Chapter 17 - Mana Regen

  "Our Analysts tracked regional mana density to estimate the number of enemy combatants and their movements. The equipment said there were three other distinct zones of high mana expenditure, which is why command initially called it the Four-Sided War. It scared the shit out of us soldiers because any company sent to investigate that third army either found nothing or never came back at all. Not even scouts from the other armies we captured knew."

  -Memoirs of a Coalition Commander

  A day passed, and Solis was forced to tell Samir about the other thing he had done the day before. Which was to trap the crickets to level up Ana and Hans. Samir didn’t say much about it and nodded, saying, “I said all I needed to yesterday. I believe you understand.”

  Thankfully, the older doctor spoke to Ira and Dimitri on his behalf, which Solis was extremely grateful for. The next time he saw the Russian couple, Ira softly chastised him, but she also hugged him, which he hadn’t realized he needed until that point.

  With new days came new challenges, and they were currently focused on [Circulation] with Samir.

  “So you use these whirlpools to move and gather your mana, interesting. Are they consistently sized and of the same strength each time, or are they variable? Rather, how high a variance can you get?” Samir asked. He had taken out a notebook of his own and began writing down notes. They had been talking for the past few hours, trying to create a good framework for the skill.

  “It depends if I’m using [Resonance] or not. Without it I can make it the size of a fist if I focus, but it’ll get down to a golf ball sometimes. With [Resonance] I have better control and it stays the size I want. I can make up to three right now.”

  They ran experiments and tests, but they hadn’t moved to testing [Corruption] inside of Solis yet. The most they had done was to have Solis lay his hand flat and create a tiny dome that sat atop a knuckle. He pushed his mana into that tiny dome and then watched with [Mana Manipulation] to time how long it took his mana to eat all the corruption inside. The answer was twelve minutes and thirteen seconds, which didn’t line up at all with what Solis had seen before.

  After some discussion, Samir finally gave the green light to take in a knuckle-sized portion of ambient mana and corruption into his body. Solis was ready on the other side with the whirlpool and collected the motes, dragging them to his chest and away from his membrane. Instead of twelve minutes, it took less than five seconds that time.

  “How does that even work?” Solis asked after they had written down their findings.

  “If your descriptions of internal and external mana are correct density likely plays a roll. Can you put more mana into the container?”

  “Not without using [Resonance] to push more out.”

  “Give it a try.”

  Solis did so, pushing as much mana as he could, before they timed it again. Only around six minutes that time.

  They repeated the test ten times each and found similar results every time.

  “Seems like a linear increase,” Samir said over a lunch of cricket soup.

  “That would mean that my internal mana is more than 1000 what it should be. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “If you trust the instrument using to measure. The System puts a number on your screen, but do you believe it?”

  Solis frowned, “Yeah. When I went below zero, I started taking on corruption.”

  “If you had no mana, then how did you have mana to try to cleanse the corruption?”

  That was a really good point. If he had zero mana, then how did he still use and see his own internal mana? That didn’t make any sense, and he felt like a fool for missing something like that.

  “Maybe that number is useable mana, maybe the rest is just the minimum for our bodies to naturally stave off corruption?”

  “A good theory, write it down. I don’t think there’s a fast, safe way to test that, so let’s keep it in mind. How much mana did you gain from the thimble?”

  “I… uh. I didn’t write that down.”

  Samir chuckled, “As these things go. We’ll make note of it after lunch.”

  That’s how the entire day passed, and when it was almost time to bed down for the night. They had learned more about [Circulation] than Solis thought possible in such a short time. They decided the pinky knuckle-sized thimble would be considered 1 unit of corruption for the time being.

  The external mana did not make any noticeable difference in eating away at corruption until Solis extended ten points of mana. They were also too slow to measure anything since Solis had to keep his hand perfectly still the entire time, lest the thimble break open as it was a mana construct. The lowest effective mana they had gotten was at 25 mana, which took thirty minutes to process, giving a total of half a mana point. Increasing the mana levels didn’t give more mana, but did speed up the time, taking five minutes with 400 mana.

  Compared to internal mana, there was no contest, but Solis thought there could be more applications of external mana when he was higher level. If he kept a sphere of high-density mana around himself, he could effectively have two separate regenerative effects, one internal and one external.

