Chapter 142—Understanding Mana

Before stepping away from the ritual screen, Tom checked how fast it would recharge. This particular artefact thankfully, was better than most. In only fifty-three minutes, he could find out specifics on the hidden trait. That wasn’t bad at all. He rubbed his hands together in glee. Soon he would be able to read the truth, but right now there was testing to complete..

This was going to be fun.

With a burst of energy, he grabbed a spear and launched himself into the familiar forms. Mastery guided his movements, making the rapid thrusts and shifts and exaggerated spins smooth. He focused on both speed and channelling power through every motion, but try as he might the movements were not stressing his body.

He could, of course feel the new trait. The continual flow of earth mana and the growing store of it inside him told him the trait existed as more than just words on the screen. The extra mana was welcome, as it allowed him to remove the majority of the downtime he experienced when trying to create new spells.

It was welcome, but it wasn’t everything Fateful Earth Body was supposed to offer.

Despite his laboured breaths, he hadn’t generated even a single point of fate and he had been exercising for minutes.

That pissed him off.

It wasn’t at the level of the trait being a failure, but it definitely wasn’t a positive. He was sweating and had managed to generate, nothing. He felt the flush of embarrassment. It was the potential fiancé throwing the offered ring away. A slap in the face in the office lobby. A failure of execution that everyone would laugh at. His old earned skill had generated a point of fate every ten minutes. If this new trait couldn’t do that and it had cost him what it had… and if… No, he couldn’t think like that, those invasive thoughts weren’t necessary. They weren’t him. He had felt the energy released in the creation of the trait. With that much power and the base inputs, the result had to be a great one.  

The issue was spear mastery. It was doing too much work with how it smoothed everything over. It gifted efficiency, and that was the opposite of what he required. He needed rawness, chaotic movements to strain his muscles.

He threw the spear away in disgust.

It was useless.

His eyes fell upon the war hammer were it hung innocently. Furiously he seized it. The skill description had explicitly referenced stressing his body and haphazardly swinging a heavy weapon would give him that.

A minute later, he stopped.

Katas by themselves were not enough. Even with the unwieldy hammer, they were streamlined movements. Designed by experts to flow effortlessly from once stance or blow to another. 

He needed pressure, so he activated the tier one combat dummy.

It was a magical artefact. It was not the same as what you might see in a training gym on earth where all you could do was hit it. The Existentia version was more than that, it could absorb the power of the blow and retaliate with it, to the point that anyone with high offense relative to defense had to dial down its power. 

It was perfect for this testing. Its weapon was a leather lined club, and he understood the maths and algorithms that drove it.  It would not target his head, but a body blow would break ribs, a strike to a limb would crack bone and disable him. It was not an opponent to take lightly.

It was designed for serious training but not for battle-hardened veterans, but rather for talented kids. For Tom, the blows were telegraphed and slow enough for him to duck or step back to evade them. Unless he made a mistake, it was not going to hurt him, but the very existence of the counter attacks added extra dynamism to his testing regime.

He swung and launched into a flurry of blows.

It reacted and attempted a counter strike. Within his furious rhythm, he quick stepped back to create space and then lunged forward to deliver a blow that would have crushed the skull of someone many ranks higher than him. Of course, with his practice hammer and the tier of dummy he did no damage, but it was damn satisfying to see it stumble backwards under the weight of a single blow.

None of what he did aligned to recommended hammer forms, but he was angry and had to stress his body, so he incorporated attacks and footwork that were more suited to sword fighting. Defensively, he settled on performing lots of quick step shuffles rather than a single decisive large movement and then offensively; he used short arm stabs and swings that landed hits without the concussing bone crushing force that a standard war hammer strike was supposed to impart.

Sweat dripped into his eyes. His muscles complained at the strain he was imparting on them. Fate began to be released, and he nearly sighed out loud as the stress and tension dissipated. But the dummy counterattacked, and he had to spend the fate before it went to something useless, which he did by pushing it toward the tier one spell he was practicing. The first of the useless ones he had to gain in order to reacquire the lost Earth Shield.

