I bounded from rock to rock, chasing after the blink fox. It nimbly moved down the hill, occasionally using its own version of Foxstep to gain ground, or Foxswap if I got too far ahead from it.

  I followed it in a merry chase around the forest, zipping around with a combination of a flight potion and Foxsteps, though the latter still threw my spirit into disarray every time I used it. When we finally came to a stop, I opened a portal to Dusk’s realm to let it enter for a snack, just like I had the first time, when I’d gotten Foxstep from it.

  Like I’d mentioned to Kene, this was an interesting test of Dusk and my new capabilities. Even though we were miles apart, I was able to retrieve and stow items from within her realm in an instant, and it only took me about a minute to open a full portal to her realm. I took it as a good sign – our connection was much stronger, and far deeper, now that I was her primary guardian and the soul-bond had become a spellbond.

  While I gave the fox some chopped sausage, a cracked raw egg, and diced apple bits, I studied it with my mana senses, trying to get a deeper and more intense look at what sort of spellcraft it had. Not for the first time – heck, not even for the first time today – I wished I had Analyze Mana-Garden, to allow me to simply zap myself into its garden, but alas.

  I studied the arrays in its body, slowly but surely piecing together a general sense for how the little omnivorous predator’s magic had evolved.

  Most of the first gate spells that were wrapped into the creature’s body were located around the mind, nose, and eyes, and seemed like more general sensory spells to feel the flow of spatial, life, solar, and temporal power, not unlike my own suite of Analyze spells. I considered sketching it, but dismissed it – I didn’t think it would add anything particularly new to my kit. Still, it explained some of how they’d evolved the way they had, and why Foxstep’s ingrained effect allowed me to target anywhere within my spatial sense, rather than just my line of sight. It also had its own mix of a harvesting and mana-storage spell, which I named Foxcache. I paused and studied that one a bit more. It seemed to be focused on extracting some of the extra energy from food to fill the cache, rather than drawing from ambient recharge, then releasing that energy when it came time to break through to the next gate.

  A memory of a giant boreal toad sitting on a frozen lake and cycling in the winter energy came to me, alongside Ikki talking about how harvesting time was difficult. This must be how the foxes had evolved to use time mana, since they couldn’t just pull it in like most beasts.

  It wasn’t a combat spell, not at all, nor even something especially relevant to me, since I didn’t actually have blink fox mana for it to overflow and help me break into the next gate, but it was still an excellent bit of spellcraft.

  Its second gate had Foxstep, of course, and it seemed to have dedicated almost the entire gate to that one spell. The energetic array now wrapped through the fox’s entire body and into its core, which it must have crafted when it reached third gate. It was then layered into the beastcore over and over.

  I raised my eyebrows at that. I hadn’t really thought about trying to use only a single spell in a gate – at least, apart from full-gate spells – but it could be an interesting strategy. Focusing all of that gate’s growth into the spell would let it grow enormously powerful.

  The fox was in mid-third gate, and I could only sense dormant flickers where its future spells for peak and beyond might be, but within its third gate I was able to copy down the Foxarmor and Foxswap spells. I assumed Foxden had to be what spell the fox gained at peak third gate – maybe at peak third gate, most foxes would go off to work on establishing their own dens? I didn’t know for sure, but that seemed reasonable to me.

  It also developed some sort of spell related to locating other blink foxes and determining territory and such, beyond the simple sensory spells it had at first gate, as well as marking territory, but those were of less interest to me.

  I studied Foxarmor. I wouldn’t have enough room in my temporal garden to take both it and Foxswap until I broke through to mid-third gate, and in the short term, the armor seemed to be more important. If I’d had it a few days ago, my arm might not be in a sling right now, after all…

  Foxarmor was deeply strange.

  It started out fine, projecting out a field of fox mana around me to warp the air and make takes take longer to hit me. It used time in a slightly strange way – it didn’t actually make the the area of warped space actually slower like with Tortoise Time, but rather, seemed to almost be trying to flow things that moved into its area backwards, pushing them back by making them want to move where they’d been moments before. Still, that wasn’t too strange – it ultimately just created a field that pushed things back and forced them to cross more space to get to me.

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  No, where it got strange was the other half. More specifically, that there WAS another half. It looked almost like the second half and the first half had originally been two spells that had grown together. Beast spells were the result of evolution, so that was definitely possible.

  I hypothesized blink foxes used them in conjunction so often that they’d evolved to link together and ease the burden of mana manipulation, and to offload the second half as more of a passive part, like its active effect had been lessened to improve the ingrained effect it could offer.

  Plus, the second half was just weird.

