Mana was such an exciting thing to play with. It was so malleable, yet uncontrollable at the same time. I know that sounds contradictory, but it was true. The more you try to control mana, the more it resists you.

Take, for example, my hand; I can gather mana in my palm effortlessly, but doing anything more with that mana is infinitely more complex. Slowing down or speeding up my mana’s movement was possible, and compacting it led to me developing Mana Skin and Air Walk. Oppositely, stretching my mana was the base concept behind Magic Threads.

Everyone tells me I’m a prodigy when it comes to magic, but from my point of view, I’ve only been working with the basics. I've yet to convert my mana into anything else; heck, I haven't even been able to form anything complex with it. Yet.

That was why I begged Tabitha to let us stay for a few days. While the crater's edge was technically poisonous to us, the massive amounts of mana present allowed me to push my skills harder than usual, with plenty of ambient mana to recharge with after a good night's sleep.

I could try something similar at the bottom of our mine where all the magicite was, but not even that was comparable to the amount of environmental mana here.

Currently, my eyes were closed while I sat on a rock. Sense Mana was limited again, but not as bad as inside the bubble. Using my skill, I could follow Tabitha's movements a few feet away. She was watching over me while I practiced, but she wasn’t spending the time doing nothing.

Tabitha was swinging her sword while balancing on top of a pile of grey bricks. She said it was helping her improve her movement skills, and it was showing. This was only our fourth day here, fifth if you counted the day we went into the bubble, and Tabitha had already doubled her movement speed on top of the strange stones. If she had a few more days to practice, I'm sure she'd be able to move normally despite their weird force-absorbing properties.

While Tabitha was working on her physical skills, I was doing the opposite. In my hands, I had around 5% of my mana gathered, around fifty points or so. Using Magic Threads, I turn the lump of mana into countless strings. Next, I overlap them with each other and try to weave them together as tightly as possible. I was trying to make fabric from my mana, intending to turn Mana Skin into magic Kevlar eventually.

I’ve slowly become able to overlap the threads with each other, but they weren't very tight, which was the whole point of the exercise. Because mana was always moving, it was hard to keep the individual strands from melding together when they were bunched up.

My small patchwork of threads collapses in on each other for the fifth time today, and I'm left with a blob of mana again. Because I’m constantly shaping it, there’s some mana leakage, but as long as I stay concentrated, I lose very little of it and can practice for hours without losing much.

Sighing, I decide to call it and move on to my next exercise. While my first exercise was focused on improving Magic Threads and Mana Skin, my second exercise was more geared toward the basics. Using the same blob of mana, this time, I try to mold it only using Mana Manipulation. Because I’m not using a second skill to boost its effects, manipulating the mana is more challenging, but that’s why I’m doing it.

It's just a theory, but I'm under the impression Mana Manipulation was holding me back. Mana Manipulation was a tier 3 skill, and I'd already passed its second test, but that wasn't enough. My various mana skills were growing too fast, and Mana Manipulation wasn’t keeping up.

So, to train Mana Manipulation, I devised the idea to form my mana into shapes, with a heavy focus on triangles as they were solid and straightforward. My goal was to form hexagons eventually, but that was still far away.

The point was I had multiple ideas on how to strengthen Mana Skin’s barriers, but I didn’t have the control to pull it off.

I needed to slow my mana down as much as possible to make solid shapes or get my mana fabric to stay whole. The goal was to slow my mana down to the point it was about to turn into magicite, though I wanted to see if I could do that too.

If I could successfully turn Mana Skin’s barrier into tightly woven threads, I would finally be able to defend myself against slashing and piercing attacks. And if I could form hexagons and layer those between the layers of Kevlar, I’d still be able to guard against blunt force trauma, though that was a future goal. Right now, all I wanted was to incorporate at least one concept into Mana Skin, as I was sure that would be enough to push it up to level 61.

