Sarah awoke with a strong headache. All of her limbs were bound and she felt she was suspended in the air as she could not feel the floor or walls. She gave an experimental tug against her restraints with each arm and leg, but was unable to feel it loosen at all. In fact, by the time she tugged a fifth time, she felt that piercing sensation coming from her bindings and she lost consciousness again.
When Sarah regained consciousness some unknown time later, she kept her limbs still, fighting every instinct to struggle. ‘Well, this certainly looks bad. Not that I can see anything in here. I suppose my options for escape are fairly limited. I could hope my trackers find the cave I crawled in and rescue me, but that is almost certainly a worst possible scenario for me. I could also struggle against these bindings again, but that certainly didn’t go well for me last time. Is there even anything else I could try?’
Sarah thought for a while, occasionally feeling a pulsating sensation flow through her veins coming from her bindings, and then flowing back out of her body and into the bindings. ‘Well, that is certainly unnerving.’ She thought to herself. ‘At least I’m not thirsty or hungry yet. Is that strange? How long have I been unconscious?’ Sarah shook her head to clear her thoughts, only to stiffen as she waited for her bindings to sedate her again. Luckily, they seemed unbothered by her actions this time and the piercing sensation did not come.
Sarah was then letting her thoughts wander through the events of the last couple days, thinking over what had happened to her so far when an idea finally struck her. ‘Status! Didn’t mother mention something about how mana was used to operate the status? Do I even have enough mana to use my status, though? Either way, I think it sounds more promising than fighting these bindings or waiting for be captured by my father’s men. Perhaps something in my status could help me out of this mess. After all, who knows how long it would take for people to rescue me, and I don’t want to risk starving or thirsting to death. That sounds like an awfully excruciating and slow way to die.’ Sarah glanced at the status screen which had popped up in her vision when she had thought the word status a few times. ‘But how do I even go about using mana on it? I suppose that sensation I felt when I touched the door to the private library ought to have been mana leaving my body? Can I somehow use that feeling to find my mana?’
Sarah closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying her best to recall the feeling she had felt when she had touched the panel on the door of the library. She had to refocus a few times, stray thoughts distracting her from the task at hand, but she started to feel she was getting close. Luckily, the event was quite memorable for her. It did almost kill her, after all. Unfortunately, however, the random pulses in her veins from her bindings was a constant source of distraction. Sarah was fairly sure that the binding pulses, however, were something different from the sensation she had when she had touched the library door and did her best to ignore it.
After some time passed, Sarah noticed it. She felt a sort of current that circled around while maintaining a distance around her heart area, looping up and down her upper body in circle. With how close the circular network was her the heart itself, it had been hard to notice before, but with her earlier experience with the loss of mana, Sarah managed to discover it. Upon finding it, she also noticed other dormant pathways throughout her body, but no mana was moving through them.
“Now, I just need to figure out how to use it.” Sarah muttered to herself, and observed as her mana continued to circulate around her heart. It flowed at a slightly disjointed pace, hitching on the uneven mana vein walls like the mana equivalent of blood clotting. For all that the an action like observing her inner mana circulation ought to have felt unusual, Sarah was surprised to find that it felt completely natural instead. It was as if the action was as second nature to her as breathing was.
After a few moments of observation, Sarah tried her best to mentally “reach out” to her mana, hoping to assert some level of will over it. Immediately, Sarah broke out in a cold sweat and released her control over her mana. It had felt like she had lost the air in her lungs the moment she had “gripped” the only bit of mana circulating in her body. If she wasn’t certain before, now she was almost positive that she only had a single strand, piece, or perhaps an inseparable cluster of mana. She had no reference to say for certain which, but she knew one thing. If she wanted to “grip” her mana and drag it around like she was planning, she would need to do the mana-equivalent of “holding her breath”, but without any other mana to hold in her veins it would be like holding her breath without any air left in her lungs.
‘Do I have any way to absorb more mana? Clearly, I am able to assert will on my mana, but is that because I can sense it, or does it have some sort of connection with me due to being a part of me? Not that either case would matter, seeing how I don’t currently sense any other mana in here, anyway.’
Sarah then shivered as her bindings pulsed some strange fluid through her blood vessels again. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to know what it was doing to her, but she was sure she wanted it off and fast.
Sarah took a deep breath to calm herself and distract herself from her feelings of helplessness in this situation. Steeling herself, she again observed her mana vein network, trying to see if there was anything about it she didn’t notice before. As she did so, she noticed that while the only relatively in-tact mana vein encircled her heart, she had several dozen mangled veins throughout her body, and one almost inexplicably connected directly from a part of her brain to her status screen.
‘It’s as if my status is a part of my body… Actually, wait, that is far less strange a concept now that I think about it.’ Sarah chuckled a little at that thought. ‘There is so much about this world I still have yet to discover, I suppose.’
Sarah decided to try one last experiment before giving up on her mana. She looked at her inner mana network again and, instead of trying to grab and drag her mana, she instead tried to give her mana a little nudge in the direction of one of her unused, damaged mana veins. The result was near instantaneous. Sarah bit inter her lip, extreme pain flooding her entire body as her mana nearly got stuck in the damaged mana channel. Just before she was sure it was truly stuck, however, and the pain had nearly caused her to faint, her mana managed to dislodge itself and flow itself back to her heart-encircling mana channel.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Sarah remained still, breathing heavily as her mana circled around her heart. Her entire body ached, dull pain throbbing from where her mana had gotten stuck. Sarah was not entirely sure she wanted to experience that ever again. She tugged hopelessly at her bindings, feeling utterly helpless as the effort proved fruitless. Sarah let a few more tears fall out of her eyes as she steeled her heart once again.
