The Fourth Gate: Chapter Eight

I flicked my mind through the list one more time, then started to make retractions. I needed to gain short term power if I wanted to progress in the tournament, that was true, but just as importantly, I needed to make a choice that would propel me forward as a mage. Orykson had bandied about the time frame of five to ten years, and years worth of instincts and mana development wasn’t something I wanted to waste on something that would only help me win another round, and then end. 

Light of the Depths was the first to go. Boosting my full-gate spells and Mantle Dragonfyre was good, there was no doubt in my mind about that. But I wasn’t an aquatic mage, and I didn’t have the body of a deep sea dragon. The combat instincts would only be partially worth it, and it fell squarely into helping me win another round and nothing more. 

The Grove Matriarch, Prankster, and Spirit general were eliminated next for a similar reason – their instincts would clash with mine, and while they offered me good compatibility, it didn’t strike the right balance between short and long term gain. Perhaps, if this was the Arcanist tournament, the Spirit General would have been better. A lot of ghost magic unlocked increasing power as you went up in gates, mingling with early bits of soul magic. But right now, I just didn’t have enough ghost spells to make it worth it. 

The Broker and Ninetails were the next to be up on the metaphorical chopping block.  I knew myself well enough to know that gaining the instincts of someone who’d taken more and more soul damage until they died was only going to exacerbate my bad habits. That might have been worth it if they’d had Hudau mana, or explicitly had some sort of strong spell overlap, but the Broker didn’t have a mana type listed. In life they’d used spells on loan from many others, and while they had used synergies, that was more of a vague concept than mana. That made it too much of a gamble that I’d lose out on the mana investment. 

The Ninetails, on the other hand, was simply too much of a gamble in general. Sure, it might be able to be super compatible, but it also might be the least compatible out of all my selections. No, that was far too risky. 

The Refiner was eliminated next. If I had the opportunity to take as many as I wanted, she’d have been a great choice for potentially improving a supplemental skill I practiced. She did doubtless have a good number of life spell overlap. But she’d not been a fighter at all, and while I didn’t want to entirely dedicate the headstone to improving my combat ability, I did want some. 

That left only three: the Jade Owner, the Fiddler, and the Autumn Weaver. Out of those three, the easy first pick to remove was the Jade Owner. I did use armor and defensive spells, but it was far from my speciality. While I could see myself settling down someday, and definitely wanted to slow down and work on a guild relatively soon, I wasn’t about to stop right now. I had at least a few more adventures before I began that. 

The Fiddler or the Autumn Weaver, then. I thought that both of them were fine choices, though neither was even close to perfect. Magic wise, they seemed about equal: the Fiddler was probably better for specifically improving my plant magic, but The Autumn Weaver was a better match for mana in general, with death mana touched by life. So what about instincts? 

I had no real connection to music. I’d gone through a bit of a phase as a teen where I got a bunch of music crystals as a teen, but I’d hadn’t really gotten any sort of long-term investment in music or shows. The Autumn Weaver, though? While I’d kind of failed to keep up with Alvaro or the library as a whole, I did like them, conceptually speaking. More importantly, there was coordination. 

I already used several different points during my fights. One of my big finishing moves involved several Spatial Anchors to direct Enhance Plant Life, multiple Captured Moments that chained into echoes, Pinpoint Boneshard, and more. What’s more, Pinpoint Boneshard was a spell that I hadn’t gotten much use out of in my fight against Liz. I hadn’t revealed my spear, since I knew that she’d just match it with a sword echo. 

And in the future, it was going to get worse. Of course it was. If I ever used a Heaven’s Gate elixir to reach false seventh, or somehow ascended there on my own, then I’d have simulacra, and each of them might need to do the same thing. Even before then, at fifth or sixth gate, I’d be able to add additional Combat Echoes or short term copies. What would happen if I had two Combat Echoes, while each of me was using four plants, four normal echoes, and four Pinpoint Boneshards? 

Ghostmind and the Timemind would both help with that. If I had ghosts to help each, they could probably take over one task. But even if they handled Pinpoint Boneshard, the Combat Echoes still used my Soulself and Will. Could I handle doing thirty-six tasks at once, even if twelve were managed by a ghost? What about when I had more echoes? I wasn’t a mind mage, and I didn’t have an Aerde like Orykson did. Gaining years worth of instincts about managing that many things would help improve how much I could do in the short term of the tournament, but just as importantly, it would help me in the long term. 

“The Autumn Weaver,” I said. The curator raised his eyebrow, and I felt the knowledge mana I was connected to fall away. Unlike Aerde’s packet, which had tied itself firmly into my knowledge mana, this had simply connected, and I felt a strange sense of disorientation as the information was lost. I still knew the thoughts I’d had about the others. I knew why I’d rejected the Fiddler, for example, and why I’d almost picked him. But the injected information about his life was simply… gone. 

