To the left of the door a small table sat against the wall, surrounded by three chairs of dark wood. Mei Lin gestured to a chair and busied herself for a few minutes at one of the room's counters. She came back with a tea set and sat across from him. He saw that the purple clay kettle was already steaming and was going to ask how when there was no stove or fire that he could see, but then he noticed the thin line of mana travelling from Mei Lin to the kettle. He looked closer and could see that she was channeling a type of fire energy into the clay in a steady trickle.

  He shook his head and looked up at her. She was watching him.

  “What it would be like to be able to see the flows of qi,” she said, shaking her head in wonder. “I can only dream of such a thing. Tell me. What do you see?”

  Alex thought about it for a moment, watching the energy, the qi, flow from her to the pot.

  “I can see a thin strand of ener… qi. It’s flowing from your hand to the pot.”

  “Is that all?”

  Alex chuckled. “No, but I don’t know what is relevant versus what isn’t. I can see the mana in the room; it’s denser here than outside. Something you are doing maybe? I can see you drawing that energy in. Like breaths of air. I can see your aura. I can see your qi circulating. It makes your aura pulse. I can see the qi infusing the pot and radiating off.”

  “Such wonders. What is an aura though?”

  “Oh… I don’t know. It’s like your energy field I guess. It radiates from everyone, but the few people I’ve seen that can use magic, or qi, seem to have much stronger fields. Aura is just what I’ve been calling it.”

  “Ah. We don’t have a word for that exactly. Many would just call it your qi. Your spiritual light, domain, or presence maybe. You cannot hold it perfectly and it,” she waved a hand around her, “bleeds off, back into the world.”

  She watched him for a few breaths and then asked, “what am I doing with the tea pot?”

  Alex looked from her to the pot and back again. “Heating the water?”

  “Do you see that? Or are you guessing.”

  He looked back down at the trickle of energy and just watched it for a moment. “Well, you are heating the clay of the pot really, not the water.”

  “Yes. Very good. But how do you know I am heating it?”

  How did he know? Besides the obvious of knowing how tea pots worked. Somehow he could tell, at some level he didn’t quite understand yet, that the thin strand of qi was a warming energy. It felt similar to what he did when he made his little fire in the palm display.

  “I… I can tell it is warming ener… qi,” he said. “I’m not sure how though.”

  “Yes, exactly. What you are sensing is my intention for the qi. Qi is not fire, or water or wood. It is just qi. We shape it into something useful with our intentions. Does it look different than other uses of qi?”

  “No, not really. The mana I see is a golden sort of colour, although that doesn’t really do it justice. It’s purple and black and gold at the same time.” He saw the look on her face. “I know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It took awhile to get used to, but it doesn’t look like any ‘thing’ that you can see normally. If that makes sense.”

  “Not really, no. But the very idea of being able to see qi in the first place seems fantastical to me,” she said with a little laugh.

  “Right, well, it’s strange for sure. And when I see people, or creatures using it, the colour doesn’t really change.” He gestured towards her as she poured the steaming tea into two small cups. “The auras I see are mostly the same colour too, although I can see other colours there sometimes.”

  “Interesting. So, if what you see doesn’t change, how do you know it is fire or heat that I am sending into the pot?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s okay. It is one of the things about qi. We shape it with our intentions, and the qi carries that intention out into the world. That is what you are sensing.”

  “Your intention?” he asked. She just nodded in response. “It’s like mind reading then.”

  Mei Lin laughed. “A little maybe. Except only once it’s left the mind. Here’s a better question for you though Alex. How do you know this pot is clay?”

  Alex opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. How did he know? He looked down at the pot. It was definitely clay. Purple sand clay even. And now that he focused on it, he knew that it contained iron and quartz and mica. How could he know that?

  He looked up at Mei Lin who smiled back at him. “Alex—your face!” She laughed brightly. “The qi that you see is a part of everything. Some say it was here before the world and will still be here once the world is gone. It has been everything and knows everything. Our connection with qi allows us to do wonderful things, but it also allows us to know more about the world around us. I imagine your ability to see it makes that even easier for you. I would have to touch the pot and focus on it longer than you just did.”

  Alex picked up his tea cup and took a long sip, trying to collect his thoughts.

  “This is all a little overwhelming actually.”

  “I imagine it feels that way. I have never known one to pick it up as quickly as you seem to be. Where I’m from you would have been taken to one of the sects to learn from a young age. And you would have had your childhood to get used to your particular ability to see the qi around you. You have been thrust into this world and have taken to it like a fish to a pond.”

