Afterlife 2.0 Bonus Chapter 01 — Through the Dark

“A deal is struck,” the agent of Astaris in a red patchwork suit said in that odd, hissing language.

His words reverberated through the Mana injected into my vein structure.

A flash of pain travelled through me, as something connected to me. Something vast and horrible beyond comprehension. Then that sensation went away, and whatever it was vanished. Only the knowledge that it had been horrifying remained in my mind.

I couldn’t go back on my word now. Breaking a contract that was enforced by a deity was, typically, a poor decision.

Service to a higher power hadn’t been something I’d been planning on signing up for. I had three experimental attempts at joining the Patronage, and the results were stored in my memories.

Unlike my usual stored memories, these experiments all had a conclusion. It wasn’t worth working with any deities. They were all fundamentally monstrous taskmasters and incredibly fickle with the information they were willing to share.

Or at least the ones in Kaelzar’s Sphere were. I was taking a risk by joining a separate Sphere. I didn’t think I would have if he didn’t claim that Ellie let him into the world. She must have had a good reason to summon him. She wouldn’t summon the agent of a divine by complete accident, would she?

No, that would be ridiculous. She’s better than that.

He was willing to teleport me to her. That's all that mattered.

As I was thinking through everything, I noticed I had notifications pending. Just before I went to check what they were, the ground opened up and swallowed me whole.

There was supposed to be a trial. I nearly forgot about that.

An almost comfortable darkness swirled around me as I fell. It was aligned with that evil Mana that he’d shoved inside me. Not that any type of Mana could be fundamentally evil, Mana was a tool and like any other tool, it was about how you used it, not what it was.

I attempted to weave a spell that would create a glowing Light orb, but it failed. After a couple of attempts, I realized I wasn’t actually able to create Light Mana to cast the spell.

He’d forcefully attuned me to whatever the hell that Mana type was.

I let out an exasperated sigh. This was both amazing and absolutely terrible.

The good news was that it was a unique type of Mana, one that I had never recorded in my memories. That meant entirely new lines of experimentation, new potential spells, and an altogether new type of Mana to use in artificiery.

The bad news was that I had lost access to the majority of my repertoire of spells. Despite allowing for far easier access to complex Mana types, attunement was something I had given up on due to the issue of overspecialization.

When you could only cast spells of one Mana type, it was very easy to counter your build. A Wood mage would be handily defeated by a Fire mage, as their spells were used to fuel their own demise. Not that anyone would intentionally attune themselves to Wood if they had even half a brain cell. The conversion loss when creating Wood Mana was a mere twelve point five percent. You might as well just learn how to convert Mana into it and retain flexibility in your spellcasting.

Of course, I could partially make up for the overspecialization problem. I had those Runes, as Ellie called them, that transformed the type of Mana either by splitting it or applying a transformation directly to it. The Deattunement Rune was endlessly useful, pulling in whatever type of Mana I wanted and spitting out Raw Mana, which meant Items could use whatever environmental Mana they could access with reasonable efficiency.

The problem with this route was that it was entirely reliant on an Item to work. I couldn’t actually cast a spell from an Item. Or at least I hadn’t figured out how to do that yet.

Maybe I could do something similar to spellcasting with rituals? That avenue was at least worth attempting exploration.

…

Why hadn't I hit the ground yet? Wind was whipping past me, and I was definitely being pulled towards something.

Flipping myself over mid-air, I couldn’t actually see myself heading towards anything. It was too dark, and the air was thick with that dark Mana. Exerting myself, I spread my Aura outwards, and realized I couldn’t feel anything for at least half a kilometre. After that point, my senses were too dull to tell air and solid matter apart.

Well, this was as good a time as any to try out my new attunement.

I went for one of my standard spell forms. Summoning a pair of wings made of Air. Except instead of Air it was… Dark Mana, I guess you could call it?

Not Shadow, as in the absence of light, this was more like Mana associated with practices one might shun in a civilized society.

It was a good thing I’d never been the civilized sort.

Instead of the usual hand signs that would form Air-based wings, my hands seemingly automatically went to that new language.

Normal mage handsigns were based around rote memorization of gestures. You could purchase a book filled with these gestures at nearly every bookshop in Fateswatch.

I had, of course, memorized every single one of them. However, at least ninety percent were useless to me now. Basically, anything that didn’t relate to Raw Mana manipulation.

Instead of using the Air gestures for ‘back’, ‘wings’, and ‘hover’, my automatic response was to cast instead using ‘envelopment’, ‘command-over-position’, and ‘absence-of-restrictions-on-personal-motion’.

I finally understood exactly what Ellie was talking about when she said this couldn’t be translated or replicated in any way except using the specific Mana type. Dark Mana coursed through my Mind Veins, activating neurons and sending packets of Mana through my body such that I moved in an incredibly precise manner.

One of my hands had to be in two places at the same time for one of the motions. It did so by removing the law of non-contradiction and blending my hand over two separate spatial positions at the same time.

All in all, it was a weird experience.

A pull on my Mana pool signified the spell taking effect. I couldn’t actually see anything, but I felt myself slowing down as I commanded my position to stay the same.

I wondered for a moment where my golem went. He’d agreed to allow me to bring it with me. I couldn’t feel the soulbond I had with the Death elemental locked inside of it. The only thing I received when I tried to feel out where it was was static.

That didn’t make any sense. Why would a soulbond return static? Is the connection damaged? That would be rather mean-spirited of him to agree to allow my golem to come, but then to break it.

