The level of magical saturation in the blood is not constant. To some of you this may seem like an incorrect statement, but I have come to this conclusion through thorough testing of instantaneous magical output on subjects in various states of rest, stress, and even duress (See Experiments 56 through 70). While magic cannot be directly measured in the blood by any known method, instantaneous output measurement shows that the level of saturation in the blood is lowest when a subject is in a state of calm relaxation, and highest when a subject is under severe physical or emotional stress. Exactly how large the difference between these states depends on the subject, but it appears that resting magical saturation can be as low as one-third of stressed magical saturation, roughly speaking.

Checking the experiments that were mentioned, I saw a number of logs explaining how each subject was made to carry a vial of water with them at all times which they were expected to boil as quickly as possible when a bell was sounded. While I had my reservations about the level of error in the experiments, they certainly showed that magic output wasn’t always constant, and took a few moments to rise to peak output in cases where a subject was relaxed. I would say resting output is likely closer to half than one-third, I thought, it looks like he assumed a linear rise in saturation, which might not be true if it’s a material diffusing into the blood.

What is the mechanism that controls this level of magical saturation, then? The author continued. It is very simple, the cores of the body can expand and contract in response to stress, affecting the level of saturation in the blood. You may have even experienced the sensations yourself, when your stomach sinks in response to fear or when your blood boils in your chest when you are enraged. Perhaps you have even felt your mind alight with power, your awareness expanded. These are all feelings that are related to the magical saturation of the blood rising. I stopped, frowning and putting the book down, then tried to correct the author’s misconceptions for myself.

He has it backwards, but he might not be entirely wrong, I thought, if these cores do have some kind of conscious responsiveness to the body’s state beyond simple regulation, stressors like those he described would almost certainly cause them to release more of their contained substance into the blood. I had to stop myself for a moment and recall that whatever the cores were, they weren’t part of standard human anatomy. If I were designing this response, I would connect them to the same impulses that release adrenaline, I thought, it’s already there, it already works, no need to over-complicate it.

Skipping a few pages because they were nothing but the author justifying his opinions with examples that were either incorrect or redundant to anyone who understood biology, I stopped once I got to the next section of the chapter. Though the cores in the body are not under conscious control from birth, through various techniques one may exert a measure of influence over their function. Through this, magical capacity may be increased over time, magical output may be augmented, and the effects of over-saturation may be mitigated. Indeed, these techniques mirror and are based on time-honored magical training, although I have altered them to increase their efficiency.

The following pages were a very long, very dry explanation of a number of magical training techniques employed across the world I found myself in. Over half of the total text was devoted to the author explaining the full practices and beliefs around them, then explaining how those beliefs were incorrect. It’s astounding that this section is so long, I thought, what reader would want to spend time seriously reading tear-downs of techniques that the book claims to supplant anyway? Finally, after twelve entire pages of uselessness, the author began outlining his proposed techniques.

Thus, the first exercise that should be attempted is to dilate the lowest core, allowing the magical saturation of the blood to flow into it and reducing the overall level of usable magic in the body. Attempting this action first will reduce the potential fatality rate of new practitioners to near zero, which is already a massive improvement over traditional magic training in this area. However, this should not be attempted by those who are elderly or injured, as it may affect their ability to heal and sustain themselves. I estimate that anyone under the age of seventy who is uninjured should be safe to proceed. Following the warning, a series of instructions followed, filled to the brim with opaque terminology that I had no hope of deciphering.

What it looks like he’s describing is a method of muscular control, I said to myself. Logically, if magical cores worked the way the author proposed, they probably had some kind of simple sphincter-like musculature inside or surrounding them. Those same muscles would tighten or loosen in order to affect how much of the solid magical “fuel” was being diffused into the bloodstream in response to the body’s overall stress level. For the briefest of moments I considered trying to get a direct visual of one of my cores in order to gather information and help learn the proper inputs to control it, but it would have created too much of a mess. Instead, I put the book down beside me, closed my eyes, and began with the parts of the exercise I could actually understand.

The first step was to enter a yahjheymihmoyr. I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but it was described by the author as “a mental and physical state of enhanced bodily awareness and calm” so I just did my best to relax my mind and think of nothing. The next step involved some kind of process of probing the various nerve clusters in the belly by attempting to move sections of the abdominal muscles individually, at least as far as I understood it. It was similar to a technique for finding inputs on a non-standard limb that I had created, so I did that instead. After what felt like around ten minutes of gentle probing, I found a combination of muscular movements that triggered a sensation that spread quickly from above my belly button outward across my body.

