Maren always said I should write down what I know rather than what I think I know. So here is what I know. Or close enough.

  Five to ten people in a hundred awakens. The rest live ordinary lives. I used to think ordinary meant lesser. I don't anymore. Some of the most capable people I've known couldn't feel World Energy if it ran through them. It doesn't make them less. It just makes them different.

  The ones who do wake up have three directions to go. You get the one your soul or your body decides for you. Nobody picks.

  — — —

  The Three Paths

  Inner World — you grow a world inside you. Literally. A spiritual dimension with its own species, its own ecology, its own logic. The Core Species manifests at awakening and you don't choose it. Mine are ants. Everyone has opinions about that. The world grows with you and eventually it has opinions of its own. You learn to listen. If you don't, you stall.

  Martial — your body is the work. The cultivation restructures the physical body at a fundamental level. Force channels open through tissue and bone and the practitioner learns to push World Energy through them until the body becomes something different from what it started as. It's painful. It's direct. The power is inseparable from the person.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Arcane — understanding is the work. The practitioner develops a notation system, a language precise enough to describe World Energy's behaviour in enough detail that the energy follows the description. The notation is written into surfaces or into the air itself. First it describes what energy is. Eventually it describes what the rules about what energy does should be. The depth of the understanding determines the depth of the effect.

  — — —

  The Realms — Ten, for all three paths

  Each realm is a qualitative change. Most practitioners spend their lives in the first four and consider Realm 5 exceptional. Realm 7 is continental. Realm 10 is recorded fewer times in history than I have fingers.

  The meaningful transitions for Inner World practitioners:

  Realm 1 — first World Law activates. The law that defines what the world fundamentally is.

  Realm 4 — second Law activates. What the world can do outwardly. Also when the world first has to sustain itself without constant management from me.

  Realm 5 — sovereignty threshold. Below this, manageable. Above this, a different category of problem.

  Realm 7 — third Law activates. Involuntary. You don't turn it off.

  Realm 10 — Law of Coordination. Everything in the world synchronized. This is where the path completes.

  For Martial: the same milestones exist as Force Channel events — Realm 1 the channels open, Realm 4 they become active rather than passive systems, Realm 7 they restructure the body's relationship to physical space itself, Realm 10 the Law of the Immovable. For Arcane: the same pattern in the notation — First Mark at Realm 1, network capability at Realm 4, law-level notation at Realm 7, permanent notation at Realm 10.

  (The pattern is not a coincidence. I've been thinking about why the same four thresholds appear in all three paths. Something fundamental about how World Energy structures development. I don't have the answer yet but I'm keeping the question.)