‘I won’t be able to keep subjecting myself to that much pain. If I’m going to do this, I will need to do this in one, single spurt! After all, I think my status may be my one and only ticket out of this mess.’
Sarah sniffled a bit as she began holding back her tears and bringing her emotions slightly under control before she focused in on her mana pathways, trying to find the shortest route from her heart pathway up through her throat into her brain and onto her status screen. No matter how she looked at it, however, the only logical paths looked horribly damaged and she was certain she would be subjecting herself to a lot of pain in going through with this. If her first experience was anything to go by, she wasn’t sure she could even get that far before passing out from the pain that was to come. From looking at it, the best option she had took a single, but horrible mangled, mana vain directly from her heart vein up to her throat, and then another single vein to the area of the brain which connected directly to her status plate from a much smaller, less problematic-looking vein. Not having any better plan, Sarah took another deep breath, grit her teeth, focused in on her mana and then pushed.
Her mana was shoved upwards and almost immediately hitched on a damaged spot in the vein. Sarah bit back from gasping and shoved again. She shoved and she shoved as pain rolled through her entire body in protest. She shoved again one last time, and her mana managed to dislodge and fly up towards her throat area, but the following pain proved far more physical than Sarah had been hoping as she started shivering uncontrollably and spat out some blood. Her consciousness wavered as she felt dizzy and started to fall asleep as her mana slipped from her control and started to return back towards her heart vein. Then, suddenly, Sarah felt her bindings pulse fluid through her body once again, and she found that the pain mysteriously vanished as the fluid passed through her and out another one of her bindings.
Sarah spat out the last of the blood that had built up in her mouth, coughing as she put more air back into her lungs. ‘What are these bindings, anyway?’ Sarah had no answer for herself, but thought about it anyway. Now that she knew the bindings’ pulses came with a pain relieving effect, she decided to try and see how frequently these pulses were happening. If she could time her pushing of her mana with the pulsations, she might be able to better force her way through her veins without blacking out from the pain.
Sarah observed for about an hour and a half, and decided that the pulses seemed to occur roughly once every ten minutes. Not that she could be truly certain, what with no watch or way to pass the time other than instinct and guesswork, but she figured it would have to be enough. Not wanting to wait so long that hunger and thirst would start to compete for the role of being the cause of her death, Sarah decided to stop observing the pulsations and work on getting her mana to her status screen again in earnest.
Sarah waited until about when she figured was a minute or so before the next pulsation would occur to her best estimate before she began to push her mana again. The recently traveled vein to her throat proved slightly smoother a trip than the first time, but it was still extremely sore, sensitive, and hitched her mana twice during its path as she grit her teeth and pushed through, doing her best to ignore the oncoming pain. Sarah pushed onward and the mana began moving up towards the necessary section of her brain as she started to sweat nervously. As her mana started getting stuck in several locations, the pain quickly shot up and became neigh unbearable, but just as she was losing hope that her prediction was wrong, her bindings pulsed through her body, bringing her temporary relief as she became frantically pushing her mana as fast as she could, ramming into damaged portions of her vein and shivering as pain and relief swept through her body simultaneously, confusing her senses with its mixed signals. Sarah started yelling, a primal instinct as she found herself fighting back against her fear and pain with her goal so close at hand, and she drove her mana the last bit of the way down the mana pathways and into her status screen.
----------------------------------------
[Mana Detected]
----------------------------------------
Her status screen lit up with a message, filling Sarah with feelings of elation. That was not to say she didn’t feel entirely exhausted and sore all over, but she felt elated none the less.
----------------------------------------
Status: Sarah Goodfellows
Class: Unselected
EXP: N/A
[Choose Class][Customizations]
----------------------------------------
Sarah let out a smile as she observed the change to her status screen. ‘Come to think of it, I would have been in big trouble had my status fully consumed my mana just now. I can still feel it within the status screen, so I technically still have mana in my body. If it had used it up, I fear I would be going into mana exhaustion right now.’ Sarah swallowed nervously at that thought. ‘Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say.’
Sarah returned her attention to her status screen. ‘Customizations? What is that?’ Sarah found herself relieved that her status screen didn’t automatically select the option just from thinking the name, as she had led herself to believe would have been the case, considering how her screen had first showed up. That said, the option mad her curious enough that she tried to focus on the ‘Customizations button’ in the same way she had been focusing on her mana movement before. This intuitive decision, thankfully, worked. Her status screen shifted, showing another small menu.
----------------------------------------
[System Suggestions | Cost: 1LP]
[Custom Search | Cost: ?]
[Back to Status]
----------------------------------------
Sarah found herself bewildered by these options. Although her inner child was briefly excited by the word ‘system’, having read a couple novels with systems as a concept, she also didn’t know what to make of either of the two options. ‘What even is LP?’ Sarah asked herself. She wasn’t sure she wanted to choose either option with her current limited knowledge. Was paying a bit of unknown currency or choosing an option with a completely unknown cost wise? Which option was scarier? Would they be worth the risk? ‘Maybe I should just look at my class options first.’
Sarah went back to her status page before having another thought. ‘What if I am locked into choosing my class if I select that option now? Could any of the customizations I choose affect what classes I have access to? Also, for that matter, would my status screen even show me an option if I could not afford to select it? After all, I couldn’t even see any of these options before I had the mana to choose them with. If this wasn’t the case, surely I would see even more ridiculously expensive options from which to choose from?’ Sarah bit her lip again, conflicted by her new options before her. ‘Which choice is more likely to help me escape these bindings and escape from my future pursuers?’