A momentary stray thought distracted him and, as tried to slide to the side with quick steps, he stumbled. The dummy, with its miniscule brainpower took advantage. The club swung towards him on an inevitable swing of doom. It was telegraphed and he could trace its trajectory, and it was slow as well. It didn’t matter with tangled feet he had no chance to spring aside to avoid it.

He tensed and rotated slightly to take the blow on his upper arm rather than his elbow.

Conjured stone formed around the point of impact and the hard leather padded club landed with a solid thunk. The stone crumbled, absorbing some of the kinetic energy, but not all of it. The residual power of his opponent’s blow reverberated through his entire arm. Without any armour, the blow should have forced him to retreat to get healing, but when he checked with his free cast of Touch Heal, there was hardly any damage at all. The impact, in addition to being partially absorbed had been spread over the entire arm. It wasn’t even going to bruise. It was like he had been struck with a rolled towel instead of the more dangerous hammer.

That, he decided could be useful. A second proven plus from his chimera trait.

The dummy seemed to stumble in surprise at the lack of damage it had inflicted. It hadn’t of course, this was just his human brain searching for patterns. Logically, what was happening was a programmed hesitation that the combat dummy would always make after landing a hit to allow the human to end the bout in case they needed to get healed. He was anthropomorphising the actions of the simple machine because, that second of opportunity, had nothing to do with his success at tanking the strike, only with his failure to avoid or block the blow. He ignored the good sportsman ship and instead counterattacked in a flurry of motion. He landed three, four, ten successful blows and then, because he was watching it intently he saw the trap he had run himself into. Danger Sense probably would have flagged the risk in time, but without it, he had spotted the threat too late. No matter what he did, he was going to get clobbered again. Time slowed down, and he launched himself out of the way. His body twisted in an impossible way and he felt the wind of the club pass his belly button and the slightest of grazing impacts. This was not his traits from the darkhole trial or the one he got as a gift dilating his perception of time, as the combat dummy had not registered as an opponent. What he was experiencing was purely the result of his latest acquisition.

That was increased attributes to allow him to escape an otherwise damaging attack.

Even as he recovered his footing, the boost of speed left him. Fateful Earth Body released more fate, and he directed it towards both gaining a sideways evolution and getting closer to a perfect cast of Conjure Stone.

He cast the spell, and it failed immediately but he noted how. He would keep monitoring and hopefully the failures would be a road map to something better.

His eyes stung from the sweat running into them.

He kept going.

When ever he made a mistake, his new body saved him from any significant harm. Sometimes his skin hardened, which helped, but left a deep bruise that required healing to prevent a degradation in his battle form. The conjured stone shield against this particular enemy was the most significant contributor. It blocked the club effortlessly while his skin defence was intended more for piercing and struggled against the blunt force the combat dummy was delivering. Then there was the attribute boost. It worked beautifully, and the burst of speed and strength allowed him to recover from his terrible footwork. Though occasionally, when he really screwed up, the extra speed didn’t always get him out of trouble, which was why he marked its performance down slightly.

The steadily building fatigue forced regular mistakes, which was why he was able to test all three bonuses in detail.

The testing wasn’t all perfect. Danger Sense naturally didn’t ping once. Its loss stung, even if the extra protection granted by his new body offset that. Fate generation was good. Admittedly, he was testing it in a vigorous training session, and he would have to see how it went in real life, but in a battle setting he was generating a point of fate every two to four minutes.  That boost was potentially massive though he still had to experiment to see how or even if he could trigger it discretely around people.

The results of the evolution potion Tom decided were worthwhile. Yes, he was going to have to spend months training to recreate what had been consumed, but it was worth it.

The thought of spending months in the lairs, bumbling around while blind and deaf to get Danger Sense back was unpleasant. He winced at the memory of how painful acquiring that skill had been. Running into a wall hurt, but it was the terror of facing the unknown blindly that was the hardest. The act of willingly walking forward without any protections when at any moment a monster could strike you required immense courage.

The resolve to advance while consumed with the dread of an imminent strike. Knowing that your shirtless back was about to be subjected to tearing teeth or slashing claws and proceeding, anyway.

