Chapter Thirteen

Three, tangentially located behind Pa Pa Jiang’s restaurant, New York City, Day 51

  After watching Ms. Winters absorbing the mana for a few minutes, Three noticed that he had managed to absorb upwards of 95% of it already and had stopped seizing, so it just grasped at the remainder and channeled it back into its core for other uses, and began to focus on the behavior of its mana in Ms. Winter’s body.

  For the first dozen or so minutes, the channeling seemed to work as planned, with Ms. Winters subconsciously interpreting the pattern and beginning to channel it. Unfortunately, just before Ms. Winters began to physically adjust to the pattern, the channeling was disrupted internally.

  After that, Three was forced to wait and watch, as the internal battle of mana inside Ms. Winters too delicate to interfere with at this point. The pattern it had painstakingly recorded was being fought off, countering in turn, and ultimately being slowly broken down by the mana already in the body. It took hours for Three to notice that the mana fighting back against the pattern was a pattern in itself, some sort of vague and ephemeral pattern tied to every cell in Ms. Winters body, a natural pattern as it were. This was incredibly intriguing to Three, as it had never really considered that such a thing could exist, and its thoughts immediately began to drift to how to use such patterns to its advantage, before it redoubled its focus, paying significantly less attention to its overall body than the area immediatly surrounding Ms. Winters and Ms. Winters himself.

  As Three watched the patterns fight each other all over the Ms. Winters’s body, with the natural pattern steadily winning, it began to notice slight disruptions in the natural pattern, repeated over and over again at almost every point of conflict between the two, and while the pattern it had provided lost in most cases, each conflct appeared to subtly change the natural pattern in the process. Three wasn’t certain but it hoped that the pattern might still succeed at its job, even as it deteriorated.

  In a last spark of conflict, just as the pattern it had provided was about to be destroyed, the last spark of mana in the pattern reserved for finalizing and stabilizing it in the host suddenly surged through Ms. Winters's body, waging one last great battle, its death struggles in a sense, and though it ultimately failed to win, that burst was the most successful in adjusting the natural pattern by far, and in the end the natural pattern survived, different than before, though Three didn’t know how.

  Three expected the natural pattern to immediately begin channeling throughout Ms. Winters’s body, but to its surprise found no progress there either, every time some of the mana began to channel, it was suddenly cut off and reabsorbed. Over the hours, then days of this happening over and over again, the mana began to change inside Ms. Winters, strange yet subtle shifts in density, nature, and wavelength began to propagate more and more through the pool of mana, until, finally, like a small tear in Three’s mana pool, a single fragment of the pool suddenly wasn’t Three’s anymore, and the change spread rapidly through the mana in Ms. Winters, soon after the channeling reignited in the absence of Three’s influence, advancing at significantly higher speeds than it had expected, finishing in minutes.

  As the monster cat began to regain consciousness, Three noted how its size had almost doubled once again, its fur growing even more pale, and though it still looked more or less the same even a cursory glance let alone the full analysis of what it had just witnessed would have told it that Ms. Winters’s body now had some measure of passive magical reinforcement, a portion of his mana constantly flowing throughout his body and strengthening it. Three worried if Ms. Winters would still be friendly.

  To Three’s surprise, mana began to flow towards Ms. Winters’s throat and mouth, and shortly thereafter, Ms. Winters spoke, “Mrrr… Hrrr… Harrr… Hall… Harro… Hallo… Hello.”

  “Hello, Ms. Winters!” Three responded somewhat cheerfully, hiding its worry, “It seems my plan more or less worked if you can talk and manipulate mana somewhat now. How are you doing?”

  “Haak… Okk… Okkarr… Okaaie… Okay.” Ms. Winters managed to say, “Haak... Haat… What. Hsss… aass… is. Mrrr… Maarr… Mana?”

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  Three pondered, coming up with a strategy, then channeled a wisp of grey mana out of its core to float between them, “Mana is an energy like this, which you can use to do magic, like sorcery, or the channeling you are using to talk right now. If you don’t entirely get it, let’s see, the next time you talk, concentrate really hard on the area around your throat and mouth and try to ‘feel’ yourself talking?” it suggested.

