Toby wasn’t in immediate danger but he wasn’t happy, turns out the mana in the environment was starting to affect him. That was bad, the system didn’t even need to tell him that his body was starting to take on inorganic traits.

His skin was crystallizing, his body was going through second puberty and his eyes were stinging. It also didn’t help that he was getting sicker, from what Toby could tell the natural mana was doing it affected his body in unhealthy ways.

The system said it was because it was interacting with everything in his body, including underlying problems that didn’t normally affect him. Any virus in his body was mutating, and changing so common cold might just do him in. Wait, is it a common cold or is it extraterrestrial mana-induced sickness?

“Hey system, is there any way I can slow the problem down?”

[No, your body is adapting to mana and the mana is changing you]

[You need to be able to sense mana before you can do anything about it]

“Well that sucks, so I just gotta sense it like kinda in the way I feel cold or smell shit?”

[Yes]

Welp they never said trying to combat foreign energy was easy, and also I never took biology.

But from his self-diagnostic and system inquiries, he figured out how it would affect him over the week. In the first three to fourish days it would slowly change his outward appearance and cause pain, he didn’t feel the pain all that well as he took his medicine every day like a good boy.

After around a week it would start affecting his organs, blood, and brain. Yes, it didn’t just sound bad it was bad, if it started affecting his brain it would affect his cognitive abilities. Or it might just kill him, now around the second week it would start affecting his bone marrow, and he would enter the second stage of organ and third stage of skin transformation.

By then he would be dead, he could feel mana but he couldn’t sense it. It felt like the wind but you couldn’t see the wind you only felt it when it affected you and you couldn't physically change it. Eating the snake meat alleviated some of his symptoms but not enough to matter. He would have to eat the whole snake but then it would just come back again.

Although it sucked, at least the animals here tasted good. The lizard people scouts are still watching but their numbers hadn’t increased so he was fine for now.

He started his daily trek through the forest, watching vines twist occasionally. Trees and bushes sucking up water, he checked his traps and put the meat that he grabbed in his newly made meat holder. Toby had managed to make a backpack out of dead vines, plant fibers, and stringy grass.

After checking his traps and resetting them he tried to sense mana, it didn’t work but he did feel the fuzzy outline of a ball of mana in his chest, really small like maybe a millimeter in diameter.

Turns out the clear water source was a lake, it was huge and he meant huge. like a city including suburbs, there was also a huge herbivore ecosystem here. The herbivores are the plants, and when they died the plants ate them. This worked as the plants here could move fast when they wanted to. And the fact that the herbivore creatures didn’t eat the main plant, only the leaves, and fruits.

“Mouuuf” One of the creatures sounded, it was very interesting watching. They had surrounded this small snake and were trying to chase it away. After it had left they continued grazing, he managed to sneak by not taking any chances, and grabbed some water.

On his way back he noticed that his medicine was starting to stop working so he hurried back. After he had his prescription the pain stopped, then he started sharpening his trap spears so he could set up more.

“Hey, is there any other way to prevent the mana from killing me”

[Adapt your body to it, or stay around materials that naturally absorb huge amounts of mana in a small area]

The first one was possible, but the latter wasn't. He didn't feel anything like that around him. It's quite easy just to find an area with barely any mana then figure out what is causing that.

The next morning he decided to stalk the lizard scouts, they didn’t notice him but it was really hard to see them. They were almost invisible and barely made any sound, he counted them and they were the same number that he counted last time.

“Krrk!” one of the blurry shapes went, and they spread out looking around it seemed. He snuck off in the opposite direction and they didn’t follow him.

After checking the traps and harvesting his catch, Toby started looking around for some bigger animals. He needed a huge store of meat and fruit to make it through winter, he had all the fruit he would ever need. The system said he had one hundred and twenty-six days until winter which would last for four months each being fifty days long.

He found a bear-like creature currently eating one of the pythons, it had an owl head.

He threw a couple of his spears at it and a couple seemed to hit it.

“Rag hooooo!” the bear screamed when it took two spears to the chest and one to the stomach.

It started running towards him completely forgoing its meal, death was important after all.

The bear managed to make it to the tree he was on and knocked it over, throwing him through the air.

He hit the ground hard; it completely knocked the air from his lungs and some spears from his hands.

It started charging him again and it clipped his arm, he managed a few spear throws but he was running out of spears.

