Chương 63: Famous Four

Enzo stared at the notification and waited for more. A Guide entry. A description. Something explaining what Beastbonding actually was, what it did, how he'd triggered it, and what it meant for Murph. Maybe even an entry on Beasts. Nothing came. He waited longer. Still nothing.

"Really?" he said to the empty trail.

"You'll give me a five-page essay on mana storage mediums, but my dog just turned invisible and all I get is two words?" The forest didn't answer either. He dismissed the display and pulled up his notifications again, hoping that turning it off and on again would work. There was nothing. The Guide, as always, was content to let him figure it out on his own. He hated it. He understood why, maybe, and he still hated it. A bark came from his left. Enzo turned.

Murph was sitting between two fern-covered bushes on the opposite side of the trail from where she'd disappeared. Tongue out. Tail sweeping the dirt behind her. Grinning. She'd crossed the trail without him seeing her. While he'd been standing three feet away, arguing with the Guide.

"Very impressive," he said flatly.

"And definitely more evidence of Val's influence." Murph's tail picked up speed. He started walking again, leaning harder on his cane. Murph fell into step beside him, looking enormously pleased with herself.

"Can you tell me what mana that was?" Murph shrugged. Sort of. Enzo frowned.

"Do you have access to the Guide?" Murph looked up at him, head tilted in obvious confusion.

"I'll take that as a no." It made sense that Beasts didn't have access to the Guide. It was clearly a spell construct, though given the depths of their magical ignorance, he wouldn't be surprised even if they later learned it was actually powered by invisible fairies. But based on the entries he'd unlocked so far, the Guide was clearly designed for and by sapient creatures. Alien dragons and elves, along with who knew what else. He shook his head. Murph whined. He glanced down.

"Just thinking. Do you know what mana types you have?" She whined again.

"That's okay. We're all learning as we go." He paused.

"I also unlocked the Beastbonding skill, but I didn't do anything to earn it, as far as I can tell. Did you do something?" Murph shook herself from nose to tail, then looked up at him with a chuff.

"You don't know either." She barked.

"Great. So neither of us knows what happened, the Guide won't explain, and you can apparently disappear whenever you feel like it." He paused.

"Is there anything else you've been hiding?" Murph trotted ahead a few steps, then looked back over her shoulder.

"That's not reassuring." She barked and kept walking. The idea to insist that she share more of what she knew was right there, the words on the tip of his tongue, but he hesitated. Then he let it go. There was nothing to do about it right now. No information from the Guide. And Murph didn't know what she didn't know. As for the rest… Murph had been his pet. Legally, property. Not that he'd ever thought about it in such terms. But that world was dead and buried under a tidal wave of raining blood and death.

The puppy she'd been was gone, replaced by the Beast she was becoming. A creature with intelligence and magic, and a will to keep secrets and play tricks. But also a desire to help out the community she was part of, through no insistence or instruction of his or anyone else's that he was aware of. That meant something. He wasn't sure what, yet. It was just another part of the ongoing existential crisis. Beastbonding could join the list. Along with Beast cores and why his puppy had more mana types than he did.

And the clearing was ahead. It opened before them, a wide break in the redwoods where the canopy thinned enough to let sunlight through. The ground sloped gently upward, covered in low grass and clover. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Murph bolted. She hit the clearing at full speed, nose down, zigzagging from one scent to the next. Within seconds she'd covered half the perimeter, tail whipping behind her as she catalogued whatever the forest had left behind.

Enzo made his way toward the center at his own pace. The slope evened out into a small flat section near the middle, where the grass was shorter and the ground was firm. There was a fallen log at the edge of the clearing, half-buried in ferns. He extended a hand.

"Telekinesis." The log lifted, shedding dirt and moss, and drifted across the clearing. He set it down on the flat, brushed off a section with his sleeve, and sat. The cane went beside him, leaning against the bark. The sun was warm on his face. Clouds sat on the horizon to the west, but they weren't moving fast. He had time. From here, he could see most of the clearing. The old trail they'd come in on. The treeline curving around.

And up in one of the redwoods at the far edge, the remains of a tree fort sagging between two thick trunks that the park rangers had never found. What was left of it, anyway. The platform had buckled in the middle, one side hanging at an angle that looked like it would collapse with the next strong wind. The railing was gone entirely. A few planks still clung to the trunk where they'd nailed them as a ladder, though most had rotted through or fallen. He and Kenzo had built the frame. Claire had painted it.

Signe had fallen out of it twice, and blamed the ladder both times even though Matt had tested every step before she climbed. Matt had wanted to add a roof. They never got around to it. That had been ten years ago, maybe more. Five kids with a hammer, a bag of nails, access to their fathers' wood sheds, and a week with no supervision. Enzo watched it for a moment longer, then pulled the spellbook from his jacket and opened it across his knee.

There were a number of things he needed to sort before the conflict with the Riders escalated. He was hoping for a week, but that assumed things would work according to his timeline. And he wasn't comfortable relying on that. In the long run, he had an incredible advantage over other mages in the form of his mutated gene. It was already proving useful in his crafting, but that was just the beginning. He had so many ideas to pursue and experiments to perform. Time was the problem.

