I set out the following morning for Kene’s village with my use of Seven League Step, pushing through the

  As I did, I noticed something new in the winds of resolve, as they twisted in to focus on my Foxstep spell each time my spirit rebelled. Reading the winds was something that I was still a novice at, but I was left with the impression that I needed to first focus on breaking the resolve root’s hold on my Foxstep before I could begin to truly and fully absorb Seven League Step.

  It didn’t offer any insight into how to actually bend the root to my will – or if it did, it was beyond my ability to read.

  Still, if I was a betting man… I was going to have to throw myself into a situation where I would have no choice but to rely on Foxstep, even though it wasn’t under control. The stress would help me punch through the barrier throwing my spirit into disarray.

  I hoped that it wouldn’t test me every time I added a new teleportation spell, though. That just sounded… Tedious.

  When I arrived in the village, Kene was out in one of the fields, tending to someone who’d been kicked by an earthmover-ox, but when they finished up, they walked over to me.

  “How did things go? Did she get processed alright?”

  “Well enough,” I said. “I got some terribly named potions for it too, which was nice. Also got you a present!”

  I pulled the black card that the Lightwatch had given me for medical expenses from Dusk’s plane, gripping it between my index and middle fingers and holding it out to them.

  “Ta-da,” I said. “I know you healed me for free, but now, you don’t have to. Charge the Lightwatch for it.”

  Kene took the card and flipped it over, then tucked it into their own spatial ring.

  “I’ll do that, thanks!” they said. “I’ll charge maliciously.”

  I laughed at that and we started walking in the direction of the forest.

  “I’m going to try and actually get a chance to play with the… I mean to actually get a chance to record Foxarmor, Foxswap, and maybe Foxden?”

  “Mmm, I’m sure that’s all that you want to do, right babe?” Kene asked, raising an eyebrow. “No desire to play with the foxes for fun, huh?”

  “None whatsoever, I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I don’t even know what a fox is,” I said. My tail betrayed me at that moment, flicking back and forth, and Kene gave me a smarmy grin.

  “Whatever you say,” they said. “I’m glad you’ll be going out that way, though. One moment, let me grab some stuff from my shop.”

  We detoured, turning to go to the pharmacy, where Kene ducked in and emerged with a burlap sack that had to weigh at least fifty pounds. It radiated compacted telluric, death, and life mana, with a hint of both creation and desolation. They dumped it in the arm that wasn’t currently in a sling.

  “You’ve got Dusk’s plane, you get to store and carry that.”

  I tossed it out behind the cottage, watching as Kene headed back in and emerged a bit later with another bag, this one smaller, but packed to the brim with acorns, whirly seeds, and small, bright red berries. They passed it to me, and I put it away.

  “Are we–” I started.

  “Speaking of–” Kene started at the same time. I gestured for them to go first.

  “Speaking of dusk, where is she?” Kene asked.

  “Playing with Kerbos,” I said. “She wanted to join Ed on patrol. It’s actually a good test – back when I was second gate, it took me half an hour to open a portal back to her while I was in your village.”

  “Huh,” they said. “What was your question?”

  “Are we going to be trying to repair some of the damage from the assassin’s attack?” I asked. “I mean, you handed me a bag of what felt like alchemically enhanced fertilizer and a bag of seeds.”

  “Yep,” Kene agreed. “Oak, ash, and hawthorne seeds, along with some other ones. The ground should be pretty fertile already, since she reduced so much stuff to ashes, but the fertilizer will help speed the growth rate.”

  “Is it enough?” I asked dubiously. “I mean, it’s a big bag, but the fire spread across at least an acre, maybe more?”

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  “About two and a half, by my reckoning,” Kene said. “So if I was going to cover it all, I’d need somewhere around six to seven hundred pounds of fertilizer.”

  “Fifty is a lot less than six hundred,” I pointed out. “And that’s coming from me – mathematics is not my strong suit.”

  Kene laughed and shrugged.

  “We won’t be able to cover all of it,” they admitted. “But that’s also all we could spare. Luckily, we can spread the seeds out over a larger area, and focus the dirt on them. It won’t fix the forest overnight or anything like that, but every bit helps.”

  “I could see about buying some?” I offered.

  “Oh, we’ll make more, don’t worry. I’m sure you’ve noticed how a lot of the more powerful mages here are life or telluric mages who do mass farming?”

  “I had,” I agreed.

  “This is a pretty basic bit of alchemy, mixing together some dung, compost, soil enrichment spells, and a few plants. The farmers don’t need my help to make it. They just can only make so much at once, and a lot of it is used on the farms.”

  “That makes sense,” I agreed.