  “Hey, Samir?” Solis said, before the man left to sleep.

  “Yes?”

  “You said something about the System, the instrument used to measure. How did you know, I mean if you can’t trust what you’re being told, how do you know?”

  “I have a healthy distrust of information I haven’t confirmed myself. My eyes, that’s all I use. If things don’t line up, I investigate. Also…” he let the word taper off, debating whether to continue, but eventually he did. “When we met, you talked about the System, about its creators and the ones who made it. I’ve been thinking about the same. When people create, they make decisions, and sometimes what they want to communicate is easier if they don’t give the full picture. People are also flawed, so in truth, I was already watching for it.

  Solis nodded and sat back down. “Okay, thanks Samir. Goodnight.”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Goodnight Solis.”

  Samir had given him the okay to practice [Circulation] with up to thirty units of [Corruption] alone. He wanted to push that, but he wouldn’t for now. Samir was right. He really didn’t know anything about [Corruption] and mana. He had shot blind, managed to hit a target, and proclaimed himself an archer before he even saw where the arrow landed.

  If he wanted to figure out how to get strong, he needed to make sure he didn’t kill or cripple himself in the process, and that started with understanding what the hell was going on in the first place.

  Taking a deep breath, Solis concentrated on the skill and activated [Circulation].

  “What do you think he found out?” Ira asked.

  “You think he found something?” Dimitri responded in kind.

  The playful gab got Dimitri a withering look from his wife as they made their way down the cave network, only navigable by the flashlights they held in their hands.

  Ira turned to the two children, who were attached to the Russian pair like glue, even after the scolding she had given them for what Solis pulled with the crickets – not that Ira minded in the least. She flashed the siblings a smile, “Translate … Do you two know what’s happening? You’re in there with Solis quite a lot.”

  Despite not leaving her side much, the siblings weren’t too happy with Ira at the moment. They had asked to be included in whatever expedition would no doubt come further into the forest, but she had met with a firm and resounding no.

  While it’d be nice to have extra people fighting next to her, the truth of the matter was that in easy fights, they’d only help a little, and in the really bad fights, they’d be a liability. She was the only melee fighter, and adding two more ranged fighters would only give her more people to protect.

  She briefly admitted to herself that if they chose melee stats or skills, she likely would have an argument against that, too. Was that so wrong, though? Not to want thirteen or fourteen-year-old kids to have to fight for their lives? They could throw firebolts and knives for a bunker; she didn’t mind or care, but actually fighting was out of the question.

  The jungle was dangerous and not a place for anyone, much less children. The children didn’t agree, and while they found great comfort in Ira’s presence, they were still teenagers who hadn’t gotten what they wanted.

  “übersetzen … not telling.”

  Ira’s eye twitched, and Dimitri laughed so hard he had to lean against a nearby wall.

  Only after a couple of minutes of descent did they meet up with Samir, who had a contemplative look on his face. It wasn’t worried, nor was it relaxed, but the way he was chewing his lip let Ira know all she needed to.

  “Samir,” Ira called, figuring that was good enough to act as a [Translate] call, “do you know why the kids asked us to come here?”

  “Best if you look for yourself Mrs. Gusev.”

  With a wave to follow, Samir led the four of them through the crack and into the dome on the other side. The first thing Ira noticed was that it had gotten darker. Much darker. The only light came from a doorway that had not existed before, leading to another dome, and another, and another, all in a straight line.

  Those domes weren’t as cleared away as their current one, with the majority of them having heavy underbrush and parts of trees inside of them. She took a deep breath. Anger had always come quickly to her, and it had taken most of her life to deal with it. ‘The anger is the result of the emotion, not the cause. I am not angry. I am worried.’

  She breathed out and tried to look at the domes with fresh eyes. Then the memory of Solis convulsing on the floor, blood combining with spit as it formed froth on his lips. The way he spasmed and flailed and cried out bloody murder while bleeding out.

  She turned to face the boy in the present as he sat with a smile in the second dome. She turned on her heel and walked back into the cave system – fuming.

  “Ira. Not. Good? Me?” Solis asked Dimitri, who sighed.

