11th of Darkfall, 412 AH
By the time the house went quiet, the most interesting specimen in it was my own right forearm.
I wrote the date in the notebook, eleventh of Darkfall, and underlined it. That afternoon's priming session had taught me two things.
First: I'd been doing it the slow way. A few nights a week, alone, I pushed mana into one patch of tissue at a time. After the priming room I'd come out saturated, every cell topped off at once. Faster, and more complete with it. The room did in a half-hour what I couldn't do in a week.
The math was humiliating, in a cheerful sort of way. Noble children got the room as a birthright, same as a name and a mount, while normal people had to work harder. I'd mind the unfairness more if I weren't benefiting from it.
Second: knowing how to use magic and knowing why it worked were different skills. Vael had thirty years of the first. It works, that's all that matters, she'd say. But her knowledge stopped where mine kept going, down into the cell, into how anatomy was related to mana.
I stood up.
The room had gone, over the past week, from a noble boy's bedroom to a one-man field station with a bed in it. Jars filled with plants ranked by collection date. A leaf pressed flat between two scraps of glass. The library's borrowed books.
I took the enhancement stance and started testing. The mana went where I aimed it now, but the tissue still wouldn't activate. Delivery worked while activation didn't, which was fine. Naming the wall is ninety percent of getting over it.
Harden.
The word did nothing to the mana directly. Naming the function made the result easier to imagine, and imagination was an integral part of how magic worked. It focused my mind, and the mana held a little longer before scattering from the edges.
I moved to the right forearm, my best instrument. The tissue wasn't special or anything, I'd simply practiced that route until my brain knew it best. Harden, down the inside of the arm, and the count went higher. Three seconds. A little over four on a good push, the day's best and no further.
I was standing in my nightshirt in the dark trying to enhance my own forearm at an hour I had no business being awake. I should, probably, have been working on whatever Vael had pointed me toward at the end of the lesson, though I forgot to remember what that was.
Ten more reps, and a pattern came up clean enough to write down. The cells that held longest were the ones at the extremities, with the forearm and fingers holding better than the core. Which cut against the gradient, because the mana ran dense at the core and thin at the hands, so by rights the core should have had more to hold.
The reconciliation I had was the dose: half an hour wasn't enough to fully prime a body my size, and the thin tissue of the hands had less to fill, so a fixed dose saturated it more fully than the deep tissue in the chest. Less reservoir, but topped nearer the brim. A correlation and a story that fit rather than a hypothesis I'd proven.
I wrote it down with the caveats: hands hold longer despite lower mana density. Maybe fuller priming. Small sample. Test again. Then I underlined the part I liked, that hold-time was a property I could improve, because I could arrange more priming.
Then I went after the stance. The books swore it was load-bearing for imagination, and I could believe that, but the real question was whether the shape changed the resistance in the path the mana took, a straight pipe against a bent one. So I took it apart a piece at a time.
The elbow was real. Changing the angle lowered the resistance, and the mana reached the hand faster and more easily, though it was a marginal difference.
Vael would have stopped me here. She'd have put me back into the full stance and told me to do first, understand after, because the body had to know the move before the mind took it apart.
She was wrong and she wasn't here.
So I kept taking it apart.
The finger gave the clearest result: ten angled pushes, ten straight. The straight path carried mana a little more easily, but the difference was tiny, not useful enough to spend another night on. If larger loads ever made the gap matter, I could come back to it.
I went back to the normal exercise on my arm. Five more reps. Then ten. Harden, hold, scatter, reset, the count creeping and then, around the twelfth, starting to drop. Three seconds where it had been four, then a hair under three. Which was also data. Fatigue was a curve and that curve was worth recording, so I kept going.
Around the eighteenth the forearm went quiet. I knew the familiar scatter, but this time the mana stopped arriving entirely. I pushed and the cells simply did not receive it, as if they'd been worked past the point of answering.
One failed push wasn't a pattern. I waited a few breaths, reset my focus, and tried once more.
The pain came up the arm sharp. "Fuck—" I let the mana go and folded the arm against my chest, breathing through my teeth.
For a few seconds I thought I'd damaged it permanently. Tomorrow I might reach for the mana and find the arm wouldn't answer.
I should have been smarter. The priming room had limits. Half an hour with a supervisor, a stop in the protocol before the dose got too high. Overexposure damages, that was the whole reason for the clock, and what had I just done? Forced too much through the same small patch from the inside, past what the cells could take. Which meant... probably fatigue, not destruction. Though wanting that to be true was exactly the reason to distrust it.
I went to the desk, but my right hand wouldn't grip the pencil properly, so I wrote left-handed. It was an observation that mattered. The conventional account treated mana as spiritual rather than physical, yet exhausting it had weakened the muscle itself. The cellular model had just gained evidence. I wrote that down too.
Targeted mana use likely fatigued cells faster than a whole-body flood would. That was the other observation my burned arm had bought. Aim a concentrated load at one muscle group and that fraction of tissue wore out fast. If it held up, specificity had a price, and the price was recovery time.
And then the questions came, lining up before I'd finished writing the day down. How many reps before the dead-spot, and did it track the priming density I'd charted? Could the tissue be made more resilient, trained to take more? Vael's worn-smooth channels surely took loads that would have torn mine clean through.
Did tolerance build with exposure, the four-second hold becoming forty becoming four hundred through the slow remodeling of cells pushed, recovered, then pushed again? None answerable tonight, all answerable eventually, by a large, enthusiastic program of research and development, most of it conducted on myself.
When the arm recovered, I had a list.