That was hard and something he was going to have to do again. Though, now that he was thinking about it, he wondered how his new trait would work in that situation. Would the bats even be able to hurt him? Could he still use them to gain Danger Sense? If his new body completely nullified the threat, he wasn’t sure they would still be useful. Which meant facing something even more dangerous.

His thoughts rushed from glee to concern to worry, and then back to joy. The change was massive, and he wasn’t sure how to judge it.

Finally, the internal alarm set to alert him that the ritual status screen was ready went off.  

He stepped back and dropped his weapon. The dummy ground to a halt. His breaths were laboured, and he glanced over to the ritual status screen. There was no reason to delay. 

From everything he knew, the nature and source of the mana storing trait was pretty clear, but he had to get confirmation on exactly what it did. The whole thing troubled him. It didn’t make sense in the context of the precognition mana storage skill he had previously earned. If he had an aspected mana trait, then why didn’t the previous skill description mention it?

“No point speculating,” he told himself as he paused briefly to wipe the majority of the sweat from his face with one of the towels. It made him hotter, but it was nice not to be dripping as he leant over the screen.

Then, as prepared, as he was ever going to be, he placed both hands on the device and triggered it. This was something that had been with him for years, so it was never going to come up randomly, but because he knew its name, the artefact responded immediately.

Words flowed across the screen. 

Trait: Aspected Mana Storage.

You can store mana for up to eight different affinity types.

This ability will scale with your magic attribute and allow the storage for each chosen mana affinity for up to half your mana pool with a minimum of eight.  

Current aspected mana stored: Earth, Precognition.

Find new mana type sources to absorb from in order to expand this list. 

Tom read the description with interest. Unbidden his eyes flicked up to the artefacts in the cupboards above. They contained sources of mana. If he used them it wouldn’t be like earth and precognition both of which he could replenish himself but if he could carry around an extra forty eight mana he wouldn’t turn his nose away from that. Especially if he could develop spells aligned to the mana type.

The next task was to calculate the rules around Store Precognition Mana and Fateful Earth Body.  

His magic stat was currently only five having grown a total of one point over three years. That meant the eight minimum was in play. With his new trait giving him four times that amount, he would have thirty-two mana in it, which was the same as precognition had granted.

He frowned slightly at that.

He would need to wait and confirm, however, he had a sneaky suspicion that the precognition storage ability instead of granting thirty two mana actually granted four times like the sub ability of his new trait.

It didn’t matter.

The combined effect of this was that for someone of his rank he now had access to a ridiculously large amount of mana. Then again, he wasn’t the only one. From the spells Corrine had demonstrated in their friendly duels, she had even more mana than he had. 

With his curiosity satisfied, he spent ten minutes getting out the lightning machine from the illusion protected cupboards and then focused on absorbing mana. He had done this before, but he felt the difference immediately. Now that he knew he had a trait to do the heavy lifting the mana flowed… um… flowed like treacle, but nevertheless it found a home inside of him. Despite the torrent of sparks that it created, the amount of free mana was low and it took him almost ten minutes to fill the eight mana capacity.

Then he snapped his fingers and pushed the lightning affinity mana into a Spark. A bolt struck out at the combat dummy and left deep scorch marks.

Tom smiled.

It was a minor benefit. Precognition mana included in the Spark spell made it act more intelligently. It would target weak spots and deliver just enough power to get the result he wanted. If he hit a cloud of bugs rather than some getting turned into charcoal and some surviving, they would all die with their brain stems burnt out.

That was the advantage of precognition mana.

Against some enemies it was a massive boost, but if sheer destruction was required or if their were no weaknesses to target, the precognition affinity mana actually made the spell slightly weaker.

Lightning affinity mana unsurprisingly did not act that way. It supercharged the spell. It wasn’t twice as strong, but it was close. His mind raced at the confirmation of his suspicions. His carefully reasoned plans and intentions to specialise in his high affinity elements might not he realised be the best strategy. If he got fire mana, then he should aim to get a spell that could make the most of its specific characteristics. Then there were more exotic specialisations outside the elements. Not arcane, but stuff like shadow, sword and space which in the right spell could have a multiplicative effect.

For example, shadow mana mixed into a camouflage spell could super charge it, or sword and air mana infused into air blades might make them a number of times more powerful than usual.

