I wake up and feel nothing.

I panic at first, as anyone would, before eventually calming down. The first thing I expected when I woke up this morning was to be in bed. The second thing I expected was that I would begrudgingly drag myself out of it and get dressed. The former requires that I have a bed in which to lie. The latter requires I have a body to drag out of bed. In my current predicament, it appears I have neither of those things.

Once I stop metaphorically hyperventilating, I try to assess my situation.

I can’t see or hear or feel anything either, but at the same time I am simply aware of my surroundings. The area in which I exist appears roughly circular with a diameter of about 10 feet, and is made of cold gray stone. I focus on a small rock, and find it clearer in my mind’s eye. I spend a while looking around before something peculiar catches my notice. In the center of this small chamber, lying on the uneven rocky ground, is a small spherical object about the size of a marble. Now, when I say spherical I mean perfectly spherical. Nothing natural is shaped like this. It's almost unnervingly perfect. Upon focusing on the small object, I find myself met with a strange feeling. The kind of sense of self one gets when looking at their reflection in a mirror. The marble is a soft somewhat icy blue, with streaks of gray running through it. It glows softly with a dim light.

Looking at myself, it dawns on me. After reading so many stories about it online, it couldn’t possibly be anything else. I probably died. It doesn’t matter how. I just hope my family is handling it alright. But I died, and now I am this marble. I am probably a dungeon. As the reality of the situation becomes clear to me, I notice something else.

I don’t know how I missed it before, but all around there are sparkling motes of light floating in the air. They don’t look physical, but it isn’t as if I can actually reach out and touch them to find out… Actually maybe I can.

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I focus my mind on the space, pouring my effort into it. There is some kind of energy there. These strange particles seem to be charged in a way. I focus on them, and after what feels like hours, they begin to move. A slow movement at first, slightly shifting, moving towards me, towards my core. As they move, they begin to speed up, until eventually the first one makes contact with my core. It's a rush, like pure energy is flowing into me. That must be what it actually is. If I am in some kind of fantasy world, and I am some kind of dungeon, then this is probably mana or whatever this world’s equivalent of mana is. As I focus, and draw the mana around me into my core I can feel the energy sitting within me waiting to be used.

Once I have absorbed all the mana I can sense within the chamber, I turn my attention elsewhere. I begin to try and find some way in or out of here. The chamber does have an opening, and I focus on it. It seems to be a pathway through the rock that extends more than 25 feet away from the chamber. I say at least 20, because at a certain point my focus becomes fuzzy. It gets worse the further away from my core I look, like a camera out of focus. 30 feet away from my core seems to be the limit of my observation range. Past the edge of my range, I can vaguely sense rushing water. There is some mana in the tunnel too, which I begin to pull back towards my core.

As I wait for the mana to reach my core, my mind wanders. Mana isn’t some ever-present force of the universe. It exists in set areas and has form, and at least to me it is somewhat tangible. There are a few possibilities. The first is that mana is a limited resource. This seems unlikely, just based on what I know about fantasy worlds from the books I have read, games I have played, and the shows I have watched. The second possibility is that mana simply appears occasionally, spontaneously deciding to exist. The third possibility is that certain actions cause mana to appear, rather than it being random and spontaneous. A fourth possibility is that mana both generates itself randomly and that certain actions can cause its generation, or maybe just influence the rate of random generation. If there are ways to force mana generation, and assuming mana is crucial to my continued existence, there may be a way for me to make my life easier. The same goes for certain actions or conditions influencing mana generation.

Enough thinking about mana. I don’t know its properties or even what it’s useful for. The best course of action is to find out what I can do with it. Also, until something somehow proves me wrong, I will run on the assumption that if my core is destroyed I die - rather than me needing a constant stream of mana to stay alive, seeing as how when I woke up I didn’t have any.

With that said, it's time to experiment.