Simply Can't Stop

Summer faded into autumn. Fallen leaves tumbled through the breeze and drifted across the school grounds.

Beside the sports field, a dense canopy of trees cast deep shade. Afternoon light filtered through the leaves in scattered golden shafts, turning the patch of ground beneath into something like a private stage lit for the season's final act.

For Mo Fan, time had moved fast — two full months had slipped by since his Awakening.

And for every one of those two months, Mo Fan had done exactly one thing: sit beneath that tree and meditate.

On the very first day of school, homeroom teacher Xue Musheng had given his students what he'd called the single most important lesson they would ever receive: the release of magic.

The release of magic came down to three deceptively simple steps.

Step one: Meditation.

Step two: Control.

Step three: Release.

Meditation was exactly what the name suggested — total, unbroken focus of the mind.

When a person closes their eyes, the mind rarely cooperates. Images surface unbidden — faces, fragments, half-forgotten moments drifting up from nowhere. But when you genuinely silence all of it, refusing every stray thought, a true emptiness opens in your head. A pure black void, like the depths of outer space.

After a mage Awakens, their element's Stardust appears in that void.

In practice, this meant that whenever Mo Fan closed his eyes, cleared his mind completely, and let every thought dissolve into that dark cosmic stillness, both his Lightning and Fire Stardust would surface before him.

His Lightning Stardust was purple — a drifting nebula of violet cosmic dust, achingly beautiful and endlessly shifting.

Inside it floated seven star motes. They moved without pattern or purpose through the tiny constellation, like seven undisciplined children with boundless energy, darting and tumbling in every direction they pleased.

For any Awakened magic student, successful Meditation meant one thing: reach the inner void, watch the Stardust emerge, and observe the lively, luminous star motes dancing within it. That was all the first step required.

Which was simple enough. For two straight months, it had been the only homework any magic student received. Meditate after dinner until exhaustion. Sleep. Wake up. Attend class. Meditate again until exhaustion. Sleep again. Repeat.

Mo Fan had put in every moment — every single day, weekends included, for the full two months. More than once he'd found himself genuinely puzzled. *Why have the teachers assigned something this straightforward and stretched it out across two whole months?*

*Maybe I should try step two on my own,* he thought, confident he had Meditation well in hand. He decided it was time to see what Control felt like.

The second step was, in theory, equally simple.

Once you entered Meditation, your Stardust appeared — along with its seven lively, high-energy star motes careening through the void with no regard for order. Control meant reaching out with your mental intent and commanding those motes to hold still. Coaxing them, one by one, into fixed positions until they formed a continuous Star Trail.

Once the Star Trail held, magical energy would flow through it like current through a wire — traveling from the Stardust into the mage's body, condensing into real magic, ready to be released.

"Fast little one, aren't you. Come here and let daddy get his hands on you." Mo Fan made his first attempt.

He fixed his attention on one of the darting sparks of violet energy, his intent reaching out, commanding it firmly to hold still.

*Fwoosh.*

The mote ignored him with magnificent indifference — and bolted. Like a little girl who'd just spotted a creepy stranger, it fled at top speed and never looked back.

"Fine. Tsundere little thing. I'll try another." He shifted his focus to a second Lightning star mote.

"Easy now. Daddy's right here. Come on, be a good mote…"

*Fwoosh.*

The second one took one look at his approaching mental intent and ran even faster, like it had just spotted an escaped lunatic charging at it from across the room.

Mo Fan worked through the others one by one. Same result every time. Not a single mote gave him the slightest acknowledgment. A few even seemed to actively detect what he was trying to do — and the moment they did, they accelerated, as if they'd been loaded up with five hundred pounds of fuel that absolutely refused to run out. They simply. Would. Not. Stop.

While the star motes kept spinning and darting, magical energy couldn't flow.

Think of it as a wire. The power lives inside the Stardust. To release it, you have to line the motes up end to end so the current can travel through them and into your body. But that required them to hold still — which they emphatically would not do.

*How am I supposed to work with this?* Mo Fan groaned inwardly. *When the hell am I ever going to learn Lightning Seal?*

The Lightning Element's basic skill was the Lightning Seal. By any measure, it was the most practical Basic-level ability in any element's entire arsenal. Master it, and you'd have genuine combat power that put you well ahead of your peers.

Shame it wasn't going to come easily.

Lightning star motes were extraordinarily restless. Getting them to hold still was not going to happen in a day or two.

*Right now I can't even pin down one. And I need to control all seven simultaneously.* He let out a slow breath. *The road ahead is longer than I thought.*

Sure enough — learning magic was no different from everything else in life. Nothing got solved overnight.

The weather turned cold. Thick padded coats replaced the girls' short skirts and stockings, and before anyone quite noticed, the season had arrived — the one southerners dreaded most, when anyone without heating was left to freeze in their own home.

"*Achoo!*"

"Damn," Mo Fan muttered from the school rooftop where he'd been running his Control practice since early morning. "If I'd known winter was going to be this brutal, I should've been working with my Fire star motes instead. At least I'd have had something keeping me warm."

Another month-plus had passed. Mo Fan could now hold four star motes in place at once.

The process of controlling star motes… how to describe it. Something like an extremely high-difficulty version of dominoes.

You had to set down four tiles, one after another, each one requiring a perfectly steady hand — not a single wobble, not the slightest deviation. Only when all four stayed upright did you make any progress at all.

The moment one tile toppled, the others followed, and you started from the beginning.

Star motes worked exactly the same way. First, you locked onto one and issued a mental command to freeze. And while you were forcing that mote to hold still — while it pushed back against your mind, flooding your skull with a sharp, throbbing ache — you could not break focus. You could not flinch. You could not let so much as a single thread of concentration slip away.

Only by gritting your teeth, maintaining absolute concentration, and overpowering that mote's stubborn resistance could you actually make a volatile Lightning star mote obey — to float there, suspended, waiting.

And once one was subdued, you had to split off a fraction of your attention, keep the first one pinned, and begin the entire struggle again on the second.

The moment you devoted too much focus to the second and let the first slip — that first mote vanished immediately, dragging the half-tamed second along with it, erasing everything and sending you back to zero.

He'd heard the teachers say it before: Control was the hardest step by far. Mechanically demanding on one hand, and on the other, it required the mage to possess enough mental stamina to sustain it.

Practicing Control the way Mo Fan did — attempt after attempt, reset after reset — drained him every single time. Each failure left him a little more hollowed out. After two continuous hours, he'd be in full collapse: ears ringing, vision blurring, thoughts scattered beyond recovery.

At that point, neither Meditation nor Control was possible anymore.

Bottom line: grinding away at Control was a godawful drain on mental reserves. A full tank, and you had two hours at most.