Chương 22: Chapter 21: The First Circle

The warmth in my palm was the first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes. Not the snow outside. Not the light sphere still hovering above the desk. Just the catalyst — warm, steady, the red core glowing at the same low luminance it had held since I'd picked it up last night. I hadn't slept. Not exactly. The book had said sleep was possible during saturation — the catalyst doing the work, the body just receiving — but I'd spent the night in a state that wasn't quite wakefulness and wasn't quite rest.

Floating somewhere between. Aware of the mana moving through me the way you're aware of your own breathing when someone tells you to focus on it. The sensation was strange. Not painful. Not even uncomfortable. Just... present. It was like becoming aware of blood flowing through my own veins. A slow, diffuse warmth that didn't come from the catalyst but from somewhere deeper. Inside muscle. Inside bone. I sat up slowly, careful not to let the catalyst slip from my fingers. The book had been clear about that.

Remove the catalyst, lose everything. Then you start over from zero. Three more days would be the price of losing my grip for even a moment. Just like the book said, the catalyst was projecting its gathering pattern into my body, and my body was receiving it, the whole arrangement depended on me staying calm enough to let it work. I looked at the catalyst. The metal was thin enough to flex if I pressed it, but I hadn't pressed it.

The core at its center — smaller than my thumbnail — had the same soft glow I'd seen in every village core since arriving. Not brighter. Not dimmer. Working. Doing what it had been designed to do. The morning passed without incident. I drank slowly from the pet bottle filled with water I had brought along, then went back to what was keeping my brain busy, one hand always on the catalyst, the other turning pages in the grimoire. The First Circle chapter was longer than the Laws section. More diagrams.

Circles within circles, notations in the local script that I still had to cross-reference with the dictionary. But I had time. Three days of it. The engraving step came after saturation. The book placed it in its own subsection, separated from the catalyst instructions by a thicker line and a heading that took me a few minutes to translate. Engraving the First Circle. A mana circuit. Permanent. Carved directly onto the heart. The book described the procedure in the same clinical tone it used for everything else.

The circle must be visualized. Held in the mind. Then pressed into the heart muscle with intent — not physically, not with a tool, but with the mana itself. The saturated body provides the medium. The mage provides the shape. The heart receives the pattern. Once activated, the circle becomes self-sustaining. The body stops leaking mana. Instead, it begins gathering ambient mana continuously — a permanent, passive draw that never ends. This moment marks the true birth of a mage.

I'd read that line four times across the past week. It hadn't gotten smaller. Below the engraving instructions, the book listed what it called "First Circle Applications". Spells simple enough for a newly-formed mage to attempt. Spells that the book's authors — whoever they were, wherever they'd gone — considered appropriate for someone who had just carved the first circle that would forever reside inside their heart. There were three. Heat Transfer: A basic thermal displacement circle.

Transfers thermal energy from one designated volume to another. The spell did not generate heat. It did not destroy it. It only redirected existing thermal motion. The maximum differential depended on mana quantity, circle stability, and precision. The book's examples were domestic: heating a cold room, cooling food for preservation, assisting metalworking, regulating temperature in a workshop. It took me about five seconds to think of combat applications. Remove heat from a monster's blood.

Deposit it somewhere else. But the book had anticipated that line of thinking — or someone had, at some point in the centuries since it was written. A note in the margin, smaller script, harder to translate: Direct manipulation of living mana-bearing organisms is inefficient and dangerous. The target's own circulation resists external interference. Expect a greatly reduced effect to none. Right. A living being with its own mana would create interference.

The spell worked on the environment — air, water, stone, metal — but a living creature with its own mana circulation was a different problem. You couldn't just manipulate someone else's mana. If you were not overwhelmingly stronger than they were, their core would simply push you back. Still. Heat didn't disappear. It moved. And moving heat from one place to another meant you can freeze one place and burn the other at the same time. No, it's not that you can. You have to.

The second spell was Moisture Compression: It gathered ambient moisture from a designated area and compressed it into a separate location. The book framed it as a survival tool. For example, it cited applications like collecting water, drying materials, preserving structures, agriculture. Useful. Not lethal. But useful. The third was Air Current: Directional airflow. Ventilation, cooling, removing smoke, assisting crafts.

