It was hard to ignore the forest around them. Alex knew he should be focused on the challenge and finding the flag, or keeping an eye out for other dangers before they walked into it like they did with the millipedes. But the forest was unlike anything he had ever experienced before. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon, or Niagara Falls for the first time.

  It was bigger on every level than he had ever experienced in a forest before. The trees had to be at least 300 feet tall and the forest floor around them was covered in roots as big around as sewer mains. The trunks of the trees didn’t look like redwoods, instead they looked like several large trees all twisted together—lots of hand holds if you wanted to climb them.

  The forest floor was rugged and covered in a dense blanket of multi-coloured ferns and thick grasping vines that seemed to cling to almost everything. The moss on the other hand DID coat everything. It grew in layered mats, thick enough to muffle footsteps, glowing faintly in desaturated greens and blues.

  All around them were the strange sounds of an alien forest. Bird calls and the chirps of unseen insects or frogs. Occasional howls, growls and shrieks echoed through the trees until it became impossible to tell what direction they were coming from.

  The game trail they followed was often overgrown and Danny had taken to running along the giant tree roots as an easier path through the brush. The clearing where they had fought the millipedes already felt like a distant memory.

  They had decided to stick closer together considering they really didn’t know what kind of other dangers existed here. They had been reminded of one very important lesson at least: This was not Earth.

  Alex slowed, then stopped altogether; taking a good look at the forest around him. He could see the mana here, like anywhere else. But it wasn’t like everywhere else here. First, it was drifting more chaotically. Back in the village it felt like all the mana moved on a current. Mostly moving in the same direction. That wasn’t the case here.

  In the forest it just seemed less structured. Like it was a part of the ecosystem. It floated between the massive trunks of the trees, but also clung to them. And the moss, which seemed to be saturated with mana. It pulsed through the vines and glowed in the ferns.

  There were no sharp boundaries, it just seemed to be a part of this system like it wasn’t in the village. He wondered about how nature would evolve over the millenia with something like mana in the environment.

  “Careful,” Sarah murmured as she stepped over another root the width of a fallen pillar. “Ground’s so uneven.”

  Alex nodded absently, eyes tracking a current of mana as it slid around the same root like water encountering a boulder in a stream. But not exactly. It clung and some of it seemed to get absorbed, either by the roots, or the moss that clung to them.

  They moved forward again, the formation loose but deliberate. Jay ranged ahead, axe slung casually over one shoulder and Danny disappeared around trunks and behind hills as he ran along his root highway, bow low but ready, scanning the upper canopy. Sarah held down their rear, keeping an eye on the trail behind them.

  Marcus and Hiro followed behind them, further back, deliberately out of view but close enough to intervene if something unexpected came up.

  Alex walked near the front, using his staff like a walking stick, grounding him with each step.

  The mana seemed to be responding to their motion.

  He hadn’t noticed that before. But it looked like they were displacing it as they walked. Unlike the roots and plants that seemed to absorb some of it, wherever they walked, currents shifted. Where they stepped, he could see the mana compress and bounce away as they moved on. He could see the little eddies around everyone as they walked, pushing the mana away.

  He held out his hand and let it drift through the flow of mana watching it eddy and curl away. But not all of it. Some stuck briefly before moving on. Why?

  He thought about the shield and spear he had created back in the clearing with the millipedes, replaying the process he had used to create them. It had required intent. Visualization. Pressure even, to hold it together in the shape he wanted. And he had felt the drain physically as he forced the process.

  But this?

  This was passive interaction.

  The forest didn’t have intent to use mana… unless you bought into the theory that trees and fungus were sapient at some level. Alex wasn’t sure about that. What about the millipedes? Or the salamandars back at the lake near the village? He could see the mana circulating within the creatures of this world. Did they do that consciously? Or was it just a natural process?

  “This place feels…” Mel said quietly. Alex didn’t turn, but he felt her beside him.

  “Old,” she finished after a moment.

  “Imagine a world that has existed for so many millenia, and humans never developed the technology to impact it like we did on Earth…” Sarah said from behind them. “Or don’t imagine I suppose—just look around.”

  Alex nodded but he knew there had to be more to it than that. Humans had impacted Earth ecosystems long before they had any significant technology advances and from what he had heard there were massive empires in this world too. What was the difference? Was it the presence of mana? Or the fact that there were creatures and monsters in this world that kept humans out of the wild places?