He finally killed it after almost a deadly five long minutes. He salvaged its fur and some meat and went back to his camp.

He boiled his lake water, cooked some owlbear meat with some of the fruits. And he had some of the edible small insects on the side, overall a perfect dinner.

The lizards were watching, he saw a few half-eaten fruits around the trees they were perched in.

Although they were interesting he was going to have to scare them off tomorrow and if they come back kill them.

If they left that would be okay with him, if they didn’t well they did have some sort of armor. And a little goes a long way in his situation.

Pov shift :)

The thing was strange and utterly horrifying, Kas Urk had to watch him slowly but surely hunt an owlbear. Those things were massive and broke down any defense you put in its way.

The others didn’t manage to see as he couldn't signal them in time, but he told them the details of what went down.

“Kas you notice how the creature's skin is changing, do you have any idea when it started” Furg spoke

“I don’t know Furg I didn’t have the night shift and they were there when I got up”

“It must be some sort of mutant, there is no way it could way it could survive in this deep of the forest otherwise”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Furg tended to rant and keep conversations going longer than they should, but it was mostly a good thing. He would have gotten bored very quickly and the scout captain always got mad when he didn’t report everything he saw.

In his opinion, he thought they should just kill it. More trouble than it is worth, many would have to die and the research or taming had a high chance of being worthless.

“Furg would you be quiet it's sharpening those wooden spears again, if we make too much noise it will notice us” he interjected in Furg’s tangent

He wasn’t exactly lying but it would start soon, and he didn’t want that thing hunting him. From what he could tell it could kill everyone in the scout group, and then go back to spear sharpening.

This happened like clockwork every night, for three whole hours it would do nothing but sharpen those spears. And occasionally it would look around and listen, that scared him more than anything if it wasn’t sleeping. It was looking for something to hunt.

After he turned in for the night and left Furg to watch he thought about how something the same size as him could be so agile and strong, it killed a scale-twisting owlbear for sky's sake.

Pov shift end

After turning in for the night he watched the lizard person that was looking at him, it was the funny one with the staff all alone.

The lizard was blurry but he could still just make it out among the leaves. The next morning he started his routine and tried to sense mana again.

His mana channels were twisted and mutating, like unseen worms writhing under his skin. He asked the system and figured out that was why he couldn’t sense mana. Toby’s mana channels were not sucking in mana but being affected by it, and gradually suffering damage.

“ Hey, system, anything I should do today?”

[Create more weapons, and try to find some herbs]

[Herbs on Durjirnack have adapted so that animals will eat the fruit but not the plant, all herbs have some kind of fruit of petal that helps the body]

Now he had something to start on, herbs and nature screw you. If you picked the wrong one it would be poison, if you picked the right one it might not help that much.

The system could help with that with its knowledge, but he would only take them in infinitely small doses. As the system didn’t know about everything here, he went off into the forest again.

While running along the branches from tree to tree, he found a really strange tree. It was surrounded by mounds of decaying flesh, and strange bulbous almost zombie-like creatures.

The system told him that was a herb, one that decided instead of being passive or defensive it went on the offensive.

Some quick hints he got from the system were that he should hold his breath and wrap his hands in cloth. Directly touching anything here would aggravate his mana symptoms, crippling him from the pain even with his medication.

He slowly crawled along with the vines, without anything noticing him, and grabbed a couple of leaves and broken branches and fruit. He quickly left, managing to not disturb the creatures below, while crawling through the trees he traveled towards the lake.

The herbivores were interested in the smell of the various bits of the plant but otherwise didn’t bother him.

“ Hey system what of what I gathered is edible or helpful”

[The branch and fruit are, but the leaves are poisonous]

He cut the fruit into pieces and grabbed the smallest piece, and wrote down what he was figuring out about this world on his phone. He still had battery and taking notes would help keep him sane, and he had a ton of portable chargers that he looted from the school.

After eating the small piece of fruit, he started thinking about getting an animal companion. From what he knew all he had to do was get an egg or baby and feed it for a long time.

He wouldn’t be able to get one now but in the future, plus if he got a cute one he could snuggle with it. Plus when it got bigger it could help him gather food, and locate water sources. But he couldn’t decide on what kind of animal he wanted so he pushed the decision off until the future.

Anyway, he was going on a tangent, he traveled back toward Helio and started cooking. He made sure to boil plenty of water as dehydration was serious in a humid jungle.