  Alex stared at the small cup in his hands. A clay cup. He could see that he had progressed quickly, but he didn’t feel like he was learning anything that he could use to really understand what he was doing. Or what he could do in the future.

  That was one of the things he always loved about programming. There were rules. And even when you didn’t know how to write something in the beginning, you could see concrete examples of what could be done and it was all just built up from the smaller principles that you already knew. The rest was just figuring out how to put it all together in the right way to get from point A to point B over and over again.

  Magic wasn’t really like that. Magic was more like Hey, you can do anything! Okay, but how? However you want! Okay, but what first? Whatever you want!

  It was limitless possibility with no rules at all. If you wanted to get from point A to point B, there was an infinite ways to do it and no rules or fundamentals applied!

  After a few minutes he quietly asked, “so, there are no rules?”

  She blinked. “Rules?”

  “Of magic. Of whatever this is.” He gestured vaguely at the air between them and then down at the pot. “I can see mana and pull it into myself. I can shape it. I can make things like a spear or even fire, although barely. Animals reinforce their bodies and that bear knocked my connection to mana sideways. I also saw a guy yesterday that can make himself invisible and practically fly.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  This made Mei Lin sit straighter. “You saw an invisible person?”

  Alex nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t see him when he was invisible, but I could still see his aura, and I could see whatever he was doing to make himself invisible.”

  “What did this man look like?”

  Alex told her what he knew of Jinhai. “Do you know him?”

  She exhaled. “Him? No. There are millions of people in the Azure Prefecture and that is just one of many in the Empire. But that ability to make oneself invisible is a poorly kept secret technique practiced by the Azure Fangs.”

  “Well that sounds ominous.”

  He thought that would bring a laugh, but Mei Lin just continued to look serious. “No, not ominous. Probably. The Fangs are like…” She paused as she thought of the right word. “Spies maybe? They spend more time outside of the sect than in. They are very secretive. If one is here and following you around… well, just watch your step. He may just be observing, but it’s better to be safe.”

  Alex paused and went back to something else she had said. “You mentioned that invisibility was a secret technique. Is technique like a spell?” If there were spells, there must be rules that make them possible.

  Mei Lin considered this for a moment and then said, “Yes and No. Techniques can cover a wide range of abilities that incorporate qi in one way or another, from enhancing one's strikes to something more like what you think of as a spell. It is the general method used to teach us to access qi.”

  She folded her hands in her lap and watched him consider her words.

  Alex rubbed his face. “I’ve been thinking of it as internal versus external magic. Am I doing something fundamentally different from you?”

  “Again, yes and no,” she said.

  He waited.

  “We don’t really draw a line or create distinction as you have. They are all just techniques you can learn. What you are talking about as external magic costs more qi, both to create and maintain. Usually anyway. It requires a combination of personal qi and external energies. An enhancement technique typically uses internal qi and practitioners in the east spend a lot of time improving their ability to store and use more all the time.”

  “In their dantian?” Alex asked.

  Mei Lin smiled. “Yes! It is the internal reservoir of energy. My people would call it a sea, or ocean of energy, but in truth, it is more like a dense but flexible crystalline structure.”

  Alex looked shocked. “Like, actual crystals? Inside people?”

  “Yes. It is that structure in your dantian that allows you to control qi. Most creatures in this world have them as well and they can be quite valuable to collect.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, they are sort of like what you may think of as a battery. They don’t hold energy though, they are energy. Dense, compacted energy. The physical form of qi.” She laughed. “This is the only time that I can see qi. In its physical form. You can absorb the qi from collected crystals into your own dantian, with practice. They can also be traded or used as a form of money in most places, thanks to their consistent value to practitioners.”

  Alex thought about all the millipedes they had killed and couldn’t imagine having to gut the things to find crystals… although that would depend on how valuable they really were.

  “Is a creature's crystal always in the same place?”

  “Yes. We call them essence crystals, or just qi crystals. But typically they can be found near a creature's centerline, so in the belly of a human or bear for instance.”

  “And Jinhai?” he asked. “The compression. The way he was able to fly, or make himself invisible?”

  Mei inhaled slowly before answering.

  “I don’t know the Fangs techniques. I was only ever an outer disciple. And I only studied as an apothecary in the Restorative Halls. But I imagine the invisibility is a more advanced version of a sect technique that many of us learned, which was a simple form of suppression,” she said. “What I learned doesn’t make you invisible, but, if you leak nothing and disturb nothing, most people's senses will slide past you unless they are specifically looking for you. So it helps you to stay inconspicuous when needed. True invisibility would be much more advanced and incorporate multiple techniques no doubt.”

