead of teaching me something like Iron Body, he could have just given me a mana shower.
If he had, the odds of breaking the fifty-fifth step would have been better.
"You said you don't store mana in the body at Gyesin, right?"
"Right."
"I've heard a high mage can cast by moving mana outside the body through will alone. You two can't do that."
"Not even close."
"But the kids in Hall One were using magic."
"When they did, weren't they using a ring or a necklace?"
"Ah. They were."
"Normally you store spellforce in a staff. Gyesin are forbidden from using staves, so they keep it in jewelry—rings, necklaces—and draw it out when they need to cast."
"What's spellforce? I've heard the word in passing, but I never quite got the concept."
"You take the mana of the natural world, sort it by attribute, rearrange it, raise its density, and give it a direction. That's spellforce. Speak the incantation and the spell comes straight out."
"Sorting, rearranging, density, direction. Got it."
"Back to the point," Catherine said. "After Gyesin comes Jenyeom. Jenyeom is the stage where you make a Thought Space in the mind. A space set against a knight's mana warehouse and a traditional mage's circles. You fill it with mana—more than a knight's warehouse or a traditional mage's circles can hold, and pure mana at that, they say. You can also convert it into spellforce and store it that way."
"Interesting."
"At Gyesin you're weaker than a knight or a traditional mage. From Jenyeom you're their equal, at Sikbae you pull ahead, and at Chukhwan you're vastly stronger. I'm not Jenyeom myself, so I can't explain it in any real detail, but one of the seniors insisted it's like making a subspace inside the body."
"A subspace?"
"That senior is Gyesin, same as us, so don't take it too seriously. Just file it away as one theory among others."
"People call the human body a microcosm," Alice put in. "Some say the Thought Space forms somewhere inside that microcosm."
"Too grand. I can't get a feel for it. All right—Jenyeom, I understand. What about Sikbae?"
"When Jenyeom reaches its peak, the seed germinates," Catherine said. "From then on, it's called Sikbae."
"What does it mean for the seed to germinate?"
"We know we have a seed. We know its attribute. But we can't perceive the seed itself, because it has no real form. Germination is that seed taking shape inside the Thought Space."
"Let me line it up. Feeling mana, and building your body with it—that's Gyesin. Making a Thought Space—that's Jenyeom. Germinating the seed and raising it—that's Sikbae."
"Yes. That's it."
"Once the seed germinates, what form does it take? Does a sprout come up?"
"It depends on the attribute. And on the person."
"I heard it's all over the place," Alice added. "You'd think a wood attribute would start as a sprout and grow from there, but no. There are wood chips, leaves, logs, even statues. The sprouts grow every which way, too. Sometimes a great spreading tree, sometimes grain, sometimes grass."
"Take the other attributes," Catherine said. "A water jar, a lake, black soil, white soil, a rock, a fish, a cloud, an ember, a bird, a beast. Start listing them and you'll never finish."
"There's even someone whose seed came out as a building," Alice said. "They say he grew it until it was as huge as Mick Tower."
"What do you call a seed once it's germinated?" Chris asked. "Are the forms so varied that there's no single name? Does everyone just stick their own name on it?"
"Their own name?"
"You know. Like Smarty."
Catherine smacked him, laughing.
"Smarty? That's too funny."
"Guess," Alice said.
"It germinated out of a seed, so it's a sprouted seed. Mash that down and you get seed-fucked."
Catherine laughed.
"You are really funny today."
"Please. You're too kind."
"Klpandi," Alice said, giving him the answer.
"Klpandi? Is that Divine Language?"
"Yeah. That's what I heard."
"What does it mean?"
"I only picked it up in passing. I don't know the meaning."
"You didn't ask?"
"Of course I asked. They slapped me down hard. Said that looking into it at my level would only get in the way."
Catherine nodded.
"Tower mages are mostly like that. Until you've climbed past a certain stage, they won't loosen the information. But watching them, I got the feeling they don't really know either. So every kind of theory is flying around, and no one upstairs bothers to sort it out. I don't know why."
"Nothing in the library?"
"The materials we're allowed to read only cover the Gyesin realm. Jenyeom is only partly open, and Sikbae materials we can't see at all."
"Klpandi... hmm. Doesn't sound great."
Chris rolled the word around on his tongue a dozen times before he asked.
"How do you raise it?"
"You pour mana into it. Take a sprout Klpandi. It obviously needs wood-attribute mana, and earth and water are essential too. Depending on the variety, some need metal as well."
"Variety. Funny way to put it. So if I want to move into the higher stages, I'll have to train more than one attribute."
"That's right."
"Anything else you know?"
"That's everything I know about Sikbae."
"Tell me about Chukhwan."
"Chukhwan... I don't know."
"Not even something you overheard?"
"Have you ever seen a Sikbae-realm mage in the Training Wing?"
"Not really. I've seen mages flying overhead a few times."
"Ever actually met one?"
"No."
"Same for us. The only mages we can meet are Jenyeom. They bring up Sikbae all the time, but they hardly say a word about Chukhwan."
"I see. All right."
Chris bowed his head.
"Thank you for sharing what you know."
Alice swatted his forearm, playful.
"Listen to you. Of all the things to say between us."
"Which is why I'm saying this. Let's never meet again."