“So, what the hell do you think happened here?” I asked Niku as I looked at a puddle of goo that looked like the starry night sky. The bits of sparkles in it shimmered ever so slightly, and I stared deep into the puddle.

  “I wish anyone had any idea,” Niku answered me. I heard her rummaging through the big pack she had brought along.

  I turned to look at her and crossed my arms against my chest. We were standing in the middle of the empty village near what looked like a town hall. It had been what appeared to be the worst off and most damaged part of the town, but even then there really wasn’t that damage. Nothing destroyed or even significantly damaged the buildings. It just had these black puddles of goo everywhere. There were scorch marks and signs of a battle, but mostly, people could move into the town tomorrow and it’d be habitable, maybe…depending on what exactly the ooze was.

  “You know I could have carried that for you,” I told her while she looked around in the pack.

  She shook her head. “No, it’s my equipment, and I am a cultivator. It’s alright. I can carry my things.”

  I nodded and watched her pull a long gray spike from her sack. It was deep gray and had glowing bits of something worked into the metal.

  “Good, hard iron. With some enchanted salt. It’s what we call a Skyfang Needle,” she explained.

  I blinked and thought of all the stories I had heard or TV shows where iron disrupted the spirit. Then there was salt, of course, which was always said to interrupt the spiritual. It made sense, and it was kind of comforting to know that in a fantasy world some stories back home were actually true.

  “Using this, I can maybe figure out what this goop is. I didn’t want to say anything to Master Moritoshi. It’s a stupid thought, but…” she trailed off. As she talked, she took a deep breath and moved the spike towards the puddle.

  As she dipped the tip into the sticky goo, it vibrated and recoiled away from the tip. My eyes went wide as the reaction got violent and began to bubble away from the spike. I inhaled sharply and took a step back from it. Niku, seemed excited.

  “I knew it!” She shouted.

  My eyebrows raised, and I looked at her. “Knew what?”

  “It’s mana!”

  I cocked a brow and looked at her, and then at the puddle that was still vibrating. It had separated away from where the spike wanted to touch it and left a bare spot where there used to be the goo, so the spike was touching the dirt ground.

  I stared at her curiously now. I knew mana was like a liquid, but this goo isn’t quite what I expected. I wasn’t sure how to ask, but… “Do you know what kind?”

  She narrowed her eyes and looked at the starry night goop and shook her head. “No. Typically, mana in concentrated form like this is the color of its aspect. Water is blue, fire is red, wood is brown, etcetera… This, however…” she trailed off and eventually shrugged.

  “There are some that have two colors, like lightning is a blue-red that hasn’t mixed or wind is a blue-white. I’ve never seen anything like this,” she pulled the spike away from the puddle, and the puddle reformed into a solid puddle.

  I looked into Niku’s eyes, and hers were bright and wide. I loved her excitement at the revelation that it was mana, her passion for all of this. She grinned at me like a crazed person.

  “This is a new kind of mana, but we can be sure,” she said as she put the spike away back into her pack and dug around in it once more.

  A minute later she pulled out what looked like an intricate magnifying glass. This tool was made of a black, smooth, crystalline rock and had a clear crystal worked into the middle of it where the lightbulb would be in one of the lamps. The crystal had small flecks of glowing bits that seemed to float around inside it.

  “This is my Spiritwick Eye. It’s dragon’s glass, and a crystal injected with crushed moonstone,” she said and held the magnifying glass over the puddle.

  “Obsidian,” I breathed out and watched her with rapt attention.

  She nodded and ran the eye over and around the puddle. The flecks of moonstone changed color and illuminated the crystal inside the obsidian. It went through all the colors you’d associate with the unique elements and a couple that didn’t. There was even one deep violet tinged with black, but there were no glowing specks of starlight in it.

  I watched with bated breath as the colors of the crystal shifted faster and faster and heard Niku explain it should stop on a certain color and that color would be the type of mana.

  “But shouldn’t the mana look like the color?” I asked. Didn’t that make sense? Red mana would be fire and everything else, like she said.

  Niku nodded at me. “Usually, yes, but this can read inside of people and sometimes just things happen…” she explained with a shrug.

  She grinned and looked up at me, excited, and the crystal cycled through the different colors faster and faster. We both looked down at it.

  “Almost there,” she said.

  I held my breath and watched the crystal staring. Miku’s excitement was so infectious I didn’t want to blink.

  Then, I had to blink. The crystal exploded in a flash of bright light. The sparkly glowing flecks blew away, and the draconian glass shattered and shot out around.

  “Ah!” Me and Niku both yelled as we took shrapnel to our various exposed body parts.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  I felt a glass shard slash at my cheek before it fell to the ground, but I moved towards Niku and got on my knees next to her. I ignored it though as I inspected Niku. “Your hand. Are you all right?”

  She looked at me with her eyes wide and her hands out in front of her. I grabbed her hands in mine and looked them over.

  She was stammering, trying to talk. “Tha… Tha… That hasn’t ever happened before.”

  “It’s alright,” I said as I looked over her gloved hands and parts of her skin that were exposed. “It seems like your apron and gloves saved you.”

  “You’re bleeding,” she said and looked at my cheek.

  I waved her away. “I’m fine.”

  She nodded. “Me too, but we have to get a sample of this.”

  I was less sure about that and raised my eyebrow at her before I looked back down at the goo.

  The wick wasn’t damaged by that, not entirely. No, I’m not sure. Master Moritoshi has to look at this,” she said as she dug in her pack once more and pulled out a glass beaker.

