“I have a theory then…” Tyler said, and he gave the group a brief rundown about the mechanics of his Curse. He was a bit wary about telling them, given that despite how he’d warmed up to them he’d still only known them for two days, but he realized most of it would be obvious if he hung around for any bit of time.

  “... I never thought about it this way, but I guess because I have so much mana running through me at any given time, I might be able to ‘touch’ the spiritual whenever I’m actively using a technique. Well, if I’m in that right mental state to actually grab onto some magic.” He shrugged.

  Alberta’s eyes had gone as wide as dinner plates. “Incredible. It would be the same effect as someone sending mana of a similar Aspect to disrupt it. I was actually theorizing about if a Death mage could try and disrupt the entire network of skeletons from a single general, but I’ve never even heard of anyone Awakening anything close to the Aspect of Death or Rebirth. Could you perhaps demonstrate this power for us?”

  “Of course,” Tyler said.

  He was also in awe of just what he’d been able to do.

  Blurry memories came back of his fight with the bird — how there had been no feasible way for him to fight back as the bird directly exerted its control over his body.

  This had been the only thing that had saved him. And then he’d done it again against the skeleton general, and he’d been excited about the fact that it had let him defeat just one powerful monster. Now, his mind raced with the possibilities.

  Alberta conjured a small shield in front of him, and he activated the Flowing Sands, bringing his hand around the thin blue rectangle and pinching. Without that strange mental muscle, his fingers just impacted the shield like he was tapping on glass.

  But when he tried to remember that feeling of tearing the magic from the Boneweld, it instantly caught on his fingertips. Not the physical shield of force being conjured, but the magic underneath it.

  Straining against the resistance, he brought his finger down like he was motioning for someone to come towards him, and the entire fabric of the magic came pulling downwards. The shield warped, then cracked into a million dissolving pieces as the technique unfurled before his eyes.

  “Holy shit,” Brandon breathed. “How much power was in that shield?”

  “Maybe a third of my maximum potential,” Alberta said with a gasp. “At that level, I could protect against the average Low-Journeyman for at least a couple of strikes. And yet for you, dismantling it seemed almost effortless.”

  Tyler stared down at his finger, and his heart felt ready to explode out of his chest. But he calmed his excitement just a bit. “That’s just a small technique from a very similar Aspect, though.”

  “Right.” The Branch Leader nodded. “Were it another shield mage, I could have done the same thing with my raw mana and it would have taken even less effort. But what about other Aspects?”

  “Catch!” Lisa said as she flung a glob of red magic towards him.

  Tyler turned, bringing his hand up just in time to let the technique sink into his palm. His skin tingled, and the inflammation in his knuckles dimmed just a tad.

  Unlike with Alberta’s shield, the technique attaching itself to his flesh didn’t Resonate at all in his eyes. Or at least, not strong enough to be noticeable compared to the powerful Resilience already in his body.

  He was actually surprised since Lisa could clearly see the incredible amount of blood Resonance within him, but he supposed it made sense. The blood in his body said a lot more about his Resilience than the Resilience in Lisa’s said about her blood.

  “Okay, let’s try it out.”

  As he’d seen before, the healing magic worked perfectly fine in tandem with the Flowing Sands if he just used the technique normally.

  And this time, simply willing himself to grasp at the magic wasn’t quite enough. It did feel easier on an intuitive level to break the magic off of his body compared to an external technique, but the Resonance within the technique was still evading him.

  Tyler set his jaw and conjured up the image of the bird standing before him — the entirety of his body crumpling downward, a web of crushing magic worming through his flesh. And suddenly, his metaphysical grasp seemed to take hold. He clenched his fist, and the technique burst apart in a poof of red light.

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  “Wow,” he breathed. “A bit harder, but doable.”

  It was certainly harder than Alberta’s Journeyman-level technique, but not nearly as hard to tear as the undead animating magic. Even if she were a Journeyman, he doubted it would have taxed him that much.

  “Both the magic animating the skeletons and that enchantment might have loose connections to Resilience,” Brandon theorized. “That kind of makes sense. What about one of mine?”

  A gust of wind blew steadily in Tyler’s face, but as he tried to grasp at the mana behind it, he couldn’t even begin to feel at it.

  “Nope. Too dissimilar, probably.”

