Zerrious sat down on the plush bed in the corner, a little bit smaller than before with a lot more colors on the blanket, and I sat in the armchair near the fire which burned a beautiful green though I didn't expect there to be copper in the odd fuel less fireplace. Neither of us were really tired, it hadn't been a particularly long day for me and Zerrious had a boon that made him need less sleep than the average person, so instead of either of us trying to sleep we sat down and went back to, essentially what we were doing before, but this time without the alcohol, though neither of us were completely sober which was likely why the cabin seemed so much more interesting and colorful this time around. Generally I preferred camping to staying here, usually because we could both sleep when we were just holed up in here somewhere had to stay up to make sure we didn't cease to exist.

  Being drunk was probably unsafe, but that didn't really matter, I was master of this space with no equal. I looked at the glowing doodles of spiders and swords and various other things as the pages turned, somehow able to fully see and study each and every image even though it turned faster than most people could even make out individual pages, let alone what was written on them. My thoughts were drawn to a drawing of my favorite form for my quill to take, a rapier with a stylized feather design at the base of the blade and a simple handle with a sharp nib at the pommel under a long thin blade. Zerrious told me that what I had thought was a rapier was actually a smallsword, the difference being that the rapier that I preferred had a longer blade and had an edge all the way down the blade where the smallsword just had a point at the tip. That meant you could slash with a rapier but it was still best suited to stab than anything else which required the least amount of strength to do effectively which was why I used it instead of the longsword Zerrious preferred as the most adaptive sword style.

  There seemed to be something about the way the page was glowing that mesmerized me a bit. There was a way that the Aether shifted under the outline and attempt at shading that had the page glowing insanely bright as the book did it's best to absorb all the Aether, though it was flowing in so densely it almost couldn't take on a green hue fast enough to not have wild Aether rampaging about my center. It was incredible to watch the Aether saturate everything in sight. It was weird to feel how solid the Aether seemed while walking through its own realm and to come to this odd liminal space in my center that seemed to barely shift at all between layers, maybe becoming more dense in the Aether than in the physical reality, but still almost no difference other than intake.

  There was a similar glow to the other drawings, more so the ones I drew of spells I knew, or had seen cast. they weren't great drawings, I really wasn't that kind of artist, but the Aether almost seemed to flow underneath the drawings in patterns of their own. It almost reflected the right patterns to cast the spell, but it wasn't quite right. I thought it was a fun addition to the pieces even though it was really only me who could see them, even if I was the only one who could see them. Maybe Nyah could, but a combined soul was a little bit different than a center, even if we could send it back and forth, they were still separate.

  Actually, how did having my soul combined with Nyah's effect things like my center, and the manifestation of my soul? Now I was curious because I had conformation that my soul was still a book, so was Nyah's also a book? Or was it somehow different without changing mine? A combined soul would be some kind of hybrid of both but mine was still just. . . a book. I would need to dive into Nyah's soul to figure it out, and that probably wouldn't be until after Zerrious either died or became a god, whichever came first.

  I just made a note to use the pages I drew on as spells first, which would be nice because they already had more Aether than the blank pages. I wasn't sure why the pages couldn't just hold more per page without drawing on them, but it was one of those weird things about souls, there was no standard ruleset for them or their centers. Some things worked and others didn't, that's all there was to it.

  I opened my eyes to the Aether to see Zerrious sitting in a rigid lotus position on the floor with his face scrunched up. I wasn't sure why he felt the need to focus so much to draw in Aether, or I supposed he had Mana, but even before my wedding Mana just flowed in and I could focus on weaving and making changes far better when I was comfortable, especially with something like this that was more an art than the pseudoscience Zerrious treated it as.

  "Zerrious?" I asked, making my way over to him and lowering myself to the floor beside him.

  "Yes?" he asked, opening his eyes to see me sprawled in front of him.

  "I'm more just curious really, but I noticed you always sit so proper when you're working with your Mana. Isn't it uncomfortable?"

  "Sure, but I need to focus on getting the patterns right, and it's touch work to make sure my center grows right," he said. That gave me momentary pause. Make sure it grows right? He didn't just let it do it's thing?

  "Zerrious, what do you mean by that?" I asked suspiciously.

  "Exactly what I said." He seemed confused.

  "Zerrious, can I see what you're doing in there?"

  In response Zerrious held out his hand for me to grab, which I did as I set my Aether through his arm and into his center. What I saw was shocking. He had an adaptive center but he wasn't giving it the real freedom to do it, so his Mana was weak and trying to fight the form that was forced on it.

  "Zerrious. . . No," I said as I studied the perfect cube of rigid cells, each a mirror image of the last, his Mana spinning about within each cell exactly the same in each one. It was an affront to the shape of his soul. "Zerrious, I need you to trust me, but you'll be a lot stronger if you just let it go. Whatever you're doing to hold it in place, just stop doing it and let your center grow how it wants to."

