Feeling that realization ingrain itself into my very core I felt my entire being shake at a fundamental level as I began to feel the structure pull in mana for the first time. Dropping back into my breathing pattern, I started to pull the ethereal energy in at a faster pace, cycling it through my core and back out into the world. The structure I had built; or rather that had been formed by my intent, and understanding; and then finished off by the impartment of Dao; was acting like coral. It was filtering out the parts of the mana it needed to perform and leaving everything else alone and I found myself forced to eject the parts I didn’t need before it started building up an imbalance inside of me. It was a strange feeling because I wasn’t being drawn into my corespace. Instead, it was almost like I was starting to feel bloated and my exhales were becoming longer and longer as more of the excess came shooting out of me.
The first part of the mana the spell frame stripped off was the wood energy that formed the base of the spell. I could feel this almost like a hardwood that was almost as strong as metal that worked at forming the base before sending out softer vines and grasses that it let parts of the fire mana consume. Breaking it down further into earth and metal which then pulled a little bit of the parts of mana that was water before springing forth rampintly shooting out wood energy into my core that I sucked into my channels and sent rocketing around my body. Part of me couldn’t help but wonder why it wasn’t just pulling off the necessary elements out of the mana to empower the spell rather than mainly using wood with the slight addition of fire and water.
Slowly the wood energy being sent out of my core began to be pulled from my channels and I noticed that not only was the bear’s spell slowly being overtaken by my own, but little imperfections that had never been fully healed were also slowly being taken care of. My ankles which I had sprained so many times as a young adult playing sports, were slowly strengthened and put back together while some of the scars that were still on my hands from my years in the kitchen slowly began to melt away. As I felt the scar on my face begin to disappear, I stopped the spell in horror.
Sure I had been angry at the time, but it had grown to be a part of me in the last eight years and was one of the last mementos I had from him, good or bad. So I was determined to keep it. Feeling that my legs were almost finished healing, I let the spell die down and stopped my internal focus, going back to the real world. Looking at the bear staring at me with laughter in his eyes. I ignored him and started to stand, before falling back on my ass as a wave of weakness came over me. Too late I remembered my spell wasn’t just based on the ambient mana, it also took energy from my reserves.
Giving myself a second to recover, I could hear Lotus laughing at me while her siblings tried to shut her up. Looking over at the three. I could see the horror in the older sibling’s eyes as they were no doubt afraid that I would take offense at their younger sibling. Which had me growing sad as I realized what it meant about the universe I had entered. They were looking at me like I might actually kill her because she had the temerity to laugh at my falling down.
Putting an exaggerated smile on my face to let them know it was okay and I had thicker skin than that I let my own booming laugh ring out. Maybe it wasn’t what was best for the little girl, as she would eventually leave this dungeon and go back to the real world where apparently little girls could be attacked for laughing at their elders.
Keeping the frown from forming on my face I realized I was going to have to start keeping my own mentality in line with my new reality. I am American down to the smallest fibers of my being. I have no problem talking to anyone as an equal and for me, respect is something that has to be earned and was never automatically given. Rubbing my hand through my hair at the thought of having to kowtow to some young master who demanded it for laughs forced me to wonder if I had it in me to kiss the ground to save my life.
Before I was able to start going that road I had a sudden realization that it might not have been my falling down that Lotus had been laughing at. My hair and beard seemed to have undergone a massive growth of their own. Spiking out in all directions it looked like I had been struck by lightning. Patting it down I estimated that I had gained at least four inches of hair growth in those couple of seconds my spell had been active.
Feeling the weakness pass, I took another stab at standing and this time managed to make it fully to my feet, even if I did need to reach out to the bear to steady myself. Looking around the room, I saw that all of the bodies were gone. Hobbling over to my pack I quickly broke open one of the pemmican bars and started to eat ravenishly, grabbing the waterskin to take long pulls to help wash down bigger chucks so I could stuff my face even faster. Finishing off the whole bar in what must have been a minute, I tossed the wrapper to the ground, before draining several large gulps of water to wash everything down.
Gasping for air, I looked at the kids who were staring at me in disbelief. Putting the water away, I put my fingers into my mouth and pulled my face in weird directions while making funny noises which caused Lotus to giggle again.
