Chapter 12 - Behind The Well

He had made his decision the night after the pond.
It hadn’t come quickly. He had turned it over for hours in the dark, the way he used to approach problems with no clean answer. If it had been possible, Arien would have undone many of the choices he had made in his previous life. He had always chosen the careful path. Safe university. Safe career. Safe rot.
He knew exactly where careful led.
When he finally reached for the System that night, it opened beneath his attention like a door that had always been unlocked. He didn’t hesitate. He put two Free Points into Perception, two into Intellect, and assigned Mana Sense.
He hadn’t expected the choice to accomplish so little at first. Mana was everywhere, clearer than before, but for weeks he still understood almost nothing about how to interact with it.
He could see farther into it now. The rivers and eddies he had learned to recognize moved with a clarity that still distracted him. On bright days, the currents sometimes caught his attention so completely that he forgot what he had been doing.
But looking wasn’t the same as touching.
He tried everything he could think of: holding his breath, relaxing completely, focusing until his eyes watered. He sat beside the water bucket, trying to touch mana for so long one afternoon that Sari asked, with genuine concern, whether he was constipated.
A few weeks later, Dod returned home for dinner with a deer.
By then, summer had arrived, bringing with it the busiest part of the year. Terry, Wod, and Zed spent their days in the fields, sometimes helped by Mari or one of the older sisters. Dod, meanwhile, had begun an apprenticeship under a hunter in a nearby village and returned home only every few weeks, occasionally with meat.
“Lisa, pass me another piece.”
“Zed, you’ve already devoured three. Leave something for the rest.”
“If you worked a bit in the fields, then you’d know that…”
“Ahem!”
The siblings’ quarrel was interrupted by a single cough from Terry. Mari took the platter of hot meat, glossy with fat and smelling heavenly, and divided the rest for everyone according to her own judgment.
“Dod, how is your discovery of Skills going?”
“Good, Father. Master Yrtek says everything is progressing at a normal pace. “Recently, I managed to assign Sharpened Sense,” Dod said, unable to hide his smile.
“Is that some version of Keen Eye?”
“Yes, it’s an uncommon version. Thanks to it, I managed to hunt the deer you’re eating.”
“Very good. Very good,” Terry murmured with a nod.
“And what exactly does that skill give?” Zed asked.
“Various things.” Dod straightened a little. “For one, I notice an opening before I consciously realize it’s there. Sometimes my hands are already moving by the time I understand why.”
“So you can shoot in your sleep now?” Zed asked.
Dod gave him a flat look. “Stand still long enough and we can find out.”
Wod snorted. “Sounds like Archery with a better opinion of itself.”
“No.” Dod frowned, searching for words. “Archery is still aiming. This happens before that. Like when we threw stones at ice on the creek, remember? After a while, your hand just knew.”

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Zed opened his mouth, but Dod continued before he could speak. “It isn’t guessing,” Dod added. “My hands know before I do.”
“I don’t understand,” muttered Zed. “Arien, what are you—hey, leave the meat, you little brat!”
Arien barely heard the rest.
Before I think.
Dod wasn’t talking about strength or aim. He was talking about noticing something before conscious thought had time to pick it apart.
Arien had been doing almost the opposite. Mana Sense was a sense, yet for weeks he had treated it like a hand. Every attempt began with the same command: move there. He picked a current, pushed at it, and became frustrated when nothing happened.
Maybe he was trying to force the answer before he had learned how the mana wanted to move.
Arien bolted outside and hid in his favorite spot behind the stone-lined well. By the time he got there, only a thoroughly gnawed bone remained in his hand.
He closed his eyes and turned his attention inward.
The mana inside him was already familiar. Hundreds of thin, ordered streams ran through his body, distinct from the currents filling the world outside.
This time, he didn’t immediately try to move them. He chose one of the streams running through his forearm and simply followed it, paying attention to its pace and the path it naturally took.
After following it for a while, he tried to nudge it slightly aside.
The stream resisted.
Arien let it settle back into its usual course and watched again.
On the second attempt, he used barely any force. The stream moved slightly aside before slipping back into its usual course.
It had moved.
He opened his eyes. His muscles ached from sitting motionless for so long, but Arien was already grinning when the familiar pull of the System returned.
He reached for his Status at once.

New skill available to assign:
Mana Manipulation (rare), lvl 1 (+1) – Mana follows patterns, but those patterns can be changed. Allows you to influence the movement of mana. When assigned, increases the amount of mana you can affect and the precision of your control.

First rare Skill.
The new Skill confirmed something Arien had suspected: Skills had to be discovered before they could be assigned. He couldn’t simply select Sword Mastery from a list without ever touching a sword. The System might strengthen something he had already begun to understand, but it wouldn’t hand him competence from nothing.
So much for cheating his way into mastery.
Discovery wasn’t his only limitation. He still had only five Skill slots.
The number had kept him awake more than once. He could discover as many Skills as he liked, but unless there was some way to expand that limit, every assignment mattered.
Mana Sense had been level seven when he assigned it, awarding him 280 Experience. That worked out to forty Experience for each level of an uncommon Skill. If the pattern held, a rare Skill should be worth considerably more.
He focused and assigned Mana Manipulation.
The familiar rush of energy from his birthdays returned.
His attention snapped back to the Status.
Lvl: 3 Experience: 60/400
Arien did the calculation. Mana Sense had given him 280 Experience, leaving him twenty short of the next level. Now he had sixty left over.
Eighty.
A rare Skill was worth twice as much Experience as an uncommon one.
More importantly, Mana Manipulation itself felt different now that it was assigned.
When Arien focused on the mana in his arm, the response was sluggish and imprecise, but the mana moved where he wanted it to.
Then the Trait line flickered. For a heartbeat, the black mark in Emissary of ▉ thinned, as though something beneath it were trying to surface. Arien focused on it immediately, but the mark returned before he could make anything out.
Still hidden. Of course it was.
He sat behind the well for a long time afterward, doing nothing in particular until he noticed how low the sun had fallen.
Most of his progress had come in changes too small to notice from one day to the next. This time, he had found the answer himself.
The goal forming in his mind was ridiculous for someone who had only just learned to nudge a thread of mana, but Arien didn’t care.
He wanted to become the most powerful mage the world had ever seen.
He had no idea what that goal even meant yet. There would be time to figure that out. Once, he had followed the safer road. This time, he wanted to see what lay beyond the places marked on local maps, learn magic no one in Three Meadows could explain, and find out just how far the System could take him. Childish or not, magic was still magic.
On Earth, he had spent most of his life reading about places other people had already explored. In Erador, he might actually get to see what lay beyond the map himself.