The next day, when Dubs opened the workshop door, a wave of heat greeted Emrys. He didn't really pay it any mind, it wasn't the first time he'd come here. This would, however, be the first time he'd do anything other than watch Dubs work. Well, "watch," so to speak.
Dubs closed the massive door behind them and pointed toward a spot where a pile of ore sat, one that wasn't anywhere near the anvil, as it happened. Dubs must have moved the stones during the night so as not to be disturbed.
"There, that's it," he said before walking off to focus on his own business, not without adding one last thing. "It's unusable ore, so knock yourself out."
The gesture would have looked strange, directed at a blind child. But Dubs knew Emrys could manage just fine.
"Okay, thanks again," Emrys answered, starting to walk toward the pile himself.
Several months had already passed since Emrys had been living with Dubs. Having gone blind, he'd had to learn to compensate for it.
During that time, he'd had the impression his senses had sharpened without him even really needing to train them, and as soon as he'd recovered enough, even before he could move, he'd started working on his haki from morning to night.
That had cost him a constant headache, the kind that never quite went away, just present enough to remind him of his limits at every hour of the day. But the results had paid off. On top of a very solid level of haki, his mental energy had grown considerably, pushing him further and further away from the risk that a shortage of it used to represent.
He could now keep his haki active permanently, at a reduced range, sure, but he was no longer completely defenseless.
Keeping his haki active continuously had also let him understand something else about Blink. Namely why, the very first time he'd used it, he'd teleported without his clothes, and why, the times after that, he'd managed to bring them along with him. As well as why, back then, he'd managed to teleport both himself and the little girl he was protecting.
When he teleported, the activation process involved covering himself in a thin layer of mental energy, a bit like with Armament Haki. In doing so, anything covered by that energy got teleported along with him. During his very first use, he hadn't thought to cover his clothes, which had excluded them from the teleportation.
The times after that, he'd done it unconsciously, covering, without even realizing it, his own clothes, the little girl, and her clothes as well.
Now that he understood the activation mechanism behind his power, he wondered if there wasn't some other move worth exploring with this principle. But that's not all Emrys has learned..
He had also noticed something else regarding mental energy. The loss wasn't linear but exponential. The less mental energy he had left, the more he lost using the same techniques, and the slower it regenerated. So the 2 to 3 seconds he initially thought would be needed for recovery after the 5 cm blink became less than a second when he was at his peak.
When the pile of ore entered his detection range, he immediately sensed the difference between it and any other minerals he'd come across so far.
Damn, I've never seen this much magical energy concentrated in an inanimate object.
From Emrys's point of view, the stones blazed with light, in every color imaginable. Some glowed a searing red, others leaf green, others still brown. But, unable to make out their exact edges, Emrys could tell these ores were still raw, unrefined, fused together with ordinary rock.
Probably because most of the weapons Dubs was forging right now were giant-sized. He had to set this kind of ore aside for his more modest creations.
Emrys stepped closer and picked up one of the rocks in his hands.
"Alright, alright, alright. So, how do I use Structural Grasp?" he wondered out loud.
From what he understood, it involved sending a wave of magical energy into the object. Kind of like a radar.
That was at least the principle that had been handed to him, along with the rest of his memories. So Emrys got to it. He gathered his energy in his arm, then in his hand, then in his palm, before releasing it into the stone in front of him.
Boom!
Except instead of a wave of magical energy sweeping through the ore, what burst from his palm was a pure explosive discharge that, given how little magical energy had actually been drawn on, only knocked the stone out of his hand.
Emrys looked at the stone on the ground, so to speak, once again, and sighed. "Yeah. Can't say I didn't see that coming."
He picked the fallen stone back up and started the same process over. Arm, hand, palm, rock. Same result.
Boom!
He tried again.
Boom!
Once more.
Boom!
He kept at it, again and again, but every time.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
His training showed not the slightest sign of improvement. Rather than getting angry, he decided to do what any sensible person would have done in his place.
Ask for help.
"Yo, Dubs," Emrys called out.
"What is it, kid? I'm busy," Dubs answered without breaking the rhythm of his hammer against the glowing metal.
"Bit late to be asking this, but how exactly does magical energy work?" Emrys asked, still sending waves into the stones as he spoke.
"You're gonna have to be more specific, kid," Dubs answered. But he didn't give Emrys time to clarify anything. "You're asking how you go from plain inert energy to something concrete, like spells or magical powers, that it?"
"You catch on fast, as usual," Emrys said, a smile in his voice.
"Any other time, I'd tell you to think back to the very first time you used your magical energy, and draw your own conclusions from that. But I don't have time for that kind of nonsense right now, so never mind." Dubs stopped hammering the steel and picked up, with a pair of tongs, what looked like a red-hot spatula. "There's a bunch of factors, obscure, technical ones. But the one you seem to be asking about is intent."
"Intent?" Emrys repeated, this time actually stopping the flow of his energy.
Dubs answered while heading toward the water tank he used to cool his weapons. "Yeah. Literally what you intend to do with your magical energy. You told me yesterday your power had several sides to it. When you were fighting the mages of Belialuin, your intent in using that energy was to create a weapon, so it was the weapon-creation side of your power that kicked in. Might sound obvious, but for abstract abilities that use raw, unshaped magical energy, like this Structural Grasp thing you're talking about, intent becomes essential. Otherwise, whatever comes out is just... raw magical energy. Like all those blasts you've been setting off this whole time prove."
Dubs plunged the giant spatula into the tank.
Pwshhh!!!
He swirled it around a bit, then pulled it back out, looking less than satisfied with the result.
Tch. The kid distracted me. I really ain't used to having company.
Meanwhile, on his end, Emrys had already gone back to training, this time with a clear, deliberate intent in mind rather than the vague, mechanical gesture from before.