  We moved through the woods, and while I caught the odd troll in my mana senses, it was a much brighter day out, and so most of them had turned to stone. Even if they hadn’t, the strongest of them were only in the early third gate.

  We arrived at the clearing the fire had made and Kene began to break the fertilizer into clumps using one of the pairs of gloves I kept for gardening. I used the spare pair that Meadow often used and joined them. We slowly moved through the blasted area, spreading out the seeds with the clumps until we had nothing left.

  As we worked, I felt something watching us, and gently unfurled my mana senses. I didn’t blast them on full power, not wanting it to feel like I was about to attack whatever was watching us, but also too curious for my own good.

  When my mana senses brushed it, I frowned.

  The creature almost felt…

  Like me.

  Shockingly so.

  My own brand of Hudau mana had a slight slant of forest from Dusk, as well as a slightly heavier emphasis on life and death aspects – though both of those were used heavily in forest mana composite anyhow, so it was hard to notice.

  This felt almost identical. It wasn’t exactly the same, it had a tinge more focus on telluric than I did, but it was closer than anything I’d ever felt before.

  I stood up from where I was bent over the seeds I’d been planting and started looking around. I meandered in the direction of the power I could feel, until I spotted it.

  A turtle.

  Larger than a normal turtle, but still not huge, only about the size of a collie or spaniel, though much wider. On its back was a small tree that almost looked like a sapling, surrounded by a ring of mushrooms, and with long hanging moss falling from its branches. It studied me with eyes that glowed slightly red, like garnets, and I knelt down. It was still too early for my red star tree to have produced any mana-apples, but I pulled out some of the diaphanous dandelions and held them out for the creature to munch on. It extended its head from its shell and took a slow, gentle bite.

  Kene stepped up next to me, and his breath hitched.

  “A world tortoise,” he said. “Incredible.”

  He glanced at me.

  “We cannot let anyone know that there’s one living in the woods here, okay? This one looks young, only a half century or so. It’s still early third gate.”

  “Should I try and bring it into Dusk?” I asked. “Or the Dragon Sanctuary?”

  “No, they’re unrelated to Xuánwǔ, and they’re connected to the land almost like a genius loci,” Kene said. “These are one of the rare spirit beasts – beings who seem to have a dominion, like spirits, yet have energy and shape changing like beasts. It’ll need to stay here…”

  The turtle continued to watch us placidly, and I gently began to run my mana senses through it. Like any other beast, its spells were a biological part of its body, energetic arrays of power, which meant I could actually sense them without Analyze Mana-Garden.

  I hesitated when I ran into a third gate spell it used. It was quite complex, to the point I thought it might be a strain for me to fit into the single tile. It had elements of creating spatial pockets, but also intertwining with the body, and what felt somewhat like both a harvesting and an enhancing spell. It was a plant and fungus spell, but it was…

  It was the spell that was growing the bonsai, tiny mushrooms, and tiny moss on its back.

  I flipped open the journal I’d brought and quickly sketched the spell array out onto the page, doing the best I could to capture every minute detail. I didn’t know exactly how the spell worked, or what it would do if I cast it, but there was no way that I’d skip out on an opportunity like this.

  Moments after I finished sketching the spell in the notebook, the turtle sank into the ground and almost seemed to dissolve. It slipped out of my mana senses, not as if it had gone under a veil, but as if it simply were the environment itself. I thought that if I focused, I could feel minor bumps where the tortoise was hiding itself, but if I hadn’t just seen it vanish in front of me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that it had been there a moment before.

  Kene shook his head, staring at the spot where it had sunk into the ground.

  “Do you think it’s growing into a guardian of this forest?” I asked.

  “If it is, it’s going to take a long time,” Kene said. “They grow slowly. I think they’re immortal, or the closest thing to it. They don’t even hatch until they’re already close to a century old and have reached third gate within the egg.”

  I let out a slow whistle, then put my notebook back into the shelf in the alchemy room. Kene stood there for a little bit longer before we went back to working on growing the trees.

  Once we’d finished the bag of fertilizer and seeds, we each picked a specific type of tree – I chose ash, since I liked the little whirly seeds. I spread my mana senses over the clearing, while Kene spread theirs over roughly three quarters of it. It was strange to me that I was able to cover so much more area than they could, but then again, I had ingrained multiple sensory spells and trained my senses for expansion, while Kene’s senses and sensory spells were meant to pick up on fine details for healing.

  Slowly, very slowly, for creating true growth was much harder than forging temporary constructs out of plants, we brought a spark of life back to the clearing. It wasn’t much, the saplings barely breaking a foot high.

  But it was something.

  When our mana was dry, and the enriching fertilizer had run dry on power, we put away our gloves and went to find some foxes.

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