  “How about this?” Lisa asked, shoving a crossbow bolt towards him. “Enchanted to pierce flesh easier.”

  He turned the projectile around in his hand, glimpsing the slight red glow that appeared near the tip of the bolt.

  Like with the healing technique, he couldn’t glimpse much Resilience there outside of the natural Resonance from the metal. The magical power and the amount of mana within it was too little to have any sort of spiritual pressure, too. Were it not for the visual effect, he could have never been able to tell that this was any sort of magic.

  But as Tyler brought his mana into his hands and pinched at the tip of the bolt, he could feel the magic within it. It was there, and it felt doable, but as he actually attempted to pull at the technique it was a bit like trying to grasp at clouds. He fumbled for a couple of minutes with it, his fingers slipping off of the magic like it was slick with oil.

  He guessed that the technique being imbued into a physical object also made it harder. The mana had something to hide behind, in a certain sense.

  “I know I can do it,” he muttered. “I just need time.”

  “I believe so too. The connections between Resonance are not set in stone,” Alberta said. “I have heard of people doing exercises with their minds and souls in order to increase the bandwidth of their mana and let them affect a wider range of things. Ah — but I realize we’ve gotten off track.”

  The woman tapped the letter. “Thanks to that skill that you’ve just shown me, the Sector President is going to have you personally receive the rewards.”

  Tyler nodded.

  “I’ve been told you also don’t know how you advanced,” the Branch Leader said sadly. “But if you want to know the secret of power — which I’d hazard anyone still living in this world would love to know — advancement to Journeyman and maybe even Adept might come into your knowledge with the favor of the Sector President. He’s an Adept himself, and the only person I know of who may be authorized to share details about such things.”

  An Adept, Tyler thought. If the gap between Novice and Journeyman was already so large, he couldn’t even imagine how powerful an Adept would be.

  “And don’t forget the treasures,” Brandon mentioned, picking up the letter that Lisa hadn’t touched since it had been placed in front of her.

  “Oh yeah,” Lisa chuckled. “If there’s anything that’ll be able to bypass the effects of your Curse, it’ll probably be in the hands of this Sector President dude. Those types of major bounty rewards — they’re the types of treasures that can be life-changing, even for a Journeyman.”

  “And even if you do not find anything suitable,” Alberta said, “you’ll also be getting the credit reward as soon as your escort arrives. Ten thousand chits should be enough to find at least something that would work for you. Especially since the same people escorting you will also likely bring things to trade.”

  “Ten thousand chits,” Lisa whistled. “That might be as much as all the rest of us in the Branch have combined.”

  Tyler’s mind raced as he imagined what kinds of magical items might be available.

  “She’s barely exaggerating,” Alberta said. “Only one or two thousand chits can afford you a proper Journeyman weapon. If you were a standard cultivator, that amount of money could fund you all the way until the Peak of Journeyman and then some.”

  “Wow,” Tyler exhaled.

  Without any frame of comparison, his mind still couldn’t quite comprehend it. But as Lisa began talking excitedly about the prices of various trinkets and elixirs she’d seen in previous passing caravans, Tyler began to get giddy with her. Surely, out of all the available options, there had to be at least something that would work for him, right?

  “And then I saw this thing that they called, like, the Moonbeam Crescent Sword. And I guess the name makes it obvious, but if you pour in Sword mana it shoots out these crazy slices that look like a crescent moon. And then there’s, there’s these heart protection artifacts, and —”

  “Lisa…” Brandon interrupted.

  “ — they have these cool little gold plates on them, and —”

  “Lisa.”

  She turned around. “I think I know what you’re gonna say, and the answer is no.”

  “You’ve been offered an advancement —”

  “No. Not now. Not ever. I fucking knew that was why they sent me a letter,” she groaned. “I’m going to tell them to fuck off.”

  “Let me finish —”

  “No. No fucking magic contracts.”

  “Lisa,” Alberta gently said, and the redhead finally quieted for a moment. “Tyler wasn’t the only one who was rewarded for his participation in the extermination of the skeleton outbreak.”

  “Huh?” Lisa asked, and Brandon finally just shoved the letter in her face, jabbing at the bottom part.

  “Oh. Oh.”

  From next to her, Tyler leaned around so that he could read it as well.

  You have been invited to undergo an advancement procedure to Journeyman. Due to the exceptional nature of your achievements, your contract requirement has been waived.