Adamant Blood

Until that moment, in that scanning room, when Mark saw all sorts of mana gathering onto that dagger in weird ways, he hadn't really understood that the shapes of mana mattered as much as the actual mana itself.

And so Mark spent the next few days going over everything he knew about adamantium smithing and relating it back to 'mana shapes', which was not a concept he had explored much at all. There wasn't anything about any 'mana shapes' in any of the smithing videos he had ever seen, and the more he explored, the more he was sure this was a Mage Secrecy thing.

"But it's all pretty obvious in retrospect, yeah?" Isoko commented, as they were between sets in the gym.

It was the two of them on the second floor of the house, in their private gym, so Mark was talking mana bindings and smithing with Isoko between lifts. Today was chest and arms, and both of them were doing their damnedest to not actually use their Powers at all. That would negate the whole point of working out at all. The body was the baseline of the Power for all brawnies, and some brawnies needed really fucking expensive equipment to actually challenge their bodies. Sally worked out at the Big Gym down the road every other day, usually with Eliot using one of the side offices to do personal work while she pumped weights under heavy supervision. Sally needed that, with her 15x modifier.

Mark and Isoko had it a lot easier, with Mark not having a Strength modifier at all, and Isoko's modifier only really active when she was in Full Platinum. Both of them were benching 375 regularly, though, so Isoko's Strength still bled through into her much smaller frame. Both of them were still sweating and straining heavily at that weight.

Mark gulped down water and then breathed deep, and said, "It's not that obvious. I thought mana was mana; that it was all different from each other. But... yeah. It's obvious when you look at Bindings and what you're trying to do with Wind Shaper. There's like… hundreds of little mana shapes, all in special rows."

"317 shapes in the minimal Wind Shaper shape," Isoko said, "And I have to string them all together perfectly and then copy that 6 times into a completed knot that won't unravel as I use it… It's pretty fucking tough, actually, without knowing exactly what the shapes really mean."

She was a little despondent.

"It's a fucking massive undertaking, you know. Sure, it's been a month since you Mapped it, but holy shit, Isoko. It's only been a month. You've only tried it once. You're not getting it right away. But you will. And maybe now that you know about the shapes, maybe those shapes will actually mean something to you now."

Isoko smiled a little as she looked away. "… Yeah. You know what? Yeah." She grinned.

Isoko got back under the bench, and Mark spotted her for her set.

After she was done, Mark went, and then the two of them took another small break.

"How's your Mapping going?" Isoko asked, dabbing sweat away from her chest.

"Horrible," Mark said, "Even with Quark helping the entire thing morphs. Union and Adamantiumkinesis are doing that, for sure. Incorruptible Body might be doing some work there, too, but not as much as those first two. At least Protect is a lot simpler than Wind Shaper at something like 2 shapes, but those 2 shapes have to curve and bend and do a whole lot of weird shit all the time. And that's the basic Alteration that I need to do so that I don't just cut myself off."

"Why not try for the normal spherical Protect, first? Just cut yourself off. It's just hexagons and the binding shape, the mortar. Do the sphere, Mark. Get your first one understood, then move on to the alteration you actually want to do."

Mark didn't want to do that and Isoko hadn't pushed before but she was pushing now, and honestly? Mark could see her point. "Maybe I should… Say? Eliot was talking about those warding plates the other day, and they're just hexes, right? Are they the Protect shape, but writ large? Purposefully placed on city walls?"

Isoko was quiet in thought. "… Yeah? Maybe? The spellform is more complicated— Unless warding hexes use some sort of magical binding mortar, too?"

"They probably do," Mark said. And then he had a thought. He wanted to see what Isoko thought first, though, so he asked, "What do you think the hexagon shape in the Protect spell actually represents?"

"You mean the same shape that's in Protect, and warding hexes, and the Power Level Hex?" Isoko asked, knowingly.

"I mean… Yeah. It's pretty obvious when you put all the pieces together. The hexagon shape has to be a general, all-purpose anti-influence… I wonder if Mind Shields and other shielding powers have a bunch of hexes in their makeup. Maybe Mind Shields are pointed toward Yellow Mind more than all the other colors?"

Isoko hummed. "… I was gonna say 'yes', but then you kept going and I needed to think about that… Seems like it could be right, though? Something to ask Blackthorn?"

"No no… But yes. I'll ask him later when I try to make another dagger, once the mana scanner artifact shows up from the Builder's Guild. It should be here tomorrow."

"You should try taking that Flight Binding and putting it down in physical adamantium outside of your body. Or maybe the Protect spell. See what happens when you make a perfect sphere out of a bunch of hexagons."

