I have started to get a trickle of mana from the connection to my forest. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning, but now it has doubled my mana production. I have to force myself to not use that mana on maintaining my form, if I start to grow back to my normal size then they might get suspicious. It hurts and is mentally exhausting to do, literally struggling to not eat after starving for days and having food being presented to me, but it is necessary.

It will be a couple days before I can attempt an escape, a week at most. The fungus spores are still nice and fresh for my use. I can use them to open up a hole in the bars large enough for my small body to fit through and then use them to tie up or otherwise disable them. I need more Solar Energy for that first though.

It might not affect flesh and bone creatures in the same way that it affects mana based creatures, but flesh and bone creatures are still affected by the manaless atmosphere. I am struggling more and more to keep my wits sharp with every passing day and I have a steady, albeit small, stream of mana to rely on, my captors are having it worse than I am. Yeah, it won’t kill them any time soon, but the lack of mana causes a kind of mental stress that I don’t think they were prepared for. They are obviously stressed and agitated, to the point of yelling at each other. They haven’t quite come to blows yet but they came close.

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Unfortunately, this means that they relieve their stress by way of beating me again. I can still heal the actually dangerous injuries, but I don’t have the mana to heal the rest. Were I made of flesh and bone I would have several broken bones and would likely be dead, but as it is I have bruises all over my body, and moving hurts. As long as I remain curled up in a ball I am fine, and I intend to stay like this as much as I can, but anything else is painful. To make matters worse nothing is healing naturally, I simply don’t have the mana to spare to treat anything that isn’t life-threatening.

I don’t think I have ever hated anyone or anything more than I hate these three men. I want to see them suffer for what they’ve done to me. Not kill them though, I don’t want their blood on my hands.

Anyway, I’m tired, and in pain. I’m going to sleep now.