  This time, Ms. Winters repeated himself over and over again, speaking very carefully and slowly, as if trying to sound out the words “Hrrr… Hall… Hello. Okaie… Okay. Haat… What. Hsss… is. Marr… Mana.” This continued on for quite a while, about three days overall, and Three channeled just a touch of mana and sent some encouragement Ms. Winters’s way to help keep him going while he figured it out. When he finally made some real progress, speaking in clear words, “Hallo… Hello. Okaie… Okay. What. Is. Mana.” A look of realization appeared on his face, “Is. This. Marrka!” he started choking and wheezing when he accidentally interfered with the channeling construct allowing him to speak, and needing to take several minutes to recover before trying again, “Was that mana?”

  “Yeah, that’s mana, you also have some flowing through your body too, so try to check that out next.”

  It took significantly less time for Ms. Winters to find the channeling construct in its body, only about a day of pacing, leaping, play swiping, and similar activities. Three suspected that Ms. Winters got distracted about ten minutes in, but even then he managed to figure it out eventually. “I think I found it.” Ms. Winters said.

  “Great! Now, I want you to try taking that cycle and turning it off, just for a bit. Feel around the cycle, until you find a place with a lot more mana than anywhere else, then, I want you to start holding mana in that place, as much as you can, until the cycle shuts down.” Three said.

  This was the hardest activity yet, and even with guidance and advice from Three throughout, it took Ms. Winters an entire week, but he managed to shut it off. “I did it!”

  “Congratulations!” Three cheerfully told him, moving to the next step in its plan, “Now, I want to ask you to do something, okay?”

  “Sure, what!” Ms. Winters excitedly answered, losing control of his suppression and causing the cycle to gradually spin back into life.

  Three hesitated a moment, “Okay, so, you see… Technically, you are no longer my creature, okay. You took over all the mana inside you when you became smarter, okay.” Ms. Winters looked confused, but otherwise calm, “So, I would like to contract with you instead, okay? It’ll be a little different than the first time, but it should help with your magic control too, is that okay?”

  Ms. Winters paused to think about it, then replied, “Okay, I will make a contract with you.”

  Three was immensely relieved by that, and began the process of carefully excising a small shard of its core and repairing the damage left behind. The process took an hour, but in the end Three was unharmed and had a roughly one centimeter long sliver of core which it maneuvered between the two with sorcery, and then it explained, “Okay, so, this is technically a part of mana channeling, we are going to connect our mana pools with this shard - no don’t sniff if!” he reprimanded the curious cat, “So, the way this will work, per se, is that I’ll channel some mana into the shard while giving you my terms, imprinting those terms in the shard and linking my mana pool to it, then you will do the same, and then we both pour as much mana as possible into the shard as a sign of consent, and then it will enter you and sit in your mana pool, okay? If we fail the second part then I have to wipe the shard, and we have to negotiate, and then do it all over again, so please go along with it for now unless there is something that makes you really uncomfortable, and please avoid any unreasonable terms on your end. Do you understand?” Three asked.

  “Yes.” Ms. Winters replied.

  “I, Dungeon Core Three, do hereby offer this contract to the Cat identifying itself before me today as Ms. Winters, that he shall protect and serve me for so long as both of us live, and shall not seek to do me harm by any will but my own.” Three began, channeling his mana to the shard.

  “Uh, I, do hereby offer this contract to Dungeon Core Three, that, uh, so long as both of us live, Three shall aid me in my pursuits to, do, stuff? Oh, and won’t attack me with a gun or scare me off a fire escape! Yeah, that about does it!” Ms. Winters said, while channeling mana into the shard, trying to mimic Three’s tone and failing miserably.

  “I agree to the terms,” Three said, seeing Ms. Winters’s terms were full of loopholes, and began channeling mana into the shard.

  “I agree to the terms,” Ms. Winters said and also began channeling mana into the shard.

  As more and more mana poured into the shard, it began to get brighter and brighter, like the mana crystal before it, and then diffused into a cloud of grey light and rushed into Ms. Winters chest, coming to sit in the middle of his mana pool, right behind his heart, and rapidly recrystallized, absorbing his mana pool in the process, growing steadily bigger to match the capacity, until it was about three inches across. Ms. Winters was grimacing from the discomfort, but once it finished, and his organs adjusted, he calmed down again.

  “What just happened?” Ms. Winters asked.

  “You became a full-fledged monster,” Three replied.