Mark looked up and away, thinking. "Yeah. I could try it. I think what I really want to try is using Union to put specific stuff into a mana crystal, and see if I can make that stuff grow like it grows out of dragonoids and stuff. Like the mana crystals you find in the wild."

"Oh now those have to be different than whatever the fuck you did. I've never seen 'broken glass' shaped mana from any of the poison monsters we've hunted for their mana crystals. Poison mana crystals from monsters are always either silver or nasty green or murky purple or black, or something like that, and they have all sorts of normal crystalline structures. Quartz and whatever-you-call-it other shapes."

"Well there you go. Maybe those kinds of mana crystals are exactly like quartz and diamonds and stuff, and they're mostly made from, like, silicon and oxygen mana, and whatever, but those individual parts are all different atoms. Maybe with that hemolytic-type poison I made it's all broken glass when large, but when it's so small you can't see it properly, and when there's a bunch of other stuff in the mix, then it crystallizes into those tubular red spike-glass from those bleeder frogs— Ah. You didn't go on that mission with me. But yeah. I have seen hemolytic poison in crystal form, and it looks like all the rest of the normal mana crystals; highly magical and crystalline in shape. Not like broken glass at all."

Isoko hummed. "Maybe… One way to know for sure is— In alchemy, you should find out if the crystals are used whole, or if they have to be broken down to components… or…" She waved a hand, encompassing the whole idea and more, as she simply said, "Alchemy."

"Complicated shit."

"Exactly. Alchemy stuff is all behind Mage Secrecy, but the smaller parts are probably out there, you know, somewhere."

They continued with their set.

- - - -

Mark sat in the mage training room of the Valen compound, alone.

Elaria and Isoko were beyond the glass behind him, looking in. He could feel their vectors, their concern, but it was a small sort of concern. A normal worry. Elaria was pretty sure Mark could do this; it wasn't even a 'real magic'.

It was just Protect.

Protect was going to sit on top of his soul, at the very edges, not interacting with anything at all, except as a surface protectant. That was the theory of how it would Protect Mark, but even Elaria didn't know if it was going to work. This was a risk. Magic was a risk.

Mark was probably going to cut himself off from being able to Union with anything, or Adamantiumkinesis. Elaria was pretty sure that as soon as Mark actually flexed his actual Binding, to use Union or whatever, that the Protect would fail and probably hurt when it failed.

Such was the nature of most people's first attempt at magery. Isoko had already hurt herself, and now it was Mark's turn.

The 'map' of Mark's Binding hovered to the left of his vision, like a morass of black fractals all slowly twisting in on itself, spinning and flowing in ribbons and curls, layering in deep pools, and rising like pointed shards. It was not the whole thing. It was not Adamantiumkinesis and Union and Incorruptible Body, but it was 70% of it. The surface 70%. It should be enough.

To the right hovered Protect. It was simplicity personified. Hexagonal plates, tessellated endlessly into a sphere. You couldn't put hexagons onto a sphere and not have gaps, though, so the gaps were incorporated into the whole thing as a solid black mortar. It was sort of like Isoko's Wind Shaper's 317 individual shapes in 6 lines, and then tied into a cohesive knot, but instead Protect was a single shape repeated endlessly.

There was about 12% 'mortar' space in this sphere that Mark was using as a Protect design.

There were probably pentagons that Mark could figure out and put into this diagram and close up the weak mortar gaps a lot. What kinda mana shape was a pentagon, though? Elaria wasn't willing to talk about that, or about anything beyond the deals they had already made for Protect and Flight magic. She was already stretching Isoko's training to have Wind Shaper instead of Flight, but she could handle that sort of stretch.

Giving Mark too many magics would make other people who wanted to get Mark into an actual Mage Secrecy contract rather mad, and Elaria didn't want to deal with that.

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And Mark was fine with that. Quark had already run some design iterations for Mark, and if Mark put in 12 pentagons, then he could reduce the need for mortar almost entirely.

That seemed more likely to 'lock' Mark into his astral body, though, and take longer to break and recover from. According to a talk with Elaria, the mortar was an important part of Basic Protect magic. It was important. She was sure that Mark understood that she was stressing that when Mark started asking questions, and so Mark was pretty sure the mortar was important, too.

Mark could also make, like, a rotating shield? That was perfectly strong in a direction, maybe? That one would use pentagons, for sure. What would the pentagons do? Have built in weaknesses against something that they didn't protect? Mark was pretty sure he knew what hexagons represented in this particular form of magic, but what did pentagons represent?

What about those broken glass-like shards that were sort of like broken hexagons, but which Tulo and Rylan had called 'hemolytic mana'? Did that shape have anything to do with the hexagon, Protect shape?