The curator didn’t seem to notice, merely leading me through the halls until we found a small alcove that almost reminded me of a shrine left for ghosts or the like. Within the alcove was a strange, very abstract statue that reminded me of a cube made of glass, with a half-dozen tubes sticking in and out at odd angles. The entire thing was a red color that was somehow both bright and deep at the same time. I reached out and placed my hand upon the statue, my body seeming to move on its own without my input. I appeared within my mana-garden, the power cascading through my spirit, almost as if I had drunk a potion or taken a pill. 

I could immediately feel the power wasn’t quite right, like wearing a shirt that wasn’t the right cut for my body shape. It wasn’t painful or distressing, simply not quite right, and the metaphorical tailoring of it to better fit took up the material. 

As it flowed into me, I felt it drawn to my death magic, as well as to my life magic, albeit to a lesser extent, but as it pooled there, it didn’t naturally flow toward any spell. It hummed, and the walls within my first gate life and death magic began to rise, the foreign power serving to grow my reserves. I let them grow for a moment, then forcibly stopped the power and considered where I could best use the flow, before starting to split it off into different streams. To my surprise, my practice using the Hudau Heart and having so many mana types helped greatly here, as I was more used to directing multiple different flows than most mages.

The first thing I did was force the power to flow into all of my mana types, not just life and death. The power that went into space, time, and beastgate was far less efficient, requiring more to grant the same amount of growth. I balanced the flow carefully so that it would provide a roughly equal gain for all of my mana types across first through fourth gate, but also only allowed a few of the threads that I created to go toward mana amount. 

I directed several more threads to specific spells throughout my garden. Some went to Foxstep, since it was probably my single most used spell out of all of them. Each spell within my sensory suite received a couple of streams of power, and my full gate spells did as well. My fungus magic took to the autumnal power fairly well, and the streams of magic I’d dedicated to them caused Fungal Armor to grow considerably. 

With roughly the remaining third of the streams of power, I went to my fourth gate, and began to dig. Years of growth was the offer of a headstone like this, and I was certain that more than one person would be directing it into just a couple of spells, making those spells hit with an incredible power that was well beyond their ken. But I already had methods for that, like a soul mana infused Mantle Dragonfyre. Perhaps more importantly, if that was what most people did, then doing it as well wouldn’t actually help me. 

My mega-enhanced spell and their mega-enhanced spell would have incredible growth, more or less cancelling each other out. If I poured everything into Fungal Armor, I might be able to take incredible hits, but it would only even the playing field against someone who put everything into an offensive spell. Perhaps there were people in the world for whom focusing on one thing above all others was the right path, but that wasn’t me. I’d take some growth, but I wouldn’t be creating any mega spells. 

There was one thing I could do to close the gap in power: advance. Of course, just advancing had the same problem as just making a mega spell. It would equal out with what an opponent had, but wouldn’t grant me anything new and unique. But I wasn’t just doing that, I was splitting between advancement, mana amount, and empowering some spells. Advancing should improve the density and quality of my mana, as well as help me take some new spells that would give me new tricks. I was only in early fourth gate right now, and if I had years worth of mana-garden development, it should push me forward quite a bit, even split apart as it was. 

The stream of the Autumn Weaver’s headstone struck the dirt, and things slowly began to shift. It dug and dug, until at last, the wall of mist overhead broke, and the hole transformed into smooth bricks. Power rippled through me as I advanced from early fourth gate to mid-fourth gate, months ahead of schedule, and I felt my mana kick up a notch in potency. From there, I directed the power to burning away the mists, and watched as they melted away. 

The stream of power began to taper off, and so I released the flows that were directed toward my mana-garden’s walls. I had a fairly large amount of mana already. Nothing prodigious, and I wouldn’t be beating anyone with a legacy devoted to enhancing mana-garden size, but it was enough. The release of these threads let me turn the focus back to advancement, and as the mists formed into a wall, I began to drill into the earth. I pushed and strained, then disconnected from the sensory suite. I got enough growth from them from simply training and constant use. The power was almost gone, and I reached up and wrenched a bit more free, disconnecting streams from my full gates as I did, and then–

There was a smooth jolt as the headstone broke through, and a second set of smooth steps appeared in my fourth gate gardens, bricks forming on the ground, and the ripple of denser, more potent mana rushing through me. The headstone faded away completely then, and I didn’t fight it. Looking over the garden, I thought that I’d made a good amount of progress. It wasn’t the absolute perfect match’s ten years of growth, sure, but I thought I’d probably put about two years worth of effort into advancement, two split among my selected spells, and two more into my mana amount. Considering the mis-match in mana, I thought I’d done quite well. 

Then I sunk through the floor of my mana-garden, instincts and will flowing into me.