Eight: Chapter 13

That night I dreamt of the Midnight Man. Maybe it was the spirit journey that did it or the focus on magic or both—I don’t know.

In 1961, my parents moved to the United States because my mom’s parents got involved in a car accident. We went so that she could care for them while they recovered, and maybe to find a better life.

It was a huge change going from Mexico City to Sherwood, Oregon. We didn’t fit in, so we stuck to ourselves and stumbled our way through the gaps between cultures. A year later, my dad’s parents joined us, which was a boon. Mi abuelito introduced me to the woods behind the house and took me hunting. A year after that I randomly picked up The Phantom Tollbooth, the book that opened the door to science fiction and fantasy. A year later, I vowed never to speak Spanish after being teased about it at school. That was my life as a child in a nutshell.

One day, at the end of third grade and the beginning of summer vacation, Michelle Dickinson from the sixth grade disappeared. Search parties combed the woods with dogs. News reporters came to town with their vans. Even me, lost in my own world of books, noticed the uproar.

And then, Collin Bradford disappeared. And Holly Tims. And Sandy Wilkers.

The parents—all the parents—freaked out and locked up their kids until the serial killer—they called him the Midnight Man—was caught. They called him that because all the kids had disappeared from their beds. For a month, both my grandfather and my mother slept in the same room with my brother Miguel and me. For a while I pretended it was a sleepover, but the room was too small for it to be fun for long.

I wasn’t scared for myself or my brother, although I sometimes wished he would get taken. Not really, but kind of. Anyway, I wasn’t scared, because my grandmother covered our walls in magic symbols and gave us kids necklaces with a pouch attached that we were never to open.

Miguel, of course, opened his, but I knew better. Besides, I could just look in his.

Inside was a stone, a twig, some powder, and a dried lizard’s head. Yeah, my grandmother was creepier than any Midnight Man, and it was comforting knowing the bigger monster was watching out for me.

Anyway, my dad still hadn’t found work by then, and he was spending a lot of time at the Black Cat, one of the bars that served Sherwood’s main street. It just happened to be near the police station, which was how my dad found his first friend in our new country—Officer Adam Bradford. He was Collin Bradford’s dad.

One night, near the end of that crazy summer, I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d dreamt I was in the desert, and the sky was on fire. A cactus shaped like a robot had been trying to tell me something, but I’d been distracted by the sound of someone chanting in the distance. The sound woke me up.

My brother was asleep, and we were alone in our room. I followed the sound of the chanting to the living room and found my grandfather, my dad, and my uncle Miguel in the living room on their knees in front of my grandmother. She waved a sprig of something green over them, and I recognized the motions as belonging to the blessing of the hunt. The men had their rifles with them.

My mother, framed by the kitchen door, was at a counter making and wrapping sandwiches. Collin Bradford’s dad stood by the front door, waiting for them to finish. He had his rifle too, as well as a pistol. I saw it poking out of his jacket.

I ran for the closet to get my .22. I’d been pestering my parents to let me go hunting for bigger game, and here was my chance. Squirrels weren’t a challenge for me anymore. I figured they’d say no, but it couldn’t hurt to ask. Well, it could, but my dad had stopped hitting us kids after my grandparents moved in. He was afraid of them, but that was only sensible, even to my young eyes.

The adults all reacted at once, each in their own way, when I ran into the room with my rifle to also receive the blessing. My father and mother frowned. Collin Bradford’s dad looked away. My grandmother’s eyes narrowed, like a cat smiling secretly. And my grandfather? He sighed and waited for my grandmother to finish chanting before taking me aside.

“Mi corazoncito, you cannot join us,” he said.

“But I want good fortune in finding the prey too,” I said.

“This is a special hunt,” he said. “For adults only.”

“But I passed all the tests you gave me: I can shoot a squirrel at twenty yards, I can wait quietly for an hour, and I can trail blood. I can’t feel the land yet, but I will. I know it. Maybe tonight or this weekend. I could almost feel it last time.”

“Then let me ask you a question,” my grandfather said. “Can you recognize justice? Because that is what we are hunting tonight.”

“Sure,” I said. “Like in the comic books.”

“But can you see it? Taste it? Feel it in your lungs and heart, like the air and your blood?”

My stomach sank as I realized what he was saying. “So it’s like the land?”

“Yes, that’s right, mi corazoncito. Justice is like the land. It is a thing you live in, and when it is broken, then living becomes hard. Until you can feel justice, you cannot join a hunt such as this one.”

“All right. I understand,” I said, trying not to whine.

