4 Moss

Feeling better, Azorious decided to stop the grief for today and cross his legs, entering a meditative state.

Mages from his Lucernia were taught to enter a meditative state from a tender age. This had multiple benefits, mainly the ability to access their Ka, the spiritual plane that contained the mana sea and acquired Formas.

As the name implied, the mana sea was the totality of mana available to use, and once expanded, it would slowly fill back up. Before meeting the Stag, Azurious' mana sea was as boundless as the ocean. For comparison, average mages had anywhere between a pond and a lake.

However, as he entered his Ka, he didn't feel the limitless quantities of blue mana where Formas gently floated. Instead, he found himself in a puddle in the middle of nowhere and none of his familiar Formas in sight. Just the white vastness of the Ka.

He almost ripped his air out, realizing that he had both lost dozens of years of study and practice, and even his mana capacity dropped to a level deemed 'unfit to practice magic.'

Azorious almost vomited blood right there and then. A dozen years of hard work building Formas and even his world-record natural-born mana sea all gone.

Magic-wise, he was now worse off than a newborn.

Even the Life Forma he had traded everything for was nowhere to be seen. The shock broke his meditative state, and it took him ten minutes to calm down.

Once back, he examined his pathetic mana 'sea'. Surprisingly the color of the gas-like substance had changed to green, an event he had never heard of.

Intrigued, he went to work to build the simplest Forma he could remember, Light.

Emboldened by the fact he already knew how Light worked and had previously successfully built a Forma for Light, Azorious thought it would take barely a few minutes, half an hour at most.

But 3 hours later, he looked at the mana with bloodshot eyes.

Every time he controlled a globe of green mana to separate from the rest and get in position, the mana inside would begin pulsing and shift capriciously, resisting any attempt to shape it.

Bitter, he renounced building a Forma and left the meditation.

"This green mana has to be defective!" He vented out. "The more I control it, the wilder it gets, moving all over the place to spite me. It almost feels..." Realization struck him, and he facepalmed.

"Alive. F**k, of course, it does," he said, rubbing his temples, not enjoying the proverbial Eureka moment.

"The Guardian said so himself. Herself? Whatever." He got up and walked back and forth, rubbing his chin.

"I am part of Life, and while it makes absolutely no sense, apparently an inanimate substance such as mana is supposedly alive too. Oh, joy. What am I supposed to do now, coax my own goddamn mana into following orders by singing it a lullaby and telling bedtime stories?" He mused with a weird smile on his face. Half frustrated and half intrigued by a new challenge.

"Also, he left without telling me what I'm supposed to do." He sighed exasperareted

Azorious seriously pondered where to start his investigation, and as a good scientist, he began by the source.

The green mana trickled into his mana sea from the connection with the organisms in the cave, so logically they should be the ones producing it. Assuming the mana could travel both ways on that connection, would that mean he could provide mana to them too?

With a thought, he prepared to send some mana in a worm. When suddenly, a thought popped into his mind. "Wait, if I kill the worm, would it count as intentionally harming?" He grimaced and looked around for anything else he could experiment with.

He sifted through every thread, discovering, besides a beetle and a tiny spider, that a patch of moss connected through him by the thinnest thread so far.

He couldn't share any of its senses (shocker, I know.), but a small amount of mana flowed into him nonetheless.

Noting down in his mental diary to properly investigate the rest of the threads later, he approached the moss sitting in the darkest corner of the cave.

A water vein had to be close by as he could feel dampness when touching the rock wall where the moss grew. "At least I won't die of thirst. I just gotta lick this wall a few hours per day." He lampooned and then began his experiment with moss.

With a thought, his mana happily left the empty Ka and traveled down the invisible connection to the moss.

Azorious watched the moss in trepidation, waiting for some reaction, but as more and more mana flowed into the moss without any apparent change, he grew impatient.

"Maybe I just can't see it?" He frowned at the faraway source of sunlight. In the darkest corner where the moss grew, he could barely make out the outline of his hand, so how could he notice any changes in the moss.

With a wistful sigh, he wished for some light.

A faint blue glow answered his prayers. He looked down at the light source and noticed a patch of moss had started mutating. It slowly spread to its surroundings from a dot of bioluminescent moss, eating and replacing the dull old green moss.

Azurious looked in amazement at the virulent spread of the new organism, and as the fresh moss was about to eat the old one entirely, he ran out of mana, and the growth stopped.

He observed his creation as theory after theory of what happened spun in his head, and he just waited for the light to run out. A Light Forma spell would typically last for about half an hour after the amount of mana he had supplied, so he patiently waited and waited as his mana reserves slowly replenished.

An hour later, still no changes.

"This is just amazing! If Eleria were here, she would love it as well." The moon moss, as he dubbed his first accidental creation, seemed to be a permanent fusion of a Light Forma with Life.

Instead of using up all mana and disappearing like all spells, this one kept on living and growing. While a new connection had formed between Azurious and the moon moss, he couldn't feel mana coming in, so he made a hypothesis.

"I must have added a spell that feeds on the passive mana generated by the plant, so I have a null balance. Still, the efficiency of it is astounding." He muttered academically. "Either that or every time I mess with something, it will stop generating mana." He supposed with a shrug.

Then he began to wonder. "Could I create something like moon moss but without the mana drain?" He remembered a famous attraction from the town he grew up in. A cave where glow worms littered the crevices like a starry sky. All of it without magic.

He removed some non-magical moss and divided it into five sample sizes. The handling and observation processes made easier by the faint glow.

"Let's try this first." with a wave of his hands, he began supplying mana to sample A while saying, "Grow, grow, grow." Responsive to him, the moss began spreading at unnatural speeds, growing over 50 times in size by the time his mana was exhausted.

Once sample A, or SA, grew from the size of a pencil head to that of a small carpet, he appreciated an increase of mana supplied, ruling out the theory that tweaked plants wouldn't produce mana.

"So, size corresponds to mana production." He added to the growing list of theories. Appreciating the slightly higher mana replenishment rate, he began growing each of the five samples every time his mana sea filled out, roughly one per hour.

And that's where he appreciated a piece of new information, each of the samples grew a few points bigger than the previous, and sample F was over twenty percent bigger than sample A. After some rough calculations, he concluded that his mana grew 4 percent more potent at every interaction with moss.

Puzzled, he sat down to meditate and observed his mana sea.

The green puddle of green gas had enlarged slightly, still smaller than any bottom-tier mage but getting closer.

This simple fact blew Azurious mind. The size of one's mana sea was determined at birth and was impossible to grow, yet now he appreciated another impossible phenomenon!

Trembling with excitement, he went back to the world outside and started making plans.