  He slowed again and looked up.

  Currents of mana wove through the canopy. Some pulsed in slow, tidal rhythms. Others looped lazily between branches. Where light filtered down in fractured beams, the mana thickened, refracting it into faint halos that hung in the air.

  Alex frowned. Why does light change density? Is the mana attracted to the light? Or the heat?

  He almost missed Mel speaking again.

  “Okay,” she said. “I have to ask.”

  He smiled faintly, knowing exactly what she was about to say. Ever since the clearing with the millipedes she had looked like she wanted to say something.

  She exhaled. “Magic. I mean… You’re doing magic now. Not gadgets. Not cartridges. Not whatever gadget they built into my lute. You made a shield out of nothing. You crushed something without touching it. Like… real magic.”

  “I suppose so,” Alex said quietly. “Real magic.” He couldn’t help the broad smile.

  “Right. So… Can you teach that? Can we learn it?”

  There it was. The question was understandable. The problem was that Alex had no idea.

  He slowed, buying time as he thought about how he could answer her without crushing that desire he could hear in her voice.

  As he thought, they crested a low rise and the forest opened into a shallow basin in front of them, the ground sloping down and away from them to the right in a long hill that disappeared into the trees.

  Alex immediately raised a hand and called out, “Something’s here!”

  Jay, who had already entered the basin ahead of them, instantly dropped into a crouch, battleaxe raised across his body. Danny rushed to the edge of the clearing, arrow already nocked on his bow.

  For a moment there was nothing. Then, across the basin, something bounded through the undergrowth.

  Then another.

  Then three more.

  A large animal burst through the thick ferns and landed on the path fifty metres ahead of Jay. It sat there and looked at them, head cocked to one side.

  “Wow,” Marcus said as he and Hiro caught up to them. “Horned jackrabbits. I’ve heard some of the merchants talk about them, but I didn’t realize how big they were.”

  Big was an understatement. They were enormous—each nearly as tall as Alex’s waist, with powerful hind legs that launched them forward in effortless arcs. Their fur was mottled grey with threads of rust that looked like the colour of the trees in the area. Smooth, backward-curving horns swept from their skulls.

  After a few moments of studying each other, the rabbit exploded into motion and disappeared into the underbrush. Alex tracked the motion by the ripple through the blanket of ferns. Occasionally one of the rabbits would burst above the cover, clearing metres of space before dropping back into the brush. They moved fast and they didn’t seem to be running away from the group. They rushed back and forth across the clearing like they were just playing. Chasing each other.

  Alex watched the mana. The rabbits were bursting with it. He could see it flow through them, then pulse in a surge down their backs and into their legs at moments of exertion—big jumps, or sharp turns.

  “They’re beautiful,” Mel whispered.

  “And not hostile,” Marcus murmured. “Unless provoked. Apparently the big ones will charge threats and smash them with those horns so the rest can escape.”

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  As Alex thought about the power of what a hit like that would be, one of the jackrabbits paused atop a fallen log and looked straight at him.

  For a moment, he had the distinct sensation of being evaluated.

  Then it bounded away, the others following, leaving barely a trace.

  Alex exhaled slowly.

  “You think they have predators? Like… what would hunt a rabbit of that size, do you think?” Danny asked.

  “I don’t want to know,” answered Rae. “In this forest? Some big cat like a jaguar or tiger maybe. But bigger.”

  Mel shuddered visibly. “Let’s hope we don’t find out.”

  The forest grew quiet around them and they started up again without any more talking, each lost in their own thoughts.

  Alex was thinking about magic.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about it now really. He had used magic. He knew he could do the same thing again whenever he wanted. But he didn’t understand it and he didn’t like that.

  It was just the way his brain worked—information had to fit into a system, or framework. But he had no framework for real magic. And that was bugging him.

  There had to be a system, and his brain wasn’t going to let go until he could at least see the edges of it. He needed some rules. Failure states. Something he could push against.

  This magic, though… it just didn’t behave in a way that he understood.

  Back home, the fake magic he knew all had rules. He’d spent thousands of hours inside them.

  Spell slots. Casting times. Components. Resource pools. Even when systems got weird—psionics, qi, wild magic—they still resolved into interfaces. You spent something. You got something. Sometimes the universe slapped you for being greedy, but it was transactional.

