61st of Season of Air, 57th year of the 32nd imperial era

Newt felt like a herd of trihorns had trampled him as he entered room five-o-three. Even dead tired, he froze after taking a single step inside. The room was brightly lit, the air fresh, and the piles of dirty clothes were gone. Someone, probably Obsidian, had finished the cleanup Newt had started, and pinned a note to a bedroom door.

The note had only one word, 'Obsidian', but it told Newt everything he needed to know.

Newt opened the door to his bedroom, once more facing a surprise. The piles of dead man's belongings he expected to see in the room were nowhere to be found. The single wardrobe stood open and empty, and like the knee-high desk, it was free of dust and freshly wiped.

Newt smiled at Obsidian's tiny gestures of goodwill.

I'll make this work.

He closed the door behind him. An oppressive, tomb-like darkness enveloped the windowless room, and Newt crashed on the futon mattress, falling asleep in two breaths.

No time seemed to have passed at all when Newt woke up. He left his room, but only darkness greeted him. Starlight illuminated the night beyond the common room's sizable double window, still cracked open to let in a breath of fresh air.

As expected, the dorm room was dark, with no lights under the bedroom doors, and Newt would have guessed his roommates were out, if not for the whiff of alcohol slowly invading the air.

What to do now? I shouldn't talk to them before first speaking with Obsidian. Hopefully, together, we can forge a plan to pull his sister and Roselilly back on their feet. The soothers are in the Chamber of Healing, but they are mortals and don't work night shifts, so I'll have to wait until morning before I see them.

Newt filtered through his options and found two places he could visit; the library, to check out a book to read while inside a mana gathering formation, or the Chamber of Runes, to set up several runic seals for practice.

Just as he was about to decide on the first option, he found an even better way to pass his time. One that would hopefully impress his master.

Newt headed straight for the Chamber of Instruction. The building was dark, its black windows and door devouring the starlight and the lights given off by thumb-sized fireflies bobbing about, flashing their partners, and searching for dead leaves to lay their eggs on.

Newt walked into the main building and found a young woman standing behind the desk, reading a book.

"Hello, Sir," she greeted, and Newt inclined his head, the constant mentions of the order's hierarchy already tugging at his nerves a bit.

"Greetings! I would like to use an energy gathering formation."

The woman nodded. "Your token, please."

She placed the triangle behind the desk and gave Newt a key.

"Straight down that hall." She pointed at a door. "Third door to the right, room number five."

Newt politely asked the young lady to interrupt his meditation two hours after sunrise, then followed her instructions and opened the door leading into the "room" she mentioned. The room was barely more than a broom closet, less than thirty square feet.

The floor was decorated with glowing lines, connecting an array of circles and triangles wrapped around singular runes or small groups of glyphs, binding them into wholes. The seal was complex beyond Newt's comprehension, but he understood the basic intention to draw together the eight evenly spaced glyphs of unknown meaning.

The faint light was enough for him to follow an arrow and read a twenty-word instruction written in plain language, which informed him where to place his manarium crystal and how to start the process. Newt followed the directions, sat inside the circle and placed his crystal in an empty triangle, from whose points three lines made the outer shell of the circle, and the main line cleaving it into two halves.

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Newt expected the lines would glow even brighter, but quite the contrary, with the crystal in place they vanished from his sight, but remained fully visible to his mindcore. As the lights went out, the drifting flow of mana became a whirlpool, spinning inside the circle and drawing in the motes from outside it. The density of energy kept increasing for nearly three minutes before it stabilized.

Newt kept observing the twisting of dancing lights for a while, and after he had confirmed everything was stable, he closed his eyes and entered his realm. The scalding wind had picked up, increasing in intensity from a breeze to a skin-charring gale, and the lava flowed more vigorously, churning and bubbling in its channels like a furious ocean.

Newt took in the apocalyptic scene.

Well, at least the spell formation is working.