While cooking he slowly immersed himself in his environment and listened to all the small sounds the jungle made.

After having breakfast he climbed a tree and started looking around. He had a cave system to his south and a lake to his northeast, and directly to his north, the forest started changing into marsh and swamp miles ahead.

The fog was rolling in from the west, during which he wouldn’t be able to hunt. Any animal that relied on something other than light-based vision or a good sense of smell could get the jump on him.

His skin was still slowly crystallized but it was slightly slower than normal. It would still complete the process in around fourish to five days, but it was still better than nothing.

To the south was a semi-active volcano that would occasionally rumble, and to the east was an ocean.

He was alone in this world so the ocean was not something he wanted to traverse, the marsh looked promising as there would be a lot of animals. The south wasn’t promising as the volcano would mutate the animals in dangerous ways.

“ System, do elementals exist, as in creatures made of fire, wind, or water,” Toby asked

[Yes, they are extremely dangerous and hard to kill]

[They can reform their body, with just a small amount of mana. And different types of mana make elementals one of the species with the most variety]

Great another creature that could kill me, from video games elementals are usually made of a certain element, and being in an environment that compliments that element would make them more dangerous. As while they are trying to kill you, so is everything else around them, as the environment would explode shooting lots of dangerous energy around.

Elementals aren’t weak in any sense, some of them can teleport or reform anywhere in their domain. And in a game, they won’t have telegraphed attacks and he only has one life.

He figured out how to manipulate mana, not mana in his body but mana in his surroundings. And extending his ability he figured out how to manipulate objects that were either dead or inanimate. He could use the ground around him as armor, but keeping loose things together required more mana per second than just holding hard stuff on himself.

Anyway, anything that naturally absorbed mana by using vines and putting holes in his wooden bark he managed to make armor, sure it sucked and he still had to breathe air, see, and not crush his ears.

[Dead wood is absorbing ambient mana time extended by 30%]

[721 estimated hours + 216 hours]

[Acquired skill: Mana manipulation]

[Acquired skill; Twisted puppeteer]

[Acquired status effect: Mana destabilization]

“ What does mana destabilization do?, is it something bad-” Everything suddenly hurt, his bones felt like liquid glass, his stomach felt like lava, his eyes burning. His body screamed, he blacked out only to wake up again seconds later, this repeated for what felt like hours. As his skin ripped and twisted and his muscles clenched so tight so they might suffocate him.

After a very long time the pain and blackouts finally stopped, he couldn’t move though so he used vines to drag himself under his lean-to he could dig up the blood-soaked dirt later. Right then he needed to sleep, his eyes felt like lead and his head had the worst migraine, so he did.

An unknown amount of time later he woke up it was night, his food had burned and his water evaporated. He grabbed his water bottles and took slow sips from them, his throat felt raw and wet but he had to get something in himself. He just waited till morning until the lingering effects disappeared, did his routine, grabbed water from the lake, and went back to camp. He didn’t want to strain himself too hard today as he needed to recover.

“ System why did that hurt soo much, and why did that happen in the first place”

[Mana destabilization occurs when foreign mana enters your body and causes havoc, with your mana vein as damaged as they are they started damaging your body, and some of them popped]

[Do not let foreign mana enter your body, this will happen every time at varying intensity]

So whenever he manipulates mana very close around himself, the surrounding mana increases and starts a chain reaction in his mana channels. His clothes were soaked with blood, and his makeshift armor was dyed red in huge patches. The wood was brown so it looked horrible in the reflection.

His skin was open in places and scabbed over in others, he used lots of his limited disinfectant on his wounds and wrapped himself in gauze. Toby couldn’t even put the armor on again as it would almost kill him unless It was genius. He would hold the wooden piece perfectly fitted for his body to himself and just manipulate the vines.

One perk of being able to sense mana is he saw blue wisps of various amounts scattered around trees, certain fruits, and animals. This allowed him to see through objects a little bit and allowed him to make out the shape, but it was very difficult as sometimes things had around the same amount of mana.

Although it was confusing he would get used to it in a couple of days, it wasn’t a total change in vision, just an overlay. It was still confusing as fuck though, it was like manually counting the total number of hairs on your body.

Overall this would be a huge help in the future and increase his margin for error, he would chase off the lizardmen tomorrow, and if they came back kill them. Today he couldn’t he could scarcely move without keeling over, if he had to move a lot in his condition he would just roll over and die rather than move.