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The more he’d learned of meditation--both from personal experience and from reading up about the subject online--the more he’d come to think that it wasn’t just this thing that he needed to do for the sake of improving his materialization ability.

It was important for the stillness that it could provide. The calm.

The world was so busy. So noisy and constantly moving. Constantly demanding his attention in some form or another. And his own mind, that was plenty busy, too. More than ever, as of late.

So it seemed to him that trying to multitask during his meditations was somewhat missing the point. And potentially counterproductive, even. After all, he’d never actually been able to feel whether or not the meditation was improving his skill with materialization.

Garovel said it did, and he trusted the reaper’s word on that, of course, but the progression was only ever detectable after the fact, not during. And most of the time, even that was questionable, because what was really causing the increase in skill level? The meditation? Or the actual training that he was doing all the time?

And then there were these “altered states of consciousness” that Emiliana Elroy had told him about. They intrigued him quite a bit. When she taught him about “Sto,” a so-called storage state of consciousness, he hadn’t been able to come up with a good use for it, which made sense, since it seemed to be mainly designed for mutation users like her.

But later on, he’d found it to be quite useful indeed as a means of helping him compartmentalize all of the information that the Candle had poured into his head. Without the benefit of Sto, Hector felt like his mind would be an even more chaotic place than it already was, these days.

It was just such a curious concept. Altered states of consciousness. He wanted to ask Emiliana more about it and perhaps see if she’d learned a new one yet, but he also didn’t want to bother her until the Rainlords returned. Then he could give her good news, too. Hopefully.

Maybe he’d ask Hanton or Pauline about it, instead. A sparrow’s perspective might be interesting.

Here and now, though, he was content to simply indulge in the confines of his own meditative exercises. Increasingly, he was feeling like there was more yet to be discovered therein. About himself, perhaps. And beyond? Hard to say. What would that even mean, really?