"So... a fan." The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. I almost dismissed it. But air was everywhere. Even a weak force applied constantly mattered. It could push smoke. Disturb vision. Help fire spread. Alter a projectile's path slightly. At First Circle, probably not enough force to matter in a fight. But later? If the spell scaled with mana density the way the book implied everything did? I filed it away. Three spells. None of them designed for combat.

All of them written by people who lived in peace and were thinking about comfort, about drying clothes, cooling rooms, preserving food. A civilization that looked at magic and saw infrastructure. I looked at magic and saw a weapon. The difference said more about my situation than theirs. Somewhere in the early afternoon, I noticed the mana had stopped feeling strange. Not stopped being there, I could still sense it, the diffuse warmth in muscle and bone — but the strangeness had faded. My body had accepted it.

The way you stop noticing the weight of your own clothes after you've been wearing them long enough. I tested it. Closed my eyes. Let my attention drift inward. The warmth was everywhere now. Not concentrated in my hand where the catalyst rested, not pooled in my chest or my head — spread evenly, a gentle feeling distributed through every part of me. The book's description came back: fill every piece of you with low-density mana until even your capillaries know where it is. I wasn't there yet. But I was closer.

I opened my eyes and looked around the study. On the wall, my pinned notes rustled slightly — air movement from somewhere, a draft I hadn't noticed before. Or maybe I had noticed it, but now I was paying attention differently. The mana in my body wasn't just filling me. It was... aware. Not conscious — nothing as dramatic as that — but present in a way that made the world feel slightly more legible. I could feel the golems.

Not their bodies, not their movements, but the faint signatures they left all around the village. I could also feel the barrier. Not touch it — it was too far, the village perimeter wasn't exactly close from the study — but sense them. A faint constant pressure at the edge of my mind, like knowing a door was closed without checking. The golems were there and the barrier was there. It was active. It was holding. And beyond it... More shapes. Moving. Blurred. That was the first sign.

The world outside the barrier wasn't blank. Nor empty — mana was still there — but the barrier distorted everything beyond it. A white noise of ambient energy spreading all around me, too mixed together to read. I did not think much of it at first. And once more, I closed my eyes. The first impact came in the evening. A low thud. Distant. Muffled by snow and stone and the barrier's invisible membrane. I opened one eye. The study was quiet. The light sphere unchanged. My notes still on the wall.

Probably snow falling from a roof. I closed my eye. The warmth in my palm was steady. The catalyst's red core glowed at the same soft luminance. The mana kept moving through me, slow and patient, filling spaces I hadn't known existed within me. The second impact came about five minutes later. Same direction. Same muffled quality. This time I didn't dismiss it. I sat still. Catalyst in hand. Eyes open now, fixed on the window. I could feel the shapes and one was in the same direction as the noise.

The study window faced the main street. The snow was still falling — I could see it through the glass, the same gentle drift that had been falling since winter started. Nothing moving. Nothing visible. The third impact was louder. Closer? Or just something larger. Hard to tell. After all, there was no vibration through the ground, no echo off stone. Just the sound and the shape. A dull, percussive thump, like something heavy hitting something else and being stopped dead. I didn't get up.

The book was on my lap, still open to the First Circle chapter. I'd been reading the engraving instructions again — not because I needed to, but because reading kept my mind from spiraling. The diagrams were simple enough now that I'd translated them. A circle. A flow direction. A notation about stabilization that I still couldn't fully parse but understood roughly. I turned a page. Another impact. I kept reading. By nighttime, impacts had become regular enough that I'd stopped flinching. Every few minutes.

Sometimes two close together. Sometimes a gap long enough that I'd start to think it was over, then another thud that proved it wasn't. I stood once. Carefully. Catalyst held against my palm, the connection maintained. The sensation of saturation faded slightly, the book had warned about that, movement disturbed the pattern but didn't make it vanish entirely. I was fuller now than I'd been this morning. The mana had settled deeper. I walked to the window. The main street was empty.

