Nico and Kai sat idly at the plaza fountain’s rim, enjoying the morning as they sipped iced teas from a nearby stall. The vendor had flavored the tea with marsh blossoms and local honey as her weekly drink special— a small charm meant to ease a morning start. The market unfolded around them in an easy rhythm: Virids stacked bundles of summer fruit, Arcanites presented gemstones with care, children darted through the fountain’s spray.
Kai sported thick black framed glasses today, giving him a sharper edge than usual. It made the air around him radiate with extra diplomacy and plausible deniability.
“Heading to the governor’s office?” Nico asked, as if he didn’t already know the answer.
“Effie and I are attending the mana environmental impact meeting,” Kai said, voice devoid of joy. “They’ve ‘lost’ years of mana documentation, so I’ll be helping them remember.”
The latter statement carried a suspicious amount of gusto. Nico nodded, relieved that Kai, who he always felt was a little on the sociopath scale, trended towards good. The two enjoyed a comfortable silence filled with the market’s clamor as they watched people walk by. Kai pushed his glasses back up with deliberate care.
“If you join today, I can go with you tomorrow to survey the stabilized east ridge,” Kai proposed while making direct, unyielding eye contact with Nico. He wore the expression of someone who intended to ignore entire categories of information all week long.
Nico’s ears twitched, undermining his own poker face. Those glasses weren’t prescription, and Kai’s refusal to mention the Sage spoke louder than any words. For some reason Nico felt a pang of sympathy toward the Governor.
“That’s considerate of you, but I think it’s best if we divide our labor,” Nico said, his voice also joyless. “We’ll cover more ground that way.”
“Mn. Efficient.”
***
The dragon eye pulsed in Nico’s palm. Its glow deepened whenever he faced east. Zhou didn’t offer an explanation when he gave Nico ownership of it. The Sage had appeared, dropped the charm, and disappeared. A perfectly reasonable way to interact with another person apparently.
Would Nico start entertaining the thought experiment of why a Sage was unceremoniously present in a region officially recorded as low-anomaly, but in actuality was clearly warped and unstable?
Absolutely not!
Maybe this Sage, who had a reputation for ignoring the council and doing whatever he wanted, liked to vacation in swamps at their most humid time of the year. Nothing about that could be disproven. Why worry twice when he could simply lean into being delusional?
Besides, he was here to survey for mana anomalies. Whether or not sages were included in that category… he would postpone that judgment until the charm finished leading him to whatever it wanted him to find.
Few people ever saw the anomalies known as Sages. The source of their power, core mana, differentiated them from the rest of the alchemists.
Distinct from ambient mana that freely circulated within all life, scholars described core mana as the foundation of the world itself, the raw core of its existence. It was infinitesimally finite and bound to laws no one fully grasped. Unable to multiply, it simply passed from one vessel to another, recirculating itself throughout the world.
In the rarest cases, it could bind to a human soul. The weight of it would deform most souls, but those that overcame the risks became wielders of fragments of its power. The number of living Sages never rose above 25 but occasionally sat below that number, as it did now. Zhoumin was the latest to become one of those vessels… half a century ago.
Even inscribed into Sages, core mana still warped its bearer’s soul until it collapsed. In anticipation of that, its vessel was also given the skill Soulbind (S). It allowed Sages to share the burden of core mana by binding familiars to themselves, granting them derivatives of the power in return for loyalty. Most of them, anyway. A certain Sage added to his infamy by having yet to take on any familiars.
The marsh thinned as the charm led Nico up in elevation. The air was still sticky, but carried the aromatic scent of wildflowers scattered along the slope. The more he ascended, the more it felt like the charm was just giving him a tour of a hill overlooking the wetlands. But an outline sharpened the closer he approached.
Half sunken in the earth was an outpost, eaten up by distortion and time. The steel frame poked through walls where insulation had collapsed. The shattered window panes dully reflected the low sun. Roots cracked the foundation while vines coiled around rusted antennae. One corner had slumped into the bog and was now a cradle for dragonflies.
The sign was rusted. Most of the lettering had long worn away.
[Ma?_?a M_?nit_?_?_?ng ?St. E??EF12]
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Now that the rift had finally dispersed, the true shape of the terrain returned. And with it, unearthed the ghost of a mana monitoring site, once meant to detect unstable flows and report anomalies.
The charm in his hand stopped pulsing and shifted into a steady emerald glow as he approached the entry. A charm-sized hole waited in the locked slab.
“How am I supposed to figure this out,” Nico muttered, slotting the charm into place. Good thing he went to grad school.
Emerald mana flowed along the seam, tracing a vertical line that split the slab neatly in half. With a grind, the two doors slid apart.
Inside, the air was dank with an uncomfortably organic smell, probably not unrelated to the moss streaked walls. Gross.
|| SKILL ACTIVATED || [? Air Veil (B) | Status effect (30min) | " air filter"]
Fresh currents of air wrapped around him, warding off mildew, spores, and whatever else had been thriving here for years.