  Large swaths of it seemed to use life mana as a bridge to allow time and space to interact with the musculature, while the life and solar connected in odd spots around the brain. I hadn’t realized solar mana was in the brain, since it was mainly life, knowledge, and mental, but that was definitely what was going on. Then again, the solar particles that helped the body fight infections existed in the brain, and some long-forgotten high school lessons seemed to dredge up something about them being used to sever unnecessary connections between the pathways in the mind.

  It got even stranger when it came to the use of time and space. It wasn’t a haste spell, not really. It didn’t make me move any faster. Rather, it seemed to run internally, bending and shortening the space and time within my body to allow messages to move to and from my mind faster.

  But what got really, deeply strange, was the fact that all of it connected to my mana senses and spatial sense, improving the processing of the feedback that it gave, and helping me move my muscles based on that.

  When I’d followed the fox down the hill, it seemed to use its spatial armor to jump from spot to spot with no trouble… Had that been from this effect?

  And the fact it seemed to have been offloaded to become more passive and ingrained… I thought its ingrained effect might be a good solution to the Haste problem Ikki had been talking about.

  This portion of Foxarmor might not literally make me faster, but it’s ingrained effect seemed like it would shorten response time and allow me to react and move my body more in accordance with my senses.

  It was no wonder even Orykson had advised me to get the spell. It was an absolute beast of a spell.

  I laughed at my own joke, then copied down the spell, contemplating on the strange nature of beast magic.

  Evolution could produce tremendous spells, capable of outperforming even the greatest mortal spell engineers… Right up until it couldn’t any longer. Like with Seven League Step, or the Foxsenses. My own mortal spells could do amazing things that evolved spells couldn’t, but at the same time, Foxstep outperformed both Quickstep and Instant Steps, the second gate spatial and temporal short range teleportation spells.

  In a way, it reminded me of alchemy and plants and medicine. There were incredible things that could be done with medicine, but there were also incredible cures within the natural world, and the science of alchemy was all about extracting those properties while leaving behind the dross.

  I wrapped my tail around my waist as I contemplated.

  My own spellcraft would have to follow a similar pattern. I was a beastmage, but I was also a person. I could use specially designed people spells and beast spells, to walk the best of both worlds.

  In a way, wasn’t I already doing that? My spatial magic focuses, for example – teleportation and portals would largely come from humanity’s developments, our societal needs for long distance travel, while spatial warping would largely come from beasts and their need to move from place to place on a smaller scale. I would be able to use both. Life and death too, with fungi and plants, and time to an extent, with my tortoise bones and my life extension spells. My mana was acting like a bridge between humanity and nature.

  I laughed at the thought. I might be letting my imagination get a bit out of control there. I was nowhere near the level of power where I could serve as a bridge between nature and humans… Yet.

  But maybe one day?

  I shrugged and began pulling some cold cuts from the fridge. All the work running around after the fox and planting the trees had made me hungry.

  The fox wandered up and begged for scraps, so I fed it a couple bits of the lunchmeat, which it happily gulped down, nosed my hand, then turned and teleported out to the portal. It trotted away, headed back to the Foxden it lived in, and I followed, using the chance to record the structure of the Foxden spell from the peak third gate fox that was currently within the den. I put a few more eggs out for them, then left to go find Kene.

  I found them crouched over a fallen tree, examining a clump of turkey trail mushrooms.

  “What’cha doin’?” I asked between bites of my sandwich. Siobhan bolted up and promptly began begging for food as well. I fed her a few bites, then sighed and opened the portal back to Dusk, because at that point, I’d fed almost all of my sandwich meats to foxes, leaving me with bread slathered with mustard and alpine cheese.

  “Hmm?” Kene asked distractedly, leaning in closer to the clump.

  “I asked what you were doing,” I said. “Looks to me like you’re staring at a nonmagical, barely even edible, mushroom.”

  They turned and looked up at me, then blinked and smiled.

  “Oh, sorry. I was working to track the fungal folk, since it had been… a while… but my plant divination spells don’t work on it, even though their bodies are partially composed of living fungus. To be fair, even with normal fungi the spell can have trouble.”

  “All fungi are living,” I pointed out. “Well. Probably. Kinda. Mostly. The line gets kind of blurry after a while, like with yeast. They’re alive, buuuttt they’re also encased in death.”

  “Wait, really?” Kene asked.

  “Yeah, instant yeast is preserved in a partially dead state, encased in a shell of death,” I said. “I happen to know this because I am a baker’s son.”

  “I… somehow didn’t consider that,” Kene said with a laugh. “But this clump of turkey trail shouldn’t naturally be growing this way – see here and here? I think it was grown by the excitement of a mushroom monster.”

  “Ooh,” I said, taking a bite of my sad, currently meat-deprived sandwich. “You know, there is an easy way for me to tell. Let me get some more lunch first, though?”

  As if on cue, Kene’s stomach rumbled.

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