The wolf was starting to lose count of the days. Its internal clock was never the most accurate, and without access to the light crystals with their cycles, it wasn’t exactly sure how much time had passed.
It might have been the fifth day or the seventh, it just couldn’t tell.
Additionally, while its routine had become rather boring and repetitive by now, it didn’t really have anything else to do, its only entertainment coming in the form of some recreational rat-killing.
It fed the human, moved its mana, tried to copy how the human moved hers to no avail, and slept as much as possible to accelerate its growth. Which was a very rapid one, because looking at itself now, it looked like any regular, decently fed canine, if a lot filthier.
The sudden break in the monotony came in the form of an unexpected Level-up.
Which wasn’t all that unexpected in and of itself, but the question of what made it Level up, was one that it realized it had no answer to. It had assumed that killing things was what made it Level up, and it had been doing plenty of that, but between its current nap and its previous one, it hadn’t killed anything, only practised on using the [Echoes of Oblivion] Skill.
So practising on its Path relevant skills also increased its Level? Or was there some other hidden mechanic that it didn’t know about?
It hoped that humans knew more about the symbols than it did, because once again, all it could do was mentally dismiss those curiosities, throw the added Attribute point onto Intelligence, and hope that its questions would eventually be answered.
Intelligence ( +4 )
It took the time to focus on its body, touching things up a little bit.
The scent receptors in its nose were an utterly mind boggling number so high that it couldn’t even count or imagine, but it decided to improve them anyway, experimentally doubling them onto one of the Skill’s phantom copies of itself, and after carefully confirming that there were no negative drawbacks to such a thing, applied it onto its real body.
It healed any wear and tear of the miniature hairs in its cochlea, the organ behind the eardrum that allowed its brain to interpret the vibrations into sound, regenerated some of the torn-off micro hairs on its antennae, got rid of some of the scar tissue on its snout and legs, and then hastily decided to double the length of its antennae.
Having to glue its bottom jaw to the ground to sense vibrations properly was just too annoying, and added length wouldn’t really have any negatives besides making the organ easier to snap and break, which would be an easy overnight fix.
Finished with its physical upgrades, it slipped back into the embrace of [Restful Awareness], and woke up with a yawn and a quick sniff.
And then immediately sneezed, not at all prepared for the absurd amount of information that flooded into and around its mind, immediately shutting off stimuli to adjust.
The human, who had gotten fairly comfortable around the wolf by this point — an observation of fragile interest — shifted.
“Good morning.” It muttered, and the wolf chuffed in acknowledgement to whatever it was she said, taking another deep sniff of the air.
And sneezing again.
It grumbled, awkwardly turning its leg and lowering its head to rub its nose with the back of its foreleg. After the phantom itch had receded, it put its paw back down, took a very slow breath through its nostrils and focused on the marvel of an overnight adjustment.
And realized that it had probably gone a bit overboard by doubling what was essentially how effective its sense of smell was. It would tone it down a little when it napped again, at least until it got more points in Intelligence.
It wasn’t quite an informational overload, but it was certainly difficult to focus on anything else but the insane, ludicrous amounts of subtle scents and aromas wafting into its olfactory receptors.
It closed its eyes, and tried to identify as many as it could, snout to the sky.
A spilled patch of grease a couple steps to its left, just above it. Weeks old. The almost spicy-sour scent of rust coating the edges of the railing, mixing with the scent of uncorroded metal. The moss growing on the bottom of the staircase and piling onto some of the metal plates of the wall to either side of the pit. Rot, decay, death and blood from below. Half-melted plastic and the musky scent of some dusty building material from the trash pit, mixed in with the scent of various bits of food discard and various waste.
The scent of blood coating both itself and the human was very interesting, a familiar iron smell undercut by a sort of gamey, pungent organic odor that differentiated it from regular metals.
From the pipes running up and down the pit, the faint, faded smell of vile poison. From outside the pit, human food, alcohol, body waste, stomach acid, a dozen different minor chemicals. Then the scent of ammonia from where the girl had urinated on herself, layered over the unique scent of the human itself.
That and a thousand more scents it couldn’t name nor recognize wafted into its nose with every breath.
It felt like it didn’t even need its eyes to navigate.
It flared its newly extended antennae out, their length now long enough to go from the tip of its snout to just before its eyes.Even without reconstructing its environment from memory, it could navigate with relative ease. Scent allowed it to roughly feel direction and proximity, and vibrations helped with the finer details.
Not that it was planning on giving up its eyes, that would be beyond wasteful. It was just an observation of interest.
It quickly folded its antennae back into its snout fur, and opened its eyes, quickly sitting down and shuffling to lie on the steps.
