The same place, some time later.
I don’t understand.
No matter what I tried, nothing worked.
I attempted everything I could think of.
Mentally “touching” the channels and the core, willing them to change with my thoughts.
Nothing happened.
But I refused to give up, not here, not now.
I felt that my future depended on this.
Repeating my previous actions, just in case, I started thinking.
What was I doing wrong?
What needed to be done?
How should I proceed?
All these questions sent me into a meditative state.
As I mentioned before, there is meditation turned inward and meditation turned outward.
So why not meditate inward on a specific part of myself?
For example, my Seventh shell, my magical principle.
I realized this later, when I was recollecting and analyzing the moment.
While in a meditative state, which for me manifests as a crystal clear and focused mind, unclouded by feelings, I began to explore my Seventh shell.
It took a long time to understand it, and what I discovered didn’t make me happy.
To put it simply, my Seventh shell was not active.
It had never been in a working state, the way ordinary wizards have.
That meant even if I could push mana into the channels, they wouldn’t be able to hold or circulate it.
They might even break.
I really didn’t want that.
And that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was that all my channels were clogged with some kind of dark sludge.
It looked disgusting, and the feeling when I tried to “touch” it was even worse.
It felt like being dunked into the most putrid dumpster I’d ever experienced.
Unpleasant doesn’t even begin to cover it.
I didn’t know what to do about that.
One thing was clear.
I needed to expand and strengthen my channels first, and only then figure out what to do with that sludge.
I thought about this problem for a long time.
My core produced too little energy.
In fact, it barely produced any at all.
And I couldn’t make it work better or initiate it.
Remembering Rudazov’s books, I understood that I needed to draw energy from an external source to initiate my magical principle.
Young neophytes meditated on external energy sources.
So why couldn’t I?
That made sense, didn’t it?
I decided to try.
After an unspecified amount of time.
Nothing worked.
No matter how hard I tried to meditate on the surrounding space, it was useless.
Which made sense, really.
When mages meditated on the space around them, they tried to perceive it with one of their senses and understand the world through that sense.
I had none of those senses.
I was completely without them.
And I didn’t have a sixth sense, at least not yet.
Thinking about all of this, I arrived at one conclusion that seemed correct for me: equivalent exchange.
Everything in the world is energy.
It doesn’t matter what kind.
And one type of energy flows into another type.
For example, potential energy converts into kinetic energy.
So why couldn’t I borrow energy from my other shells?
After all, they all intertwined and interacted with each other.
So why couldn’t energy from one shell flow into another?
Energized by this idea, I began thinking about how to make it happen, not yet realizing where this path might lead.
Examining my shells, I came to a disappointing conclusion.
I didn’t really have a choice.
Why?
Because my First and Second shells were in stasis.
Messing with my Third shell, my astral body or aura, would be dangerous.
Every source I’d read said that injuries to the astral body were incredibly difficult to heal.
And I wouldn’t dare touch my Sixth shell, my memory and mind, for a very long time.
The fear of losing my personal memories was still too strong.
That left only my Fifth Principle, my emotions.
Once I realized that, I didn’t rush into trying to transfer energy.
No matter what anyone says, messing with your own soul is terrifying.
But I had to do it.
The first thing I did was “feel” the point where my Fifth and Seventh shells touched.
The point of contact looked like blurred boundaries, like clouds intersecting each other.
At those intersections, channels ran from the Seventh shell into the Fifth.
Through those channels, I tried to send energy from my Fifth shell into my Seventh, with the goal of initiating my core.
The first attempts, of course, failed.
I simply didn’t know how to approach it.
After many attempts, I tried to isolate a specific emotion, imagining it as energy, and direct it through those channels to my core to initiate it.
And you know what?
It worked.
Small emotions, like nostalgia, didn’t provide enough energy.
So after several attempts, I started isolating my strongest emotions.
Those were rage, anger, hatred, heartache, fear, and of course, love.
These emotions occupied a large portion of the part of my astral shell responsible for feelings.
I hadn’t considered the possibility that there might be too much energy.
At first, everything went well.
Energy flowed into my core in a small, steady stream.
Because of this, my core began to slowly activate.
With each drop of emotional energy, the core beat more frequently and more strongly.
While the core gathered momentum, ignoring the energy feeding it, I began monitoring the mana entering my channels.
Gradually, it moved through them, strengthening them and waking them from their dormant state.
I locked the excess energy in the core to avoid damaging my channels.
After some time, when my channels were strong enough, and I was about to start cleaning them, I felt an unbearable pain.
I dropped everything and started searching for the source of the pain.
I found it.
Actually, I found multiple sources.
My core and my Fifth shell both hurt.
While I wasn’t paying attention to the “conversion” process, it had accelerated on its own.
The Fifth shell itself began intertwining with the Seventh shell.
And the mana locked in my core was harming it, inflating it like a rubber balloon.
As soon as I noticed this, I immediately directed the mana into my channels with one goal: removing the blockages.
The mana flowed through the channels in a powerful stream, striving toward its designated goal.
Once that was done, I turned to solving the first problem.
I stopped the “conversion” of emotions and began “unweaving” my Fifth and Seventh shells.
It was difficult.
Incredibly difficult.
One of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.
But I managed it, after an unknown amount of time.
Glancing at my Fifth shell, I saw that it had become smaller.
Much smaller.
Shifting my attention to my core, I realized that there was still a lot of mana left, but the work was done.
The impurities in my channels were gone.
But the mana had nowhere to go.
Just as I realized this, I felt a push.
An incredibly strong push, so powerful that I began to lose consciousness.
With the last remnants of my fading mind, I managed to command the mana to expand, strengthen, and deepen my Seventh shell.
***
**The same place, several hours earlier.**
In a place where different planes and energies intersected (or perhaps it was their source, who knows?), a single lost soul drifted.
It looked like a sphere burning with gray-blue flame.
It had drifted here for a long time, but something changed today.
It began to transform.
Sometimes it dimmed, sometimes it flared brighter.
It changed color from gray-blue to plain gray, or sometimes to a deep, almost black blue.
Then, at one moment, it froze.
A black liquid began to seep from its boundaries.
As soon as it appeared, it burned away in the jumble of energies filling the space.
Finally, even that stopped.
Everything seemed fine.
The soul was intact, no longer being twisted out of shape.
The black liquid was gone.
But not everything was so rosy.
The mere presence of a soul in this place was one thing, but the presence of black liquid, a product of the real world, contradicted the very essence of this place.
And the space would not tolerate it.
It decided to get rid of the source of this “matter.”
The space around the soul began to crumble, and through the resulting breach, a stream of energy shoved the soul forward.
As soon as the soul disappeared behind the gap, all the fragments quickly returned to their places.
As if nothing had happened.
Except for one small detail.
Originally, the soul was gray-blue.
But at the moment of its disappearance, it was blue-gray.
That doesn’t change anything, does it?
Or maybe it does.