The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Three (Patreon)

I considered for a long moment, before I looked at Rebecca and nodded. I had known that there was a risk of Dawn’s true nature leaking eventually, but there had to be a reason that Meadow had insisted that we get her a mask and pass her off as the shade of a solar-aligned sky estragon. We’d gotten powerful, absolutely, and I didn’t want to devalue all of the work that we had put in. But I also knew that, apart from being Meadow’s apprentice, I had little enough protection against a rogue Occultist or Magi. The masks were good, but they weren’t infallible, and both Darius and Meadow had suggested they could look past them. 

When I thought about it from that perspective, the choice was simple. The Magi and Occultists wouldn’t be paying in-depth attention to the thousands of competitors across hundreds of events. But they’d be paying attention to the tournament itself, and some of the competitions for events that interested them. If Dawn kept her mask on, and didn’t participate in the fight, there was little reason for most Magi or Occultists to dig too deeply. If nothing else, I expected Orykson and Meadow would help nudge their attention elsewhere – Meadow out of a desire to help and protect me and Orykson out of a desire to continue breaking down and analyzing Dawn’s strange magic without letting any of his competition study it. 

“I think your solution is the simplest. We’ll keep Dawn out, stop her from doing any sort of active participation. Dusk will be allowed to fight with me, unrestrained.” 

Rebecca gave me a beaming smile, then turned and began to confer with her colleagues for a while longer. Xuan argued fiercely against Rebecca’s decision, but in the end was overruled two to one. They wrote out the rules in a more thorough format than a general, casual conversation, then I signed off and was shown to the rooms where competitors and up to two guests were staying for the rest of the week, until the train out to the Silent River Sect. 

The accommodations that they gave were certainly nice. It was a suite large enough to have been a house, with a sitting room, small kitchen, two bathrooms, and three located along one of the skyrise buildings that overlooked the massive city. But despite the luxury, and the countless athletes, mages, and warriors that wandered around the halls, I didn’t really enjoy my time there. With the tournament’s opening ceremony less than two weeks away, I buckled down and went hard on the gate carving. Kene brewed a handful of elixirs designed to reinforce a person’s concentration, and between the two of them, I was finally able to complete carving out all of my gates. The task had taken months, but with it finally complete, and with the train leaving to the Silent River Sect tomorrow, we all gathered together in the small sitting area to discuss my next steps.

“I suppose I should break through to fourth gate,” I said, drumming my fingers on the table. “Unless you think I should keep that I’m so close to ascension hidden, and ascend midway through the tournament to surprise people?” 

“No, that doesn’t make sense,” Kene said. “Anyone with any experience in this sort of thing will be able to guess anyone at peak third is basically just waiting for an excuse to break through. I’d break through with space and time, leave life and death until you’ve finished maximizing your potential with your full-gate spells.” 

“I concur,” Meadow agreed. “I think that’s the wisest plan.” 

“Why wait?” I said, frowning. “I mean, it’s not going to cost me anything to ascend early. It’s just going to mean I’ve got to keep pushing.” 

“I hesitate to use numbers, because they fail to take into account things like upward growth,” Meadow said. “But I think there’s a decent – though highly oversimplified – explanation using them. Let’s say your current full-gates reach their maximum growth potential at a ten, while a non-growth spell is set at five. When you ascend, that cap is raised to thirty, and a non-growth becomes fifteen.”

I nodded my agreement as Meadow gestured at me. 

“If someone works hard to reach a seven out of ten, higher than the average non-growth spell, when you ascend, they’ll become a fourteen out of thirty. Weaker, and with much more effort needed to bring out the power of a growth spell. Let’s say they buckle down and make it to twenty-one before they ascend again. Now they’re at forty-two out of ninety, and a non-growth spell is at forty five. They have even more work to do in order to not fall behind. Except, as I said, this simple analogy doesn’t take in upward growth. All spells grow within the spirit, meaning the non-growth spells will keep pulling further and further ahead, while all of their time is split between reaching a greater potential and growing the spell normally.” 

“That’s why it’s important to maximize the potential at each gate before ascending,” Kene said. “It’s technically possible to catch up with the forty-eight theoretical points, but it’s loads of work. If you max out your potential to ten out of ten, you’ll be at twenty out of thirty. Then if you reach your maximum potential again, you’ll be at sixty out of ninety. It’s more work now, but much better long-term growth. But like Meadow said, this is a flawed model. None of those numbers really mean anything, they’re just to illustrate the point.” 

I considered that, pursing my lips. Ikki had flat out told me at one point that he didn’t approve of growth spells. At the time, I hadn’t entirely understood why. I’d reached the maximum potential of the spell for second gate easily enough, but that had also been second gate. I was guessing in their theoretical model I was at an eight, maybe eight and a half, especially after all my sparring with Ivy, but I still needed to keep working at it. How bad would it be if I somehow reached seventh gate, or something ridiculous like that? Meanwhile a non-growth full-gate spell, like the one that Liz used, might offer less potential power, but they could spend resources and time increasing the height of the spell in their spirit to let it grow like a normal spell. When a growth spell worked, it worked amazingly, but… I definitely saw some of the issues Ikki had tried to highlight ages ago. 

