***
Tutorial Quest - Main
Allotted Time Remaining
56:01:37
***
Less than two hours and it would officially be a week since Alex had arrived in the tutorial. That wasn’t exactly true. He’d actually already been there for over a week since the quest’s countdown didn’t account for the six hours before he’d been forced to accept the task, but it made little difference. Now he just wished he’d waited longer to look at the prompt, though Alex doubted the system would have let him cheat its deathtrap for long. He pushed those thoughts away forcing his focus to the present. If he had time to waste on hypotheticals, he had time to train.
There were only seven weeks left before he’d need to kill the beast king, but Alex felt further from the goal's completion than he ever had. Escape had already been far-fetched when he’d learned about the quest. Now, with his abduction added to the list, Alex couldn’t imagine how he’d become powerful enough to complete it in time, and that frustrated him. He’d worked himself ragged those first few days to put even the smallest dent into the quest requirements, only to end up trapped and tortured; his levels stagnant and momentum diminished.
Realistically, the situation was only as equally impossible as it had been when he’d picked this option, so there was little to mope about. Unlikely as it was that he lived through the next fifty-six days, he would try. Worst case scenario, he should at least be able to take Trevor and Greyson with him to the grave. For the moment it was enough to keep him going, if the levels the men granted ended up putting him on track to completer his main quest, then he might just have a future to look forward to.
Finally reaching a semblance of calm, it still took Alex three tries before he fell into the partial meditative state most useful for his task. The issue wasn’t the meditation itself, but rather the cell he was trapped in. As much as he tried to avoid thinking about his surroundings, the enhanced senses of his system-improved body made a poorly veiled fact even harder to ignore. His cell, his clothes, himself, everything was filthy, the odor permeating the space as much an assault on his nose as the hammer was to his bones. It was expected considering his current living conditions, but far from something Alex could graciously accept. Adding it to the list of gripes he held against his captors, he eventually managed to push it to the periphery, his mind set on breaking into his inventory.
While the energy he’d been sensing had been entirely unmanageable during his initial attempts, Alex felt he’d come to better understand its elusive nature over the last few days. Rather than fight against the erratic movements, he learned how to somewhat predict them. This new proficiency allowed what he learned to be mana, to stay true to whatever nature it had that Alex couldn’t understand, while letting him shape it into something he actually found useful. After that things began to fall into place, a pattern that now appeared obvious having been missed during his prior days of fumbling attempts.
Initially, he’d thought the pull he felt when activating an ability was the mana, however it turned out to be much more complicated than that. There was mana, then there were skills. The mana encompassed his entire body through pathways akin to veins but in a slightly different way. Rather than a relatively closed system of pathways where the majority of energy sat in his “veins” the mana system differed in a few key ways.
There were parts of his body that absorbed mana, the things he’d assumed to be vein-like, and parts that stored mana. The pathways did the absorbing, a network of layers upon layers of tiny tracts that formed a full body mana absorbing field at the macro scale. They seemed to store little energy themselves, but rather provided routes for the mana to reach a hub that sat somewhere in his torso. To his inexperienced mental picture it looked a lot like a fuzzy blob, and not for the first time, Alex wished he had access to Sixth Sense. He spent a few more minutes examining random aspects of this whole system before forcing himself back on track. The changes his body had undergone had to at least be at the molecular level, and that fascinated him, but he knew better than to get lost in it.
Focusing on the blob he couldn’t quite make out, Alex made a few attempts at accessing his inventory, where the difference between the mana and the pulse became more identifiable. Each time Alex mentally activated a skill, it let out a ping of sorts. For his inventory, that ping traveled up his arm before fading out. He tried a couple other skills he knew to be inert before noticing the signal was headed towards his chest or, more specifically, the hub. Alex didn’t know how, but it seemed among other things these chains directly suppressed the buildup of energy in his torso.
If he was understanding it correctly, the blob was his mana pool and skills automatically called for mana from it to activate, even if it wasn’t labeled to have mana as a resource cost. Since the mana and signal were failing to reach each other, none of the skills could activate. That didn’t explain why Pain Resistance and Meditation still worked, but he didn’t have the luxury of wasting time to find out. His initial inclination was to attempt at brute forcing the process, but even with the additional knowledge, it would differ little from what he’d already been doing. Taking a moment to think about it, a better idea soon presented itself.
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Alex had become accustomed to basing the mana expenditure of his continuous skills, such as Sixth Sense, on his mana recovery rate rather than his mana pool's total value. When normally implemented, it would ration his mana in case of emergencies, now it made Alex think he could activate skills without the use of his pool. If he could intercept the skill’s signal and connect it to mana in his pathways that should work as a substitute. The only issue would be if the mana he pulled in wasn’t enough, but that shouldn’t be the case for resource-lite skills.