Looking on the ground I saw a small pile of weapons on the ground which told me the kids had managed to get some more loot while I was out. It was starting to look like I was going to have to make some choices on what to carry as a couple of more fights like this and I doubted we would be able to continue packing everything away. Coughing to get my attention Sienna slowly walked up to me before Kowtowing and holding up several new cores in her hands.
Embarrassed by having someone I viewed as a child to be protected act in such a way towards me, I hurridly pulled her to her feet. She looked surprised but continued to hold out the cores for me. Looking at her bloodstained arms, I realized she had been the one to harvest them when I was out. On one hand, I wanted to take them, but the greedy hoarder inside of me was quick to point out this was just them paying me back for what I had already given them and if there was a couple more for interest then that was just good business.
I quickly shut him up as without them I would have died when I was unconscious. Closing her hand over the stones I did my best to indicate they were theirs to keep. As much as I felt there had to be a way to absorb them into my core, I understood that there would surely be more cores coming later and I could claim some later when I hadn’t spent the end of the fight unconscious. But when I let go of her hands she continued to push them towards me insistently speaking quickly and more urgently despite knowing I wasn’t going to understand her.
As she seemed to be getting more upset by the second, I quickly took them from her hand. I had to wonder if they weren’t allowed to have them or if they were just grateful that I had freed them, either way, I couldn’t force them to keep them. While I had no intention of abandoning them once we made it out of there, I would keep it in mind if I did manage to absorb them and figure out a way to make sure they received the value in some other way later on.
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Taking them from her I saw that there were almost two perfect globes of green and brown while there was a blue one that was somewhere in between the flat stones I tended to get from the fodder and the globes that the mages tended to drop.
After putting them into my pocket with the others, I spent a couple of minutes playing charades with them, finally getting the point across that I wanted to know what happened after I had gone into my core space. Of course to them, they no doubt thought I had just collapsed from blood loss, but I didn’t have a way to let them know what I had been doing. Even if I could I wasn’t sure I would.
It was becoming clear to me that I definitely had something that if it wasn’t unique, it was something that someone of my power level shouldn’t have. The way they had been willing to acquiesce when they thought I was demanding sexual favors had really put a chill in my soul. Clearly, there wasn’t a rule of law in this world as I knew it, and I could only imagine if there were laws they would be firmly on the side of those with power. Not having the power to even stand up to lowly goblins without help I was sure if my core was deemed valuable by those in power they would have no problems taking it from my corpse.
Not to mention my ability to absorb Dao, so far nothing else seemed to have any hint that it was there, but something had to be generating the sky funnels and if they knew there was an ant running around down here sipping from their private stash there would no doubt soon be an exterminator to follow.
There wasn’t any benefit to telling them and I had no doubt if my secret was ever discovered, they would soon find themselves captured so they could be used as leverage against me. So for now I would be keeping it to myself. Unless I managed to find a powerful backer I could trust not to strap me to a table and experiment on me I would just keep continuing on as I had.
Looking as the kids reenacted their fight with the goblins, I saw that rather than helping her brother finish off the goblin basher, she had trusted him to take care of it and sent her fireball winging over to the earth shaman that had been buffing the spearman. It hadn’t killed him but had forced him to move his spell to himself.
Gaian had been quick to capitalize and ripped his foe’s throat out. Apparently, he had determined that it would be better to keep pressure on the mage and give him time to let his regeneration work on recovering the grievous wounds he had taken from the protected spear wielder. While he had kept the mage from buffing the basher, Aspen had finally managed to get a strike past the goblin tank’s shield and cripple him. After dancing around him for a while the goblin had finally stumbled and he had finished him off. It seemed that three fireballs was Sienna’s current limit and after casting her third she hadn’t been able to do much until she recovered a decent amount of her mana, which had me wondering if she had overdrawn herself.
