“You know that isn’t true. Your family means everything to you. That’s been clear to me from the start.”
He…wasn’t wrong.
What would I have done if Jin had told me all of this in advance?
Would I have cooperated with him and tried to assassinate Vera, just to prevent the possibility that she would go free?
No, I told myself. I wouldn’t have taken that route. I still wouldn’t have been willing to kill her, or to risk my mother.
Which meant that to a degree, what Jin was saying was true. I wouldn’t have gone his way.
But could we have found another option, a third road if we’d worked together?
Maybe.
I couldn’t know.
And for the moment, I was too angry to properly consider it.
I unclenched my fist, turning and heading back toward the door. “I’m leaving.”
Jin’s voice was faint, pained. “I really am sorry, Corin. But I when I think about the damage those god beast attuned could have done—”
I turned my head, shooting him one final glare. “You’ve made your point.”
It wasn’t deliberate, but I slammed the door on the way out.
I was still fuming as I fled the hospital quickly after that. I didn’t know what to think about what Jin had said. Was I automatically negatively disposed toward any sort of plan that involved shooting an unconscious woman in the back?
Probably.
Was I being irrational, because the plan he mentioned would have risked my own mother?
Almost certainly.
Did that mean that I was wrong, and that Jin’s plan was right?
Not necessarily.
Jin may have accurately predicted certain elements of my reasoning, but I still thought — or maybe just hoped — that he simply hadn’t given me enough credit. That I would have found a way to use the information and come up with a better plan.
When is using lethal force acceptable?
I wasn’t so innocent that I believed there was always a diplomatic solution to every situation.
The problem was determining when and where the optimal solution was to take the irreversible step of removing someone from the world. And for someone who preferred peaceful solutions, I knew I wasn’t particularly great at reading people.
That was a critical flaw, and there was no easy solution to it.
Magic could give me shortcuts that might help in the future. I could try to learn things like spells for detecting if someone was speaking the truth, or even to try to control someone, if I decided that was more moral — or more effective — than physical violence.
But no magic I knew of could tell me the result of my actions. People had been trying to divine the future with magic since it was first discovered, and the results were always unreliable at best.
So, no matter what method I used to try to solve a problem, I’d never know if I’d picked the right answer. And if I picked fighting against my friends, like I had with Jin?
I’d always have to wrestle with wondering if I was right.
I really, truly hoped that I wouldn’t have to make a decision like that with Tristan.
Chapter XI – A Persistent Hatred for Colored Square Puzzles
I spent the rest of that day studying alone and trying to get invasive thoughts out of my mind. I had too many doubts about Jin, about Patrick, and about my own priorities in life in general.
On the positive side, I finally found the time to start really digging into foreign attunements. I stopped when I found something that sounded fascinating.
The Juggernaut attunement utilizes transference mana to create powerful bursts of kinetic energy, allowing the user to move rapidly around the battlefield. Their specialization is converting their shroud into transference mana, which they can use to deflect physical attacks and smash through obstacles. This is difficult to maintain for long periods of time, so Juggernauts generally only shift their shroud for a few moments at a time.
The first part was how I was trying to use the ring of jumping already…and the second idea was very appealing. Most attunements had limited defense against physical attacks, and deflecting them with transference mana sounded like a perfect solution that might be possible with my own skill set.
I wasn’t sure if it would be possible to convert my shroud at my attunement level, though. Shroud manipulation was a Sunstone level ability for most attunements…but I already knew there were exceptions, like Guardians.
Maybe having two different Carnelian attunements that both generated transference mana would be enough to let me accomplish the same thing?
There was only one way to find out.
I activated my Enchanter attunement to get a better sense of the mana flowing within my body, as well as the two shrouds around it. I could sense the mana inside my body easily enough, but the shroud was more or less invisible to me without my attunement active.
That was a key problem. I couldn’t feel the mana from my shroud in the same way I felt the mana within my body, and that meant I couldn’t just mentally command it to change into another mana type like I would with my internal mana supply.
Maybe that was the key difference between a Carnelian and a Sunstone — would I be able to sense my shroud as if it was part of my own body at that stage? That was an appealing prospect; it would make tricks like this much easier.
In the meantime, I needed to find a workaround.
The first way I tried to experiment was converting some of my mana from gray into transference, and then trying to push it out of my body, hoping it would mix with the shroud.
It didn’t; the transference mana just dissipated into the air.
I wasn’t surprised by the result, but I was a little disappointed.
What else could I do?
I remembered what Keras had said about his own shroud, which wasn’t gray mana. That was because a shroud was a result of the body leaking out excess mana…meaning that if my excess mana was a different type than gray, theoretically the shroud would be the same.
Could I convert so much of my body’s mana into transference mana that I was emitting a different type of aura?
Testing that was a much riskier prospect. Even though I routinely converted a large amount of mana into transference or mental mana, that was in the process of expelling it from my body immediately into a spell. Keeping an abnormal amount of transference mana housed within my body wasn’t necessarily safe.
I skimmed my books about the idea. There were lots of spells that involved infusing your body with various types of mana, either to assist with healing, or to improve your movement, or that sort of thing. I didn’t see anything that referred to those spells changing the composition of the caster’s shroud, though — presumably because they just weren’t changing enough of it to have that effect.
Humans had a lot of gray mana, since that was our mana’s default state. I speculated that it would probably require converting at least half of my mana to change the composition of my shroud, and most spells weren’t designed to use up that much mana, both due to the dangers and the inefficiency.
Reading did remind me that Summoners ended up generating all sorts of mana inside their bodies from their contracts, though, and they didn’t generally suffer any ill effects. That helped me feel a little more comfortable with the idea of tinkering with my mana.
I decided it was worth trying, but in a controlled fashion. I converted some of the mana in my right hand into transference…and waited.