Chapter 10: Where Does Mana Come From?

  Teresa was walking around the perimeter of the island by herself, while a goblin with two horrifically broken legs crawled after her. She was taking the first shift which would last three hours, then it would be Sarah’s turn and then Preston’s. The party had agreed that after that last wave Madeline and Jake could use some uninterrupted rest, so they did not even have to ask to take the chance to sleep in.

  Teresa was plenty happy to stay up longer. As a matter of fact, she was almost reluctant to sleep if not for the fact that it would certainly impact her ability to fight. She had too much to think about, and a lot of things to try.

  If she had the time, she might even get some practice using the shortsword she had looted. Embarrassingly enough, one of the particularly larger goblins had a belt with a sheath that had just barely fit her, and she wasn’t sure how to feel about being a XXL in goblin size.

  The staff the Shaman had used unfortunately had been broken in the final fight. They had attempted to repair it using Mana, but it seemed the Shaman’s staff did not have the same ability to be repaired.

  Firstly, she began trying to actually control her Mana. As she walked, she activated and tried to figure out where the Mana came from in her body. Using the skill, she traced the path the Mana took through her arm to get to her palm. The Mana had to travel through her arm to get to the skill, though once she traced the path to her shoulder it became much harder to pinpoint exactly what was happening.

  Feeling the Mana go through her arm hadn’t been too difficult. Sure, it was hard to tell what was just her imagination, but once she got the hang of it she could generally tell where the Mana was flowing in her arm and how fast it was going.

  Once she started trying to trace where her Mana was in her torso, the sensation became extremely vague and weird. It was like trying to feel your eardrums as it processed sound, not something you could normally do.

  Then again, when you turn the noise loud enough you can feel it.

  Teresa tried to accelerate the Mana flowing in her arm, pushing more of it into her much quicker. The process was difficult and straining, like she was flexing half of her body and then trying to flex it more. She felt a hint of where the Mana was coming from doing this, but something else stole her attention.

  Her palm was glowing bright green, and she became more aware of where the Mana was being transformed into restoration Mana. It was like there was a thin layer that her Mana passed through, and in that layer the Mana had parts of it stripped away, extracted, and put together in a different order. She couldn’t sense exactly how this process happened, as so many things were happening to her Mana in such a small space and time frame. The process was almost instant, her own regular Mana came through one side and restoration Mana came out the other.

  Moving her attention back to her torso, she continued trying to pinpoint where the Mana traveled from. It was almost like her entire torso spat out Mana, but somehow defied the laws of space to make the distance between any two points on her torso to be zero. She was certain Mana was coming from any point in her torso, even her head, but only actually appeared around her shoulder.

  Teresa decided to try and make her Mana appear on the opposite shoulder, then make its way over to her hand across her body. What she found was perfect. The Mana flowed around some sort of shape that took up the vast majority of her torso. The Mana had to flow close to her surface layer of skin to make it past the shape, and any Mana that touched it would get absorbed back into her Mana pool.

  She pushed it further, trying to summon Mana all over her body and have it travel to her hand. She found that the shape was actually split in two. There was one large invisible nonexistent mass that took up most of her body excluding her limbs, and a second smaller one inside of her head. Regardless of which shape the Mana entered, she knew it increased her current amount of Mana. She was able to absorb Mana in two different places to refill her Mana pool.

  Teresa was fairly certain these two shapes were actually just one object, despite being disconnected by space. She wasn’t sure why she knew this, but she was weirdly positive about it. As a matter of fact, both of the shapes felt incredibly familiar, like she was an idiot for not having noticed the invisible, no-matter masses beforehand.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a System notification, and while she wanted to ignore it to keep focusing on what she was doing, she was completely dumbfounded by the notification and stopped channeling Mana.

  Skill Level Up!

  

  Type: General

  Gain a sense for Mana and its movement, allowing you to manipulate it to perform magical feats.

  ----->

  

  Type: General

  Gain a sense for Mana and its movement, allowing you to manipulate it to perform magical feats. Your careful introspection on your use of Mana has allowed you to gain a glimpse of your Soul. You may use Mana slightly faster and more efficiently.