What am I doing? I sighed, popping open my heads-up display. It took a few seconds, but when I finally found the correct abdomen movement again, I flexed the area gently and watched the heads-up display for changes. At first, I saw nothing, but then I noticed the magic bars acting strange. Whenever I would press one way, the bottom bar would lose one or two percent of its total value until I relaxed the muscle. Flexing in another way created a vertical line on the top bar that started at its far left and moved rightward, stopping around one-fifteenth of the way in. When I released the second motion, the bottom core would be briefly missing some of its length, and it would regain it as the vertical line on the top bar moved leftward.

It’s almost exactly what I expected, I thought, I’m changing the internal capacity of the organ and the vertical line on the top bar tracks the extra magic saturation above baseline. As quickly as the idea formed, I found problems with it, because there was no way it was that simple when default magic saturation could rise and fall. As usual, I’m not seeing everything, I grumbled, Instead I’m getting some kind of breakdown that’s simplified for quick usage. Annoying, but better than nothing.

Pushing a bit harder, I saw that I could double my blood’s magical saturation without hurting myself, but going over it was when the gentle tingling sensation began to become painful. That would make sense too, my resting level is probably half of what my stressed level is, I thought. Going in the other direction, I tried to suck magic saturation out of my blood. Unlike adding it, I felt no sensation whatsoever except for a slight tension in my belly which might have just been my muscles. If I hold it like this, what will happen? I wondered.

After a few more minutes of keeping my blood magic levels as low as I could, I finally allowed myself to relax. My mistake was immediately communicated to me by a searing pain that exploded from my belly, so intense that I almost fell out of the chair I was sitting in. As quickly as it came, it ended, and I was left wondering if what I had experienced was even real. Nothing was amiss on the heads-up display, but there was a dull ache in my belly that hadn’t been there before.

Deciding to let myself rest for a while, I grabbed the book again and continued to read. Do not dilate a single core on its own for an extended period of time, as the others will adjust the level of magic in the blood to compensate. When the core is finally relaxed again, the rapid change in magic levels is not only painful but potentially fatal. To those who would doubt the latter, know that there is a monastic order in Uwlsayniyah whose participants commit suicide at the age of one hundred and seven by dilating the brain core for a full day, then releasing it at sunset. Though they do not allow the corpses of their adherents to be examined, one who has read this far can easily determine that the cause of death is most likely extreme brain damage caused by condensed magic fragments.

“That warning probably should have been at the beginning,” I muttered in English, resolving to make sure to read any future instructions more carefully before acting them out. The rest of the second chapter didn’t contain much that I hadn’t already figured out on my own. More techniques for “grasping” the heart and brain cores were included along with further misplaced lists of warnings. The author also attempted to make a number of suggestions about future experiments to prove the “methodological dominance” of each core, which was to say he wanted to prove that the cores each processed different kinds of magic. I wasn’t in a position to say he was wrong, but I also saw no compelling evidence for his theories.

After finishing the second chapter I sat down and began working out how to move my other two cores. The heart core moved through a motion that almost felt like the first movements of gagging, and the brain core felt like trying to flex the back of my head. Both were easier to move than the stomach core once I figured out how to do it, and both produced nearly identical effects on the heads-up display, though with the second and third bars for brain and heart cores respectively. I also tried to move magic from one core to another and found that it was possible even though it was pointless. Maybe if I’m ever in a situation like Koyl was, I can deny my enemy some power, I shrugged, then I opened the book again.

“Chapter Three, Non-Conscious Magical Effects,” I read aloud, raising an eyebrow at the title. The first paragraph of the third chapter was so jargon-laden that I had a hard time understanding even a single complete sentence, let alone finding any useful information in it. I read it over four times before giving up and moving to the second paragraph, which was even worse. Could there be a glossary? I wondered, marking my page and turning to the back of the book with a sigh, Of course not, that would be too easy. Back in chapter three, I wracked my Uwrish language skills to try to understand the content of the first page, then moved to the second and paused.

A large, hand-drawn diagram of the human body without skin was illustrated on the left page, and another block of nearly-indecipherable text was on the right. Opting to ignore the text, I turned my attention to the picture of the body, examining it for accuracy. There were mistakes, mainly in how the muscles of the chest bound together, but it was remarkably accurate otherwise. On the next two pages, two pictures of hands sat side by side with a few numbers above them. The first picture was missing a finger down to the metacarpal, and the second showed that same hand but with the proximal phalanx restored. Turning the page again showed a hand with proximal and middle phalanx on the left, then a fully regrown finger on the right.

