Jack stared intently at the plant; he was just about ready to throw it across the room. For what must have been hours to this point, Jack had been trying to make it grow. He had tried everything he could think and everything he had been told.

  He held onto it with his hand and tried to push mana into it; as soon as it left his hand the mana disappeared. He channeled mana into his hand and he willed it with all of his heart to grow. He whispered to it and caressed it and in a moment of desperation he even sang.

  Nothing had happened. The tree refused to grow, and Jack collapsed back onto the floor of the white training room. He glanced up at the orbs in the corners of the room, the ones that were absorbing the mana he was purging as he trained.

  He tried for a little bit to stop purging as he wasn’t sure if that was affecting him being able to actually work out how to make the plant grow. It made no difference. Monty made it look so easy, he just stomped the ground once and the roots of a tree around him shot up in front of him like a shield.

  Jack sat there staring at a plant for hours and couldn't make a leaf grow. If he was anything, however, it was persistent, slow and steady. As Jack sat back up, he heard the doors to the outer room open and turned towards the sound.

  Turrel walked in and looked at him through the glass, then made his way over to the inner door and stepped through.

  “I have been asked to see if you could lower your purge output just a little, Jack. Monty said something about Rummi being happy but asking a lot of questions,” he said as he walked towards Jack.

  Nodding, Jack adjusted his vortex to the lower end of its capability, around 5% of his capacity.

  “Sorry about before as well. A little rest has helped me put my mind back in order. I see you are still struggling a little,” Turrel said as he glanced at the plant in Jack’s hands.

  “Mate, I think this plant is defective. Honestly there has to be something I am doing wrong here. I have done what you guys have told me. ‘Shape, Purpose, Power’ like that should mean anything to me,” Jack said as his shoulders slumped.

  “Hmm, I think while Monty’s methods were effective to begin with he has done you a disservice with skipping some of the fundamentals. He tends to brute-force things much more now than he did in the past. Let’s take a short break while I tell you a story, hopefully it might help a little.” Sitting cross-legged in front of Jack he continued.

  “Monty was a healer on his home world before induction. He had an amazing knowledge of how the body works, which muscles were responsible for what, how the skeletal structure and circulatory systems work, all of it. This set the foundation for how he approached his study and progress to where he is now. He was a quick study, even during the induction he stood out. His attention to detail and motivation to understand was impressive and what made me excited to work with him.” Turrel smiled as he reminisced.

  “Out of the three pillars, Monty excelled at Purpose. Purpose is the understanding; it is giving mana the knowledge of exactly what you want it to do. How you want it to act, what you want it to affect. The more direct and explicit you can be when imparting that, the better the purpose you are able to give it.”

  “Monty was able to look at someone that was sick or injured, identify what was wrong and understand how to fix the issue. Because of this he was able to master the healing skill at a rate that was impressive even for me. I watched him tending to someone that had injured themselves during training. Earth mana, shockwave gone wrong and the man had crushed his wrist and broken his forearm.”

  “Monty explained to me his process while I watched. He said because he had done it the hard way, had seen what went into healing a bone, setting it, securing it and letting the bone slowly regrow. Because he had thought that and understood, giving the mana the purpose to heal the wound was easy.”

  “He struggled with giving it shape. He knew that the bone was broken but he couldn't see inside the man's skin. In his mind, he knew that there might be shards of bone that would need to be moved; his wrist was completely crushed. Even if he could fill the spaces with mana and regrow the bone, there may be shards out of place or stuck in his skin.”

  “Because of his understanding, and the limits his own mind set on how things had to be done, he placed limits on himself. I asked him what he would have done if the man had lost his arm completely. He was so stuck on how he would have healed this man in the past, he was trying to replace his tools with mana.” Holding up a finger and looking very seriously at Jack.

  “Mana is magic, Jack; it fills the voids that your mind cannot bridge and exists outside of logic. Do not be restricted by perceptions of what is and is not possible. Ahh but back to the story.”

  “Monty stared at me like I was an idiot but I told him to humour me and work through it out loud. He did but got caught up on details, silly things like, 'You can’t just regrow an arm! How would the nerves be connected? Where would the blood come from?' Irrelevant I told him.”

  “I asked him what if he had some sort of magical putty that could substitute for all of that. Something he could mould and shape however he wanted. If he had that could he regrow an arm? Now Monty being a smart man could see what I was trying to get at.”

  “The wheels were turning and he looked at the man with enough excitement to scare him a little. He still ended up needing to use an X-ray machine we had in the first aid room. But that was the day that the ‘Healing Weave’ you have experienced was born I believe.”

  “There is some nuance here and I don’t want to cloud your mind with ideas. Purpose is different for everyone, Jack; there is a part of it that is instinctually linked to your own perceptions. Monty’s issue was that he was being a little too specific to start with. I think your issue is likely on the other end of the spectrum.”

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  Turrel shook his head side to side, and motioned for Jack to hand him the plant.

  “Shockwave was simple because it was easy for you to visualise, from there you can infer the Purpose you are trying to impart. This is different. What do you know about how plants grow?” Turrel asked as he took the pot in his hands and held it out in front of Jack.

  Jack stared at the pot and thought about the story, obviously he could get into detail but a plant needed four things to grow as far as he knew. Water, light, nutrients and air. His life mana couldn't create water as far as he knew, it couldn't do air either but that probably didn’t matter. The air was really just providing carbon dioxide, which mana could do? The water was a way for the plants to absorb nutrients, which mana could do? Light was energy to power the growth and the nutrients were the material.