Also, there was the question of how many hexagons to use in the design. A sphere covered in 10,000 hexagons was a whole lot more solid than a sphere covered by, like, 10 hexagons. A lot less gaps! A lot less need for mortar. Mark's current design had 333 hexagons and 11% mortar.

Was the mortar good or bad, though?

Mark had no idea.

Elaria told him what she could tell him, and no more.

And so, Mark wondered. Did the number of hexagons, like, change the sensitivity of the Protect? All Protect only worked when something actually triggered it, after all. You could turn a spellbreaker to high-sensitivity and it would trigger off of anything that touched your astral body at all. Or you could turn the sensitivity down, and only something that really tried to influence you would be rejected…

Those were thoughts for another day.

Mark had his design.

And he had to do the whole thing, all at once, not stopping until it was done. Otherwise it would break down into jagged dreams on top of churning sand, and that would hurt.

Mark said, "Last minute check, Quark."

Quark responded in his vision, "Check commencing… Check complete! You are free to be indisposed for the next 12 to 24 hours."

Mark breathed deep, and then he went inward gradually, like slipping into another view of himself, pushing past the surface of his own skin and then sideways, into a twisting vision that left him standing on top of his soul. Black on black on black; that's what it was. And yet Mark felt perfectly at home, because he could see the nuance of it all. There was no light, but there was light. There was no depth to the ocean, but there was depth everywhere.

And Quark was there, too, like a silver mirror of Mark, standing on top of the undulating ocean of Mark's soul. Quark's very presence made all of the black around him more intelligible.

Mark said, "Hello, Quark."

"Hello, sir."

"Show me the hexagons."

Quark gestured to the sky, beyond the roiling crashes of Mark's blackness, to a hexagon the size of a swimming pool and the thickness of a hair. Another 6 hexagons appeared around the first one, and then the spread began; a tessellation. The hexagons spread outward. When the distance between strings was great enough to allow for real space between the lines, more hexagons crowded the space between, and thus, the sky filled with hexagons.

Quark would work on that for a while, and Mark would come back to actually build it all, which would take time, but not nearly as much as it might appear. The hexagons were perfect in implementation, meaning they were all the exact same size and shape and everything, so once the process got started, then it was repetition after repetition. All ideas of 'imperfect hexagons' were filled in with the mortar between hexagons.

Mark had the core of the spell to find, though.

A memory of perfect defense.

Mark had almost no memories like that because all of his experiences were more focused on winning; not perfection. What did a perfect defense even look like? Mark had no real idea about that, but he did have some ideas he could play around with.

He had chosen the idea of a perfect 100 in every category of the Power Hex, which is what he most imagined when he thought about Protect, anyway. So, where to find that memory?

Mark had made the memory just a day ago, when he was preparing for this attempt.

Mark looked inward and saw a vague, ephemeral memory of himself holding a hexagonal tile that Eliot had made as a mockup of a warding tile. It was grey and kinda soft, because it was unfired clay. Mark held the grey hexagon softly in his hands...

There.

Mark saw the memory in the dark, like images in the black. Everything was black, but Mark could still see color everywhere he looked, and he saw the grey tile right there.

Right here, in his hands, right now.

Mark took that memory and surrounded it with the idea of Protect magic, and then he dropped the memory into the black ocean underfoot. Fractal black crashed left and right, ignoring the memory, and the memory fell to where it was useful.

While maintaining that connection in the ocean, Mark looked upward, at the hexagon overhead. He started weaving hexagons in the sky, blackness flowing upward and filling in the first perfect hexagon, from which all others would follow.

Mark picked a direction, and put up another hexagon at that location, filling in the diagram made by Quark, and then Mark kept going in that direction.

He wasn't sure how long it took but he filled in a hundred shapes, and then there was the starter ring of hexagons right up there. Mark connected the line of hexagons he had created, and suddenly he felt a shift in his soul. Something connected, solidly.

The memory of protection lay far below, shining brightly in the black, connecting outward to the ring Mark had put around himself.

The next rings went much faster. Mark barely remembered doing them, but he did remember each flash of connection back to that original ring, and each crossing at the southern hex, and how Quark's image in the sky was amazingly exact and that meant that Mark had to shift himself a few times to try and match it. He failed a few times with that matching. He had to compensate by making the next hex smaller or larger than needed, which was not great.

It was what it was.

Mark started on the 7th encircling line next, which was angled around the equator of his soul, connecting through all 6 of the original lines, twice.

And then Mark worked on the 8th line, and then came the next line, and the next.

Everything got pretty fucking weird somewhere in all of that when Mark looked down and he saw his soul was kinda threadbare, with the black pulled away from the spikes, swirls, and pools of the black ocean, to reveal absolute black and shining black and piercing black, like weird coral formations.