And it began to practise with mana again.
Even if a small doubt in its mind lingered that maybe it was just wasting its time, all it took was one reminder of the visions it had seen when choosing whether to accept its Path or not, and it faded, at least for a while.
The symbols hadn’t lied so far, so the problem was on the wolf’s end. It was doing something wrong that was preventing it from succeeding.
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It felt like trying to grasp something with its jaws that was just close enough to have its teeth brush against it, but just far enough to be unable to take it.
Routine continued, another dozen rodents killed, another couple bloody mouthfuls for the human, another nap that let it know that in just one more day or two, the tendons would be ready to stiffen and start functioning.
A sharp gasp startled it out of its rest, and its head snapped up, instantly awake and aware, ears standing straight as it hurriedly swiveled its head around for threats.
After a few tense moments of silence without seeing anything amiss, its ears drooped as it grumbled in annoyance, and settled back down to sleep.
“Sorry. I just-” The human started, and the wolf grumbled more forcefully, almost growling.
The human got the message and went silent, so it shifted with a tiny chuff of gratitude and settled back to rest.
It really wanted the new colors to appear already.
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The condition of her body prevented her from meaningful rest despite her exhaustion, and the beast constantly waking her up for new words to mimic was another factor that had stopped her from hoping for anything more than short naps.
When awake, she would gently practise her remembered spells, followed by cancellation commands, making sure to never let her core become completely full with mana, something that everyone, mage or not, knew was a waste.
But after a particularly lengthy nap that ended just moments ago, she’d come to realize why [Mana Tank] didn’t appear to be doing anything.
The Skill was waiting until her core had been filled back up entirely so it could start draining it, never allowing it to remain completely full, pooling the excess bits of her mana into her circuits, inert and ready to be used.
Her body was the mana tank, and her core was the battery.
That realization was already uplifting, and then she realized the implications of what this Skill was doing and could hardly believe what she was seeing. Mana constantly filling her circuits, automatically, meant many things.
For starters, the flow of mana through her circuits would improve, the capacity would improve, the capacity of her core would improve, and if she took a long sleep with the Skill at a high Level, enough that her body would be stuffed full of mana by the time she woke up, she could technically have multiple times as much mana at her disposal than her core could store on its own.
From what she knew, most low Level mages didn’t store mana in their bodies because it required constant mental effort and attention to keep it in place, which most couldn’t do, not until they got their Intelligence high enough, and the rate of mana regeneration early on in one’s career only made such a strategy viable if someone was expecting a fight hours ahead of time.
And she just circumvented every single one of those problems. The only worry was if the Skill would stop on its own, or just keep stuffing her circuits with mana until they burst.
At the moment however, the process was very slow, so the chance of that being an actual risk would only pop up if she spent a couple days unconscious.
She suppressed her smile, reminding herself not to get too hopeful, reminding herself of all the various ways that tended to blow up in her face. Joy was quickly followed by despair as she’d come to know, so besides that explosion of mirth when she heard the abomination say “god fucking damn it” in its creepy, ear-grating voice, she would do her best to not become too hopeful.
In the absence of positive emotions, the negative ones became all the more pronounced, so she simply suppressed them too, a resigned apathy slowly but surely taking hold of her as she shifted her mindset.
She was still stuck in a pit.
She was still blind and crippled.
And she still had nobody.
With an empty expression and an empty heart, she lifted her chewed up fingers, and continued practising in silence.
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After waking up once more, and feeding the human her dose of blood, it decided to go for a different approach than usual to its mana practise.
Instead of focusing on the mana itself, it focused on its source, its soul. Like an invisible, phantom limb that it could feel but at the same time not, it sat in its usual position, in the middle of its chest.
The wolf expelled mana, watching the process with the unseeing eyes of its mind.
The energy, the odd mist around its soul, gathered in the direction indicated, and its soul pushed it away with a mental order that was about as difficult as picking bits of gore out from between its teeth with a tongue that it could barely control.
That was to say, very.
But the mana complied, and simply wafted out from within its flesh to harmlessly float away and dissipate into the foul air of the pit.
It repeated the process a couple times, then decided to try and visualize both the mana and its soul, just to see if it would help its mind with the process, and much to its surprise, it worked.
Its imagination probably had left much to be desired, as it imagined the mana as some sort of oddly-behaving yellow gas and its soul as a blue light crystal like the humans used, but it was seeing progress for the first time, and couldn’t care less at the moment to refine or personalize the imaginary vision any more.
As the minutes rolled by and it tested its newfound ease of pushing out mana, it eventually stopped and let its mind frantically run through various possibilities, trying to figure out what it had been doing wrong.