And the risk of dying, whether to external pressures or through killing himself by accident. Sumi was right. All of his spells were applications of pure force, regardless of how creatively delivered some of them were. There was nothing inherently wrong with that. Arcane mana favored him. It 'loved him', to take a leaf out of Kenzo's book. Crystal, metal, and light were the same, but it was also different. Arcane was his doting mother. The others were his annoying siblings.

And all of the other mana types he'd successfully accessed through batteries were varying degrees of strangers. Some were neighborly. Old acquaintances. Friends of friends. But none of them really liked him. Kenzo had suggested the reason Enzo couldn't create a spell structured from those types was because those mana types lacked his signature. None of them knew if that was true or not, or if the mechanism was something deeper, but it was the best theory they had. For now. It came down to time.

If he had more, he'd experiment. But he didn't. So it was time to improvise instead. But first he needed to complete the missing adaptation for Mana Absorption. It was an interesting bonus from being a Magus, which allowed him to create separate adaptations for his mind and heart reservoirs. Interesting because Mana Sense didn't, despite being shared by both wizard and cultivator. Val and Kenzo had described the process for creating cultivator adaptations.

Where the wizard connected mana threads to the endpoint extended through their forehead, cultivators did so by creating a circulating mana flow that began and ended at the heart's endpoint. Enzo pulled up the Guide's interface and navigated to the section for skill adaptations. A list appeared in his vision, and populated fast. But the interface itself had also changed. It now showed options for every skill he'd unlocked, and even provided filters. He glanced at Murph, busy digging at the base of a tree.

Then the largest butterfly he'd ever seen raced by, and she launched herself after it. Enzo turned his attention back to the interface. The Guide had been modified. That aligned with what he'd learned from the original entry packets provided when he'd gained access to it. The information had outlined how the Guide was exploratory, and would explain things as they were encountered. But it was also personal, shaped by the user's experimentation and individual comprehension of magic and anything else they encountered.

And there had been a line about how the Guide would change as they developed. He remembered that line. It had stood out at the time, because it hadn't been clear if the expanded functionality would come through individual or social growth. It had implied both, but given very little either way. Did that mean that humanity was winning? Were others like him and his friends out there fighting to carve out their own little communities? Creating new magics and fighting back Beasts and Eaters and mini-tyrants?

They had to be. There'd been so much death, but people were adaptable. The list proved it. He shook his head and read the first adaptation.

'Mana Absorption: Increased Capacity — Creator: Lorenzo Locke — 43k+ adoptions' Enzo blinked.

"What?" He read the next one.

'Mana Sense: Mana Information Translation and Display — Creator: Lorenzo Locke — 19k+ adoptions.' He let out a breath when the third one finally had someone else's name attached to it.

'Mana Absorption: Automatic Conversion — Creator: Meha Kulkarni — 15k+ adoptions' The fourth one was his again.

'Mana Control: Increased Range — Creator: Lorenzo Locke — 14k+ adoptions' Then Sumi and Val.

'Mana Control: Stable Threads — Creator: Hayashi Sumi — 13k+ adoptions''Mana Circulation: Instant Blended Flows — Creator: Valerie Locke — 11k+ adoptions' Enzo stared into space, the interface refusing to blur even as his eyes unfocused. Sumi creating something to aid with her mana control wasn't surprising. She'd worked hard to master her own threading, and he remembered her mentioning his own unnatural control over arcane mana as being something she wished she had. Val being on the list was the opposite.

But considering Kenzo's demonstration, it wasn't a surprise that an adaptation related to the ability to blend mana types together was ranked so high. He really needed to test that himself. It was on the list, but his wizard skills were far more advanced and the knee would inhibit any physical combat until it was fixed. His gaze continued downward, out of his control, the interface scrolling with his intent.

'Mana Circulation: Faster Flows — Creator: John Richards — 9k+ adoptions''Empowerment: Mindless Mana — Creator: Remy Langlois — 8k+ adoptions''Mana Sense: Muted Colors — Creator: Fang Ning — 6k+ adoptions''Mana Sense: Combat Sight — Creator: Yamamoto Kenzo — 4k+ adoptions' He frowned at the last entry. It had just slipped into what was obviously the top ten most popular adaptations ranked by adoption count, though the list kept going. From there, the numbers decreased fast, eventually dropping into the hundreds.

Kenzo hadn't said anything about it, though Enzo vaguely recalled overhearing Val arguing that Kenzo was cheating because he somehow knew what she was doing even when they were training without using Simplified Invocation. That meant the adaptation probably had something to do with sensing the mana your opponent was using in their techniques and spells. It was exactly the sort of brilliant trick he'd come up with, though it might only offer a fraction of a second's advantage.

Except it was probably far more useful when facing Eaters. Maybe even Beasts. And it meant that between them, they'd created six of the most popular skill adaptations on the planet. They were famous. Yay.