  "But, magic is a formula. You put it into specific patterns with exact elasticity and perfect-"

  "No, it's not. It's an art, you fold it and weave it like a tapestry, you guide it to make the shapes and patterns so you can work together. Do you know how many pages I actually made?"

  "Well-"

  "Two. I just let my center take care of the rest, and you should too. It's an automatic process and it will work with you better and be happier to be with you if you let it be happy," I cut him off.

  "Happy?"

  "I guess that is misleading, it's a force so it doesn't really have feelings, but you remember how there were conductors? How energy was transferred through them better? Well it's like that, the shape it takes make it function better and it naturally moves to that shape, so if you want it to function right you need to let it."

  Suddenly each cell of Mana started going wild, growing and absorbing other cells until they finally reached a sort of equilibrium, cells floating about and some grouping together and becoming what seemed like crude multicellular organisms. He might have a god damned ecosystem by the time it fully developed. Now that was some bullshit. I didn't even get a fucking library and he got a full ecosystem?

  "That is a lot easier," he finally admitted, breaking me out of my angry reverie.

  "Of course it is, it should be a lot easier to make natural systems work than to force something," I explained. "You really thought magic was a formula?"

  "Well, yeah. It makes sense, you have certain symbols or patterns that need to come in a certain order. You need to make it with precision, especially as it gets more complicated and you start mastering schools."

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  That made sense, especially with his first real foray into magic being enchanting which I understood to be very different in terms of how it worked. I didn't know much but I knew there was a magic element and a carving element, but I didn't have the know how to explain anything but the spellcasting version which was quite different.

  "Anyways, you should get some rest, we'll probably find Dave in the morning," Zerrious said. I was okay with the idea, but I wasn't sure I trusted his hold on the Aether.

  "I think we should exit the Aether before I try to sleep," I said. He understood, he was nothing if not pragmatic, though I still felt bad saying it aloud.

  "Right," he said. Though the idea of the Aether consuming me alive did give me a rather. . . drastic idea. I would never do it though, not unless I had a way to make sure it was safe.

  "You might was well either sleep or do some practice with your spells. You wont ever have more Mana available to you than here, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to try some new stuff with spells. I know I made a spell, though I would never use it on another person, there's got to be other spells possible that no one has made yet. If you use some of the enchantment principles with the other schools you get something like my quill blade that's much more adaptive than usual, so if you start mixing ideologies than I'm sure you'll find some incredible knowledge that way," I advised right before I pulled out of his center and lay on the ground, now consisting of an endless field of the most beautiful flowers of all colors, some even looking like an oil spill as they shimmered in the Aether sun.

  "This place is disorienting," Zerrious muttered as he blinked the light from his eyes and took note of the field we sat in. "I never know what to expect, it makes me kind of dizzy."

  I vaguely remembered something like that, but it was a thing of the past now. Probably another part of the wedding complications.

  "Hmm. I'm not sure how to fix that other than practice. Why don't you go try to run out of Mana while I watch you experiment, remember, try new things, create new schools of magic," I told him. He sighed lightly and got to his feet in a quick hop. It made me think about the gods. They created a system that supports learning as many skills as possible over learning one skill as much as possible, which meant that it encouraged creating new skills with regularity more, which seemed a dangerous concept if there were illegal Names. Especially if there wasn't a clear idea of what made a Name illegal in the first place. It couldn't be arbitrary, or Zerrious would have already gotten them with his thievery escapade. I supposed I'd know when he earned one. Or when I earned one.

  I sat up, watching Zerrious stand and consider. I saw the Aether start weaving into a spell before he even raised his hand to start and that surprised me because not only had Zerrious just started, but he had very minimal control over the Aether as of yet. I took note of it and watched him attempt to create a fireball and fail. I could see the snag, he had tried to make it malleable to outside influences like my quill blade. The problem is, he made it malleable and the effect is one of brute force.

  "Zerrious, try combining that with something else. . . Maybe conjuration to make the flames more solid, or abjuration to make flames that reject certain things," I noted. Reinventing these spells had as much to do with understanding the idea of the spell as much as it did the ideas of the different schools.

  "Why not enchantment?" he asked, pausing. As I said it I looked harder at the Aether. I was really only watching the big flows and strands before but there was always more, and what I saw shocked me. It was like when NASA pointed that camera into an empty patch of space and found hundreds of stars that were invisible to any other telescope. The complexity of the patterns was maddening, so I let some of them fade into the background and I saw a bunch of different patterns that looked like variations to the fireball Zerrious had attempted earlier. I could tell right off the bat that most if not all of them wouldn't work, but it was an interesting development that I took note of, even taking the time to sketch out the overlaying patterns I saw in my notebook.