The sweeper I'd seen earlier was gone, dormant in whatever alcove it returned to when its circuit was complete. Beyond the buildings, at the edge of the village where the barrier dome met the snow, I could see nothing. To be fair, I had removed my glasses to read. Even if something was there, at that distance, it wouldn't have changed much of what I could see. No, I could not see it, yet I could hear it. I could feel it. The shape was there. Moving. The sound and the sensation matched. Thud.

The sound came from the north edge. Thud. Now from the east. A different creature? I stood at the window for a long time, watching snow fall on an empty street, listening to the sounds, focusing on the shapes. I didn't sleep that night. Somehow not because of the creatures — after midnight the shapes had retreated and the impacts had faded. The reason I couldn't sleep was because somewhere in the hours between the second sunset and the first grey hint of dawn, the warmth in my body had changed.

It wasn't diffuse anymore. It was complete. Every part of me. Every muscle. Every bone. The book's description matched what I felt — not approximately, not metaphorically, but exactly. I was full. Again, the book did say people could sleep during the process thanks to the catalyst, but there was absolutely no way I would have managed it that night. I sat in the dark with the catalyst warm in my palm and the knowledge settling into me the way the mana had: I had finished the first step. My body was ready.

Now I had to carve a circle into my own heart. If I succeeded after that step, I'd be a mage. If I didn't — if I carved wrong, if the circle was unstable, if my visualisation wasn't precise enough — my heart could simply explode. Sweet. I had one shot. I'd been sitting on that knowledge for days now, ever since I'd first translated the engraving section. And it hadn't gotten easier, but before I started I had already chosen... Whatever the cost, I'd shoot my shot. Outside, the impacts had resumed.

Fainter now, or maybe I was too focused to think about them for now. I was certain things were hitting the barrier I could recognize the noise. Trying to get in. I didn't know what they were — the same species as the first beast, or something different, or a dozen species drawn by a new signal they'd never encountered before. It didn't matter. The barrier had held last time. It would hold this time again. And the next.

After that, I'd be a mage, or I'd be dead, no the book said the failure rate had been increasingly low since catalysts had been created. Soon I'd be a mage and I would find a way to get rid of the things, unless the things outside killed each other first on their own. If one of them won. If the others died or fled. If the winner was wounded enough that I could finish it with magic, or a knife and a lot of luck. Then I'd have a second core, more meat and I wouldn't gain another few days of peace.

That could take a day. A week. Or never happen at all. The battle royale outside my barrier might produce a weakened winner tomorrow. Or it might drag on until spring depending on the number of the things outside. Heck, the winner might be something so large that even wounded it could kill me with a glance. I wouldn't wait on a gamble. Yet here I was, willing to risk my life to become a mage. How ironic. Just like the book said, I closed my eyes again.

I focused as much as I could to feel the mana around and inside me, the way the catalyst made them move, the pattern engraved into the catalyst's core that caused it. I had to precisely map it, using a thin and precise thread of mana to make a copy of the circle. When it was complete... I moved the catalyst close to my chest as close to my heart as I could. And slowly imagined the shape I had just copied move inside my chest. For the first second, I felt nothing. It hadn't reached my skin yet. Then the pain came.

It felt as if a rough piece of metal was penetrating my skin, slowly. It was torture, I almost fainted on the spot, I cried and screamed, but I kept going. My concentration slipped. The circle shook. For one terrifying second, I felt the shape inside me lose its precision. I forced myself to breathe. Again. Maintain the flow. Do not think about the pain.

If I stopped now, if I passed out, at best I'd be dead; at worst, I would have to live the rest of my life as a crippled man alone in this deserted land even if the book disagreed that's how it felt to me. It felt like eternity had passed, finally the circle I had created was sitting perfectly at the center of my heart, I could feel it, now it just had to start spinning, and spinning it did. Faster and faster, it wasn't like the catalyst, I could feel mana gathering much faster now.

In theory now, it would start getting denser and denser, that was the circles job after all, until eventually my body would be full of that denser mana. Then I would need to do this again. My breath was heavy, somehow, I had managed it, I had yet to cast a spell and this was just the beginning of my journey but that was it, I was now a mage like one of these anime characters that had gotten a cheat skill for some dubious diety. I was thinking about this when my vision blurred. There was nothing left to resist.

The circle was stable. My body finally allowed itself to stop. The catalyst slipped from my hand.