When the dragon had ripped the mana from Gaian he had indicated that while it had brought him down to almost empty he hadn’t actually felt any ill effects. But from how Sienna was describing she felt after casting her final spell, I was forced to wonder if his time in the hell ball had changed him enough the dragon wasn’t actually able to fully drain him. Alternatively, it could be something else entirely that I hadn’t thought of and I was just trying to make sense of something with limited information. As my hamster wound himself up to spin out some more theories I realized that I should probably leave it alone when I had no chance of actually being able to test them. I certainly wasn’t going to chase down the dragon just to try and find out.
Shaking my head to clear my musings, I watched as Aspen showed how he had finally finished off his opponent with a massive strike of his spear that almost sent him sprawling with no goblin there to receive it now. He quickly joined the bear and they eventually overpowered the shield mage. After that Gaian started trying to heal me, but he had almost drained himself dry constantly trying to recover from his own wounds. He had needed to recover mana before he started so Aspen had started collecting the weapons while Sienna had taken one of the daggers the enemy mages had on them to cut out the two mage cores and the core from Aspen’s kill. Everything else had been reclaimed by the dungeon before they could get to it.
I tried to ask about Lotus’s apparent madness, and why she would run out to attack the goblins like that, but they just shrugged. I could tell they looked concerned but they were just as clueless as me. I would have to try and keep an eye on her in the next fight and look to see if my unique way of looking at the world could see anything that might be happening to prompt her episodes to see if we could stop them.
She was lucky the goblins she had gone after were already crippled, as I’m sure if she had chosen something else the outcome would have been completely different.
Going over the rest of the gains they had managed to collect all of the weapons I had thrown along with everything the goblins had dropped. They were quite the efficient scavengers. When I indicated they should take anything they thought they might need from the pile. Aspen was quick to grab a club and a dagger. Sticking them into his belt, I managed to hold back a small chuckle when I saw that he had put them on the same sides as me.
It was flattering to be so well thought of, thinking back to the times my own son had loved to imitate me brought tears to my eyes that I was quick to blink away so they wouldn’t think that I was upset with them. Ruffling his hair, I saw Sienna was happy enough keeping the dagger she had previously claimed along with the club she already had.
When Lotus started trying to pick up a spear, I don’t know which of us was quicker to stop her, but it quickly made clear that none of us thought she should have one of the bladed weapons.
With the constant glow coming from the mushrooms it was hard to tell how long we had been down here, but after having the muscles in my legs regrown I thought it was a good time to take a break. While I wasn’t ready to try and absorb any more cores for now, I did think it was a good time to figure out my own armor situation, so hopefully, in our next fight, I could manage to skip the healing afterward. Although I had my own spell, I could already tell that it was going to be something I needed to be focused on rather than the point and click method the bear seemed to have lucked out with.
Setting up the tent was quick enough, and after I had moved the three containers to the center, I set up the tent behind them so that anything coming from the two branches that led to the room would be slowed down slightly. While either the bear or I would constantly be on watch it would hopefully give whichever one of us was sleeping some time to join the fight. Pulling out some food for the rest of them, I poured some water into a basket for the bear while handing the second skin to the kids.
Digging into my pack I had to go through several packages of food before I finally saw the small bundle I had been looking for. Opening it carefully I started pulling out the couple of bone needles I had whittled from some twigs. I had at first thought to use the bones of the pig, but they were to hard for my knife and I hadn’t wanted to dull the blade.
Pulling out some of the sinews I had twisted and dried, I removed my pants, wanting to take care of the two gaping holes in the back of my legs before I did anything else. Cutting some of the bottom of my right pant leg off with my knife, I quickly formed two patches as the holes that were bitten into the legs were too large to just sew together. After threading the needle, I slowly started to stitch the first patch on only to be interrupted by Sienna. Looking down to make sure my boxers were still intact and my modesty was preserved, I looked at her expectantly to see what she needed.
She seemed hesitant at first but then she came to a decision and I guess just trusted I wouldn’t be insulted. Taking my project from me she much more confidantly sewed the patch on in a matter of minutes. Handing the pants back to me so I could examine her work I saw the stitching was much better than anything I was going to manage. Never one to let pride get in the way of superior results I, decided not to stand on circumstances and pulled off my shirt so she could fix the holes in the sleeves as well.
Grabbing the remaining dagger and the two goblin jerkins I decided my time would be better spent kludging something together that would protect my insides.