The next five days were spent under my father’s supervision, trying to figure out how to sense the mana inside of the fish stone. It was difficult for me to keep my focus and motivation up, even with my Grade 6 Willpower, but the thought of learning how to do magic kept pushing me forward.
Besides the excitement of learning how to do magic, I was also pushed forward by fear. I still vividly remembered the fear of being killed by skeletons at any moment I had experienced back at the Market, and the feeling of my arm melting before my eyes when that skeletal Mage had launched a flash of green light at me. I also remembered the hollow, empty streets of the Market. If I wanted to avoid ending up the same way as the original inhabitants of the Market, I needed to boost my strength as much as I could. I didn’t know how much of my abilities I would be able to take back into the Market, but learning how magic worked would still greatly improve my survival chances when we returned, since I would have a better idea what to expect from hostile enemies. And if I could bring some of my Abilities back to the Market, or even just cart back a huge amount of Achievement, it would make me much stronger as the three of us explored the area.
Finally, on the sixth day of practice my hard work paid off.
During the day’s training session, I was able to sense a slight… tingling sensation. It originated from deep inside of the fish core, and it felt like a tiny droplet of liquid electricity when I ‘felt’ it. The feeling of sensing mana by using my absorption essence was incredibly strange - it was like I was blindly sticking my hand into an electrical socket, but instead of getting electrocuted the energy simply rubbed itself into my fingertips, letting me know it was there without harming me.
I was so excited that I nearly lost focus, but I forced myself to calm down and re-establish my connection with the mana in the stone.
“I think I got it!” I said, keeping my eyes closed and my senses attuned to the tingling sensation.
“You did get it! That’s my baby girl. Now, focus on the energy inside of the rock, and try to pull it in. Everyone pulls in mana differently, but most people make a mental picture to help them. I personally think of the energy as a massive ocean, and then picture myself grabbing a bowl and scooping it into my mouth. This might not work for you, so try whatever feels right. Once you absorb some energy, your body will do the rest on its own.”
I did as he instructed, trying to reach out and pull the tingling sensation inside of me. I first tried to picture the energy inside of the stone as a kind of air, and then focused on breathing it in. However, while I felt the energy inside of the stone wriggle a bit, it didn’t actually enter my body. It seemed I needed a different image.
My next two attempts at devouring the energy in the stone also failed. Worse, I could feel my absorption essence draining away with each failed attempt. I had only been vaguely aware of my absorption essence before, but now that I had sensed mana for the first time, I was finally aware of a reservoir of energy inside of my body. And every second I used it to sense mana and interact with it, the absorption essence in my body was slowly draining away.
In other words, I had limited tries to get this right before I had to stop for the day. I had barely managed to sense mana today, and I wanted to at least eat a little mana before I ran out of tries for the day.
On my fourth try I finally succeeded in taking some mana away. I imagined a spoon, and pictured the mana inside of the stone as a kind of liquid, similar to a soup broth. Then, I used my imaginary spoon to scoop out some of the ‘liquid’ inside of the stone. It worked, but I realized my visualization method was flawed. About half of the tingling sensation ‘fell off’ of my spoon before it made its way inside of my body, dissipating into the air.
Even the half-spoonful of energy had an effect on my body. It felt like I had taken a sip of pure caffeine. I felt mana swirl around my body, and the absorption essence inside of me started to crazily rip away at it, digesting it and converting it into something my body could use. Finally, the newly digested energy began to make its way towards my arm.
The energy in my arm started stabilizing itself, gradually ‘solidifying.’ The feeling of having chugged an energy drink started to fade away, and instead it started to feel like I had a small amount of gelatin on my skin.
I opened my eyes before I took a look at my arm. Sure enough, there was a small, glowing chunk of white energy on my arm. It didn’t resemble the fully-built runes my father and the elder had. It was much less mature, and it was white instead of green or red. But I still felt excited when I looked at it.
I had taken my first step towards becoming a wizard!
My father gave me a huge grin. Moments later, he started cackling, before he picked me up and swung me around happily. “That’s my girl! Good job, Miria!” He gave me a sloppy kiss on the top of my head. I quietly smiled and reciprocated his hug.