  "Because it's an instantaneous spell, making it adaptive doesn't do much. You want something that will have an immediate effect and I can't imagine something like divination to do much with a fireball," I said as I recoiled slightly from the sight I had focused on directly next to Zerrious. I didn't let myself stop as I noticed Zerrious nod consideringly and raise his hands. One of the patterns got brighter as the larger flows of Aether started taking it's shape and the other patterns faded almost to nothing, but they remained in the background with the other impossibly many patterns.

  I could tell he'd combined it with abjuration to make a fireball made of purifying flame even before the notice even popped up to confirm it. He tried a few more combinations, moving from abjuration to conjuration, divination, illusion, and transmutation, although the only two that didn't work were enchantment and divination. Conjuration made the flame so dense it was almost a physical force, illusion made the fire seem a lot hotter than it was, and transmutation made the fire contagious as it started turning anything it touched into fire, which made for a dangerous spell that was hard to put out.

  As he started messing around with more spells a light started coming from his back as a new Name burned itself onto his body.

  Notice!

  Name gained: Sephnal (Spellsmith).

  It just looked like one Name, but every one counted. That put him up to 698, a good place to be, not far from a boon now that I thought of it. The Name looked like it was about combining different spells to create new effects, which I was shocked to find wasn't already something people had figured out, but clearly the magic wasn't near as developed as it rightly should have been. Back home this stuff would have been picked apart as if a pack of rabid hyenas had gotten to some fresh meat.

  "Oh, I actually wasn't expecting that," Zerrious exclaimed as he read the notification for himself.

  "Combining skills and professions to make new ones is exactly how you grow, and it's the best way to become the strongest you can be. The downfall of this world is that it doesn't reward you for expanding your skills after you've gotten the Name, so people don't think to innovate like this which means the world stagnates," I explained, perhaps pointlessly. "When the world stagnates then things don't get better for people. My world was like this once, but now everyone has tablets that they can use to message people a world away, there's people in space, disease isn't a death sentence and the life expectancy is as old as a hundred in some places! There's countless skills and things to learn, things that can't exist in a world that isn't actively trying to better itself. That needs to be the difference between you and everyone else, Zerrious, you need to work to grow, that's the drive that'll make you a god." I got off my proverbial soap box and flopped onto my back, letting the flowers make their attempt at cushioning my fall, which they failed at miserably.

  "Your world sounds incredible," Zerrious lamented as he approached me, his muscular frame silhouetted against the brightness of the sky in a rather striking image.

  "Everyone sees another world and thinks it's better than his own, but the only difference between mine and yours is that you have magic. Everything my world has and more can be yours if you work hard enough to make it." I wasn't much of a philosopher, but that was a pretty common idea. I pulled out my guitar and started strumming, bending the sound into an electric wine and then pitching it down deeper to play Enter Sandman, or at least the opening riff I could remember.

  "You're the smartest man I've ever met, Sigurd."

  I laughed at that, stopping my tune and meeting his eyes. "Zerrious, there is a difference between education and intelligence. I am disgustingly educated as far as this worlds standards go, but I am not very smart. You on the other hand are one of the most brilliant people I have ever heard of, everyone else on your level has been in history books as the smartest people of their time," I explained as my chuckling died down.

  "I don't know, you've figured more out about magic than anyone here, and you had never heard of Mana before ending up here."

  "Well, that's not true. It was just a thing of fiction for my world."

  "Still, you found secrets after just a few years here and now your teaching me when it should rightly be the other way around based on how many more Names I have than you. You're really incredible."

  "Just a new perspective is all. No misinformation to color my view," I said, sitting up and looking at the sky. "It's not very easy to tell the time here is it? You should invent a watch, it would be very useful with how much time we spend in places that seem removed from time."

  "A watch?" he questioned.

  "Just a geared device that helps you keep time. The size of the gears changes how long it takes for each to move around, and then you just get it set up with these arrows so that one turns every second, another turns every sixty seconds, and the last one turns once every sixty minutes. From there there would be twelve hours on the clock that would restart at midday and midnight and the hands would point to the numbers to show you what time it was. I'm not sure how it would be powered here though, I kind of failed to invent electricity," I said sheepishly.

  "I can do that," Zerrious said, shocking me thoroughly. "It'll take a while though, a few months at least, plus I need materials."

  "I can do that!" I exclaimed. "Do you think the places we can get these materials are open yet?"

  "Depends on what time it is. You are forgetting we don't have money, right?"

  "I'm sure I've got a service I can offer in exchange. I'm a pretty useful guy," I said while opening the veil between worlds. "Ladies first."