“You have a strong heart, Oliver. One day, you will feel the land. One day, you will feel justice. One day, you will know what it is to have family and desire to protect it, and then you will know what it means to be a man.”

“Okay, abuelito. I’ll practice hard to feel the land. I promise. And justice too.” I scrunched up my face, thinking about my marriage prospects for the fourth grade. “A family will have to wait. Maybe when I’m in middle school.”

My grandfather laughed quietly, a sound I loved. “It can wait even longer than that, mi corazoncito. You have time. Unlike others, you have time. Now, I must go.” He patted me on the shoulder, picked up his rifle, and joined the other men at the door.

My mother told me that I shouldn’t share what I’d seen with my friends at school, but I just shook my head. I didn’t have any friends to tell. There was only my family.

My grandmother noticed my apathy, and said, “It’s a secret of the house, to be hidden among the deeper ways of brujeria.”

“Oh, okay. Then I definitely won’t say anything.” My mother should’ve just told me that from the beginning.

There weren’t any more kids who disappeared after that night. The only disappearance was the Midnight Man. He vanished into the lore of my small town, occasionally trotted out to scare children into behaving.

I was a smart kid, but dense. I didn’t connect the events of that night to the Midnight Man until much later. The memory lay buried and unexamined for years. It wasn’t until I was doing research on serial killers for a horror movie called He’s in the House that I realized what had really happened that night. I had stared blankly at the library’s microfiche reader as the memory washed over me.

I never told a soul about the hunt for justice—not Helen and definitely not my kids. It was a secret of the house, after all.

The memory fluttered through me, like a bird landing on a branch only to be startled away. I wasn’t that dense kid anymore. Helen and I had spent a long time and a lot of energy unpacking the weird baggage of my childhood. A few things stuck though—from my grandparents and parents—the roots of which ran deep. One was the land. The importance of family was another. The bitter and sweet taste of justice was a third. And fourth was that magic was real. For a long time, I’d doubted that last one, but I’d come back to it in my later life, after Helen passed away.

I’d only recently committed to living fully in this new world, but the experiences and memories of the old one didn’t easily let me go. Some of them lingered, but I’d just have to do my best to keep moving forward and not get weighed down by what came before.

I failed miserably in trying to go back to sleep, so I lay back and stared at the darkness until dawn broke.

The day began with a drizzle, the rain falling half-heartedly. It was the worst kind: not light enough to ignore, but not heavy enough to bring thunder and lightning. I planned to stay inside until the rain decided to commit one way or the other.

The refrigerator had remained cold overnight, which confirmed the antler could run for longer than six hours. My mana had recovered overnight, so I infused about a quarter of it into the antler to see if it’d keep cold from one morning to the next.

The cave was big enough for my morning routine, so I did my resistance training, qigong, yoga, and meditation. There wasn’t an impact on any of my attributes yet, but I could feel changes happening under the surface. Because of the qi, I think.

There was something addictive about qi. Not Addictive like in the Status condition, but more like… a bowl of good posole. It filled you up and warmed you through, and you’d fight off a mad dog to drink up the last bit of broth at the bottom of the bowl.

Afterward, you’d feel right somehow, like the world and all the things in it were in the places they belonged. Okay, so I loved posole—maybe more than I should—but I also loved how qi felt as it moved inside me.

After my morning routine, I sat in meditation and soaked up the excess warmth and energy. A notification dinged.

Well, that was a great way to start the day and a nice recognition of my progress. The increase also reminded me that I still had a free attribute point to spend. I’d planned to assign it to Intelligence, but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

I spent the point, but didn’t feel anything change in response. There was now a (15) beside my Intelligence attribute though, which meant I’d have to grow into the new stat. Ah well, I’d hoped for an immediate gain, but at least the attribute was headed in the right direction.

It was still drizzling outside, so I practiced my magic skills instead of crafting. That turned out to be a good decision, because the post-meditation mindset helped me focus. I found I had an easier time bending the water to my will.

I got a thimbleful to levitate an inch above my palm. I also discovered that just as water mana was attracted to water, water was attracted to water mana. My will wasn’t strong enough to pull water from the pool yet, but I did gather mist from the waterfall. The feat took five minutes of steady concentration to collect a cup’s worth of water in my hands.

My mana ran out shortly after, and the recovery rate was relatively slow. My estimate was that I gained about a point every hour, which meant I should have enough for more experiments come dinner time.