With mana in hand, I slowly form it into a sphere. It didn't change much outwardly, as it was only more round now, but instead of being a solid mass of mana, the inside was now hollow. I then slowly shift the sphere into the shape of a halo. The amount of mana was still the same, but now that it was concentrated several times over, it was spinning quite fast, and I needed it to slow down before I shifted the shape further.

Using Mana Manipulation, and nothing else, I force the mana to slow down as much as possible. Then, once it becomes more manageable, I slowly bend the halo of mana into the shape of a triangle.

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I successfully form a triangle, but mana was leaking now that there were edges to deal with. Unlike when it was a circle, the mana couldn’t flow as freely, and making it take sharp turns led to the mana essentially crashing into each other.

I only hold the shape of a triangle for a minute before I again start to change it. I form a square from the triangle and then elongate it into a rectangle. The angles weren’t as sharp, but with more of them; there was more mana bleed. Eventually, I form a pentagon, but that’s when I lose control.

My carefully controlled mana construct collapses in on itself, and I'm forced to scramble to hold onto my mana lest I lose control of it and it disperses into the atmosphere. Unlike my first exercise, I can only run through my shapes exercise a couple of times before I need to stop. I only attempt my shapes exercise twice more before calling it quits.

Opening my eyes, I wince at the bright sun, as I've been sitting with my eyes closed for almost two hours now.

Tabitha pauses mid-swing of her sword and turns toward me as I hop to my feet. “Finished already?” She asks with a hint of excitement.

After finishing my shaping exercises the last three days, I'd move on to practicing Air Walk, but today was different. We’d stayed here longer so I could practice, but it was time we moved on.

When we returned here this morning, I had set a limit for how much mana I would use before we set out again. And now that I had hit that limit, it was time to pack up.

"Yeah, I think it's time we leave,” I reply to an eagerly awaiting Tabitha.

“Finally,” Tabitha grins. “Did you break through?”

Tabitha was talking about Mana Skin, and all I could do was sadly shake my head. "I gained a few other levels in other skills, but not the one I wanted.”

Pulling up my status page, I remember that I haven't looked at it since we first came upon the crater. It has been almost a week since then, and thanks to the danger of the crater, plus my training the last few days, I’ve seen a decent amount of growth in that short time.

LV: 75 Experience: 639,589/ 1,054,850

Health: 2,530/2,530

Stamina 1,548.61/1,697

Mana: 901.84/1,030

Vitality: 253.03

Endurance: 100.37

Strength: 156.03

Dexterity: 156.02

Senses: 62.71

Mind: 65.60

Magic: 103.36

Clarity: 79.25

Status Points: 0

Skills:

Tier 1:

Meditation (LV80), Running (LV79), Blacksmithing (LV75), Hammer Skills (LV70), Axe Skills (LV60), Cleaning (LV53), Mining (LV51), Chanting (LV51), Drawing (LV48), Trading (LV48), Cooking (LV47), Sword Skills (LV40), Acting (LV36), Dagger Skills (LV35), Wood Carving (LV32), Sewing (LV32), Dancing (LV30), Alchemy (LV15), Pugilist Skills (LV11), Spear Skills (LV2)

Tier 2:

Sense Mana (LV80), Double Step (LV67), Charm (LV50), Hammer Arts (LV50), Measurement (LV49), Axe Arts (LV39), Intimidating Shout (LV34), Steady Hands (LV34), Writing (LV32), Mathematics (LV31), Increase Price (LV22), Lower Price (LV20), Sword Arts (LV17), Gourmet (LV15), Dagger Arts (LV13), Marching (LV5), Shout of Valor (LV3),

Tier 3:

Mana Manipulation (LV65), Expel Mana (LV63), Double Strike (LV45), Weighted Strike (LV45), Precise Strike (LV44), Flash Step (LV37), Contract (LV22), Enchanting (LV10), Poison Resistance (LV5)

Tier 4:

Mental Resistance (LV62), Mana Skin (LV60), Inject Mana (LV54), Extract Mana (LV40), Magic Blacksmithing (LV36), Magic Threads (LV28), Air Walk (LV24), Empowered Spell (LV17), Ironclad Agreement (LV8), Multi-Strike (LV5), Appealing Deal (LV3),

