Zelig went back in on purpose this time.

  He waited until Marie was asleep, lay down on his makeshift bed, closed his eyes, and just waited for it. The shift. The frequency changing. It took longer than the first time, maybe because the first time he hadn’t been trying, but eventually the room went wrong in that specific way it went wrong and the purple came up around him like water rising.

  He landed on his feet this time.

  The sand was the same. Purple, cold, heavy air sitting on top of it like a lid. The humanoid stones stuck out of the ground in every direction as far as he could see. He stood there for a moment just looking around.

  Last time he had punched the ground out of frustration and found a stone by accident. He wasn’t going to do that again. He wanted to actually look at this place.

  He crouched down and picked up a handful of sand.

  It was fine. Finer than regular sand, almost like powder. It sat in his palm and didn’t do anything.

  He let it fall.

  Watched it drop.

  It fell slower than it should have. That was the thing he had noticed the first time and filed away without fully thinking about. Everything here moved slightly slower than it was supposed to. The sand when it kicked up, the way sound travelled, the way his own breathing felt slightly delayed between his lungs and his ears.

  He picked up another handful.

  Held it.

  Focused on it the way his Base rank training had taught him to focus on the small mana he had. Not much, barely anything, just that faint background pressure behind his sternum that mages called their pool. He pushed a thread of it into his palm.

  The sand in his hand lit up.

  Not brightly. Just a faint pulse, like something in it recognizing something in him. He opened his fingers slowly and the grains floated. Not falling, not flying. Just sitting there in the air above his palm, lit from inside.

  “Oh.” He said it out loud to nobody.

  He moved his fingers. The grains moved with them.

  He closed his fist and the light went out and the sand dropped.

  He stood up and looked out at the expanse of purple stretching in every direction. Every grain of it. He looked down at his feet, at the sand shifting slightly under his weight, and understood what he was standing in.

  This whole place was mana. Not like the trace amounts he had in his pool. Not like the ambient traces mages harvested slowly through ritual. This was mana as a landscape, as a substance, as a world. An ocean of it. Whoever built this place had not just made a training ground. They had made it out of the thing itself.

  He thought about that for a moment.

  Then he started walking.

  He found the second stone about twenty minutes in by his count, though time here was unreliable and twenty minutes could mean anything.

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  It was bigger than the first one. Broader through the shoulders, the humanoid shape more defined, like whoever shaped it had put more care in. It was half buried the same way the first had been, just the upper portion above the sand.

  Zelig stood in front of it.

  Last time he had touched one and got a vision he hadn’t been prepared for. He was prepared now. He reached out and put both hands flat against the stone’s surface.

  The light came. White and immediate, same as before, going straight past his eyes into whatever sat behind them.

  A room. Big, stone walls, the kind of architecture he had seen in books about the Middling Ring academies but larger and older. Two figures across from each other with space between them.

  One was clearly Eastern. The stance, the way the body was held, low and rooted, coiled without showing it. No tools, no instruments. Just the body.

  The other was Western. Older, robes, with the particular stillness of high rank mages who had stopped needing to move much because the world moved for them instead. One hand slightly raised.

  They looked at each other for a moment.

  Then the Western mage did something with that raised hand and the air between them cracked open. Not an explosion. More like the space itself disagreed with what it was being asked to do and expressed that disagreement loudly. A force, flat and wide, travelling fast.

  The Eastern fighter dropped under it like it wasn’t there. Came up inside the mage’s reach.

  The mage pulled something else out of the air, closer range, a concentrated point of pressure that would have gone through a normal person. The fighter redirected it with a forearm movement so small and precise that Zelig almost missed it, sending it sideways into the stone wall where it left a black mark.

  This went on.

  Zelig watched every exchange. Filed each one. The mage was pulling from something external, drawing on the ambient energy around them, shaping it into force. The fighter was working with only what the body contained.

  The thing was, neither was winning.

  That was what interested him.

  The vision rewound. Played again. He let it play four times before he let go of the stone.

  He stood in the purple sand and thought about what he had just watched.

  The mage in the vision was at minimum High Armada by the techniques used. Possibly Commander Armada. He was pulling enormous amounts of mana and shaping it with the kind of precision that took years of ritual rank advancement to build. Against a body cultivator who had no mana at all and was still not losing.

  Zelig looked down at his hands.

  His mana pool was Base rank. He could light up a handful of sand and float it. That was the ceiling of what he could do right now with magic and no ritual work was going to change that quickly, rank advancement didn’t work that way.

  But the martial techniques from the first stone were sitting in his body already, not fully integrated, still rough, but there. He had something in each hand. Neither of them was enough yet.

  He picked up a fistful of sand and let the mana into it again. The grains floated. He shaped them slowly, spreading them out, trying to hold the shape. They drifted apart after a few seconds. His pool wasn’t big enough to maintain it.

  He let them fall.

  He started running through the forms from the first stone instead, the masked man’s movements, in the heavy Metarealm air. The resistance of the air here was useful actually. Like training with weight.

  He practiced until the headache came, that specific pressure behind his eyes that meant the realm was about to push him out.

  He had time for one more thing.

  He crouched down and put his palm flat on the sand and pushed every thread of mana he had into it. All of it. The grains in a wide circle around his hand lit up at once and rose. Not floating. Vibrating, fast, a low hum coming from them that he felt in his back teeth.

  His pool hit empty.

  Everything dropped.

  He sat down hard in the sand, dizzy, the way you go dizzy when you stand up too fast except from the inside out. Sat there breathing until it passed.

  Empty pool. First time he had run it completely dry. He noted how it felt, filed it, decided not to do that again until his pool was bigger.

  The headache sharpened and the light took him.

  He blinked back into his room. Dark, quiet, birds not yet. Still night.

  He lay on his back on the makeshift bed and stared at the ceiling.

  His mana pool was empty and his body ached from the forms and his head hurt from the exit and he felt better than he had in a long time.

  He knew what the sand was now. He knew what the stones were. He knew his pool was the problem and he knew what solving that problem required.

  Rituals. Rank advancement. The formal Western system he had been avoiding because Base rank could run a street con and Base rank didn’t draw attention and attention was the thing he could least afford right now.

  That calculation was changing.

  He closed his eyes.

  He did not go back into the Metarealm. He just slept.