Perhaps I had misjudged those boons, much like the nurture boon it wasn’t that they gave me something that I couldn’t do already, rather they made trivial an otherwise difficult task. While I waited for the kid to stir I played around with the anima and physical forms of a number of creatures in the dungeon and discovered what the boons had done. Before it had been a task of serious focus to create a new creature. Now the image of what would be created formed easily and could be manipulated and reshaped without constant effort to hold it together. Anima was also changed, what I had done with the kid to sustain his life with anima was possible with all of my creatures, my experiments had produced a pill bug 5 times the size of a normal one which laid eggs far more quickly.

Supplying cells and bodies with resources got easier after I got the boon as well though I hadn’t noticed. Sorry [System] I guess you are alright after all.

The practice was mostly to distract me from my patient, I knew that I needed to give him time to rest and recover and that by any sense that I had he was well on the way to recovery physically. Even the small spark of anima that was all that remained of his lifeforce was slowly recovering, I tried to understand how he was seemingly generating anima from nothing but all I could detect was a slow expansion of his reserves.

Watching the anima flow through him as it recovered I was entranced by the way that thin filaments of anima would leave the core and trace their way through the body. I noticed that where the filaments moved the cells were stirred to greater function, the improvement was very broad and the effect small, but I suspected that if his reserves were full the kid would be able to recover from injury faster and preform at a higher level than would be physically possible. This was probably a part of what let people survive in a world of magic and monsters.

The kid continued to sleep and I descended into my core room to distract myself by examining the flow of mana through my dungeon. The claiming of the upper cave and healing the child had drained my anima to a dreg of what it had been while my mana had continued to replenish quickly. I noticed that the mana seemed to be generated anywhere that was claimed, leaking from the walls of the chambers and tunnels. The newly claimed area was quite large however and the mana was pooling at the narrow entrance to the lower chambers and rushing down in a waterfall into the core room. The mana flowed into my core where it became directly usable. The bottleneck around the entrance to my lower tunnel was not a huge issue as I was hardly using most of my mana but I was bothered by the thought that there was waste in my system, if mana was going to be an important resource for me then I wanted to make sure that it was generated efficiently.

I watched the mana pool down into my core as time passed, idly working on my LEDs and failing to get them to work, I had a vague memory of how they were supposed to work but I was beginning to suspect that there was some crucial trick that I was forgetting. I tried to construct a fluorescent bulb out of quarts crystal and some noble gases and got that to work after a few minutes so I could not imagine what I was missing. But the task was calming and didn’t require anima so I served to pass the time.

It is often overlooked just how impressive a creature man is when an accounting of such things is made. For it is a sad truth that mere endurance in the face of trials great and many is not an impressive sounding thing when compared to the strength of beast or magic of elder beings. Yet that resilience is uncommon in life, for there are few great dragons who, being beaten, bruised, starving, and chased through the night would have continued on quite so long as young James.

Still as James awoke in the dark after the exhaustion and fear of the previous day he had hit the end of the endurance that his spirit could muster and fell back on that last and final resort of the human child, a strategy that could only be employed by a few of the worlds creatures.

His cries rang out in the enclosed space as he vented the grief and fear in call to any of his species that might hear, a gamble of evolution betting that aid would come before predators. If he had been anywhere else in the wilds of this unclaimed land he might well have died, but while no human was near to hear his cries there was one who remembered being such and who was also programed by ancient instinct to respond to those cries. And who in this new and strange form was uniquely suited to provide it.

Mab was in a foul temper, she always was when the forgotten was driving her to do something unpleasant. The fact that it was spring was not helping, spring meant that her peaceful winter solitude was coming to an end. She had spent the last few days preparing for a Seeing, one of her more common rituals and one that she actually understood fairly well. The noxious potion had finished brewing in the last few hours, a mix of powerful hallucinogens poison and regenerative power that would expose her mind to visions of the future and heal her of the damage that the brew would do as it worked through her.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The bag of knuckle bones lay beside her as she prepared the last of the tools for the ritual. A circle of white sand lay around her laid on top of a stripe of black charcoal that stood out from the brown dirt sharply. Around her were six bowls of fat and herbs each with a wick ready to burn for the duration of the ritual, what irritated her most about this was how she forgot the recipe for this almost as soon as she finished making it. She hated the feeling of helplessness that came of being the puppet of something bigger than herself but instinctively knew that she had to continue even if she did not know why.