I didn’t regret taking my growth spells. They had let me become comfortable with my body, which had been the entire reason I’d started learning magic. Then, as I set my sights on other goals, they’d risen to the challenge, helping me punch above my weight class. But it was telling that I’d be stuck at peak third for a while yet, while Dusk and Dawn were so far ahead. 

A cat bumped his head against my leg, and I looked down to see the battered gray tomcat that I’d seen hanging around Ikki, and on the boat to the Idyll-Flume, and now on the other side of the planet. I reached down and scratched its ears, wondering if it was some sort of familiar to someone far stronger than I, before I looked up at Meadow and Kene. 

“Alright, let’s do it. I need to break through with Space and Time. Then what?” 

Meadow shrugged, leaning back in her chair and taking a long sip of a glass of iced tea with milk in it. 

“I’m not sure. If you’d been Orykson’s apprentice, then he’d have had you learn a bunch of spells related to pocket spaces and such. There are spells to attempt to force someone in a demiplane, to move yourself or parts of yourself in and out of one, to anchor demiplanes in quasi-permanent open positions… but that’s not your focus. There are plenty of meta spells for teleportation, but you use Foxstep, not a pure spatial short range teleport. That leaves a handful of decent spatial warping spells, mainly the ones used for travel in combination with teleportation, and the meta-spells for Seven League Step. Truthfully, fourth gate’s a bit of an odd one.”

“How’s that?” I asked, tilting my head to one side. To my surprise, Kene was the one who answered instead of me. 

“Spell engineering. Most professional mages, like demiplane builders, stop focusing as much on advancement once they have hit third gate. As such, there’s been a great deal of work done on engineering fourth gate spells to utilize emergent properties of third gate. The attempts to bring fifth down to fourth are less funded, and less successful, as many spells incorporate the amplified resonance. It means fourth is often filled with half-baked attempts at a fifth gate reduction – like the Seven League Step meta spells, a handful of spells whose emergent properties are stymieing engineers – like the spacebending transport spells, and a few true winners that really use said properties – like forcing someone into a pocket space.” 

“I see… Meadow, I recall you mentioning some full-gate spells that you thought might suit me?” 

“I did,” Meadow smiled. “But we can address those after the tournament. You’ve met one source of them already, and on the way to the sepulcher, we should be able to hit four or five other places with animals that blend together a lot of space and time in their magic.” 

“Sounds like a plan,” I agreed with a nod. “Alright. I’ll ascend with Space and Time, and just burn that mana. No spells, just a focus on burning out my mists and digging, if I get that far. But my real focus will be getting life and death ready to ascend. I hope there are more useful spells there?” 

“There are a few more,” Meadow agreed. “At least on the life front.” 

“Not for healers,” Kene grumbled. “I filled mine with a bunch of rituals to try and help me match up to versatility… whatever.” 

“True,” Meadow conceded. “But you utilize life very differently. I think Malachi will find more use for them, and ghost magic has a number of spells at fourth gate that are, as Kene phrased them, ‘a few true winners’. I’d not worry about death, and you should be fine with life.” 

“Alright. Then let’s do this!” 

Despite my excitement, there was still a good bit that I needed to do if I was to actually ascend. Getting my mana-garden overflowing enough to attempt the ascension wasn’t too terribly hard for my spatial mana, as I had several spatially aligned plants – null ranunculus, transivy, spiritshield lichen enhanced pointer moss, and even a bit of the dreamwalker lichen. Temporal, on the other hand, was limited to my emperor’s tree and echo shrooms, which meant I needed to build some alternative stores. But between my plants, a bit of alchemy, and simply letting loose soul mana in my spirit to allow it to transform into a larger quantity of soul mana, I was able to gather enough magic to prepare for an ascension. 

And so, I gathered my mana together and formed myself in my mana-garden. I strode through my spatial garden, pulling all of my mana together. To my surprise, even with the carvings not yet catalyzed through the process of ascension, they still channeled the power toward the attempt, letting it gather far faster and easier than it had during my third gate breakthrough. I pooled it together, forming a wedge with my will, and slammed it into the gates. An instant later, the spatial gate cracked open, and a new stream of power flowed through my entire garden. It rushed through the carvings that I’d made on my gates, and the magic within them sparked to life. I felt my mana senses… sharpen. They grew clearer and more useful.

Moments later, I blew open the gates to my fourth gate temporal mana. The effect was less dramatic this time, as my gate carvings were already active, but there was still a surge of power. 

After all the work I’d put into carving the gates, I couldn’t help but feel conflicted. On one hand, I’d poured countless hours into carving and re-carving. On the other, I had almost died during my breakthrough to third gate. By comparison, this just felt… anti-climatic.