“Research,” he whispered. “And lots of it. And fuck it, I’m going to have to expand my knowledge base.” The words did not give justice to the herculean task he was assigning himself.

This wasn’t going to be reading books or asking Dimitri for guidance. The knowledge he needed probably didn’t exist, at least in human hands. There would be civilisations built around using aspected mana, but humans weren’t one of them. He was going to need to produce his own hard data by running experiments.

Plus, it was probably overly idealistic of him to assume he would have a choice of affinity. It wasn’t like he’d be able to create another six mana generation skills. The two he had been successful in acquiring had leant on his impressive personal affinities and even then, it took April and months of work to make it happen. The selection of his final six would probably depend on what efficient sources of affinity mana were available either from Known Heretic or more directly from the orphanage and Dim.

“Research and discuss with Dimitri,” he corrected, hoping the older man could at lease answer the second question around what natural treasures he could be given in order to fill his storage.  .

Decision made he refilled his reserves and then packed the equipment away and then he refocused on ineffectively trying to hurt the combat dummy. The aim was not to win it was to test his new trait and based on the number of times he was struck in his testing was exceedingly effective. Winning or hurting it, he soon discovered, was potentially impossible. Even after he resorted to using Power Blow, he still couldn’t leave any significant marks on it and it was only a tier one version.

The failure illustrated how far he had to progress to even reach his previous power levels and then he had to double or triple that again to become a force capable of shifting the competition in humanity’s favour. 

With five minutes to go before the mandatory two hours were complete, he lowered his arms and risked one final check of the ritual status screen. When he had been five, leaving evidence of using the device during these sessions would have been suicidal. Now that he was older, that threat was no longer the consideration. His peers were using it all the time. There was regular bragging when someone had gotten an extra point in strength or agility. Their abuse of the artefact for trivialities opened it up for him to use it more openly.

It was, Tom recognised, most likely a deliberate design choice aimed to protect reincarnators like him. 

With hands on the device, he focused on the Precognition Mana Storage Skill.

The exact wording of the trait appeared on the screen

Skill: Store Precognition Mana – Tier 1

This skill boosts Aspected Mana Storage and allows the trait to store four times more precognition mana than usual. When stored mana is above the baseline amount 2% of stored energy will be lost every minute.

He nodded as he read the details. It had been updated to reflect his extra knowledge. It still functioned the same as ever, allowing him to store thirty-two points of mana and have those points decay over time. The only difference was now he knew the underlying mechanism and when his magic stat increased to sixteen that thirty-two would go to sixty-four and then every time he doubled his magic attribute after that the amount of precognition mana he could store would also double.

It was a wonderful synergy, and it, along with Fateful Earth Body, turned Aspected Mana Storage from an average trait to an extraordinary one. In its base form, it increased his mana pool by between three and five times, but with mana storage traits that became a factor of up to twenty, which was beyond huge.

Tom nodded a silly grin on his face.

For a moment, he imagined the future and the abilities he could possess.

Danger Sense and related precognition abilities acting over ten times stronger than everyone elses, his titles supercharging his attributes, Fateful Earth Body, the divine fruit making everything better, Known Heretic creating a flow of high tiered resources and then him possessing more mana than even those who had all the traits focused on increasing their reserves. All those different threads would come to together to form the nucleus of something special.

He could feel the potential. A reality breaking strength to rival Throm a person who could turn a mountain into a sculpture.

It was a base to rival the Dragon.

He could become the kind of being that powerhouses would only whisper about.

It would require work to realise.

But that was something he controlled, and he had never been afraid of pushing his body, mind, and soul. 

Years, it would take years of dedicated training, but the tapestry that DEUS had woven was becoming more and more clear.

Her vision to save humanity.

Everything was not on his shoulders. He knew that. She was sure to have other plans in motion, but… he could taste his own future.

With the tools he had and those he was yet to gain, he could save humanity.

He could guarantee Em’s future. He would not be a leaf being blown helplessly around by a cyclone, a victim of fate, it was possible, not a guarantee but just a maybe, there was a chance he could become strong enough to control his own destiny and save his little sister.

All he had to do was work, and that was something he was good at.