Divine beings had their own agenda, and their agendas usually weren’t ‘being a malicious prick for no reason’. Unless you were dealing with a trickster god, but that didn’t sound like Astaris’ whole vibe.

“Hello?” I called out into the gloom. “Anyone able to tell me what I'm supposed to—”

I was interrupted by something slamming into me. My ribs shattered, and I think my arm on that side of my body was completely smashed to pieces.

I took a wheezing breath as I waited for Vital Energy to do its thing and repair my broken body.

Through teary eyes, I could finally see further than an inch from my face. I was lying on a brick road next to a light post with a gas lantern hanging from it.

How the ground snuck up on me like that, I had no idea. I was certain I wasn’t moving at the time of impact.

Did the ground fall towards me then?

That didn’t make any sense either. I impacted the ground on my side. If it had come up to meet me in the direction I was falling, I would have landed on my chest.

Also, even if it was moving at terminal velocity towards me, it shouldn’t have broken my ribs. I had enough Fortitude that I could mostly ignore terminal velocity falls.

Just assume the laws of physics aren’t working as they normally do and move on—no need to pick every little thing apart.

A couple of minutes later, when I finally ran out of Vital Energy, I peeled myself off the ground, only taking a moment to cough up blood from my previously punctured lungs.

It was times like these that I was glad I had a congenital insensitivity to pain. I certainly felt worn out like a well-used dishrag, but nothing actually hurt.

I performed a few test motions to ensure that the only damage left was bruising. I had focused on repairing my ribs and removing bone shards from my lungs. My arm was still kind of fucked up, but it functioned when I pushed Dark Mana through it, which was enough to work with.

I also checked my spatially expanded tent to ensure it wasn’t damaged. Luckily, it was slung over my back on the side facing away from the ground. My staff, however, snapped in half after I landed directly on top of it. I tossed the broken parts into the tent. They’d probably be useful later.

I wondered if that was intentional on the divine agent’s part.

Now to see where the hell I had ended up.

The lantern’s light was bright, but I couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction. Not that light was even the main problem. The Mana in the air was so dense it almost seemed tangible.

Thick dark tendrils of Mana drifted through the ever-present gloom.

Upon getting a better look at the light post, I noticed latches connected to the hook arm that the lantern was hanging from. Using my good arm, I tugged on it and with a click, the rod detached.

I considered trying to gain some height for a moment before dismissing the idea. If I couldn’t see the ground, I was no better off than before.

I detached the drain on my Mana that was sustaining my hovering spell. A puff of Dark mist drifted off my body. I hadn’t even realized that I had been wreathed in the substance until that moment.

It was odd how natural this Mana felt to me. Attunements don’t normally give this much insight.

With nothing else to do, I picked a direction on the road and began walking, only to reach the edge of what seemed to be a high cliff. The road abruptly ended at this point. It looked like the world itself had been cleaved apart.

Turning and heading the other direction I didn’t face the same problem again, the road seemed just to go on and on. I was likely placed at the edge of the Zone I was supposed to clear if this could even be called a Zone.

As I walked, I tried out spell after spell to try and get a handle on the new attunement.

I could say one thing for sure: it was an incredibly weird Mana type.

Unlike normal Mana types, which seemed to respond well to being used within their own domain. Fire spells would work better if you were trying to start a fire instead of putting out one, for example. Dark Mana, on the other hand, seemed to work best when it was doing the opposite of what things wanted to do naturally.

For example, if I tried to increase my speed while walking forward, I would instead find myself slowing down. If I stood perfectly still and cast the same spell, however, I would instead begin sliding forward.

It was as if the Mana was opposition in and of itself.

There had to be something deeper to it, though—some layer I wasn’t seeing.

I really wished I had any Skills that actually helped me cast spells with this Mana type, but I didn’t bother taking any knowledge-granting Skills from my Class. I just went with my standard empowerment Skillset.

Suddenly, I felt something through my soulbond besides the static I had been listening to until now. It felt like my elemental was experiencing near absolute fear.

I had no idea what could make Death itself feel fear, but the signal was coming from right up ahead. So I was probably going to find out soon.

As I continued forward, I started coming across what at first appeared to be almost random piles of stone and rubble. These began to transform into walls that had clearly eroded over time and sustained some form of damage.

When I started to come across buildings, they would have entire parts sheared off, missing roofs, or in one case, looked like some massive creature had stepped on it.

I was doing this to see Ellie. It’s going to be okay, I’m going to see her.

Oh gods, I should have asked for more clarification as to what he meant by a trial, why did I—

I froze as I heard a noise off in the distance. It sounded like something had quickly scuttled across a hard surface. Clicks echoed across the ruins, the only sound that had disturbed the silence.

I kind of wanted to turn off the lantern, but it was my only source of light. Instead, I just turned it down a bit and moved closer to the walls.

Wait, wasn’t I missing something here?

Dark Mana is Mana relating to opposites. My eyes have Mana veins running through them. Shouldn’t I be able to cast a spell that reversed my vision so that the Dark was easier to see than Light?

I turned the lantern off and dropped it.

Hunched against a wall in the pitch black, I began fiddling with potential vision spells, after a few attempts where I completely screwed up my vision by making it feel like I was staring into the sun. There was a lot of darkness around, and it was very bright when inverted. I eventually found one that worked.

The entire area lit up as if it were wreathed in daylight. I saw a grand ruined castle just up the road I was travelling on. It turned out I was going in the right direction.

The problem with that is using my new sight, I now knew why my elemental was scared. 

Because I was too.