The Ancient One spoke entirely from experience—she'd suffered the consequences herself, and her warning to Bella was genuinely well-intentioned.
Casters were far too easily led astray. One lapse in attention could send you down the wrong road, and those who managed to stay true to their original convictions were vanishingly rare.
"I will, Master. I'll remember what you said today."
Bella's answer was sincere. The Ancient One began the day's lesson.
The Ancient One wasn't a psionic herself, but she'd wandered the multiverse for years and had encountered this type of caster before. She was more than qualified to teach.
And if she was going to teach, she was going to teach properly—anything less would be unworthy of the title Bella had given her.
She had clearly put in the preparation, designing a curriculum specifically for Bella. But before the formal lecture, there was one thing she needed to clarify first.
"During my travels through the multiverse, I've encountered casters like you. Their numbers were greater, and their methods of harnessing psionic energy far more systematic."
Bella listened with rapt attention. This was exactly why she valued the Ancient One—her breadth of knowledge and experience. Just hearing the words was thrilling. The multiverse! How many casters were out there? How many psionics?
The Ancient One paused to sift through her own memories. At seven hundred years old, the sheer volume was staggering. Many recollections needed to be carefully retrieved and sorted—a human brain wasn't like Odin's or Thor's divine mind. Both brain and soul had their limits, and right now she was methodically paging through her past.
Nearly a minute passed before she spoke.
"I have three curricula for you. All three rely on the mind for spellcasting, but they're mutually incompatible—at least as far as I can tell. The mind is an extraordinarily vast, boundless world. Even if you have the determination to encompass all of it, in the beginning you should specialize in a single path."
Bella understood the logic of specialization perfectly well—she just hadn't had a choice before.
She inclined her head slightly. "Master, please explain in detail."
"Very well. During my multiverse travels, I once encountered a race that also used psionic energy. They called themselves Psychic Warriors—heavily combat-oriented. They would summon a specific weapon from the depths of their soul to fight alongside them, and as their psionic power grew, the weapon grew with it."
Psychic Warriors? Bella considered for a moment. The description reminded her a bit of Psylocke. Honestly, she didn't enjoy fighting—given the choice, she'd rather hang back and watch the show.
The image of a Psychic Warrior pulling a giant soul-sword out of their spirit and hacking away at people reminded her of those old xianxia novels where monsters would spit out their inner cores to bludgeon enemies—cores that were fragile as glass, yet still used as projectile weapons every single fight.
If that soul weapon was destroyed, the wielder would almost certainly be crippled along with it.
She kept her expression neutral. The Ancient One continued.
"I also observed a being from another universe who wielded psionic energy to communicate and connect with all living things. He was powerful—when I fought him, his illusions held me in place for a full three heartbeats."
Bella thought it over. This sounded like the branch most traditional psionics gravitated toward: the Telepath.
Beguiling minds, running circles around opponents with an endless arsenal of spells, standing above it all like a god surveying a chess board—savoring the satisfaction and control.
She didn't enjoy toying with people's minds. She deliberately kept her mind-reading to a minimum, precisely because she feared losing control. This specialization was powerful, but for her, it was also deeply dangerous.
"The last one—" The Ancient One thought carefully. "I once befriended a secretive order of psionic monks. They were guardians of some secret in their home dimension—what exactly, I never asked.
"They could use psionic energy to carve out an independent space within their own bodies, storing important artifacts and texts inside it. They called themselves Astral Voyagers. The pocket dimension seemed to grant them a degree of resistance to aging."
Psychic Warrior, Telepath, and Astral Voyager—three paths of specialization laid out before Bella.
Psychic Warriors excelled in combat. If she wanted a future of nonstop fighting, this was an excellent choice.
The Telepath path was enormously tempting—too tempting, which was precisely why she didn't dare take it. Train long enough down that road and her entire personality might warp beyond recognition. She didn't consider herself someone with iron willpower. That path was equally dangerous.
As for Astral Voyager—this specialization offered zero direct combat improvement. It was essentially a portable storage space that let you adapt on the fly to any situation. The pocket dimension also provided some resistance to time-based magic—not immunity, just resistance. And judging by the name alone, at higher levels this was almost certainly a specialization built for running away.
One for fighting. One for mind control. One for escape. Which would it be?
The Ancient One offered no recommendation. The choice was Bella's alone.
Bella weighed her options back and forth, and ultimately chose the most conservative path. She didn't want to fight endlessly, and she didn't want to become a villain. She'd be an Astral Voyager.
Survival was victory. If an enemy was too powerful, she'd grab her family and run.
"Please teach me the Astral Voyager's path, Master."
The Ancient One showed no particular reaction. At her level, every specialization converged at the highest tiers—different roads, same destination. It didn't matter which one you picked.
Her mastery gave her a commanding vantage point. She could use her own methods and Earth's existing knowledge to guide Bella down the Astral Voyager's path.
"The Astral Voyager is a specialization suited to multiverse travel. To carve out a pocket dimension, the first thing you must do is achieve perfect stillness of the mind."
"'The spirit of man loves purity, yet the mind disturbs it. The heart of man loves stillness, yet desire pulls it astray. If one can banish desire, the mind stills itself. Cleanse the mind, and the spirit clears on its own—naturally, the six cravings cease to arise.'" The Ancient One's Classical Chinese was impeccable, her cadence rising and falling with an almost musical elegance.
"Can you understand this passage? Do you know what it means?" The cornerstone of her first lesson rested on a single concept: stillness.
Bella made a face. You've been teaching beginners for too long, haven't you? A passage this straightforward from the Classic of Purity—what was there not to understand?
She didn't show off, though. She answered honestly with her own interpretation.
The moment the Ancient One heard it, she knew her question had been unnecessary. She'd grown so accustomed to teaching grade-schoolers that having a college student in front of her took some adjusting.
She didn't bother recalibrating much. Instead, she took the passage's deeper implications as her springboard and began to teach from there.
Gradually, Bella started hearing genuinely new insights. She raised questions as they came, and the Ancient One answered each one from her own understanding.
The process of carving out the pocket dimension went remarkably smoothly—so smoothly that Bella herself was surprised.
Deep within her psyche, she opened a space roughly the size of a storage chest. Books, ancient scrolls, Apples of Eden, the magic carpet—all of it could now be stored inside the pocket dimension. This quasi-spell ability dramatically improved her survivability in unpredictable situations.