New World Day 9

  With my eyes damaged by my experiments, I was at a complete loss about what to do. I had to wait and hope that my regen skills would come through for me. In order to pass the time, I decided to try and sleep for as long as I could. My shoulder and hand needed time to heal anyways. What was one more thing added to the list.

  I stood up and walked to my right towards where my memory told me the bed resided until I bumped into the soft mattress, climbed into bed, and tried my best to sleep. It didn’t come easily. I worried my eyes would never heal. I had survived one crucible only to dump myself into the abyss. Dozens of disturbing futures whirled through my mind. Each future proved to be more terrible than the last. I had never before wished so hard for something, anything, to knock me unconscious. I tossed and turned in bed as I tried to hide from my fear. My exhausted body overcame my fears after a time and sleep finally arrived.

  I woke up multiple times only to refuse to get up or even open my eyes. I feared that if I opened them that I would still just see darkness. Fear pushed me to lay there in bed each time until sleep overtook me once again. After the fifth time, I reached my limit. There was no way that I could get back to sleep again. My potential blindness frightened me, but since I couldn’t sleep, I decided to check on my spiritual world.

  My breath caught in my chest and my emotions raged out of control when I saw my spiritual world. The sight that greeted me was not at all what I expected. It was much much worse. All of the cracks around my mana lake were healed, but there were now over two dozen cracks around my eyes. Not only that, these cracks were longer and wider than the previous cracks. I didn’t want to dwell too long on what I had done to myself. I needed a distraction of some kind. I turned to the other mana veins and wondered what I should do to pass the time. When I experimented with my sight, I found that it wasn’t easy to get mana out of the veins to enhance my body. There had to be a better way to go about things. A few different ideas came to mind, and there was one in particular that I zeroed in on, but I wasn’t sure of the best way to implement it. Before I went off on any more wild experiments, I needed to try a few things out first. I had only sent a bit of mana through the one mana vein and hadn’t even completed a full loop. There might be other effects if I started doing full loops.

  Due to all of the damage around my eyes, I refused to mess with the upper body mana vein. I sent a small amount of mana coursing through the four arm and leg mana veins instead. After a few dozen loops, I increased the amount of mana to a moderate amount, and 50 loops later I changed it to a fairly large amount. Waves of mana swished down the four mana veins hundreds of time. One thing that became apparent was that it was hard to control all four waves at once. There was no way I could split my concentration enough to create the kind of delicate waves required for the process I used on my eyes. Before I jumped to conclusions, I wanted to test one last thing. I poured the maximum amount of mana into each vein and began circulating it. I failed to see any change at first but when I increased the speed of the circulation, I started to feel some changes. They were small things at first. I felt the air running through the hairs of my arms. Then I felt that the fabric of jeans rubbing against my legs became coarser and coarser. The areas that the four mana veins passed through became more and more sensitive, and they felt like they were overflowing with strength. As that strength flood through my limbs, I noticed that the mana rushing through the mana veins had dropped by a fair amount.

  It seemed that it paid to be cautious once in awhile. I only needed to circulate my mana through the veins in order to boost the strength of my body. It took too long to get things going so it wasn’t ideal, but it was a start. I had an idea that should help in that regard. I intended to create smaller non-looped mana veins that would spread out from each of the main mana veins. I envisioned something similar to a network of small capillaries like those in my physical body. The issue that worried me would be how to keep from losing too much mana down the new mana veins. If I circulated the mana fast enough, would the momentum of the mana wave reduce the loss of mana to an acceptable level? I wanted a portion to go down the mana capillary anyways so some loss wasn’t just acceptable but necessary. If I lost too much mana down the capillaries then I might need to create valves or a membrane of some sort that would allow mana through only when sufficient pressure was placed against it.

  All of that was for the future though. The most recent experiments showed me that I still needed to create a bunch more mana veins. I felt only a tiny amount of the mana reach my extremities so they would each need their own mana veins. I planned to create 11 smaller mana veins. Once I completed those 11 mana veins, I could turn to making the mana capillaries followed by hopefully a spiritual body. That was my original goal after all.