  This wasn’t. Mana here didn’t feel like a spell slot.

  It felt like gravity.

  It was like Green Lantern magic—whatever he could imagine, he could create… maybe.

  But that didn’t even begin to line up with what he saw the mana doing in the forest, or how the animals here seemed to interact with it.

  In D&D terms, this world wasn’t Forgotten Realms type magic, and it definitely wasn’t mana-as-fuel. If anything, it was closer to an environmental physics. Sort of. You didn’t expend it. You displaced it. Redirected it. Shaped or trapped it briefly in shapes that collapsed the moment you stopped holding the walls up.

  Which at least explained the fatigue or muscle strain he had felt when creating bigger objects. Not magical exhaustion, but some sort of structural load. Like using a muscle that had never been used before.

  Of course, neither the millipedes nor the jackrabbits had cast anything. They didn’t shape the mana with intent. Instead, they just seemed to breathe it in like air. It circulated through their system like blood in a way. Then, it was available for them to use to enhance their actions. Was it a closed system that just recirculated the mana they had within them? Or did they burn mana like a form of energy?

  Alex wished he knew someone who had answers.

  What he knew was that he was using mana like an external tool. And the flora and fauna of this world, or at least some of it, internalized the same energy to use internally. Alex could make an object for a time, but animals here could enhance their physicality. Just like…

  He turned his head and looked back at Hiro. At the time he had just thought it was special effects, but now that he understood what the Dungeon Inc. show really was, he knew differently.

  Hiro had somehow used mana to enhance his punches with elemental forces. Fire and electricity. How did that work? He hadn’t really realized the truth about it until now.

  Was Hiro doing something like the creatures here? Internalizing the mana and using it to enhance himself somehow?

  Or was he something different again?

  Alex stopped and turned back to look at Hiro directly. Beside him he felt Mel stop and turn with him. Whatever Hiro was doing, it seemed to be similar to the creatures of this place, but was obviously more deliberate and controlled.

  Alex took a deep breath and stared at Hiro—trying to see. After a moment he could. It wasn’t as strong as in the rabbits or millipedes, but it was there. He could see the mana circulating through Hiro like a soft light, feeding into a subtle aura that radiated off of him. The mana was heaviest in the stomach area. Alex automatically raised a hand to his own belly, but didn’t feel anything.

  So what was Hiro doing differently? He wasn’t shaping mana. Somehow he was containing it. And circulating it. What system inside the body allowed for that? He shook his head. None of this seemed to fit together at all.

  He thought about the ANIP system they had all received. The scientists had explained it like a secondary tech nervous system. He wondered if internalizing mana was like that. Did it create a secondary, or tertiary in Hiro’s case, magical nervous system? Or just empower the systems that were already there?

  Alex swallowed. He had no real way of learning the truths or answers that he wanted. Not yet anyway.

  “Keep glaring at me like that and I’m going to start feeling defensive,” Hiro said with a grin.

  “Oh, shit. Sorry.” Alex shook his head to clear his thoughts. He hadn’t meant to glare, it was more of a squint so he could see better.

  “What’s up?” Hiro asked as he and Marcus finally caught up to them. Alex and Mel turned and walked with them.

  “I was just trying to figure out how my magic, and whatever it is you do, are connected. I… I can see the mana inside you. But I don’t think I’m doing the same thing.” He knew he wasn’t really.

  “You can see the mana INSIDE him?” Mel asked with a shocked look on her face.

  “Well, I can see the mana everywhere really,” he said, waving a hand at the forest around them. “But yeah, I can see it circulating. Like an energy. I can see it in Hiro, in the millepedes we fought. Even in those jackrabbits.”

  “Huh,” Hiro said. “I can’t see it. I can… feel it, though that took a while.”

  Mel looked back and forth between them. “I am so jealous. How do I do this?”

  “I’m not sure. It just sort of happened. And I don’t shape energy outside myself,” Hiro said. “What Alex is doing is a lot different. I tried, after the fight. Just to see. But I can’t.”

  “You just punch things,” Marcus said with a smile.

  Hiro smiled. “Basically.”

  Alex fell into step beside him. “You said before it was internal? How did you… I don’t know, activate it in the beginning?”