  “So it’s not bending light around him or anything.”

  “It might be. But it starts with internal control.”

  Alex took a moment to try and absorb that.

  “So, do you often learn techniques and then build upon them with more advanced versions?”

  She tilted her head as she considered this. “Yes, maybe. But it’s just an easy way to advance, not a requirement. Actually many techniques will come with multiple levels, so you start with the first level and work your way through the various forms over time. I studied as a healer, but after a couple of years decided to learn to fight as well.” She smiled. “I thought maybe I would go adventuring and be a party healer.” She shrugged. “I never did. But I studied two techniques that were very different than anything I learned as a healer. Techniques are simply a path that you can follow to learn.”

  He glanced at her.

  “There is no right way, I mean,” she continued. “There are just proven ways. Each sect develops their own methods. Breath patterns. Circulation paths. Compression cycles. They work and get refined over generations. We have forgotten techniques and old techniques that no one uses anymore because more efficient paths have been found. And even the simplest breathing techniques may vary from one sect to the next.”

  “So they’re not universal.”

  “No. In the west they learn to do their magic in a very different way, and their magic is quite different as a result. They have colleges that specialize in specific types of external magics, but, at least as far as I understand it, their teaching methods are very similar to what you might find in a sect. They would use repeatable exercises to train students to utilize their particular style of magic.”

  So, spells, or techniques in this world were really just frameworks. Repeatable processes that trained people to produce consistent results. He shared his thoughts with Mei Lin who gave him a long look.

  “Infinite possibility is not useful,” she said gently. “Not for learning. If I told you that you could do anything with your mana, what would you do tomorrow?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Techniques narrow the field. They make progress repeatable. They give structure and endpoints to focus on.”

  “Even if the structure is arbitrary.”

  She shrugged lightly. “If it works, does it matter?”

  After a moment, she walked over to a shelf and pulled out two thin, bound volumes.

  She returned to the table and handed them to Alex.

  He ran a hand over the silken covers that were otherwise plain and worn.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “This one,” she reached out and tapped one of the books, “is a beginner’s manual from my sect,” she said. “The Eight Forms of Resonance. Your ANIP should translate it just fine, but if you have questions, let me know.”

  He opened the first book carefully.

  “It does not teach invisibility,” she added dryly. “Do not look so hopeful.”

  He smirked despite himself. “What does it teach?”

  “It categorizes technique and teaches basic forms,” she said. “It teaches new disciples to breathe properly and use their awareness. But all of my sects' more advanced forms evolve from one of those. The other one may give you some insight into some of what this Jinhai was doing. It doesn’t cover invisibility, but it will show you how to be more in control of your own energies.”

  “I think I understand. So, with mana, or qi, you can do pretty much anything with enough practice and a strong intent. But these spells and techniques you use, help put a little form around the intent, which basically makes it easier to imagine, or comprehend what you are doing?”

  “That sounds right. And they make teaching someone else easier and consistent, which is important in a sect with tens of thousands of disciples needing to be taught every year.”

  “Oh.” Alex hadn’t really considered the scale of this new world much. “This is a good place to start then?”

  Mei Lin laughed. “You have already started and have flown down a road that takes others years. But, if you want a good base to build from then start here.” She tapped the first book. “Stabilize your core. Learn to control your presence. Learn to circulate without strain.”

  He nodded. But his thoughts were racing. Learning these basics would be important, but for the first time he thought he understood the bigger picture. Magic wasn’t really about spells, or techniques as Mei Lin called them. Magic was just about learning to manipulate mana into whatever you wanted. All the spells and techniques and systems of this world were just various ways to think about how to do that. Things that made it easy for those who otherwise might struggle with the intent required. But also a way for senior practitioners, as Mei Lin called them, to control a student's progress.

  Which meant that eventually he would be able to build his own weird spells to do anything he wanted. From fireballs to illusions. At least in theory.

  Mei stood and collected the empty cups. “You cannot solve everything in one sitting, Alex. Read the books and meditate on the learning.”

  Alex stood, deep in thought and collected the books. He still had so much he wanted to understand, but Mei Lin had given him a lot to think about. He thanked her and stepped back out into the morning light.

  It was time to find his friends and head for the training yard.

  ***

  Wisdom attributed to Master Qiren, disputed authenticity

  Most disciples seek to strike harder.

  Few learn to strike sooner.

  Fewer still understand that breaking harmony requires less strength than creating it.