“Composite? I’ve heard that one before.”

  “Oh, yeah. We were talking about the swamp composite. That’s actually a good example that we can refer to, but that’s a little bit later. Let me first explain that composite mana, or composite in general, is what we call mana and its derivatives with two or more dominant aspects. As before, this applies both to mana, phenomena or objects saturated or manifested by mana, and to the control stage. The dominant aspects can be natural to a phenomenon, but they can also be extraneous aspects implemented by some external force.”

  As he was saying this, two larger lights, one grayish-green and the other white, began to spin around each other, also moving smaller, colored lights. Finally, absorbing all aspects, they merged into one fist-sized ball of slowly spinning air, colored by a shiny, white mist. The sphere flew towards Orion and, upon touching his body, dispersed, causing the cleansing effect he was already familiar with. Even though Zaiah had already used it on him, when they left that black goo-desecrated place, he could still feel its refreshing effects.

  “This time I’ve also added a visual aspect so you can see it. The main aspects used in this composite were air as a medium and the activated aspect of cleanliness.”

  “I unders… uh, wait a minute. When you cast it earlier, your body flashed.

  “Hmm, really?” Zaiah asked innocently.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I’ve had to focus a little bit beyond my capabilities to smoothly use the visual aspect. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “But… I mean… Are you… Uhm. Have you flashed before just to look cool?” asked Orion, looking at the crystal with narrowed eyes.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m quite sure I saw that.”

  “Oh, yeah. The liquid you encountered earlier was actually water modified by a swamp composite. The composite itself was created from another interesting phenomenon, namely dimensional resonance. As you’ve seen, it doesn’t exactly resemble murky, swampy water but rather sticky, rotten resin, so it’s a perfect example of how forces in nature can elevate their own aspects and overwhelm others.” Zaiah continued, shamelessly changing the subject. “When it came to integrating this universe with the System, mana in the area you were transferred to was enriched with environmentally compatible aspects. There used to be a vast swamp, and in the middle of it was a small mangrove forest. The swamp aspect dominated in mana so that, soaked in it, it apparently began to resonate with some place or object in another dimension. They began to attract and stick together, disrupting the dominance of aspects and thereby elevating, among others, the aspect of stickiness.”

  “Wait a minute… That sounds like a recipe for disaster. On a planetary scale, if not larger.” said Orion, whose attention was effectively diverted from the subject of the flashing.

  “It would be, but in such situations the System intervenes and creates closed objects that it manages and that exist harmlessly between dimensions. By the way, I believe that the System, in sending you here, has considered the possibility that you will enter this object on your own and there unlock your pathways simply by gaining levels.”

  “Wait, what? Could I have avoided this whole ‘popping and blowing’ thing? Damn, that sounded bad.”

  “Yes, but the process would also be unpleasant and would take much longer. You’d avoid that feeling of panic, but it would be risky. You’d have to level up by fighting monsters in the Heart of the Swamp. Ah, that’s the name of the object created by the System, by the way. It’s just that as you level up, your pathways constantly change and improve a little bit. You can imagine, then, that this movement would slowly push out the impurities.”

  “I have plenty of questions again, this time about this Heart of the Swamp.”

  “Well, we’re a little off topic… you know, explaining how magic works and all that. But alright, if you want, let’s talk about the swamp.” Zaiah said in a tone of expectant denial, making Orion somehow imagine that the crystal had suddenly got puppy eyes.

  Then came the second part of the explanation. This time, as an example, a fireball was used in which the mana controller incorporated an aspect of stickiness, causing the fire to behave like that stinking snot, clinging relentlessly to the body. Another example was controlling an already existing aspect in a fireball and deliberately suppressing it. Orion didn’t know which example was more frightening, as in the second scenario, the fireball would lose its visual aspect, which basically meant an invisible flame.

  Zaiah also added that with the ability to control at the composite level, it would be possible to create a fireball almost identical to the one created by controlling a single aspect of fire, but the composite version would be ‘more real’ and more durable than its easier-to-create alternative. He said there were no words to fully compare the effect with something from a world without mana, but he pointed out that in addition to these advantages, a composite would also be more resource-efficient. By manually controlling at least two aspects, the primary active aspect, in this case the aspect of fire, would receive more energy that would otherwise be required to attract other aspects.

