Week three, day seventeen of the Kell program.
Amaron stood in the training chamber at dawn, his body reporting damage in ways that had become routine over the past sixteen days. Strained muscles in his back from yesterday's endurance drills. Bruised ribs from the combat sequence on day fifteen. A persistent ache in his left shoulder that had been there since day four and had simply become part of his baseline physical state.
His mana pathways hurt in ways that had no physical analog — the specific burning sensation that came from forcing circulation through channels that were being deliberately stressed beyond their normal capacity. Mordain called it 'controlled damage.' The body adapted to stress by becoming stronger at the stress point. Mana pathways worked the same way. If you damaged them carefully, repeatedly, in ways that forced adaptive growth, they expanded. You became capable of channeling more mana, with more control, at higher densities.