If the density of pathways in a given area were any indication, hands and feet were the prime mana absorbers of the body. He had no clue why, but it made sense with the men having specifically focused the energy dampeners on his wrists and ankles. Deciding his inventory wouldn’t be the best skill to test his theory with due to its proximity near the mana blackout zone, Alex went with something further from the epicenter of his troubles. It took him a few signal tests before he decided on his analysis skill. He’d tried to use it a few times upon waking a few days ago, but had given up after the constant lack of success. But with the skill’s positioning behind his eyes, it was far enough from his restraints that it should work with the new activation method, if he could manage it properly.
The first issue he noticed was his ability, or lack thereof, to pull in mana. Regeneration rates were fixed as far as Alex knew, but with his mana pool full, nothing trying to use the mana, and the cuffs’ passive sabotage, it was proving difficult for him to get a hold on. The whole process was like flexing a muscle he didn’t know he had, and Alex spent over an hour on just that. When he finally managed to find a consistent way to pull in mana the next issue, keeping hold of it, presented itself. Pulling the mana in felt like breathing with less sensation, he couldn’t feel the mana, but his mind’s eye showed him it was there. Holding the mana felt like summoning a headache.
It seemed to actively want to flee his pathways, and the mental strain that accompanied it nearly took him out on his initial attempt. Alex didn’t know if that was because his pool was full, or a consequence of the cuffs, but he pushed on regardless. During the course of that hour, he tried a few methods to get the skill working. Activating the ability then pulling in mana always failed due to his ineptitude with the energy, so he ended up pulling and holding mana before sending out the activation ping. It was his only realistic way to success, but Alex found himself having to inch the mana further and further up his pathways as it continuously failed to connect to the skill.
Mentally exhausted from all the meta-physical manipulation his brain only had a surface level understanding of, Alex activated the skill. The description finally populating in his vision making him smile, simple as it was. A notification that he barely registered resonating in the background.
***
Item
Name: Rock
Grade: G
Rarity: Common
Description: A gray slate rock.
***
He tried it a few more times after that, to get more familiar with the process and better at holding the mana before leaving meditation for a short break. His hope was to use the time to relieve his headache some, but the thirst and hunger set in quickly and he opted not to rest for long.
Before starting in earnest, Alex had to make sure the task was possible. He spent a little mapping out a tentative path and, while it would be tedious, it wasn’t impossible. With the sheer volume of infinitesimally small pathways, there were routes linking the whole of his body, even when it appeared to be entirely inert. A quick glance at his clock showed he still had four hours before the men arrived. If he was fast enough, he should have it done by then.
Alex started with trying to pull mana through the closest pathways to his skill that were still active. He saw a few on his forearm, but slight jostles seemed to alter those connections to the point they weren't reliable, so he moved his search up, and up. It was around mid-bicep where the worst of the epidermal restriction seemed to end. The deeper beneath the skin he went, the less interference there was, but to start he needed to be somewhere that had a more stable connection to the surrounding mana.
Soon, Alex found himself painstakingly tracing through a maze of paths to reach his skill. That wasn’t much of an exaggeration in the way inert paths acted as dead ends, some going as far as to drain the mana and disperse it back into the air, forcing him to start from the beginning. The worst part was that he didn’t actually know how deep he needed to go to reach the skill. The ability’s ping dispersed somewhere near his starting point, but even after thirty minutes of tunneling he still failed to activate the ability, and so he pushed forward.
His first milestone was his elbow another fifteen minutes later. It had been incredibly tedious, but Alex was praying the skill would work with the mana that far down his arm. It didn’t, and to make matters worse his focus on the ping made him lose hold of the mana, forty-five minutes of progress erased in an instant. It only took him fifteen minutes to recapture that ground but another half an hour to get past the joint, the way pathways worked on the bone confusing him some. Over the next hour, he got halfway down his forearm, the work only becoming more stressful as the viable pathways went from rare to scarce. The next time he sent a ping, he lost half his progress but didn’t let it get to him, Alex could tell he was close now. This time it only took Alex fifteen minutes to recover the distance, and a little while later, nearly three quarters down his arm, he took a moment to pause, his mental grip tight on the mana he’d dragged thus far.
By this point it was like playing a game of maze based Jenga. Every pathway he went through was akin to a block being pulled, as he hoped all his progress wasn’t reset to the start. Knowing he had time, Alex kept his hold while dropping into a deeper meditation as he focused to a level he never had before, completely splitting his focus between the mana and the skill's activation. Finally, he triggered the skill, and for the first time in what felt like forever he accessed his inventory, the pounding in his head momentarily overshadowed by palpable relief spreading throughout his entire body. Recognizing the call of a notification, he immediately pushed it away, instead readying to grab something: water, food, a weapon. As he made the mental command to his storage, Alex promptly passed out.