"Hold the flow steady. Don't let it spike."

  Lysara's voice cut through my concentration like a knife. I sat cross-legged on the floor, sweat beading on my forehead despite the cool morning air drifting through the cracked window. My hands rested on my knees, palms up, a single droplet of luminous blue mana hovering just above my right palm while a darker, purple-black droplet hovered above my left.

  For the past hour, I'd been practicing what Lysara called "dual-stream isolation", maintaining two separate mana currents simultaneously without letting them contaminate each other. The normal mana flowed easily, responding to my will like water through a familiar channel. The corrupted mana, however, fought me with every pulse of my heart.

  "Now, bring them closer. Not touching, just near enough to feel the resonance between them."

  I exhaled slowly and raised my palms, bringing the droplets within an inch of each other. The air between them crackled with invisible tension. The corrupted mana pulsed, a living thing hungry to consume its purer counterpart. My control wavered.

  "Focus, Zane. It's responding to your anxiety."

  She was right. The moment my concentration fractured, the corrupted droplet had swelled, tiny tendrils reaching toward the blue light. I clenched my jaw and forced my breathing to steady, drawing the dark energy back into a perfect sphere.

  "Now... attempt the blend. Just the outer edges. Think of it like dipping your toe in water, not diving headfirst."

  This was the part I dreaded. I closed my eyes, visualizing the energy streams more clearly. With excruciating precision, I allowed the outermost layer of each droplet to stretch toward the other. When they made contact—

  Pain shot through my chest, not the searing agony of our first sessions, but a deep, throbbing ache that radiated outward. The sensation was like plunging a freezing hand into scalding water, the shock of opposing forces meeting violently. Yet beneath that initial clash, something else emerged. A strange harmony, discordant but powerful, like music played in a minor key.

  For three heartbeats, I maintained it, the thin veil where corrupted and pure mana merged into something new. The blend created a thin ribbon of violet energy, neither fully dark nor fully light. It swirled between my palms, casting eerie shadows across my face.

  Then it collapsed.

  Both streams dissipated into the air with a soft hiss, leaving me gasping. The room spun briefly, and I braced one hand against the floor to steady myself.

  "Better," Lysara said, and that single word of praise cut through the exhaustion. "You held it seven seconds longer than yesterday."

  I managed a weak nod, trying not to show how much the effort had drained me. After a week of daily practice, these exercises still left me feeling hollow, like someone had scraped out my insides with a dull spoon.

  "Your control on the exhale is improving," she continued, walking a slow circle around me. "But you almost lost it when the energies first merged. What happened?"

  I rubbed my sternum where the ache still lingered. "It felt... wrong. Like trying to mix oil and water while they're both on fire."

  Lysara's mouth twitched in what might have been amusement. "An apt description. Normal mana and corrupted mana aren't meant to blend naturally, their resonance patterns are fundamentally opposed. One flows, one consumes. One creates, one destroys."

  "Then why try to blend them at all?" I asked, not bothering to hide my frustration.

  She stopped her pacing and fixed me with those dark blue eyes that seemed to see more than they should. "Because you've already done it, Zane. The moment that core melded with your heart, it created something new. What we're doing now isn't forcing compatibility, it's teaching you to control what's already happened."

  I stood, fighting a wave of dizziness. "So I'm stuck with this... this poison forever."

  "It's not poison. It's power." She reached for my left hand, turning it palm up where faint purple veins still pulsed beneath the skin. "Corrupted mana is just emotion made manifest. Pure rage, grief, fear, distilled into energy. The problem isn't its existence. It's that most people can't contain it without being consumed themselves."

  Her finger traced one of the veins, and I felt a curious tingling where she touched. "But you, you're different. Your heart should have given out days after absorbing that core. Instead, it adapted."

  I pulled my hand away. "Lucky me."

  Something flashed behind her eyes, annoyance, maybe. "This isn't a curse, Zane. It's a rare opportunity. Most mages spend decades trying to understand a single mana type. You have direct access to two opposing forces within the same body."

  "It doesn't feel like an opportunity when my heart might give out at any moment."

  "Is that what you think is happening here?" She laughed, the sound sharp and unexpected. "If you were truly dying, I wouldn't waste time on circulation drills. I'd have you harvesting experience points by killing whatever I could find for you to fight."

  I stared at her, caught off guard by her bluntness.

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  Lysara walked to the small table where her instruments lay, crystals, vials of shimmering liquid, delicate copper tools for measuring mana flow. She picked up a translucent stone that glowed with a faint inner light.

  "Mana is the lifeblood of Myrithar," she said, holding the stone up. "It flows through everything, the earth, the air, living creatures, even some inanimate objects. But it's not uniform. It has... currents. Eddies. Places where it pools and places where it runs thin."

  The stone in her palm began to glow brighter as she spoke, responding to her words, her presence.

  "Most people can only access the smallest fraction of the ambient mana around them. They draw it in, channeling it through their bodies like water through a pipe. The Academy teaches standardized methods, rigid, safe, predictable." Her nose wrinkled slightly. "Boring."

  With a casual flick of her fingers, the stone in her palm fragmented into a dozen smaller pieces, each floating independently around her hand like tiny stars orbiting a sun. They spun faster, blurring into rings of light.

  "True masters don't just channel mana," she continued, her voice dropping lower. "They become conduits for it. They don't force it into patterns, they discover the patterns already present and move with them."