  Her careful introspection on her use of Mana had allowed her to glimpse her fucking what? Did the System just tell her she has a Soul? Like, a legitimate, actual fucking Soul?

  It’s not like Teresa hadn’t been exposed to religion before, but to have it spelled out for you that yes, you do in fact have a Soul and it has magic was pretty batshit. For every question she had answered about where Mana comes from, she had about a million more.

  Does this mean there is an afterlife? Did she always have a Soul, or did she just gain one from the System? If she always had a Soul, then why wasn’t she able to use Mana in the past? She could tell that was where her Mana came from, and that her Soul naturally produced Mana, but why did it produce Mana? How did it produce Mana? She could feel the outline now of what was apparently her Soul, but she couldn’t see inside of it.

  Her Soul was not a physical object, that much had become clear to Teresa. If someone were to cut her open and look at where she felt her Soul was, there would be nothing special there except some blood, bone, and organs.

  Even when invisible, her Soul felt orange. She didn’t know why, considering technically it had no color, it wasn’t a physical object. But if it was a physical object, it would totally be orange and look like a giant crystal. Teresa felt this was probably the most useless insight her skill level up had granted her, but learning anything about your Soul was pretty freaking cool.

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  Teresa reactivated , and found she had a much easier time understanding the path her Mana traveled to get to her palm. She could easily amp up her skill, making her palm glow green with restoration Mana. It rapidly drained her Mana and the glowing green was incredibly obvious to anything with eyes, but she could tell her healing capability would skyrocket in the short term.

  If Teresa had gotten stabbed in the leg again by that damn mosquito, she would have probably been able to heal the injury in under a minute while overclocking her skill. She would quickly run out of Mana, but for more run of the mill injuries like stab wounds and cuts, she was certain she could heal that incredibly fast.

  For situations like with the poison where she had to heal someone continuously for a long period of time, she would still need to rely on her standard without overclocking it, as it wouldn’t provide any extra benefit. Still, this was huge. She really wanted to stay up past her shift, but knew Sarah’s phone alarm would wake her up any minute now.

  Teresa had spent far longer than she had thought on this. When she had started walking the goblin, the sun was just setting. Now, the moon was high in the sky, and the goblin was still crawling after her shouting what she was certain were expletives.

  Checking her stats once again, she gladly saw that her was at level 1 with a few percentage points to spare, and her had also gained some progress, now sitting at 83% as opposed to the earlier 68%. Hilariously, her skill had also gone up to 0.8%, thanks to the goblin that had been cussing her out for the last few hours whatever language goblins spoke.

  Soon, Sarah came to relieve Teresa of her shift. She kind of wanted to stay up later and keep figuring things out, but sleeping on it might also be useful. Just as she was about to show Sarah the screen confirming Souls were real, Sarah handed her the rags from the sleeve of her healer robe.

  “Here, we all cleaned ours up and figured you could probably reattach it to your robe with some Mana. Also, I think I figured out the kill notification thing. Madeline and I didn’t get a notification, but Preston, you, and Jake all did. Madeline and I never managed to land a hit on the Shaman, but Jake had used his to make the Shaman attack him. Then, you kept him alive, doing your job as the healer.”

  “Well shit, I didn’t think of that.” Teresa said, feeling dumb. That definitely made sense, but there was one problem. “If us distracting the Shaman was enough for a kill notification, then why didn’t you and Madeline get one? You two distracted it as well with your arrows and sparks.”

  “I think it has something to do with how well we distracted it. The Shaman barely cared about our arrows and spells, it just casually deflected them with minimal effort. Meanwhile with Jake, it quite literally could not attack anyone else until Preston went at it. I imagine it’s probably something to do with preventing weak people from getting power leveled with a strong friend by minorly assisting in a fight way above their own level.” Sarah answered.

  “That… checks out.” Teresa said, thinking back on the fight. She felt like she should have thought of that, but she rarely ever actually thought of herself as exclusively the healer. It was just something she did because she could, she also fought on the frontlines with Jake and Preston killing monsters herself, which was literally the opposite of what a healer would do.