Ikfael wasn’t around, so I left her breakfast by the pool. After that, I started tackling my to-do list—first by replacing the spear and flint knife left behind in the spirit world, as well as turning the remaining bone spikes into stilettos and making scabbards for them. The arrows would unfortunately have to wait until I got more turkey feathers.

A few hours later, with a new, lighter spear in hand and a flint knife looped to my belt, I braved the desultory rain to hike up to the top of the waterfall. There were vines in the area I could use to lash together a frame for the deer hide to stretch it once it was done soaking.

The minty scent was gone, and all the devil vines were missing. Ikfael’s threat from yesterday must’ve sent them packing. I decided it was safe to collect several coils of purple and orange-flowered vines. After bringing them back to the cave, I set out again, this time to gather wood for the frame. I also looked for more cedar bark.

Tying the deer hide to the rack needed finer cords than the vines, and a good amount too. I expected to spend a lot of time braiding rope. It was going to be tedious, but necessary if the hide was to be stretched to maximum usefulness.

By the time I was done foraging, I had stripped a fallen cedar log clean of bark and gathered a fair amount of punk cedar too. Punk cedar was the rotted center of the log and was used to smoke and color buckskin.

I came and went from the Glen, and was a muddy mess by the time I was done. The only good news was that the drizzle finally let up, so I went downstream to clean off and catch myself a fish dinner. I baked a whole bass along with some fava beans and onions.

Some day, I was going to get a hold of some salt, and it would make everything so much better. Still, the meal was tasty, and by alternating between venison and fish—as well as various fruits and vegetables—I made sure I got all the nutrients my growing body needed.

Ikfael wasn’t back yet, so I set aside a portion of the meal for her. Then I closed my eyes to feel out my energy reserves. A healthy amount of qi flowed through my meridians, but the amount of mana seemed… less full? Less than I’d expected anyway. Was it because I’d spent time outside of Ikfael’s territory? Her blessing was supposed to include a bonus to recovery rates, and it must include mana too. That was good to know.

I do wish System-Eight would provide numbers with the tooltips. It’d make planning easier. A counter for tracking qi and mana usage would also be nice.

I lay back and watched the wind dance in the treetops. The clouds above them drifted westward, no doubt taking the half-hearted rain with them. My mind wandered, and I let it, not thinking anything of substance.

That was it. Nothing else happened. I did miss Ikfael’s company, though, since it was nice to have someone around, even if she just lazed in the pool while I worked. That feeling was one of the things I’d had to deal with after Helen died: the emptiness of the house. Dogs helped. Cats too… when they felt like it. And friends and family, when they visited. Hobbies and projects. Work and to-do lists. I’d kept myself busy, always in motion, because if I hadn’t, I would’ve fallen apart.

I sighed and took a breath. It wasn’t lost on me that all the training and bushcraft I was doing kept me busy in a similar fashion. So, I forced myself to rest: to sit with my worries and fears, while the wind danced and the clouds drifted.

I didn’t fall apart. Not then and not now. Helen’s death and a new world, I’d survive both.

That’s enough sitting around.

After all, there were still a couple of hours before the sun set, and I could use the time to explore the Spear Arts skill. I poked at it with my mind, and inside was the feeling of holding a spear.

“Skill-Sensei, is that supposed to be helpful? I suppose it’s better than a rune, but not by much.”

Anthropomorphizing the skill aside, it was all I had to work with, so I picked up my new spear, at which point the feeling promptly disappeared.

“That’s weird.”

I put the spear down, and the feeling returned. I picked the spear up, and the feeling disappeared.

“Listen, I’m sorry the spear’s homemade, but it’s all I have.”

There was no response from Skill-Sensei. I’d had no idea he would be so picky. Well, screw him—this was the spear I made, and I was determined to learn to use it. I hunted through my memories, looking for anything that would help.

A couple years back, the company had produced a five-part series on historical European martial arts. The problem was that the show focused on the longsword, and only twenty minutes were devoted to spears and polearms. It was a ridiculous decision, given the importance of the weapons in medieval warfare, but our finances… weren’t exactly great at the time. We needed a money maker, and the company placed a bet on the romance of the sword.

There were also the countless kung fu movies I’d seen that featured fight scenes with spears and staves. Those weapons were much longer than my four-foot spear. Still, there were hints I could maybe use.

Let’s see: left foot forward, left hand forward. Yes, in my memories, there tended to be agreement between the hand and foot. And then, when the footing changed, the hands did too. I slid my right foot forward, but didn’t know what to do with my hands. I switched grips, but the movement was clumsy. I could see myself accidentally dropping the spear if I tried that motion in the middle of a fight.