  “No. You. Ira … Unhappy. World.” Dimitri shook his head and patted Solis on the back.

  They could’ve used [Translate], but Solis didn’t want to, and Dimitri hadn’t offered. In truth, Solis was afraid of what he’d hear. In an odd way, speaking in these fragments made things clearer. He had to distill what he wanted to say into its most basic forms and then use similar words to communicate. It felt like he was pushing the emotion that he wanted through rather than the words, and there was comfort in that.

  “How? Me know.” Dimitri gestured to the dome around him. “Dangerous mana. You. No mana,” Dimitri grimaced as he tried to put complex reasoning in a language he didn’t know in incomplete, confusing sentences.

  Solis returned the grimace, not looking forward to trying to explain an even more difficult concept, mana circulation, with even worse Russian. He started to explain it with diagrams he solidified with [Mana Manipulation], showing, step by step, the process he used and how he did it.

  After Samir left and he was alone in the dome, Solis started using [Circulation] to draw in corruption. He’d solidify stone around a hand or his chest to trap the correct amount of [Corruption] in and then absorb it, swirling the mana so it wasn’t touching his membrane and then consuming it.

  It’s just that he had reached a point where he had been regenerating around 1 mp/s with the skill. So, he had activated a single point of [Division], which increased his parallel thinking ability up to superhuman, and then gave him another stream of thought. So then he was able to regenerate around 2.4 mp/s, which increased to 3.8 when he added another point. Then he had leveled up to 9 after a few hours of constant regeneration and used that point to put another in [Resonance], which brought him up to 3 [Division], which he used to get 4.2 mp/s.

  With a net gain of 1.2 mp/s he had used it to activate [Processing], which let him make the whirlpools more powerful and fit more corruption inside of him, resulting in a 3mp/s jump. Two of the mana per second he put back into [Processing]. At the end of everything, after three hours spent building and stabilizing his work to account for some modicum of safety, he was regenerating a net of 5 mp/s. So, instead of several days to get up to full mana, it now took him a little over seven minutes.

  Which meant every seven minutes he could create two domes worth of space… so he had. Every time he broke his concentration on [Circulation], he had to start from the beginning, building up to full functionality after about an hour, so he couldn’t just constantly build until he figured out how to run [Circulation] while moving and using his mana for other tasks.

  Throughout the night, he had built six additional domes, increasing their space and access to the forest. The sales pitch he was going to give is that this is how they’d explore. Solis was creating dome by dome and then slowly creeping in under full protection, but then Ira had walked out, and Samir… well, he didn’t know what Samir was thinking because the man was hard to read, but this isn’t how he thought things would go.

  By all counts, they should’ve been happy.

  “Is safe?” Dimitri questioned.

  Solis hesitated, but ultimately nodded, “Yes. Safe.” Then, after a moment, he added, “For me. Safe for me. Not others.”

  Dimitri frowned, “Why?”

  Why? Well, because it took a specific set of skills, finesse, and knowledge of how it all worked. Even then, if he messed up and lost concentration on all his whirlpools at once, he likely had enough corruption inside him to kill him on the spot. They’d just tear straight through the mana membrane and cause a cascading effect that would be impossible to recover from.

  ‘So how is that safe you fucking moron!’ but he didn’t say that out loud.

  He knew what he was doing better than he did yesterday… and they needed this. He needed this. They couldn’t stay stuck in these caves forever. They needed freshwater, and now he could regenerate enough for everyone to drink whenever they wanted from [The Endless Spring Droplet].

  Hell, he could even act as a mana battery for Samir or anyone else. If he just made a structure around his hand and another person's, he could cleanse the mana internally and shunt it back out into the enclosed construct, and the other person could take it for themselves, no corruption or cleansing involved.

  It was a little dangerous, but the risks were worth the rewards.

  He didn’t say any of that, though. He pushed the guilt aside; it wasn’t the same situation as it had been days prior. It was different. It really was.

  There was a need, proper prior information to be gathered. This time, he had done it correctly, even if it was dangerous.

  He didn’t say any of that, though, instead replying. “Pure [Resonance],” and hoped that no one else would ask questions about it anymore.

  They were finally going to explore the jungle, and he didn't want to slow down for anything.