  But getting points for keeping the tank alive to distract the miniboss? Of course the healer would get points for that, it’s basically the job description.

  “And here we were thinking it had something to do with the rags.” Teresa said, smiling. “I guess once we thought of a wrong answer it was hard to think of anything… else?”

  “What?” Sarah asked, seeing Teresa’s face suddenly look very confused as she looked down at the rags in her hands.

  “It’s just, these rags barely have any Mana in them.” Teresa said, looking at the fabric. She hadn’t really paid it much thought, but her robes contained a certain amount of Mana. Everyone’s equipment did, and she just figured it had something to do with reinforcing the material using magic.

  Now looking down at the rags, she still felt some Mana doing exactly that in there, slightly reinforcing the fabric. Otherwise, there was a lot of it missing. The Mana reinforcing the rags also felt a little bit different than the majority of the Mana in her robes, but she could feel that very same reinforcement Mana in small amounts.

  However, the majority of Mana in her robes did not help to reinforce anything, making her question what exactly that Mana was doing.

  “Oh yeah, before I forget. Check this.” Teresa said, sharing her description.

  “Oh nice, you leveled it up- you can glimpse your fucking WHAT?” Sarah yelled, rereading the description more carefully.

  “Yeah, I guess we all actually have Souls.” Teresa said with a smile, enjoying the astonishment on Sarah’s face. She wondered if it would be funny to walk off now without any further explanation, but decided this was something that might somehow be useful. “That’s where our Mana comes from, or at least mine I guess. I haven’t exactly seen anyone else’s Soul, so I don’t know for sure. But it’s like an invisible, intangible object that takes up most of my torso and part of my head. I can absorb Mana into it and expel Mana from it, and I think it does some weird stuff I haven’t figured out with distance and space.”

  “That’s… crazy.” Sarah said, still reeling. “I don’t know what to even do with this information, but thank you for telling me. I… I need to think about stuff I guess. You heading to bed now?”

  “Yeah, I’ll go to sleep. It’s been a long day for me.” Teresa said wistfully.

  “Tell me about it. Fighting waves of monsters was not how anyone was expecting today to go.” Sarah replied. Teresa hesitated, then nodded.

  “Yeah, I was expecting today to feel a lot shorter.” She said, turning around to head towards a gift shop everyone had decided to sleep in. It didn’t have the stench of dead monsters in it, so it was far more cozy than the Statue of Liberty.

  “I get you, I don’t know what timezone you were in but it was already well into the afternoon for me when the Tutorial started. You stayed awake for what, 14 hours after that? Go get some sleep Teresa, I’m sure you could use it.”

  “Thanks, will do. Stay safe walking the goblin.” Teresa replied, now walking away as the goblin slowly crawled after Sarah.

  “Don’t worry,” Sarah said with a laugh as she held up her bow and an arrow. “I’m armed.”

  Teresa just shook her head with a smile and walked towards the gift shop.

  A long day indeed.

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  Sarah watched as Teresa walked away, before walking in the opposite direction with the goblin in tow. She felt a bit lucky, thinking that everybody in the party had turned out alright. It was like being in a group project where everyone actually did their own work, an absolute miracle.

  She walked with the goblin behind her, keeping a healthy distance. She was a little uncomfortable with the thing, Preston wasn’t the only one who’s seen Goblin Slayer. Regardless, she was confident she could easily kill the creature if need be.

  In the distance, she could have sworn she saw a bit of movement out in the desert. Her vision had improved significantly, being a decent bit beyond what any normal human would have. She had the highest Perception in the party, and knew that if anyone would see something out in the desert, it would be her.

  She thought about whether her concern was valid or not, since she wasn’t actually positive she saw anything. Still looking out at the desert, there was nothing but sand. There was what looked like the occasional cactus far away, but they had already been there for a while.

  Still, Sarah had seen enough horror movies to not be stupid. She turned around and began walking back towards the gift shop, deciding to at least warn her party that she might have seen something. It will make her look skittish to them, but so be it.

  There might be something alive out there in the desert.