  The floating fragments suddenly collapsed back into her palm, reforming into a perfect sphere that pulsed with gentle light. The demonstration had seemed effortless, yet I sensed the immense control behind it.

  "That's what we're trying to teach you, Zane. Not to fight the corruption, but to understand it. To move with it rather than against it."

  I ran a hand through my sweat-dampened hair. "And what if I can't? What if it's too much?"

  Something flashed across her face, concern, perhaps, or something deeper. "Then we try something else. There are other ways to—"

  A sudden wave of dizziness hit me, cutting her off mid-sentence. The room darkened at the edges, and behind my eyelids, I saw—

  —stars falling from a black throne—

  "Give him back!"

  —a woman's tears, her voice breaking as she pleaded—

  "Zane!"

  Lysara's voice snapped me back. I found myself on one knee, breathing hard, her hand gripping my shoulder.

  "What happened?" she demanded, her eyes searching mine.

  "I don't—" I shook my head, trying to clear the fragmented images. "Just a headrush. I'm fine."

  But I wasn't fine. Something about those flashes felt too real, too familiar, like memories I couldn't quite place.

  "You're pushing yourself too hard," Lysara said, though her expression suggested she didn't fully believe my explanation. "We'll continue tomorrow."

  I pulled away from her grip, frustration suddenly boiling over. "We'll continue, and continue, and continue, and for what? So I can sit in a room mixing colored lights while my body slowly falls apart? While Cael prepares to throw me into some Academy I know nothing about?"

  The words escaped before I could stop them, sharp with a week's worth of accumulated exhaustion and fear.

  "This isn't working," I continued, gesturing at the training space. "I'm trapped in this... this dying body, playing with mana like it's going to save me when we both know it won't!"

  Lysara didn't flinch at my outburst. She stood very still, regarding me with those penetrating eyes.

  "Are you finished?" she asked quietly.

  The calm in her voice only fueled my anger. "No, I'm not finished! I'm tired of pretending I've got some magical solution when every day I feel this stuff eating me from the inside out! I'm tired of—"

  "Control."

  She said just that one word, and somehow it cut through everything.

  "That's what this is about, Zane. Not just mana control, but control of yourself. Of your fear. Your anger." Her voice remained steady, but there was an edge to it now.

  I opened my mouth to argue, but Lysara raised her hand, cutting me off.

  "That outburst just now? That wasn't entirely you." She stepped closer, her eyes fixed on my chest where the corruption had taken root. "The corrupted mana amplifies negative emotions—anger, fear, doubt, despair. It feeds on them, and in turn, they feed it. It's a cycle."

  My shoulders slumped as the anger drained from me, leaving behind a hollow exhaustion. "Am I not in control of my own emotions now?"

  "You are," she said firmly. "But they're... enhanced. Particularly the darker ones. Think of it like standing in a storm, you can still walk, still function, but the wind is always pushing against you, making every step harder."

  I sank down onto a nearby chair, rubbing my face with both hands. Deep down, I knew she was right. Even now, I could feel it, that unnatural current beneath my skin, ebbing and flowing with my heartbeat, stronger when my emotions spiked.

  "Is that why I feel so..." I searched for the right word. "...unstable, sometimes?"

  Lysara nodded, some of the clinical detachment leaving her expression. "The mana you absorbed wasn't just corrupted, it was ancient, filled with memories of pain and violence. Those impressions don't simply disappear. They linger, influencing your energy patterns, sometimes even your thoughts."

  A chill ran down my spine. "Are you saying it's... conscious?"

  "No, not conscious." She sat across from me, her posture relaxing slightly. "Think of it more like... emotional residue. The core you absorbed had been gathering negative energy for possibly hundreds of years. All that rage, fear, and suffering left an imprint."

  I glanced down at my arm, where the faint purple veins pulsed beneath my skin. "That's why the training isn't just about controlling the flow, is it? It's about not letting those emotions take over."

  "Exactly." Something like approval flickered in her eyes. "When you meditate, when you focus on steady breathing and clear visualization, you're not just manipulating mana, you're creating stability within yourself that the corruption can't easily disturb."

  The realization hit me. "All those breathing exercises, the visualization drills—"

  "They're as much for your mind as they are for your mana," she finished. "The two are inseparable. Most mages learn this gradually over years of training. You don't have that luxury."

  I nodded slowly, pieces falling into place. "That's why my control improves most when I'm calm."

  "And why it fails spectacularly when you're frustrated." A hint of a smile touched her lips. "Your emotions are like fuel for the corruption. Keep them steady, and it becomes manageable. Let them spiral, and..."

  "And I end up having meltdowns like a toddler," I muttered.

  Lysara actually laughed at that, the sound surprisingly warm. "I wouldn't put it quite like that, but essentially, yes."

  I leaned back, processing everything. "So I need to be what, perfectly zen all the time?"

  "Not at all." She shook her head. "Emotions aren't your enemy, Zane. They're natural. Essential, even. The goal isn't to eliminate them, but to experience them without being ruled by them."

  She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "We're only scratching the surface, Zane." She stood, smoothing down her robes. "But for now, I think we've done enough. Get some rest. We'll continue tomorrow with a different approach."

  As she turned to leave, I called after her. "Lysara?"

  She paused at the doorway, looking back.

  "Thank you," I said quietly. "For explaining. For helping."

  Something softened in her expression. "You're not the first person to face this struggle. You won't be the last." She hesitated, as if debating whether to say more. "But you might be the only one who survives it."

  With that cryptic comment, she left, closing the door softly behind her.