There it was, hilt up in the ground. It looked as if the light around the blade bent to avoid it. The black blade called to Lyra almost as if she could hear it speak. Her eyes locked on it as she kneeled down and reached forward. Grasping the blade, she lifted it up in line with her eyes and looked over the script written on the blade. Runes she had never seen before laced the blade and handle. Taunting her with secrets that she couldn’t know yet.

“If this works like it did in the game, all I have to do is resonate with the mana inside.”

With the blade in hand, she worked on channeling her mana out from her center, but something kept her from moving more than a few inches from her core. With every failed attempt to move her mana Lyra felt pain start to build up.

“The fuck is this? It’s like I’m trying to move through molasses inside my body. This should be the easiest place to move my mana.”

Stopping for now, she sits down and focuses inward. Examining why the mana can’t go through her body like it should. Minutes pass as she works on it, the glowing black orb of power inside her consuming her thoughts. She feels out the way it moves. It took close to an hour before she finally saw it. The mana wasn’t moving badly because something was wrong with her body. No, if anything she was built to move mana through herself like gliding on ice. The issue was that her mana was thicker than anything she had ever seen.

Her natural pathways in her body were formed like a river. Completely fine to hold the water as it went by, but unable to handle the flood waters that were her mana. This was why she had nearly died on arrival, it was so dense that her body couldn’t handle the pressure. The more she processes the world around her and what she has become, the more she feels cursed. It was then that she made a realization. Looking back towards her tail, the glorious blonde fur ending in a purple tip. Inside her tail were innate runes of power, and better yet they are void based. Sending a tendril of power down the connection to her tail from her core, it flowed with such ease that she almost couldn’t tell that it was still moving slowly.

[Mana Manipulation 2 → 3]

“This is what I was missing. I should be able to bind the blade finally and if I study my tail, I should be able to combine the runes needed to form my Novice Core.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Slowly and gently, she brought the blade close to her tail and then in the final inches moved her tail forward to touch it. Channeling the mana into the blade she felt an immediate resonance like no other item she has ever used before in the game. Maybe it was that she was in a new world, or maybe it was her affinity with the Void, but she felt her power flowing to the blade. The blade kept drawing in more and more mana as it greedily absorbed all it could take. Trying to pull the blade from her tail didn’t work either as it had latched on somehow. Seconds passed as she fed the blade seemingly endless amounts of mana.

Seconds turned to a minute, then two, and then everything went dark for Lyra. One second she was channeling mana, and then the next she was waking up with grass and dirt in her mouth from falling face first into the ground. Sitting up, she spit out the dirt and tried to get the taste of grass out of her mouth.

“Gross. I feel like I got wrung dry.”

Looking in, she saw her mana was heavily diminished. Reviewing her status, she found herself at almost empty with a bit left over to spare. The blade was ravenous if anything.

“Taking so much of my mana just to bind must mean that it's at least powerful.”

It took a second as the flood of information about the blade came back to her as she slowly recovered. The blades information seemed like it was less than open about all its secrets, but the one thing it was open about was its mana drain ability. Each attack made with the weapon would siphon mana from the target and deposit it into a storage gem on the crossguard for some kind of use. As Lyra looked the blade, and the new gem on it a new screen opened up.

[Congratulations on completing the quest - Claim the Void Blade]

She was ok for one second before suddenly it felt like her guts were being ripped apart. Her pathways were getting rewritten as her core condensed and was refined. Looking inwards, she saw the new runes forming inside of her. She realized that the system was giving her a Novice Core as a reward for completing the quest. As her core finished up her breathing was finally calming down. She knew for sure that there was no way this was a game still. The pain was too much for her to imagine someone would ever play it.

Internally her pathways glowed brightly while maintaining the dark appearance of the previous core. Her mind wandered to her newly formed Novice Core. The Core rotated slowly now with the new patterns holding it in place, and with her new pathway marked with the runes she could finally channel mana through her body. It was still slow but now she had full access to her high mana pool. Opening her eyes she looked down to where the Blade sat once again stabbed through the ground. She reached again for her new weapon. The tool of her survival just as dangerous to her as her enemies.