The forest had ended abruptly, but the trail continues on and down for a hundred feet or so before merging into the main road.

  The road itself was paved, which surprised Will. He knew ancient civilizations had paved highways but a part of him never really believed the scope of them. Maybe a few hundred feet before the entrance to a major city or something like that. Not..this.

  The grayish-tan paved road stretched for miles in either direction. He didn’t see any intersections, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be any. The road was wide too; at least thirty feet across.

  He knew next to nothing about the geography of this world, but became instantly curious to see if this was common throughout this world or not.

  They began walking again and quickly made it onto the road. They checked the positioning of the sun to make sure they knew which way to go, and then started heading north.

  The walk was quiet, and they were the only people on the road. Will had a million questions, but he was starting to be more selective of what he asked. There have been a few times now with multiple people who have looked at him weird after he said something that made his extreme ignorance of this world obvious.

  So for now he kept his mouth shut and just looked around. The forest continued on their right side, thick and forbidding; although he had found it peaceful while they were in there.

  To their left was mostly open fields, rolling grasslands, with copses of trees spaced sporadically.

  As the day continued, they finally came upon a town. Or maybe it was a village? Will wasn’t entirely sure on the difference. Size would be the obvious guess, but where that difference in size was supposed to be he wasn’t sure.

  What bothered him though was the state of the village. It looked to be about twelve buildings or so grouped together about a hundred feet to the left of the road. Although the word “building” might be too generous a term. They were mostly hovels.

  A few metal sheets, a lot of wood planks, but mostly saplings, logs and sticks piled and stacked to make a modicum of a shelter.

  There’s a massive forest right there. Why wouldn’t they use all that wood to build better houses?

  There was a few hours of light left so Will didn’t think they were going to stop, and he ended up being right. Alea continued walking right by the town.

  Will couldn’t help but stare. He’s no stranger to poverty, but this was on a different level. He could see small little gardens in front of each hovel, barely enough to support a single person, but he was sure there would be more than one person living in each.

  He did see a few people walking around. A few women tending their gardens. A few kids running around. A couple of them were kicking some kind of ball back and forth together. One of them having some kind of growth over his right eyebrow. A few men were about, fashioning stronger supports for some of the homes, but only a few.

  Will was confused. He knows the world has magitech. He can only imagine how much easier that must make people’s lives here. He knows there will always be have’s and have nots, but even in his own world the poor benefit from the current technology. Just take cell phones. When they first came out, almost no one could afford them. But after enough time went by, almost anyone could afford a simple burner from almost any store.

  It didn’t seem to be the same here. This level of poverty, despite the high level of magictech that Will had seen evidence of so far, was crazy. This screamed of a third world country, not a developed nation. It spoke volumes about the leadership. Then again, for all he knew he was in an entirely different country than he was when he and Alea competed in the tournament. Still.

  He kept his thoughts to himself as they hurried along. They had no extra money to give them, no extra food they could spare, no services they could do for them. It still rankled him to just walk past them, doing nothing. It didn’t feel right.

  He was reminded of something Amos had told him once. How those in power make the rules and those rules can go either way. If he wanted things to be different here, then he should become powerful enough to make those changes.

  He intended to.

  They traveled until the sun started to set, and then went back into the woods a ways to make camp. Somewhere deep enough that their fire wouldn’t be seen and they’d have better protection from the elements.

  After they finished eating, Will and Alea both meditated. Will was determined to figure out a way to make his prospective sensory technique work. The problem was he didn’t really know what he was looking for. He didn’t know how to sense aura, and sensing anything wasn’t a thing back in his old world, so it’s not like he has any experience to draw from.

  That’s when a thought struck him.

  Can I sense my own lightning?

  So Will focused and activated his lightning inside of himself. After a few minutes of concentration he thought he could, but he wasn’t sure.

  What about natural lightning?

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  It wasn’t storming out, but at its core, lightning was just a discharging of an electrically charged atmosphere after a separation of electrons during a storm.

  So Will focused and tried to sense electrons in the air. And nothing.

  He tried and tried for two hours and nothing. It may of been possible to do it during a storm when there was a high concentration of electrons, but right now that proved to be impossible.

  He decided to go to bed to get as much sleep as he could for tomorrows travel. He probably stayed up way later than he should have anyway.

  Over the course of the next week he tried everything he could. Eventually he found out he could sense his own lightning, it had just taken time, practice, incredible persistence and trying different things until he had finally gotten the feel for it. After hours of effort he tried sending little sparks and jets of electricity out in random directions with his eyes closed. Focusing on sensing it outside his body first and then on the inside of himself seemed to do the trick. Still took a while though.

  He could sense his lightning when he first summoned it, but he realized that after that he had a hard time. Especially if he was maintaining his element within himself like when he coated his body in lightning. He realized he was just kind of going with the flow and trying to force it. Basically going off instinct.

