The pain hit before reality did.
It sent him rocketing upright from his lying position, ruffling the serene ecosystem of his bedsheets.
"Gahhh…"
He clutched his head, fingers digging into his scalp.
This easily took the cake for the worst headache he had ever experienced — and somehow the most intense.
His body felt unresponsive, like he had trained his muscles to failure, yet his heart pounded as if something were hunting him. He could feel the adrenaline under his skin.
His body was broken, but ready. Poised.
A hellish combination.
Safe to say, this was a hundred times worse than that hangover he had after graduation. That one left him bedridden for two days.
Besides that—
What had happened to him?
All he remembered was the searing pain of touching the colors. The rush of memories. And then… something. It was like his mind was blocking it, protecting him.
But that wasn't his biggest concern.
The memories and emotions of seven different lives swirled violently in his head, a terrible cacophony. The pain ramped up to an unbearable degree as the memories sharpened and the emotions intensified.
He flung himself off the bed, gripping the sheets as he fell.
"A bed—what?!"
The pain surged again. He stumbled into a lamp, knocking over a stack of papers before crashing to the floor.
The pounding in his skull rivaled the hammering of his heart. He felt like he was going to explode.
Agony gripped his very soul. Blood trickled from his ear canals. His heart felt as if it were trying to tear free from his chest. All he could do was clutch his head and gape.
"Calm down."
A voice cut through the discord in his mind like a blade through cloth.
"Your mana is going haywire. Contain it."
It was authoritative — gruff, but not unkind. It reminded him of his father.
The voice guided him, and he complied.
He gathered the loose memories, forcing them into a tight sphere. Then he imagined himself wielding a lasso, spinning it overhead before throwing it around the sphere and pulling it tight. In his mind, he planted one foot on top of it, one hand resting on his hip while the other wiped imaginary sweat from his brow.
He didn't know how he was doing it. He had never used mana before.
But it felt right — as if the memories wanted to be contained.
"That's good, young one. Now the final step — conceptualize."
Conceptualize?
He didn't know how. Most of what he had done so far had been instinctive.
Fortunately, the pain had lessened to something manageable. He still lay on the floor, limbs shaking, breath labored — but he could speak.
"How… how do I do that?"
Silence.
At some point, the blanket he had been clutching had fallen over his face. Before he could pull it off, the voice returned.
"You must conceptualize the best form of your mana. Every pathfinder must do so to tame it. By conceptualizing it into something, you can synchronize with it and wield it. For you, think of it simply as finding a shape for that… mess inside your head."
It sounded like one of his old academy lectures.
His grip on the sphere of memories began to loosen. The agony threatened to return.
Focus.
All he needed was a shape. A form.
The answer came almost immediately.
A sea.
A gray sea of thick sludge, growing more viscous toward the depths.
The moment he understood it, he was inside it.
He swam. Shallow emotions brushed against him — fleeting happiness, subtle touches, laughter. They flowed in gently, nothing like before. The pain was gone. He felt weightless.
Now that the dissonance had quieted, he could think.
This was his magic — his own unique origin spell.
The voice had told him to calm, contain, conceptualize — the three principles of mana control.
The first was calming down. This one was rather self-explanatory. Mana reacted to a person's emotional state. If you were unstable, your mana would be unstable as well.
The second was containment — control. Mana was a force that naturally sought harmony with its user. It was rare to find someone completely incompatible with their own mana.
Since mana desired alignment, containing it was less about domination and more about synchronization.
Of course, mana was still inherently chaotic. It could only be considered stable once the final step was completed — conceptualization.
This was the most difficult part. You had to determine the shape and form your mana would take within your body — more specifically, within your mana core.
He had rather easily shaped the torrent of memories in his head into a bottomless sea, emotions suspended within its waters. The depth and pressure of the sea reflected the intensity of those memories.
Others would conceptualize differently. Some might see towering trees stretching into the clouds. Others might imagine raging storms that rained fire.
It all depended on the temperament of the mage.
He lightly swam through the shallow currents of emotion, letting fragments of memory brush against him.
He didn't know whether to feel triumphant or horrified.
If this was what mana control felt like, he doubted everyone experienced it this way.
It likely had something to do with those seven colors.
Speaking of which—
Before he could think further, the sea vanished. A force pulled him upward toward a distant light hovering above the gray expanse.
And suddenly—
Darkness.
The blanket.
He tore it off his head and pushed himself into a seated position, rubbing his temples. His body no longer felt destroyed. His mind was quiet.
"What's happening to me…?"
"That's what I'd like to know. Ain't that right?"
A voice to his right — haughty, condescending, nothing like the previous one.
He spun toward it and froze.
A shirtless man stood there. Scars covered his torso — some faded with age, others fresh. His hair fell to his cheeks before tying into a tight ponytail that reached his upper back. Just like his.
And his eyes—
Two blood-red moons.
There was something wrong. His hair was bleached white. And in the center of his chest was a hole. Inside it floated a blood-red heart, beating one second too slow.
There was one more thing wrong.
He was identical to Kamrik.
A perfect copy.
"Wha—what's going on?!"
The man smirked. "What? You're acting like you've never seen yourself before."
"I—"
"I don't know how we ended up here either," the man interrupted. "But you were flailing around on the floor like an amateur. It was honestly impressive."
He began clapping slowly. "I've never seen someone so out of control of his mana. And you didn't even know the three basic methods of mana control! You're a riot!"
He laughed.
The heart in his chest gurgled in twisted amusement.
And Kamrik's own heart beat just a little harder.
He felt a flicker of irritation at the pointed words aimed at him. It wasn't his fault he was new to this. How was it fair that he was being humiliated by some copycat version of himself?!
He steadied himself, wiping sweat from his brow.
"Who are you?"
The blood-eyed man's expression shifted to faint annoyance.
"I don't think I need to tell you that," he replied. "Don't be a bigger moron than I thought you were."
He finished with the look of a lion gazing down at an ant.
Kamrik furrowed his brows.
This guy had a rather trashy attitude, huh?
Irritation threatened to bubble back to the surface, but he pushed it down again.
Focus.
"Where is the voice that was helping me?"
The blood-eyed man's smirk sharpened. He raised a finger and pointed behind Kamrik.
"Oh, they're behind you."
"They're?"
Kamrik turned.
Three men stood there.
Each bearing his face.