Tier 5:

Sense Soul (LV40), Soul Manipulation (LV19)

Tier 6:

Soul Devourer (LV10)

Increased Skill Levels

Cooking (LV46-47) 4,650exp

Dagger Skills (LV35) 1,750exp

Dancing (LV29-30) 2,950exp

Steady Hands (LV34) 3,400exp

Gourmet (LV14-15) 2,900exp

Mana Manipulation (LV64-65) 19,350exp

Flash Step (LV37) 5,550exp

Poison Resistance (LV4-5) 750exp

Mental Resistance (LV62) 15,500exp

Extract Mana (LV40) 10,000exp

Magic Threads (LV26-28) 20,250exp

Air Walk (LV22-24) 17,250exp

Multi-Strike (LV5) 1,250exp

Skill Experience: 105,550exp

Crafting Experience: 1,761exp

Fighting Experience: 1,947exp

Total experience Gained: 109,258exp

So much experience, and it was only a tenth of what I needed to level up.

I've been focusing almost solely on my mana skills, which showed in the skills that leveled up, though there were a few surprises I wasn't expecting. Like Dagger Skills, I have no idea when that leveled up. I’ve been using my knife to process our dinners every night, but was that enough to level it?

My newer skills also leveled, such as Multi-Strike and Poison Resistance, even though I wasn’t doing more than a few exercises with them each morning and afternoon.

My morning stretches featured dancing with Tabitha, so it made sense that it leveled. And with all the exotic magical beast flesh, it's no wonder Cooking and Gourmet continues to jump in levels.

All those skills were important in their own way, but they couldn’t hold a candle to my magic skills. I haven’t spent days back-to-back working on my mana control since over a year ago. My days were usually too busy to devote that amount of time to one subject, but maybe I need to seeing what it did for me.

After I started my mana exercises, Mana Manipulation went up two levels. I think I was already relatively close to level 64, but even then, to gain another level soon afterward just went to show my exercises were working.

Magic Threads and Air Walk jumped up three levels each, which was a lot more than I thought they would. But one of the biggest things was Extract Mana reaching its first test at level 40. Usually, I’d be using the skill to gather mana from my surroundings or pull in my mana after injecting it into my weapon, but I've recently found another use for it.

I’ve been trying to use Extract Mana to remove the extra ambient mana from my system, the opposite of what I usually use it for. So far, I've only managed to bleed a bit of the excess, but I bet if I can figure out how to do it properly, Exact Mana won’t be stuck at level 40 for long.

And pushing all my magic skills had an extra unintended benefit. The mental stress I put myself through daily to shape my mana was enough to push Mental Resistance to level 62, again proving I could level the skill outside my soul if I did the right things.

If I had just one more day of practice, maybe I’d be able to push my skills another level higher, but the same could be said anytime. But then again, I always need one more day, and unless I hide out somewhere like a hermit, I will always wish for more time to practice. So even if I spend years out here, another challenge will always exist.

And besides, I miss home. So that's why I'm not going to ask for more time.

We have one last target off in the distance that we've seen almost every day the last week. The dead zone, which we can see even now, was the last place of interest for us. For an area like that to be this close to the crater, there had to be something special about it.

Personally, I was hoping for rare metals, many of which could leak toxins and kill plants. I’ve gathered a lot during this trip, but if I could find a sizable deposit of high-tier ore, it might be worth returning for another time.

I wasn’t holding my breath, but a girl could dream.

Adjusting my bag, I make eye contact with Tabitha. She was patiently waiting for me to get my gear in order. My bag was bulging with materials, but my stats let me carry it as if it weighed a fraction of what it did.

Once I'm sure everything was secured correctly, I smile at Tabitha, and she returns the gesture. I felt that even she was tired of the forest and looking forward to returning.

It won't take us long to reach the dead zone, and after a quick look-see, we can start heading home.

Dead zone, here we come!