  I lost a significant amount of mana thanks to me experiments, and I pondered over the description of the mana vein skill as I waited for my mana to recover. The System description said that I could circulate mana my mana with great speed without losing any in the process. Did that mean that what I had done wasn’t considered just circulation but enhancement as well, or did it mean that there was a limit to the speed at which I could circulate my mana before I started to lose some in the process? I hoped for the former, but feared that it was the later. There wasn’t anything I could really do about it, but if there really was a limit to how quickly I could circulate my mana then I might need to look to strengthen the walls of my mana veins in the future. Provided of course, that the mana capillaries worked out as I hoped they would. If they didn’t work out as hoped then the loss of mana might prove to be a blessing in disguise. For now, I decided to focus on creating the mana veins for my toes. If I screwed something up losing a toe wouldn’t be as bad as losing a finger…

  The experience I accrued from creating the main mana veins proved to be a great help in creating the secondary mana veins in my toes. The length of the new mana veins needed to be shorter and the loop tighter in order to fit in the smaller space of my toes, but I managed to create one that satisfied my requirements after a few dozen tries. The pain from completing a secondary mana vein when compared to completing a main mana vein was like a fly biting you versus an elephant stomping on you. My failed attempts meant that I ran out of mana after I completed the toes of my right foot. With one foot completed and no mana, the only thing I could do was wait until my mana regenerated to work on my other foot.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Nightmares and vivid mental horrors haunted my mind as I waited. I needed another distraction before I lost it. I focused on my breathing and pushed everything else out of my mind. One long breath in through my nose. Followed by a long breath out of my mouth. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. As I focused all of my mind on my breath, the ghosts that haunted my mind faded away. Before I knew it, my mana was regenerated and I created the mana veins for my other foot. I worried that not confronting my fears would come back to bite me in the ass later, but how do you fight something intangible like fears nightmares? I distracted myself by clearing my mind and concentrating on my breathing three more times. I saved a certain area of the body for last. The most delicate one of all. There was a need to protect it and nothing else. I created it without any issue, and everything was fine right up until its completion. A scream tore itself from my chest as an explosion of pain went off in my body. As my consciousness faded away, I realized that there were some pains that you could never prepare yourself for.

Spirit increased by 1!

Minor Mana Wielder ( C ) ***** evolved into Lesser Mana Wielder (UC) *****

Basic Spirit Regeneration (Passive) (B) * leveled up!

Basic Spirit Regeneration (Passive) (B) * leveled up!

Basic Spirit Regeneration (Passive) (B) * leveled up!

Minor Regen (Passive) ( C ) * leveled up!

Minor Regen (Passive) ( C ) * leveled up!

Minor Mana Control ( C ) * leveled up!

Minor Mana Vein (Passive) ( C ) ***** evolved into Lesser Mana Vein (Passive) (UC) *****

Name: Jason Silver

Job Name: N/A

LVL: 4 3%

Job LVL: N/A 0%

Job Points:

N/A

N/A

N/A

Titles:

Survivor (B) LVL 4 95%

Fool (B) LVL 7 90%

Pack Killer (B) LVL 3 81%

Beast Killer (B) LVL 3 76%

Risk Taker (B) LVL 5 97%

Repeated Risk Taker ( C ) LVL 6 14%

Compassionate Fool ( C ) LVL 1 78%

Curious Fool ( C ) LVL 3 71%

Stupid Fool ( C ) LVL 3 37%

Extremely Stubborn Fool ( C ) LVL 2 97%

Lesser Mana Wielder (UC) LVL N/A

Title Points:

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29

Stats:

HP:

MP:

Mana Regen:

Endurance:

Strength:

Speed:

Spirit

Bonus Points:

101/125

5/42

7.50 per min (-2)

13

9

9

6

12

Status Effects:

Regen, Spirit Regen, Disease Resist, Parasite Resist, Poison Resist, Spiritual Cracks x9, Blindness

Skills:

Basic Axe Mastery (B) LVL 7 56%

Basic Gun Mastery (B) LVL 4 78%

Minor Regen (Passive) ( C ) LVL 4 11%

Basic Spirit Regen (Passive) (B) LVL 7 5%

Basic Disease Resist (Passive) (B) LVL 6 72%

Basic Parasite Resist (Passive) (B) LVL 6 85%

Basic Poison Resist (Passive) (B) LVL 5 17%

Minor Mana Control ( C ) LVL 4 26%

Lesser Mana Vein (Passive) (UC) LVL 1 0%

Flexible Mana Lake (Passive) (B) LVL 1 0%

Pain Control (B) LVL 1 0%

Basic Close Combat Footwork (Active) (B) LVL 1 83%

Basic Ranged Combat Footwork (Active) (B) LVL 1 92%

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