  To summarize the composite stage, our favorite soup was used as a final example, in which the controller could influence not only its salinity but also its consistency or temperature.

  “Ah, it’s a wonderful feeling to have someone willing to hear about the intricacies of mana.”

  “Hmm? Why do you like talking about it so much?” asked Orion, although he was quite surprised at the complexity of the whole thing. In novels, games, and movies—or at least in the ones he saw—it was just mana, and they used it to do magic; that’s all. Very little has been done to explain the nuances of this energy.

  “You see, Ori, mana is the primal energy that, according to legends, was used to create reality itself. It also means that whatever you’re witnessing in this world, you can logically explain through the interactions of mana aspects. Do they reinforce each other, or do they fight for dominance? Do they merge, or do they spin in an energetic dance, driving other, smaller aspects? Does the cooperation of the aspects require external energy, or, on the contrary, is energy expended to keep them from interacting? Every question you have can be reduced to this and thus solved.”

  Orion stood in silence for a moment, absorbing the newly acquired information. He already knew enough to know that he knew far too little. Although Zaiah’s words sounded like fundamental truths of the world, he just felt he still didn’t grasp the importance of it all. Perhaps something mundane would be helpful to get his mind started to appreciate this new reality. So he decided to ask, but to avoid being taken as a mockery of the subject, he first explained his feelings.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “All right, you ask. That’s what this is all about.” said Zaiah, pleased with his approach.

  “Okay, so, given all these energies, aspects, dimensions, and so on, how does it all come down to, for example…” he paused for a moment, looking around, and then he went up and picked up a piece of rock the size of a fist. “…this rock right here. I think I understand what you’re saying, but I just can’t seem to fit it into the real world. Was some complex magic used to create it too? Was it created by the mana of a single aspect or by composite mana?”

  Zaiah chuckled.

  “Nothing that simple. You see, I was just about to move on to the most complicated stage of control, as well as the composition of mana, namely the essence. The essence consists solely of the active aspects of a concept, and to control it, you have to control all; or almost; all of them. Controlling two aspects alone requires a great deal of knowledge and the ability to focus on separate things. To control three aspects, imagine that you can write a poem while simultaneously singing a song and playing some logical thinking game. The essence is not just two or three aspects, but dozens, hundreds, and more, depending on the essence.”

  “I’ve… also heard that one before.”

  “Oh, right, you’re just after the integration, so you must have seen the notification.”

  “The notification? Wait… yeah, I did. There was something about essence in the notification.”

  “Essence Isolated.”

  “Yes! Do you know what that could mean?”

  “Well, I think since we’re talking about the essence, it’s inevitable.” Zaiah said, though he sounded quite insecure. “You see, in many cultures and beliefs, people before integration believe that they have souls. That they’re some kind of real self that, separated from the body, will go to the realm beyond life. The thing is, it’s not. To put it bluntly, pre-integration people don’t have souls, just loose essences made up of all the aspects that make them who they are. To illustrate a little bit, they believe that the scattered cattle are one organism, forgive the expression.”

  With that, Zaiah fell silent, but seeing that Orion was not trying to argue, he continued.

  “The mere possession of one’s own essence distinguishes people, like all life, from ordinary, dead matter, but it is still not a full-fledged soul. It is the System that, during the installation, collects all these aspects and isolates them, creating something like a mobile dimension as a container for the essence of each person. Through this process, the System can carry out its operations directly within one’s essence as a separate whole, hereinafter known as a soul, thereby enabling the individual to develop in a mana-rich environment. It’s the mana that carries the presence, remember?”

  Orion stood silently, looking at Zaiah and digesting the information. Frankly, this information did not deliberately discourage him but rather confirmed his assumptions.

  He’s always believed that a person is really a collection of what they’ve been through, what they feel, and how they deal with their current emotions. It’s the experiences, combined with the substances present in the brain at the time, that cause a person to answer the question in a given way and not otherwise. Add a little dopamine to the decision-making process, and there’s a chance you’ll get an entirely different result.

  So why claim to have a soul? Well, people have always liked to feel special, superior to other races, and even better than other members of their own race… and he was the same.