  I stood and looked down at her and watched her collect the sample. Only a moment had gone by since our yelling and the explosion, and now I heard a new familiar noise. There was a loud stomping noise and a bellow.

  “MRRRRRR.”

  I looked over and saw Betsy charge towards us.

  “Whoa there, girl,” I yelled and lifted my hands up.

  She bellowed again, and I could feel her worry through our link. I nodded and patted her head between the horns.

  “No worry girl, we’re alright. Just a mishap with her equipment,” I said and smiled at the protective familiar.

  Betsy moved her head closer to my face, and I stared into one of her eyes. Before I realized it, her tongue came out, and she gave me a long, wet, sloppy lick on the cheek that had been cut. While it was wet and sloppy, there was a charge with it. A charge of her lightning power tingled my skin. When I went to wipe my face, I noticed there wasn’t any blood. I could still feel the tingling sensation on my skin and looked at Betsy.

  “That’s a good ability to have,” Niku said and looked me over.

  I looked at her and cocked an eyebrow.

  “She healed your cut,” Niku said and looked at my cheek before she looked back at the ox.

  Betsy gave a nod of her big head, and I could feel her smiling at me in my head. I reached out to pat her softly. “Thanks, girl.”

  “Alright then, let’s go check in with the elders,” Niku said and held up the beaker full of the goo.

  I nodded, and the three of us hurried through the village to the base of the mountains, where the elders’ homes were. Since it was also where we had been squatting the last few days, it had turned into our little base camp. As we ran, I had been careful to steer clear of the goop on the ground, and I was thankful that the village was small. I may have been a cultivator and in better shape than I used to be, but I still wasn’t used to running.

  We found Hisai, Moritoshi and a few of the other sect representatives standing in the front yard of the house I had been sleeping in. A house that had belonged to the village protector, someone named Silas Zhao who apparently was a pretty powerful cultivator himself.

  “It’s mana!” Niku shouted before we even reached them. She shouted it a couple more times until the people turned curiously to look at us.

  I opened the front gate, and Niku rushed past me, holding out the beaker towards her teacher. Teacher. Something about calling the man master bugged me. I mean, yeah, I understood it was a different world and was a lot more martial in practice. I don’t know; it still bugged me.

  “Master Moritoshi, it’s mana,” she said again when she reached him.

  I went and stood behind her, and Betsy waited just on the other side of the fence. The poor ox was too large to stand in the little front yard with all the bushes and plants the Zhaos had in their yard.

  “What? No, it can’t be,” Moritoshi looked at his student and frowned. “There’s no mana that would look like that.”

  “The Skyfang Needle confirmed it,” she said and looked back at me for support.

  I wasn’t sure how to tell the results of her little test with the needle exactly, but if she said so I believed her, so I nodded. “Yeah, it’s definitely mana.”

  The other two who stood and spoke with Moritoshi were Hisai, who had become something like an unofficial mentor to me in the last few days, and Taimei, the representative from the Moon Lotus Pavilion. They both stood quietly but looked quite curious at the student’s findings.

  Moritoshi frowned. “Let me see the Spiritwick Eye. Did you use that to see what sort it was?”

  “I, uh, I did…” she had started to say. She hesitated, unsure of how to tell him what had happened to the tool.

  “It blew up. She was using it over the puddle, and then it exploded at us,” I said, kinda wishing Betsy hadn’t lick-healed the gash I had received.

  “It blew up?!” Moritoshi sneered up at me.

  It was still kind of hard to believe that I was taller than someone since I only came in at five foot nine inches, but he did in fact have to look up at me. Even though he still somehow always seemed to look down his nose at me.

  “Yes, master. I’m sorry. I was trying to tell what sort of mana it was and was running the crystal and it blew up,” Niku said and lowered her head.

  Moritoshi sighed, obviously frustrated. “That was expensive. That beaker is full of the mana?”

  “Oh, yes, Master,” she said and handed over the beaker full of the dark goo with shining lights.

  He took it and inspected it without uncorking the bottle.

  “Well, I’ve never seen mana such as this,” Hisai said curiously and put his fingers to his chin in thought.

  “Nor I, what element could it be?” Taimei asked and mimicked Hisai. The three of them looked into the beaker.

  “Wait a second,” I muttered as I stared into the beaker. I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before.

  The three of the smarter cultivators looked at me. Moritoshi frowned.

  “I know that constellation,” I said and pointed at the glowing bits of light in the goo.

  Now Hisai frowned at me. “Didn’t I show you the constellations last night? Nothing in here looks like any of those.”

  “No, a constellation fro-” I paused and looked at the four of them, who stared at me expectantly.

  The glowing lights in the beaker looked exactly like a star constellation I knew quite well from back home, the Big Dipper. I only knew this from a girlfriend I had who used to ride with me in the truck. She was really into the sky and would bring a telescope out on the road. I stared at the three of them, wondering how to give them this news.

  “Uh,” I said dryly as my mind raced.

  As I thought of how to try to explain how I thought, no. I knew what the glowing bits and maybe the type of mana were. There came a shout that came from the hill that Hisai and Hisai had cultivated after my nightmare.

  “We found something!”

  The shout was loud, so loud that I almost had to cover my ears. The man on the hill obviously was pushing and using his power to make himself louder. Turning, the four of us looked across the village, and after squinting, I saw Fang Min in his red robes before the cherry blossom tree.

  “Down by the water, Kio wants you to come down,” he shouted and pointed down towards the ocean.

  “Well, clue after clue,” Hisai said and sounded giddy.

  Patreon

  Which is usually 15ish chapters ahead.

  Discord and start a conversation.