My memory wasn’t clear enough to recall what the martial artists had done with their hands.

“What else?”

I tried thrusting the spear and swung it around. I smiled—how many times had I done this with my kids? Swung an imaginary weapon in the fantasy battles we’d fought in the living room, through the hallways, out into the yard, and through the woods beyond.

I pulled the spear back and jumped to the side to dodge the assassin who suddenly attacked from behind a tree. I slid and ducked under his sword, lifting my spear to impale him in the heart.

A soundtrack began to play.

I ran, the spear at my side. There were more imaginary assailants—the Glen was suddenly full of them—but I stabbed them all as they tried to surround me. I laughed at their oafishness.

Their captain appeared out of a cloud of black smoke. He carried an ōdachi, a Japanese greatsword. The other assassins backed away to give us room to fight. I saluted him with my spear, but the fool was uncultured and sneered in response. Well, he’d pay for that.

I took the initiative and jumped at him, my spear thrusting like lightning. He batted it away, his ōdachi circling to cleave me as I passed. The keen edge missed me by a hair. I backed away, wary. The sneer never left his face.

I slid and thrust, dodged and ducked, as the battle between us raged. It was a brutal duel, and my breath became ragged. The assassins’ captain was just as winded though, and he’d have a fine scar just above his left eye if he survived.

One of his lackeys got impatient and swung at me from behind. I felt the wind ahead of his blade. I ducked under and rolled and—oof!—hit my head on a rock.

“Ow. Ow. Ow.” I made a T symbol with my hands. “Time out. Time out.”

The imaginary assailants waited for me to recover, looking amused. Hah… the fools. I’d lulled them into a false sense of security with my temporary lapse of competence. I leapt up and caught one under the chin with my spear, then I swung in a circle to clear the space around me. The spear slipped from my sweaty hands—and it flew straight into another assassin’s stomach.

“I intended that.”

Altogether, I goofed around for about half an hour. It would’ve been longer, but the assassins were too out of breath to keep going.

“Well, that was pointless,” I said, panting. “And also fun.” I gave one last thrust, still playing around, when I felt a momentary flash of holding the spear.

Wait, what? Did I win Skill-Sensei over with my enthusiasm? That couldn’t be. The skills weren’t really sentient. I was just having a bit of fun by calling them sensei.

I started moving my hands along the spear’s haft to see if the feeling returned, and it came back when my right hand was near the spear’s butt and my left was just shy of the center. I recreated the positions and suddenly felt like I was holding the spear. Only for a moment though. Just as quickly as the feeling had flashed through me, it was gone.

I moved my hands out of position. Nothing happened. I put them back, and the feeling returned, again only for a moment. I repeated the motion three times, with the same result.

It was like the skill was saying, “Yes, that’s right, but keep going. There’s more.”

Which made sense. The rest of my body was standing normally, in nothing like a fighting stance. The only martial arts stance I knew was horse from Baduanjin qigong.

I spread my legs wide, my feet parallel to each other, and dropped my center. The position was comfortable after nearly a decade of practice, but I couldn’t see how it’d be useful for the spear. In movies, fighters almost always staggered their feet, like a boxer might or in yoga’s warrior one pose.

I turned my hips and torso to the left, which naturally transformed horse into warrior one. My left foot pointed forward, and my right foot was perpendicular to it. The skill flashed in approval, and I grinned.

It was like a game or a puzzle. The body could only move in so many ways, and the trick was to find the right combination for the task. Skill-Sensei was the referee, and he would reward me with a flash of holding the spear whenever I took a step in the right direction. In a way, it was like having my very own biofeedback machine helping to learn the stance. And maybe more? Would there be a next step that taught me how to attack and defend too?

So I systematically played with all the joints and angles in my body and discovered that Skill-Sensei was very specific about his preferences: weight evenly distributed between my feet, a straight back, and my head held high with my eyes looking out beyond the spear’s tip.

Interestingly, there were variations that also worked. For example, the distance between my feet could change, but my center’s height had to raise or lower in response in order to feel like I was holding the spear.

Ironically, the hardest piece of the puzzle to solve was how to hold the spear itself. I quickly discovered that using the whole hand was a mistake, as it limited the spear’s range of movement. Gripping mainly with my thumbs and two strongest fingers dramatically improved the range of movement, but Skill-Sensei didn’t approve.