  The fear of death could also come into play, as well as the promise of an afterlife, which was convenient enough to control the masses. The fact that he had his own essence was already beyond his expectations of humans, for he had always considered them to be just scraps of flesh and bone, capable of logical thought. That was his creed, which he accepted and learned to live by.

  Looking at it from the other side, this information really clarified a lot about his situation. Zaiah, probably unknowingly, gave him an idea of what might actually happen when he was in quarantine. He was this mobile dimension in physical form, which, by the way, sounds ridiculous, but he had everything inside that made him… him. That’s why the wounds were so painful, and the bleeding felt like he was losing parts of himself.

  The System had already explained this to him, but now he had the full picture. By eating the beasts, he most likely pushed their aspects into his essence. No wonder he ended up with strange behaviors and alien thoughts. It was Neru who half-consciously helped him fight these aspects with his own. As he thought about being in that place, he remembered moments when he was eating and felt like he was about to burst. That’s probably what damaged the essence container, as well as disrupted the whole thing. Most likely, the ‘burst of energy’ that his friend gave him at the time may have also stirred things up a bit, to put it rather euphemistically.

  “I see. I guess plenty of people wouldn’t like that information. So how did it happen that something as complex as essence was responsible for this stone?” he asked, tossing the previously raised object.

  “To put it bluntly, the essence of creation is responsible for both this stone you hold in your hand and the ground you are currently standing on. It happened when the neutral mana in the cosmos was directed with the will to exist, and the very intensity of this will created the essence. That’s how this universe came into being, or more specifically, the matter it contains. At first, this matter was a compact mass of highly energized, chaotic energies and phenomena, so when the mana lost its direction and released this matter, there was a simple chain reaction.”

  “The Big bang?”

  “That’s… one way of looking at it, alright. The energy of the explosion was so enormous that it separated new elements that eventually became what they are today. But their final form was determined not only by their interactions with each other but also by existing essences.”

  Zaiah paused, thinking for a moment, then continued.

  “Well, the explanation of essence has gotten a bit fuzzy, but while we’re at it, I might as well tell you about the main differences between the essence and the other stages of complexity. Firstly, the essence, unlike the simpler compounds of mana, affects reality by itself. The level of impact varies depending on the activity of the aspects and whether the essence is directed. But the very fact that it exists makes it, in a way, a model for the world.”

  Zaiah said, his voice taking on that enthusiastic tone again.

  “If you had a mana cloud next to you in the form of the essence of something,” he continued “let’s say of our soup that we modified to our liking, there’s a good chance that’s how they’re going to make the soup in a universe that, for example, is integrating right now. It is the influence of the essence that is responsible for you being human and looking mostly like Egill. It is because of this that the universes in which this explosion of primordial matter is taking place right now, will eventually contain life, plants, and civilizations. Nature simply doesn’t invent new things unless it has to.”

  After another pause to absorb the information, Zaiah continued his lecture.

  “Now, moving on to the topic of differences, to give you a better idea of the situation, I’ll add that a stone made of composite, after some time, will disappear, disintegrating to the level of neutral mana. However, the one created by controlling the essence can only be destroyed by other forces, such as physical crushing. To paraphrase this, a creation of essence that was not made in a raw mana environment never returns to its level, at least not without using considerable force to separate aspects. Manually extracting a particular aspect from the active essence is extremely difficult, almost impossible, except if you have an affinity for that aspect, but that’s for another time.” said Zaiah, refraining from further deviating from the topic.

  “Moving to the controls and going back to our analogy,” he went to the summary, “operating on the essence, you control not only the selected ingredients of the soup, but all of them, and what’s more, the gist of the soup itself. I’m willing to bet there’s no one in this world who has control at the essence level of something. I’d add that with control over essence, you could either make a perfect copy of this stone or create something normally impossible, like, say, a physical cube composed of life itself. It would also be up to you whether this cube would resonate with something in another dimension, influence reality in its location, or simply serve as a throwable toy.”

  “Well, I didn’t expect it to be so complicated.” concluded Orion, noting that Zaiah went silent again.

  “It’s wonderful, don’t you think? And that’s just the beginning! We can divide each stage of control into six more sub-stages, of which…”