Mark kept going; there was more than enough black to go around.

And then he was done.

Mark floated on a thinner ocean and the sky was… a fucking mess of hexagons.

"Holy shit," Mark said, looking up at himself. "That's a fucking mess!"

"It's 84% according to plan, sir," Quark said.

And then Mark was standing on the hexagons, looking down again, and… Well. Mark admitted, "So it looks okay from up here… Aside from all the horrible pit drop depths— Ah, and the ocean is coming through the holes now—"

Urk!

Mark slammed awake, sitting on the ground in the mage room under the soft lights, and everything was too constrained. He was trapped inside his body, his Unionsense flickering like knives under his skin as his adamantium flopped on the ground over there, spilled into shards and digging into the ground. Everything was bloated.

"You're okay, Mark!" Elaria said to him through speakers, "Just breathe!"

Mark tried to breathe but everything was too tight. Too close. His skin was too close and his clothes were too close and—

Mark doubled over and puked even as he tried to pull off his shirt, his puke getting everywhere. His head spun inward. He couldn't breathe, move, or touch anything. He couldn't feel his fingers or the ground. He couldn't feel gravity or the puke all over his face, and there was no smell—

"Connect to him, Isoko," Elaria said.

And then there was a lifeline.

Mark grabbed that lifeline and his skin broke open and his life expanded outward like flesh passing through knives. It hurt like a motherfucker. But Mark could breathe again.

Mark was on his back, pants around his ankles, shirt tossed to the side, with no idea how he had gotten there at all. The knives were still in his flesh, the pain was there, but Mark was able to see again, to feel the world with his fingers and his knife-torn Unionsense.

Breathe. Calm. Breathe.

"So that was a bad reaction," Elaria said, "But you're okay. Pull your pants up and start your stretches. Isoko, you can stop now."

Isoko pulled back, but not before she gave Mark a bit of dignity back with a quick Purity/Impurity. Mark was thankful for that, and Isoko responded with a bit of mirth and acceptance in her vector. It was fine, she was saying. It happens.

Feeling Isoko say all of that with her vector was like trying to make sense of the world through grease-covered glass; Mark could do it, but it wasn't clear at all.

Mark pulled his pants back up and got to stretching both his body and his astral soul.

The knives-in-the-soul got worse before it got better.

An hour later, Mark was able to walk around and feel sort of okay.

Elaria Valen sat him down and told him, "So we found out some things today. I found out that Quark helping you to Alter your Binding in this way made it worse for you, in the end. He's too strong for how weak you need your magic to be so that you don't have a reaction like that. Next time, cut the alteration by half. Be sloppier. Nothing happened now, but you should probably go home, then stretch, sleep, and eat, and repeat as needed."

"What happened? The map was a good map, right?" Mark asked, "If I don't make it that way, then… would it work as Protect at all?"

Elaria considered her words, then said, "You don't have enough soul to make the Alteration to your map. Your Binding cracked down on your Alteration so that you didn't kill yourself. The Alteration to your map should have worked. It obviously did not, and since I doubt the problem was on your end, then the problem lay on my end, with the Alteration I gave you. We'll have to do something a lot simpler next time, Mark. I am sorry it ended this way, this time."

Mark… accepted that. He nodded, and it hurt to nod. "Thank you for your expertise, Elaria."

"You'll take several hours to recover. Might not need the full 12. You can try again next week. For now: stretch."

Mark stretched his astral body until it didn't feel like knives in his flesh. When it was just needles all throughout, Mark tried to walk home with his adamantium on his shoulders, but he couldn't manage it at all. The weight was too much, and he couldn't use his Kinesis to support the weight at all; that hurt too much, too.

So Isoko carried Mark's adamantium backpack instead, and she got Mark's illusionary belt to disguise it as a normal backpack.

Mark walked without flinching too hard but Isoko helped him a few times with a hand on his shirt, a bit of Tactile Telekinesis to keep him upright, when the pain got too bad. Isoko helped him all of the last hundred meters it took to get home, and then Mark went straight to bed.

"Holy shit," Isoko said, looking down at Mark, as she put the backpack down to the side. She took off the belt, too, and set it on a hook. "You got it bad today."

"It already feels better," Mark said, eyes closed, horizontal and feeling like he was floating, his sense of direction all fucked up. His Unionsense hurt, too. "Might be more than 8 hours, though."

"I'll be here for you like you were for me, so do some more painful-as-fuck stretches and then sleep."

Mark chuckled, and that hurt too. And then he got to stretching.

It hurt.

It got better, eventually.

Mark slept.