  Jack's face scrunched up, it couldn’t be that easy could it. Turrel seemed to be hinting that it linked to his perception of it. Monty was great at healing because he believed he knew how it worked. Jack wasn’t an idiot but he had no idea how the shockwave was working for him, in his mind it was the actual mana that he was compressing and shooting out of his body.

  That in itself might be the reason why it works, his understanding of compression and picturing the mana like compressed air. Jack’s eyes widened. Did he just spend hours staring at a plant, because he didn’t believe he could make the plant grow?

  If his thought process was right here, it wouldn't actually matter if he was right or not. As long as he believed he understood it well enough to make it work and it actually made sense to him, then chances were the mana would just … do the magic? One way to find out.

  Reaching out for the pot plant Turrel stopped him from grabbing it.

  “Hold on, Jack. I think it is important here to point out that in some situations more mana isn't the best option. I feel whatever you were about to attempt may have been a little more … heavy-handed than it needed to be.” Slowly he handed the plant back to Jack.

  “Monty has conditioned you to using large amounts of mana. I would advise against that in training. Learning to use less mana to achieve the results you need will be more beneficial in the long run. Why use a bulldozer when a hammer will do the job?” Looking at the space around them he pursed his lips slightly.

  “It is also not that large of a room. Mana is powerful, it can do more than you would expect in some situations.”

  Jack nodded, looking at the plant and the ceiling and picturing a much more crowded space. He took the pot from Turrel, his vortex was as low as he could get it, that would probably be enough. As he drew in and started to channel the mana through his arm he felt Turrel place his hand on his hand.

  “Less, Jack. Control over your mana flow will be important no matter what. But if you decide to go with the Domain option eventually you will need to be able to use mana without relying on just taking everything from your vortex.”

  “Got you, got you. Monty was more of a sit in the room and work it out yourself sort of teacher you know?” Feeling the hand lift from his arm he stopped purging and tried to only pull away a very small amount of mana. Not being interrupted again, he focused on the pot in his hands.

  He sent the mana down his arms and through his fingers. While learning his purge skill he had to learn how to move mana outside of his body. It was hard but as long as he held on to the flow tightly he could maintain it for a short time. As soon as he lost control the mana dissipated, which was actually how he learned purge.

  This time, however, he focused it into the soil around the plant. Jack was pretty sure he could shape the mana to guide how he wanted the plant to grow. For now he just wanted to see if he could get the purpose part correct. He needed the mana to give the plant all of the nutrients and materials it needed to grow. He could try releasing it directly into the soil but that probably wouldn’t work, he needed a way to connect to the plant.

  He couldn't see the roots directly as they were inside the soil, but he knew they had to be there. If he simply imagined feeding the roots with mana and giving it everything it needed to grow it should work.

  To be safe though, he tried to create a little globe with the mana. He placed one half of the globe just above the soil at the base of the plant, leaving the other in the soil. That way part of the root system had to be in contact with the mana.

  Then he simply tried to activate it. He knew what he wanted it to do. More detailed than simply to grow, the mana had an actual purpose and he could feel something resonating through his connection with it this time. He focused on that resonance and there was a pull on the mana.

  Staring at the plant, he felt its roots greedily absorb the mana he was feeding it. The small limbs on the plant started to thicken and stretch and new branches sprouted as leaves formed on them. The pot that had fit into the palm of Jack’s hand, cracked open as the roots burst through the ceramic material.

  The plant itself grew to double, then triple its size, tilting out of Jack’s hand as the pot burst and started to fall to the ground.

  Turrel reached out and grabbed it before it tilted completely, together they slowly placed the now considerably larger plant on the floor. Its roots provided a surprisingly rigid bed for it to rest on as Jack surveyed the outcome.

  “Jack… I think you might be a little smarter than you let on. That or you are just extremely lucky,” Turrel said as he stared at the plant. Jack tried to process the words as he too stared. The roots looked very different to what he was expecting. Instead of a woody root-like appearance they looked almost made of stone.

  “Ahh, I am as smart as I have always been, Turrel. People tend to make assumptions based on how I normally behave. I doubt luck has much to do with it.”

  The roots weren't the only thing on the plant that seemed off. The leaves on the new branches seemed strangely stone-like as well.

  “Turrel… What sort of tree is that?” Jack asked warily.

  Staring at the plant before gingerly raising his eyes to meet Jack’s Turrel put on a hesitant smile.

  “Look, it was meant to be a teaching experience to get you to try new things and struggle a little bit. I was going to comment about how it’s a big universe and things that are facts to you aren't always the case. Eventually you might have gotten one of the existing leaves to grow a little but that would have been it.”

  Stroking his beard, he slowly shook his head.

  “It was a petrified tree from my home world. Technically it is more an ornament than an actual living plant… It only feeds on a very, very specific material from my home planet. Something you obviously have no idea about or understand in the slightest.”

  Turrel reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small tablet. He stretched it out like he was zooming out on a smartphone and it doubled in size. He started making notes on it, muttering to himself.

  “Hmm your mind assumed it was a normal plant and because you believed that, you believed it would work. No… that shouldn’t have worked, you would have had to picture something to sustain the plant's growth… How … Sorry, Jack. Explain what you did here please.” Turrel's eyes were wide as he stared at Jack expectantly.

  Sighing, Jack realised he was in for a potentially long interrogation before he could try again. He really wanted to get the skill acknowledged so he could work on levelling it up. As soon as that thought crossed his mind, he felt the tingle at the back of his mind and a smile spread across his face.