Mana: -1

Mana Recovery: 5% per hour

Time till full capacity: 4.2 hours

Due to the reconstruction of your mana core, mana recovers at one fifth its normal speed.

Alice had been quite busy in the last four days, she had finished smoke tanning the wolf skin and she had tried to read all ten pages of the terms and conditions. She failed miserably with the last one. She barely got halfway through the first page of it. But even though she had barely read it, she had read enough to know not to accept the offer. Not because of anything it said, but because it went through such effort to hide the facts from her, greatly diminishing the trust she had in it, and so, Alice denied the offer.

With not much else to do, Alice thought of making clothes with the wolf leather, but realised she had no idea where to start. Alice decided to try out one of her more neglected skills, [Fate Vision].

The moment Alice used the skill the world lost most of its colour, reminding her of a well aged photo, yellowed by time. Time slowed down, as if everything was swimming through a thick syrup.Alice tried to drag her arms towards herself so that she could get a better look and saw that she had become a mix of blacks, whites and greys, as if she was no longer a part of the world. Alice looked around before letting her eyes settle on a nearby tree, immediately, her head ached and she instinctively realised why. At the moment her mind was battling to understand the entire past, present and infinite futures of the tree, she needed a focus to limit the information she got at once. Alice recalled that in her dream the ‘focus’ was a book, while she felt that anything could be used as a focus, some would undoubtedly be better than others.

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Alice summoned the book and stared at the tree, this time there was no headache, after some time, new pages began to emerge from the book’s spine. The pages told of a seedling growing relatively uneventfully into a pretty normal tree and then eventually dying. What Alice found interesting wasn’t the day to day life of a tree, but the fact that the way it died changed every time she read it. It seemed to bounce between natural causes, a lumberjack and fire, with a few added extras like being knocked over in a storm. Excited by the things she read, Alice looked at the tanned wolf hide. She read about hunting and patrolling and sleeping, about the death of pack members and their replacement. This wasn’t what Alice expected a wolves life to look like, but she had no idea what it should look like, so she kept reading. Until she found a blank page.

The blank pages confused Alice as they shouldn’t be able to exist, if the future was yet to be known, then the words on the page would constantly change. If the past wasn’t known, the words would be visible but unreadable. Blank pages would only happen if that information has never and will never exist. The particular information that didn’t exist, was the wolf’s childhood, it had never been a cub or had a mother. There were also sections of unreadable gibberish interspaced within the wolf’s dreams. Alice wasn’t sure what this meant, so she read ahead to the hides future. Here she read about the hide rotting away over the course of a few years, maybe getting eaten by some hungry animal.

But she never read anything about herself trying to work the leather or making it into clothes. In her confusion Alice reached out to the hunk of leather, in between her fingers it felt hard and cracked, she knew she could do more with this skill than find out information, she just didn’t know what.

Having made no progress, Alice turned of the skill and planned everything she would do when her mana was replenished.