The preparations done, the old woman lit the wicks and began to chant a spell known only to a few practitioners of the truly ancient magics of the world, though Mab did not know this even as she worked the spell it. The mana, to those that could see such things, began to writhe and twist within the circle sending ripples that were caught by the double circle around the old woman the brunt of the mana was stopped there but such was the power of the working that all around the hut where the old witch lived totems of subtle make began to glow as they dispersed and muted the emanations from the ritual.

Inside the circle the witch Mab was fading, the magic of the ritual far too much for the weak and frail human to bear. Shaking hands griped the bowl of green-brown liquid and brought it to her lips. As the potent brew disappeared a change was triggered in the magic of the circle as the mana that had begun to flag and weaken was redoubled even as it became more stable and controlled. Now steady hands reached for the bag of bones and emptied them onto the ground before the form of the old witch and something far older than human years looked out from those cold dark orbs and Saw.

A cackling laugh that was cold and harsh as the crackle and roar of glacial ice and deep as cold black winter nights shook the clearing. Lips pealed back from iron teeth and a savage grin crinkled a weathered face.

The kid was crying, This should not have been so surprising but it was non the less making it difficult to do much of anything. Even though I could do nothing to calm him down I felt terrible just letting him cry like this. The kid was clearly on the mend as I could see from his anima which had already begun to recover significantly. But he was also not healthy enough to let go yet either, it was night time and he still needed rest, the mana in the air here was giving him energy but once outside I suspected that he would start suffering. I had to assume that we were in the middle of nowhere and give the kid the best chance of survival he could get and to do that I would need to fuel him up and send him to the surface in top shape.

The rain had stopped in the last hour and I was hopeful that there would be people out searching for the missing kid, if I sent him out in the morning he would have the best chance of getting out and finding them.

Planning on sending the still weak kid out into the wild felt wrong but getting him back among people was the best plan and anything else would be a terrible risk to his life, one that I refused to take.

Dawn broke over the trees and the light drove back the creatures of the night even as those of the day began to stir. It was through this wood that an old woman walked, driven by a certainty of purpose that she could not understand and yet trusted. Mab was not in a foul mood this day, she could not say why this would be, the walking was tiring and difficult and the ritual had left her sore as it always did. Yet as she walked along she felt a lightness to her bones that she had not felt in many a long year. She was doing her best in fact to remain in a foul temper as was her practice but was having trouble quite managing.

“Right proper nasty business making a old woman walk all up and down a mountain like this.” the grumbling was a consistent drone as the lady walked.

A novice woodsman would likely taken her for inexperienced in the wild with the noise she made complaining. An experienced one might notice that her feet were always steady and soft making her voice the only noise she produced. A truly worldly and wise individual though would have noticed something far more important. In a world of magic and creatures of legend where skills could grow to grant legendary strength, when a grey haired person walks with confidence in a place of danger it is wise to leave them be.

At last though the woman came to a clearing with a few jumbled rocks strewn about and felt the instinct that has driven her loosen its hold and instruct her to wait here and rest until the appointed time had come.

Alright, it was time, with the jamming effect of the kids anima no longer affecting me since my surgery I was able to carve ladderlike handholds in the shaft to let him out. All he had to do was find them, something I was sure he would do in the growing light.

The kid had gone back to sleep after a few hours of crying and honestly I couldn’t blame him, I doubt I would have been much better in his place. The anima that he had was still low, but I knew I couldn’t keep him supplied forever. There might not be a limit with what I could do with magic but there was certainly one on my skill. The kid needed to go and find his people who would be far more capable of taking care of him.

I waited as the sun rose higher and light began to brighten the shaft, I covered the upper level of the shaft in a white quarts coating that reflected light and brightened the chamber. It was still a few minutes until the kid stirred and even then he did not immediately notice the hand and foot holds I had made for him. There was a certain anxious panic that flashed through me when he finally noticed, and with a brave look and a wipe of his nose on his sleeve the kid started to climb up and out of my domain.

With a final scramble once he reached the top he disappeared from my vision.

As he did so I felt an urge that I couldn't repress

Good luck to you kid, I don’t know who you are or what your story is but I wish you the best.