“On your first attack, when you charged, your breath hitched and your mana flared in your chest,” Seshka said.

  Tyler stood a few paces from her, pole held loosely in both hands, sweat cooling against his skin now that he’d stopped moving. His lungs still burned faintly. His face, on the other hand, felt like it was on fire from embarrassment.

  “When you tried to feint,” she continued, pacing around him, her eyes scrolling up and down his frame like a butcher weighing up his slab of meat, “it spiked down your left arm. You are shouting your moves with your own energy before your muscles even move.”

  Tyler tried to swallow to clear his throat and answer, but he’d been holding his breath. When he did finally speak, his words came out wobbly — not crying, but scared, wavering between high and low pitch.

  “That’s… not intentional. I didn’t even know I had mana until yesterday.”

  Seshka stopped in front of him and met his eyes, looking deep into them as if trying to see what was hidden there.

  “Yesterday? This cannot be true. Every child becomes aware of their core at eight. This is when they can join the sect. You may not be able to be Proven until you’re eighteen, but that gives years to shape your core, strengthen your soul, and define your cycle.”

  Tyler just raised his hands and shrugged in a defeated gesture. What she was saying made little to no sense, so why pretend he even had the first idea what she was on about?

  “Like I said earlier, I was not lying. Until a few days ago there was no system, no Proven, no mana levels — nothing. This is all new. Here, this might help. Imagine if someone suddenly gives you another head and you are taken to a place where the grass can now talk to you. A strange voice says you have to go find a Billy Goat Gruff. Then you meet someone and they say, your other head is not working correctly, you should have been training it years ago, everybody does, why haven’t you?”

  Seshka just stood there looking at Tyler. He might have rambled on a little, and he liked the confused look on her face, but he did need to make her realise that all this was not normal for him. If he was going to make sense of it all, she had to understand that before offering training or help.

  “What’s a Billy Goat Gruff?”

  “Exactly! That’s it — what I’m trying to say. When you say shape your core, strengthen your soul, they’re my Billy Goat Gruff. I do not know these things. I have never known these things.”

  It was Tyler’s turn now to inspect Seshka as she stood there thinking. Was she deciding this was all a bad idea, that she should just go off on her own? That would be a shame, Tyler thought. She could definitely handle herself and seemed willing to help him out, but this might be a bit too much for her.

  Seshka spent the next few minutes quietly standing, obviously thinking it over before she finally spoke.

  “Well, you went from a god to a battle-hardened fighter to a new recruit, from my view, in less than a day. Might as well go all the way to youngling. My quest is still active to assist you. My rewards are still visible. I suppose the gods test us all in different ways.”

  Tyler just smiled, not bothered at being referred to as a youngling. He’d prefer it, actually — at least Seshka might go slow and explain things clearly to him.

  “Not knowing you have a core or soul,” Seshka continued, smiling slightly at her words as she shook her head in disbelief, “does explain why you seem so chaotic. You have limited to zero control. I am surprised you managed to bind that special sack if this is the case.”

  “From the beginning, every living thing has a core. Some call it the Origin Core, some call it the Primal Core, some use other names, but basically it is a core. My father said imagine it as a round, spinning representation of all yourself — your life energy, your mana, your will, your essence. It swirls around at your very centre.”

  Seshka walked forward and gently placed Tyler’s hand just below his ribs and held it there.

  “This core can be trained, strengthened, controlled. In doing so, you can shape a soulspace. We can get into soulspace later, but for now know you already have one. I’m not sure how, or what state it may be in, but it is there. You have bound something to it, so we know it’s there. It stays there like a passive ability from your core, ever present.”

  Tyler tried to feel for this soulspace, but all he could really feel was that strange energy swirling tight just below his chest. He could direct some of that energy slightly, to an extremity, but it took whichever route it fancied to get there.

  “Then you have your cycle patterns. This is what younglings spend years on developing before they become Proven. You can direct each individual piece of energy in your core around your body. This strengthens it, and your core grows stronger.

  “Take my cycle — the Thread Cycle. I train my mana to form very thin channels around my body in a slightly curling pattern. It takes a lot of focus and control. If a channel becomes too wide, I stop, take a step back, let the channel repair, and start again. But eventually, over time, I create a loop that my mana can flow through. If that loop is long enough, the mana in my core empties into these channels and I can focus on the core to replace that mana. Once both mana sources — one in the channels, one in the core — meet, they combine, making my mana more stable.”

  She paused, then shrugged slightly.

  “Well, that’s how we tell the younglings, and I think it’s good enough for here. You need to get control of your mana and other energies. Do not have them going where they please. It gives your opponent a clear sign of what you are doing, and makes you weaker.”

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  “Okay, and you said chakra — is that my mana flowing around me? It’s messy, not controlled?” Tyler asked. He was pleasantly pleased with the explanation Seshka had given and thought it best to show he was engaged in learning this.

  “Yes, the whole process is your chakra. It can be felt by others who have developed their own to a certain point. It is even said that those of higher ranks can use their chakra as a weapon. I have not seen this, but it is widely reported as true.”

  “How do you then train? I mean, I try to control my mana. I can sort of make it go to my hands and get it to jump across my fingers. But it takes a lot of effort, and how it gets from my core to here is random.”

  Tyler opened his hand, palm up, and let some of his mana jump loosely across his fingers in little elongated blobs. He had to concentrate too, knowing that if he stopped, the mana would just go back to spiralling where it wanted to.

  Seshka looked at Tyler’s hand, then at Tyler, then back at his hand.