"Woohoo!" a hundred-foot-long flying serpent roared above Newt's head. "This is great! Keep finding good stuff!"

Newt looked up and saw the air turn to flames wherever Magmin passed.

"Are you training?" Newt asked, unsure about what he was seeing.

"Wouldn't it be a shame to waste all this energy? Mana's in the air," the snake started singing, and Newt just shook his head.

"I'm off to train too, don't interrupt me with your antics."

Newt headed down the slope and stopped right before his realm barrier. The shimmering curtain had hardly moved since he last saw it, but with the sudden influx of mana, Newt could see it inch away from him bit by bit. The wind was quieter at the edge of the world, and he decided it was a good enough place to train.

Newt summoned Granite Crust with half the usual energy, and the dark aura solidified into the uniform cover of rune-covered blackish scales. He further reduced the hypothetical mana he fed it by another half, and the barrier still stood, fainter, thinner, and less substantial.

Newt halved the energy again, and the scales burst like a misty bubble. A handful of experiments later, Newt found that Granite Crust required at least twenty percent of its full power to manifest at all, and at that level it dispersed at the gentlest touch. A third of its full power was required for it to shield him from attacks, but even so, the barrier was five or six times as fragile as it was when Newt filled it with everything he had, making it clear that he should either use the spell at full power or not at all.

Let's go with a quarter for now.

Newt willed Granite Crust into existence, then summoned another layer just under it. The two flows of energy merged, becoming a single Granite Crust at half power.

Newt dispelled his defenses and tried again, achieving the same result.

I could push it further away?

Newt tried it. He summoned a quarter-power Granite Crust, pushed it six inches away from his skin, then summoned another one. Immediately, the further layer winked out, snuffed and dispersed by the wind, its flow of mana severed and diverted into the layer nearer to Newt's skin.

Newt frowned, learning something new about his abilities. Instead of trying again, he summoned two gloves of Granite Crust at quarter power and encased his hands. He touched one with the other, and nothing unusual happened. He extended them from his body, and the forces pushed against each other.

Why?

He made one half-strength, while the other remained at quarter power, and they still repelled each other. Newt tried summoning a quarter-power Granite Crust to cover the weaker one, but again it absorbed the energy from the rest, the earthen defense snapping back to his palm, like a glove.

Suddenly, Newt's stomach lurched. He dismissed both techniques and grabbed his head.

Keeping the same technique at two different distances felt like forcing my eyes in two different directions.

Newt felt that there was something he was missing, something he was on the cusp of understanding. He took a deep breath, laid on the warm, rocky ground, and closed his eyes.

Why do the two gloves repel each other, but adding two to the same hand merges them? What's the difference? And why doesn't my head hurt when I have two on the same hand or two on different hands, but when I have all three it's draining me?

He visualized the flows of energy. When there was one glove, the flows were identical, and the closer glove consumed them both. Regardless of the amount of mana, it was designed to use that specific alignments, pattern, and flow as fuel.

So, I can't use the same continuous technique twice at the same time in the same place. Magmin Scales and Magmin Flames are similar, but there are distinct differences, which allow me to use them simultaneously.

I need to change the technique slightly between layers.

Newt considered his hands covered in Granite Crust touching. Outer layer to outer layer. What if I make a double protection with inner layers touching?

Newt tried it. He didn't know the mana circulation he would need in the real world, but such technical questions did not exist within his realm. If it was possible outside, it would happen, no matter how complex the underlying mechanics were.

The double Granite Crust appeared, but Newt immediately found a problem. The rigid outside pressed against his skin, hampering his movement.

This is useless, but a good first step. Well, if flipping it over, how about rotation?

Newt focused, and Granite Crust covered his person, then another layer crawled on top of the existing one. As it materialized, Newt reversed the tiny scales with earth runes, flipping the glyphs upside-down, and the two layers coexisted. They didn't devour each other, steal each other's energy, or cancel each other out.

One layer of scales covered the other, and Newt knew he had made something great.

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