Wait a minute, those numbers are time indications, almost certainly, I thought, turning back to the first page, they’re a number of hours after injury. The hand with the fully missing finger was labeled as being one hour after the injury. The second was two days and six hours, the third was four days and fifteen hours, and the last was seven days and three hours. I remember this, seven days to regenerate a finger, I thought, then I turned the page to find more hands.

The next set of four images was largely the same, but the times were vastly different. The fully missing finger was marked as half an hour, the first phalanx regeneration was marked as sixteen hours, the second was marked as one day and thirteen hours, and the fully healed finger was marked as three days and two hours. My mind lit up, and I flipped back to the jargon-laden paragraphs just before the hand pictures with a renewed desire to figure them out. How did they do it? I asked, as though posing the book a question, The answer has to be here.

The speed of zahvgeyvay paozhahlayihdeyl is affected by saturation, but not to the degree that one might expect. The ehmeylawyoyt magic zoyzmeyyb that govern paozhahlayihdeyl are nperwpaayjh to seydhtdeyl only at a safe speed, so as not to jhoynvaom the body of lowmpaoeylmz as the ehpweyloybeyy goes about its daily life. Pictured in the following eight images are two injuries, one that was healed naturally, and one that was healed by a Gwahlaob priest educated in an art known as S’shehthchah Iy'ao'ah Ahkt'chn'nehshkt, which roughly translates to ‘physical manifestation of the soul’ in our language.

Seeing a piece of Gwahlaob speech written out phonetically, I finally understood why the people of Uwriy sometimes thought that English didn’t have enough “hissing” noises to be Gwahlaob. Flipping past the images, I dove into the text once more, trying and failing to obtain any details about the pictured technique. Frustrated, I skimmed forward through the chapter, then stopped when I saw another diagram of a limb being reattached. Though it was hard to understand the specifics, what I could understand detailed a process not unlike what I had done when Yaavtey removed my arms. There were also notes remaking about how similar it was, magically speaking, to the Gwahlaob technique.

“Healing should be… suppressed as much as possible, the limb must be… fresh, still warm… magic still inside,” I dictated to myself, summarizing the text I could understand and filling in the gaps with my own knowledge. “If skin has grown over the injury, a sharp knife should be used to… remove it. The cut points of the limb must be pressed together, then most importantly the magical saturation level of the… injured area… of the body should be raised to at least double its stressed value. Using… control over the… healing magic the skin should be made to seal over the severed limb, and magic should be focused into the area until… blood flow returns. Do note that this has a risk of-” I stopped as the difficulty of the text suddenly spiked.

Controlling the healing, I did that before when I attached my arms, I recalled, It hurt all over my body, so I must have been raising the magic saturation in my blood by accident, but how did I exert control over the healing process? I tried to recall laying in the alley, furious at Yaavtey, at humans in general, at one of the worst moments in my recent memory. I don’t know, I thought, I just did it, I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing beyond trying to stick my arms back on, and wanting to kill Yaavtey. There was no technique to it, just raw power.

“Rage and desperation,” I said aloud in English. “Every time I’ve managed to do something like this with magic, I was enraged or desperate, usually both. High adrenaline, high stress.” Putting the book down, I glanced over at my shoulder and sighed. Though it had grown out a tiny bit over my week of work, I still had nearly five centimeters to go before it reached its full size, and then I had many more weeks to wait before I had an arm again. Why am I not mad about this? I wondered, Is this not just as bad? In fact, is it not worse? With Yaavtey, I failed due to lacking information. I was at fault then because I was ill-prepared by my operator. In this case, however, I was defeated by tactics I should have expected.

“How could I fall for one of the oldest fucking tricks in human history?” I swore under my breath in English. “How many times have I used ambush tactics? How many times have I seen others use them? It would have been obvious that he had backup if I had thought about it for a moment, but I was too busy fighting to think.” I felt myself getting mad, though at myself instead of someone else. “Human body or not, my failure was unacceptable. These people are not idiots, and I am not some ill-trained mercenary. I am better than this, I was designed to be.”

I could feel the adrenaline in my veins, so I took a deep breath and squeezed the three new muscles I had discovered, plunging my body into a sea of agony. It was as if I had been lit on fire from within, my nerves themselves glowing white-hot and threatening to disintegrate. “You will not wait in this mansion for months, shuffling papers and numbers under constant threat of assassination,” I ordered myself, growling and gritting my teeth. “You have well over a hundred years of experience using bodies with all manner of abilities and integrated tools, this will not be the one that you fail to master. If a human can control this ability, so can you.” With not a mental command, but a will, I gathered the white-hot pain and shoved it into my shoulder, then all I could see and hear was static.