  “Breathing,” Hiro continued. “Meditation. After a few months here I could feel something. Mana I suppose. Dr. Holt’s wife, Mei Lin, she taught me some breathing exercises and gave me a book, well, it was more like a pamphlet really, but it outlined some Tai Chi like movement practice. So I started doing that. It was… meditative. Just movement and imagine the world’s energy entering with your breath. Settling. Over time, it becomes part of you.”

  That was an explanation that seemed to make a lot of sense to Alex.

  He couldn’t help himself.

  He pictured drawing in the mana he could see—those thick, luminous threads drifting through the forest—and pulling them inward. Past skin. Past muscle. Letting them settle somewhere deep.

  His ring went cold. Alex stumbled half a step and stopped.

  Hiro was staring at him.

  Mel looked between them. “What happened?”

  Alex closed his eyes briefly, replaying the sensation. It was a build up of pressure. But felt wrong. Maybe not wrong actually. But he hadn’t been prepared for it.

  “It felt like I had swallowed too much water for a second there. Like I was drowning,” he said.

  Hiro studied him for a long moment. Then nodded. “Good.”

  Alex blinked. “Good?”

  “Well, you didn’t expect to get it right on the first try did you? It took me a week of dedicated practice. But I think, what you felt, means you can do it too.”

  “Oh, I want to do it too,” Mel said as they resumed walking.

  Alex thought he understood what Hiro had done now. It was just going to take some practice to prepare his system. But he couldn’t see how this connected with what he had done before.

  He looked out at the forest while he thought.

  A cluster of insects lifted from a patch of glowing fungus as they passed by. Their wings beat too fast for human eyes, but Alex could see the mana flaring around them in jagged bursts.

  A bird launched from a branch overhead. Mana flowed smoothly into its wings, then dissipated cleanly as it glided.

  Mammals and birds use bursts of internal mana to power themselves. Or empower themselves maybe.

  Hiro’s system was a little different, but still contained internally. Both were contained, mostly closed systems.

  Then there was him.

  Alex flexed his fingers, feeling the faint ache left behind by the spear he’d formed earlier.

  How did he externalize that power? If he could understand that, maybe he could do more with it.

  He slowed deliberately and reached out. He shaped a thin plane of resistance between his palm and the air in front of them, barely perceptible. The mana responded instantly, but unevenly. Turbulence formed along the edges. But there was a small plate of hardness floating in front of his hand. It moved along in front of them as they walked.

  He could feel the pressure of holding the form. Less than the large spear he had created, but it was like his stomach was clenched with the effort. He released it, heart pounding.

  Mel had noticed. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Alex said, though his arm trembled faintly. “Just… testing something.”

  “Can you show me?” she asked softly.

  Alex hesitated.

  “I don’t really know how yet,” he said finally. “And guessing wrong could hurt you.”

  Mel nodded slowly. She didn’t look disappointed. Just thoughtful.

  “When we get back I can show you the breathing exercises that I’ve been doing. Maybe Hiro will share that pamphlet he has with both of us?” he asked and raised an eyebrow towards Hiro, who just nodded in response.

  “So cool,” Mel said with a giant grin. She started dancing along beside them.

  Hiro stopped in the middle of the path suddenly enough that Marcus bumped into him. Mel and Alex both paused and looked back at them.

  “Did you hear something?” Hiro asked.

  Danny was standing higher up the hill on their right, staring off through the trees.

  Then Alex heard it.

  A distant boom.

  Then another, echoing faintly through the trees.

  “Has to be B-Team,” Danny called down grimly.

  Another explosion echoed.

  “They might be in trouble,” Jay said as he trotted back down the path towards them.

  Alex tightened his grip on his staff. “We better go find out. That’s a lot of explosions.”

  They broke into a run as a group.

  ***

  The Western mage believes himself cautious because he refuses to keep power within his own body.

  He builds tools. He draws lines. He places distance between himself and the force he commands and calls this wisdom.

  But, to shape the world without first shaping the self is backwards thinking. It is putting more trust in symbols than the air you breathe.

  Such mages rely on angles and anchors because they have not yet learned to trust their own internal order. They speak of safety while standing behind walls that collapse the moment their attention falters.

  Do not mistake avoidance for mastery.

  Power does not become less dangerous because it is held at arm’s length. It merely becomes less understood.

  From the Scrolls of the Inner Gate

  Master Lián Zhēn