Further in, another sealed door blocked the way. Through its window he glimpsed machinery that looked important.
He leaned closer to examine the inscription etched across the lock. It was dense with mana circuitry, his specialty. He took a step back as gold mana gathered at his fingertips.
|| SKILL ACTIVATED || [? Air Bullet (C) | "shot of air"]
The gust shattered the door’s upper pane of glass. The alchemist carefully reached his arm through and jiggled the handle until it clicked open.
The main operations room was surprisingly intact. A bit rusty, but the wiring hadn’t been eaten by insects or mice. So that was a win. The control board spread out with rows of buttons and switches, all of which the alchemist pressed and flipped with trained expertise. Nothing happened, but the symphony of mechanical clicking and clacking was satisfying.
“Well… here I go,” he muttered.
|| SKILL ACTIVATED || [???? Shock Pulse (C) | "it shocks"]
He fed a jolt of electricity into the wiring. The monitor reacted with a brief dance of static before settling into a faint glow.
The screen was dim and grainy, but usable.
---------------------------------------
[LOG IN]
[Password: █ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ]
---------------------------------------
“…….”
---------------------------------------
[LOG IN]
[Password: p a s s w █ ? ? ]
---------------------------------------
With a cheery jingle, the log menu opened.
“………………………………………”
Nico had successfully bypassed the startup sequence with his hacking prowess.
[System Start... EEF12 Operational Node Rebooting...]
[Welcome Operator.]
[Archives: Mana Field Survey / Rift Activity / Anomaly Reports]
[Last Transmission Sent: 12,734 days ago.]
[Transmission Status: UNKNOWN]
The archive unfolded in neat rows, one anomaly after another. The station had been detecting unstable mana and logging rifts for decades with eerie consistency. None of which had ever been transmitted.
Nico’s tail lashed behind him in annoyance as he tabbed through the logs.
These mana reporting stations were constructed decades ago by the Forged Nation as an act of ‘goodwill’. They were meant to operate as preventative measure— to detect unstable mana and identify rifts before they could impact the reality they formed over.
But the forests here were thinner than they should have been. Their roots were brittle enough to crack from being stepped on. The water reflected light with an oily sheen. The marsh critters were small and sickly. A station wasn’t needed to see that the land was polluted with unstable mana. It had long failed its purpose.
Both Nireya and the Forged Nation had agreed to share access to these stations in the name of keeping Tellur ‘neutral.’ In practice, that meant Tellur could receive aid from either side in exchange for convenient access to its resources through favorable rift management contracts.
If this station had been hidden by a rift, it offered both Central and the Forged Nation a way to avoid responsibility for how they had treated this region. It was easy to let the area slip through the cracks when it could be written off as a backwater post. The rift would take the blame for obscuring the station.
It helped that every official report on the region had confidently listed it as showing ‘low anomalies.’ Those reports had been accepted without question, even as locals began sanctioning off large portions of land as too blighted to inhabit. It was likely one of the top excuses used to deny Effie’s repeated requests for assistance. It begged the question if the rift had been intentionally maintained to conceal this station.
He pulled a device from his inventory to assist him in documenting the information. Nico adjusted the dials on the terminal and waited for the interface to stabilize. The old monitor flickered to life, displaying charts of oscillating cosine and tangent waves, mana density mapped against time. He sighed at the sight of it, uncomfortably reminded of his grad school days.
He tabbed through several more entries, cross-referencing coordinates and volatility readings. The strongest readings aligned directly at the station. That was expected, since it matched the rift he and Kai had just resolved. But the records showed continuous detection for 17 years, right up until the station stopped logging a decade ago.
Effie’s documentation noted that the east ridge had been a wetlands reserve under restoration until it was sanctioned off six years back due to mana pollution. A high-rift zone wasn’t unusual, but Effie would have mentioned it.
It left two possibilities: the rift had reformed after the old one unraveled, or there was another rift still here.
He stepped outside to take a look. There was plenty of daylight to burn, but the perimeter was overgrown with knee-high wildgrass. Whatever remained of the original monitoring station structure was buried under years of neglect, and anything useful had long been hidden below.
“…”
How unethical would it be to do a controlled burn of the area?
How could he convince himself this wasn’t just simple arson?
He considered his options.
|| SKILL ACTIVATED || [火 Fire Flare (A) | "fire aoe"]
A low ring of flame swept around the station, burning back a meter of grass. The fire hissed in the damp air; only possible with a mana-assisted burn, considering how wet it was.
|| SKILL ACTIVATED || [? Extinguish (B) | "air removal"]
He withdrew the oxygen from the flame, leaving only a blackened ring of earth around the station. He paused, studying his work.
“…”
|| Skill Activated || [? Wind Thread (C) | "gentle lift"]
A current of wind rolled out in a circle, thinning the smoke until it vanished into the treeline.
He stood back and regarded the station again, its air clear once more. The column of smoke rising above it had made him feel strangely guilty, like he’d committed a crime in the name of taking shortcuts.