  Letting himself sit and truly sense his lightning inside of himself as well as he could allowed him to realize how clumsy he had been so far with his elemental manipulation. This meditation and familiarization with his element seemed to immensely help his control over it.

  It’s almost like my masters knew what they were talking about. Huh.

  He laughed to himself.

  He also began to theorize that there might be a difference between his own lightning and naturally occurring electricity aside from the obvious; that one was natural and the other was lightning he created. It’s what lead him to the thought that’s why he was having such a hard time even slightly sensing the incredibly small and subtle electrical currents that run through the body and brain. He just wasn’t entirely sure of the exact differences.

  It was during the second week of travel that he finally caught a break.

  It was during the middle of the night, a few dozen feet into the woods to protect against prying eyes or the element. He had already been asleep for a couple hours when a clap of thunder startled him awake. It took a second for his sleep addled mind to register what was happening, but when he woke up a little it clicked. He bolted upright and scrambled out of his tent. He looked around and saw a hint of storm clouds slowly rolling in his direction.

  Then the rain started.

  It started light, but in no time it was starting to come down in sheets.

  He would see a flash and then some time later hear the thunder. But faster than he realized storms could move, that interval became smaller and smaller until finally they were over top of him; the lightning and thunder happening almost simultaneously.

  He sat down in the middle of it and started meditating, immediately realizing the opportunity in front of him.

  His clothes had long since been drenched through but he didn’t care. This was his chance! Naturally occurring lightning! This was an invaluable opportunity to learn as much as he could. Especially because he had finally got a feeling for sensing lightning, even if it was only his own. And who knew when he would get to experience another one.

  The second he sat and let himself dip into a meditative state, lightning flashing all around him, rain coming down so thick that you couldn’t see a foot in front of you, he felt himself almost connect to the atmosphere around him. Or rather, the connection was already there, and he just couldn’t feel it before.

  All of a sudden a massive bolt struck extremely close to him. Even in that brief instant Will learned so much. It was so close he felt a few volts tingle through him, leaving him unharmed, somehow not even phased, but the clues it gave him were eye opening. It even gave him an idea for a future technique.

  But he needed more.

  He needed more than just ideas for a big attack. If the fight between Amos, Taleya and Belial taught him anything, it was that control over your element was even more important than raw power. Far more important than Will had realized, especially before the big fight, and even more so after he felt the edges of this natural raw lightning. His instincts were telling him that that’s where true power lay. Or at the very least, a path to it.

  So he focused deeper. He allowed the connection he felt to the air around him to deepen and he focused.

  Another bolt struck, closer than the last. And then another, and another. He thought he heard a scream in the distance, but he was to consumed with what he felt around him to even make sure that’s what he was really hearing.

  There they are!

  He could finally feel it! He felt the absolutely massive concentration of electrons in the air way above him. He could only vaguely feel the opposite positively charged area of clouds above the negatively charged ones, and the positive charge in the ground beneath him. He didn’t know why he felt the negative charge more clearly than the positive, but he didn’t have the time or the brain power to think about that right now.

  He let himself immerse in the feeling of those individual charges, even tried to feel the individual electrons, but that ended up being beyond him. All he could feel was the general charge around him.

  He then focused on the continuous lightning strikes. Each one sending small, not even visible, strands of electricity inside of him. He was able to follow those strands as they reduced into smaller and smaller bands of plasma until it dissipated to a state he could no longer feel.

  He wanted to focus more on the massive bolts, he knew there was so much to learn on the grander scale, but he kept himself focused to the micro scale. To the most infinitesimal details he could manage to sense.

  If he could manage complete control over the smaller forms of electricity, he felt like he would have an easier time controlling more larger quantities of lightning.

  Besides, he couldn’t use large scale attacks yet. He was still to weak in cultivation. Anything bigger than his body coating technique and simple blasts of lightning sent as a projectile, were beyond him. Anything stronger would begin to injure his soul. With this in mind he redoubled his efforts and his conviction to learn and grow as much as he could in control and fine detail in lightning.

  All too soon the storm passed.

  He stayed in that deep meditative state for as long as he could, but as the storm passed so did that odd connection he felt to the atmosphere around him.

  He slipped back into a more normal state of meditation and before long he couldn’t even maintain that. It took him a second to realize why. He was shivering so violently from the wet bone chilling cold that he was literally shaken out of his trance.

  A few seconds after that he realized he was mentally exhausted. Which he was sure added to his inability to maintain his meditation.

  He opened his eyes and looked around, doing his best to keep his aggressively chattering teeth still.

  He was surrounded by scorch marks. A few trees had seemed to of exploded around him, and both his and Alea’s tents were gone.

  Actually, where is Alea?

  “What in the BLOOD AND ASHES WAS THAT?!”