The correct answer, determined by process of elimination, was to hold the spear mainly with the three weakest fingers and use the thumbs and index fingers in a supporting role. That was weird and counterintuitive, but Skill-Sensei was adamant. The feeling of holding the spear ran through me when I finally stumbled across the correct answer. And it stayed. I’d found all the pieces—my body was in full alignment with Skill-Sensei’s demands.

The feeling was sweet, almost like magic… and it vanished as soon as I stepped forward. I didn’t know how to move my hands and jumbled the transition. I got back into alignment and tried again, with the same result.

Learning from Skill-Sensei was going to be a long, pain-staking process. Thankfully, it didn’t take much to be effective with the spear: just stab a thing with the pointy end. If I had to, I’d muddle through any combat encounters until I learned more and got better.

I slid forward instead of stepping, and that helped—at least I didn’t have to reposition my hands. The practice thrusts weren’t bad either. Skill-Sensei didn’t approve, but I saw how my left hand could steer the attack from the front, while my right hand drove it forward from the back.

Oh, Skill-Sensei just flashed. And it happened again when I remembered to strengthen my core muscles. It had been a chance idea, based on the fact that anything physical I’d done in my life stressed the importance of maintaining a strong core.

I practiced until dark and convinced Skill-Sensei to approve of two more thrusts and a backward slide. My body was worn out by then, even with Ikfael’s Blessing boosting my recovery rates.

My mossy bed called to me, and I answered—only to pop right back up. I still had mana to spend, and there was a quick experiment I’d been meaning to try.

I found my spear and infused it with nature mana. The haft smoothed, the flint sharpened, and when I nicked my thumb on the spearhead, it was like being cut by a razor. Then I infused qi into the spear, and the magic intensified. I tried to scratch the haft with my flint knife, but it resisted marks. And tapping the spearhead against the cave wall didn’t chip it either. The qi improved the spear’s inherent characteristics, just like the nature mana, and the effects stacked. Nice!

Interestingly, the System provided different ways to achieve the same goal. It hinted that there were multiple routes to a healing spell: Hydromancy for sure, but also maybe Nature Magic or even qi?

It also meant I had two reservoirs upon which I could draw. This redundancy between qi and mana-based magics wasn’t necessarily useless either. If for some reason I ran out of mana, I could switch to qi, and vice versa.

This was all assuming I could figure out how to cast an actual spell, of course, and that mana- and qi-based magics were similar. Those were some pretty big assumptions though, so I brought myself back to reality to focus on what was immediately possible. I ran several tests filling my gear with qi and nature mana.

I learned that:

• Once infused with an object, qi and mana were lost to me. Retrieval and reabsorption were no longer possible.
• Things that used to be alive, like wood, had meridians, although they were empty of qi and mana. When I enchanted something, my energies flowed toward those channels and then through them. A good analogy was rain falling onto a roof and the gutters collecting the water to direct them in specific directions. The real surprise, though, was seeing how inanimate objects held similar channels. For example, my hammerstones and the flint spearhead.
• Even small amounts of magic were helpful, but it took filling an object to capacity to trigger the best effects.
• Every object could be infused with either qi or nature mana or both. It was like they had two enchantment slots that ran in parallel, each with their own bonuses and timers.
• The capacities of these slots differed from object to object. My spear needed about two points each of qi and mana. The same was true for my bow, while my arrows only took half a point each. These estimates were based on how full and empty the reservoirs felt before and after the enchantments.
• The enchantments lasted for a minute, unless the objects were overfilled, in which case the duration extended. For example, if my spear needed two points of qi to trigger the qi-enchantment, then four points would extend the duration to two minutes and six points to three minutes.

And the effects were pretty spectacular. My bow had already been improved with the infusion of silverlight during the spirit journey. With the addition of qi and mana, the wood smoothed even further, and the draw evened out. Even the bowstring tightened and became more elastic. Enchanted, the orange-fletched arrows almost reached the same quality as a modern broadhead.

It should be okay, then, to focus any silverlight I gather on myself instead of my gear, at least until I get a better handle on how much is needed to level up. If my stuff isn’t good enough for a job, I can just make up the difference with temporary enchantments.

It wasn’t that I didn’t find the prospect of leveled-up gear alluring, but I felt an urgent need to improve myself first, especially since it didn’t seem like silverlight would be easy to come by. I couldn’t expect a spirit journey or an invasion of Ikfael’s territory every day. At least, I hoped not.

After the tests, I went back to bed, satisfied that I had more tools for my survival toolbox. Go, me.

I was doing my best to ignore the sheer exhaustion, when—damn it, I forgot to explore the Stealth skill. I attempted to muster the wherewithal to get up again, but fell asleep in moments.