Boom!
Still an explosion. But a bit weaker than the previous ones, as if something had shifted slightly without quite being enough.
He tried again.
Boom!
This time, right before the explosion, a fragment of information flickered through his mind, too fast for him to grasp. A number, maybe a weight, instantly wiped out by the blast that followed.
There. I'm close.
He tightened his grip on the stone, shut his eyes harder, and focused on the phrase he'd started repeating without even meaning to.
For the first time in a good while, Dubs turned toward Emrys and looked at him.
"So, you get it, kid?"
Emrys didn't answer. He was already deep in a trance, eyes closed, entirely focused on the ore in his hand.
"I'll take that as a yes," Dubs said, not the least bit offended, before turning back to his furnace.
For his part, Emrys was doing his best to follow the advice he'd just been given.
I want to know this stone's secrets. I want to know this stone's secrets. I want to know this stone's secrets. I want to know this stone's secrets.
He kept repeating it on a loop as he channeled his magical energy. He doubted seasoned fighters went about it this way, but it felt like a decent start to him.
He was now reaching the final step: the wave of magical energy.
I want to know this stone's secrets. I want to know this stone's secrets. I want to know this stone's secrets. I want to know this stone's secrets.
And as his energy poured into the rock, instead of the usual blast, something else entirely happened.
A stream of information flooded through Emrys's mind. Information all relating to the stone he held in his hands.
2.4 kilograms. 6.7 centimeters between its farthest points. Rock rich in glowing iron ore and cloudy copper. Extracted from a quarry formed 14,560 years ago, using a pickaxe striking at an angle of 36.7 degrees, in the dead of night, under pouring rain. Because of that, the glowing iron had degraded slightly, while the cloudy copper had gained in quality.
And that wasn't all. The more magical energy Emrys channeled into the stone, the more of its secrets it revealed to him.
The glowing iron was, in reality, just ordinary iron, its atoms surrounded by micro-particles of fire magical energy. The cloudy copper, meanwhile, was copper whose atoms were surrounded by lightning and water magical energy. Because of that, the cloudy copper remained somewhat unstable, at risk of disintegrating if struck by lightning. The atoms making up the glowing iron had come together three billion, six hundred and seventy million years ago. Those of the copper, one billion, five hundred million years ago.
The atoms and particles making up both ores, as well as the other trace minerals and the ordinary surrounding rock, hadn't been born from a Big Bang. They had been created by a being, whose name was...
But before he could get any further, Emrys felt hands close around his shoulders and shake him violently. It yanked him out of his trance all at once.
"Hey, kid! Kid! I don't know what you're doing, but stop it. You're making a mess of my workshop floor."
At the sound of Dubs's voice, Emrys immediately stopped channeling his magical energy, dropped the stone to the ground, then collapsed himself right after, completely drained.
He could feel blood running from his nose, his mouth, his ears, and his eyes.
A taste of iron filled his mouth. Every beat of his heart echoed like a hammer blow against the inside of his skull, dull and steady, and he couldn't tell whether it was pain or just the echo of his own fear.
"What... what happened?" he asked Dubs.
"No idea, that's for you to tell me. Never seen a case like yours," Dubs answered, having mysteriously shrunk down just long enough to scoop Emrys up in his arms and run toward a small door next to the workshop's main entrance.
"I feel so weak."
"That's pretty normal, you're out of magical energy," Dubs said, laying Emrys down on a human-sized bed. "I'm no expert, but I'm guessing you pushed Structural Grasp a bit too hard."
"I didn't think it'd go this far. There was this uncountable amount of information running through my head. My brain filtered most of it out automatically, but I don't think it came out unscathed. I went back through that ore's history more than three billion years. Worst part is, I don't feel any pain in my brain, and that's exactly what makes me think I did some damage. I—"
"Calm down, kid. No need to dump it all out at once, calm down. We're gonna get you fixed up. Just tell yourself, at least you don't feel anything, that's something."
Dubs wiped the blood off his face and laid a damp cloth over his forehead.
"Wait here, I'll be right back."
He left the room.
The five minutes that followed felt far longer to Emrys, lying there alone in the dark, his own breathing loud in his ears, the taste of blood still lingering at the back of his throat. He tried moving a finger, almost on reflex, just to check everything still responded properly. The finger moved. That was something, at least.
Then heavy footsteps announced Dubs's return.
When he reappeared, he was holding a scepter in his hand. A white staff, wrapped in serpents that were white as well.
Dubs brought the scepter close to Emrys's head and spoke a few words.
"Sacred treasure, release."
At those words, a white light burst from the staff and washed over Emrys, who almost immediately felt a splitting headache.
"Holy shit, my head," Emrys shouted, clutching his skull with both hands.
"The Scepter of Asclepius. A weapon I forged in partnership with a member of the goddess clan, who came by to have a weapon made, a while back now. It's got a healing power. Course, it can't heal wounds as bad as the ones you had when I first found you. But for brain damage, I figure it should do the trick."
"So why does my head still hurt, then?"
"Weren't you the one who told me, not even five minutes ago, that it was the damage itself that kept you from feeling anything? Now you're feeling the payback from your little trip through the maze of structure," Dubs said, standing back up.
"Damn it."
Dubs stepped back and looked at Emrys with an expression a little less cold than usual.
"Listen, kid. I won't ask you what happened, and I won't ask you to stop doing it again either. But try to take it easy. Okay?"
The tone of his voice surprised Emrys, who answered anyway. "Okay. And sorry for the trouble."
Dubs left the room again, but this time, he didn't set foot back in it for the rest of the day, leaving Emrys to rest.
Sorry for the whole section on blink and mental energy in this chapter, which is normally only for structural analysis, but I forgot to include this small detail—and by small, I mean HUGE—in the previous chapter.