  “What mana affinity is that? Mine is wind affinity — you can see the silver tint of it form,” Seshka said as she held her hand out, palm up, silver mana flowing from her fingers and forming a small blade in her palm.

  “I have seen many types of affinity, read about the rest, but I have never come across a pure white form before.”

  “I don’t think it has an affinity, or at least the system doesn’t say it has one.”

  “That’s nonsense. All mana has an affinity. How would it work if it didn’t?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know how it worked even if it said it had an affinity.”

  Seshka again paused, thinking. Tyler didn’t want to get sidetracked with other unknowns and prompted her to continue.

  “Let’s worry about that later. Let’s just get back to how I control this. What do I need to do so I can make something like that blade you just did?”

  Seshka refocused her attention on the moment and smiled. “Don’t expect this level of control straight away. First you must tame your core. You must control it, not the other way around.”

  Tyler felt Al shift his focus for a moment, like the AI had turned around and was now paying attention to what was happening. He never said anything, but Tyler had a feeling he wanted to.

  “Most younglings start with chaotic cores, and they are taught to restrain it. They have to focus on the energies swirling around and pull back on them, restrain them from moving. This is not easy for a child, I can confirm. At first it feels like you are not doing anything. It just keeps rotating around and around. But eventually, you feel a little tug, a slowing down. When you feel that, you set it as your anchor, putting more weight on it, pulling on it. Eventually it slows, becomes steady, and more easily controlled.”

  “Pfft! That makes no sense. I thought she was here to help,” Al burst out in Tyler’s mind.

  “How long did it take you? You know, to get it under control?” Tyler asked as he tried to ignore the AI — well, at least for now.

  “Oh, I was top of my class, so don’t expect to be as fast as me. I had control of my core and started my Thread Cycle training at eleven.”

  “Three years? It took three years to quiet it down? Are you sure? I have seen someone with fire mana — is that what you call it? Mana that produces fireballs, anyway. I know someone from my world who is the same as me, but after three days he could shoot fireballs from his hands.”

  “And you can infuse mana into weapons to make them explode. How do you do that? The system helps. If you get close to something — or more than likely, just starting out — the system helps more.”

  That made a little sense to Tyler. He had sort of tried to infuse his mana into his pole, then the system gave him the skill and it was as if he knew how to do it. That was probably the same for Shahan.

  “I have a better way. A way better way. Better way. Way better. Hers is bad — like the worst bad.”

  “Later,” Tyler mentally said to Al. He did want to hear what the AI had to say about this, but he wanted to keep his focus on Seshka for the time being.

  “I see. That makes sense, actually. So what now?”

  “Now I eat. You are welcome to join, but keep trying to slow down your core and gain control of it.”

  “That’s it? That’s all the instruction? Try to stop it?”

  “Yes. It will feel strange and take time, but you will eventually feel it. No point carrying on right now. We can see how you have done in the morning. Plus, I am hungry — it has been quite a day for me.”

  Seshka turned and walked to the small fire where she had a pot simmering over it. Tyler watched her for a moment, felt his belly rumble, and headed over too. He might as well get some food. Plus, he could mentally chat with Al while he ate.

  Seshka handed him a bowl without another word. The stew was thick and simple, roots and strips of meat softened down into something that smelled far better than it looked. Tyler remembered there was bread and wine in Malek’s barrels.

  He reached for the spatial sack at his waist, and a warm loaf of bread simply appeared in his open palm, steam curling from its crust. A heartbeat later, the chilled bottle settled into his other hand, condensation already beading on the glass.

  Tyler was taken aback — not just that the two items had magically appeared in his hands, but the state in which they appeared.

  The bread was soft and warm, smelling as if it had just been taken out of the oven. Had someone cooked this decades ago and placed it in the sack, keeping it frozen in time? The same for the wine — it was chilled as if taken directly from a fridge.

  Seshka just smiled, grabbing two cups, placing them on the ground between them and ripping off the corner of the bread.

  “First time I am actually pleased I met a mana chaser. He won’t be needing any of this anyway. You’ll have to tell me what other food there is. My storage is not as grand.”

  Tyler poured them each a drink, nodded, and dove into the stew, the two of them sitting quietly as they ate. As they did, Tyler kept part of his mind on the food, but thought he’d at least try this calming of his core.

  He focused beneath his ribs, to that place Seshka had pressed her fingers. The swirl was there, restless as ever. It didn’t feel evil or wild. Just… busy.

  He tried to restrain it by mentally pushing at it in the opposite direction of its spin. Nothing happened. So he tried to pull it. Nothing happened — well, it might have gotten a little faster.

  “No! That’s wrong. Stop, stop. It will take forever and be even worse than having no core. You need it to go faster!” Al said.

  “Fine, tell me why I need it to go faster when Seshka insists I need to control it.” He had intended to ask Al while he ate, so might as well hear what he had to say now.

  “It wants to grow. So, if you help it, it will — and a lot faster than stopping it. Get it to spin fast, really fast. So fast it can’t leave the core. It traps itself. Then it can only leave if you show it a way.”

  That sort of made sense. It was like a centrifuge. Slow rotation meant everything sloshed together. Spin it hard enough and the heavier elements pinned themselves outward, separating cleanly.

  He tried again pushing mentally in the direction of flow, the rotating energies got faster. He stopped and they slowed but not back to the same speed there was a small increase and was it tighter, he wasn’t sure might just be the warm food he was eating.

  “That’s it that’s it. More more. more!”

  Could it do anymore harm, probably but he felt Al was onto something, so he mentally kept pushing his core to go faster as he took a drink of the wine, which he had to say Malek had great taste and dug back into his food. Let see where this takes him.