“All right Miria. Now that you’ve gotten a little bit of mana inside of you, it’ll be easier to pull in more. However, you need to practice every single day until you finish building your first rune. Whenever you aren’t pulling in more mana, the mana inside of your arm will slowly leak out. Once you have a rune fully built, the mana you’ve absorbed will stop escaping. Once you’ve built your first rune, you will need to take a break. If you don’t give your body enough time to get used to the rune, you might hurt yourself, so in the future you’ll need to pull in a bunch of mana, turn it into a rune, and then stop absorbing energy until your body finishes dealing with it, okay?
“The other thing you need to remember is that every rune makes you stronger. The first three runes will naturally make your body stronger, healthier, and faster. Every rune will be harder to make than the last rune, so most people save up fish stones and other, harder to acquire cores called land beast cores until they feel that they’re ready, and then.
“Every three runes also represents a much bigger breakpoint in rune creation difficulty, but will also improve the reward for each new rune. The first three runes enhance your body, getting you ready to make the next runes. Runes four, five, and six give you a new special ability. Runes seven, eight, and nine enhance your brain and mana pool, giving you more energy. And the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth runes will enhance all of your previous runes to incredible degrees, as well as grant a few other abilities. For now, just focus on making your first three runes,” said my father, as he finally let go of me. “Other than that, each person’s body can only make so much absorption essence.. That means you can only make a certain number of runes, because each rune costs a certain amount of absorption essence to maintain. Eventually, you’ll spend as much absorption essence on maintaining your runes as you make every day, making it impossible to form more runes. You’re still a long ways away from that, though.”
“I understand, father,” I said. “Thank you for helping me learn this.”
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“Of course I’d be here for such a big moment in your life! Your mother and I were going to wait until you got a bit older for you to learn, but since I got hurt, we decided it wasn’t a bad idea to start now. Fish stones are uncommon, so we were worried you might waste them, but you’ve always been focused for your age, and it’s not like we have a huge shortage of fish cores either.” My father gave me another gentle hug before kissing my forehead. “I’m proud of you, sweetie. Now keep going and finish your first rune!”
I frowned. “Before I get back to working on my rune, what is mana, dad?”
My father scratched his head, giving me a strange look. “Well, uh… that’s a good question. I think I heard one of the elders mention that mana is the essence of everything, or that it was the ocean mother’s gift to humanity. I don’t know what that means, and there are a lot of contradictory ideas and legends about what mana is. Either way, I just know that runes absorb mana and make my body stronger, and I can’t interact with mana without using absorption essence. If you’re still curious when you’re older, maybe try talking with the elders of the tribe? They would know more than I would.”
I sighed, before I shrugged. If my father didn’t know the answer to my question, there wasn’t much I could do about it. And from what it sounded like, this world’s understanding of ‘mana’ might be very vague, or even incorrect. Since the chat log we had found in a shop in the Market had referenced Magic multiple times, the Market probably had a better understanding of mana and the four essences, so I might just need to wait until we returned before I learned more. For now, I would just focus on finishing my rune.
* * *
I spent the next few weeks working on finishing my first rune. It was slow and difficult, and every night I would lose some of the progress I spent hours building up, but eventually I succeeded. My mother and father had obviously prepared a lot for my first rune - we had almost three dozen fish cores stockpiled for my personal use. Which, as it turned out, was far, far more than I needed. Every single fish core had around three ‘spoonfuls’ of energy inside of it. As I grew better at manipulating absorption essence, I started to waste less mana, and near the end of my first rune I only wasted about a third of each spoonful instead of half. While I felt that this was still a pretty frustrating level of waste, and felt bad for losing so much energy, my parents told me it was pretty normal to lose some energy from a fish core. According to my mother, even most adults lost a quarter of the energy they tried to ‘eat,’ and children often lost fifty or even sixty or seventy percent. In total, it took me seven fish cores to finish building my first rune.
The moment the rune was completed, I saw a new System notification, and my body started to feel different. I ignored the System notification for now, and instead focused on the new rune I had built and its effects.
The rune started pulling in energy from my surroundings. Tingly bits of mana filled up the rune, and then my physical abilities all started to increase by leaps and bounds. I opened my Status Screen to see if it had anything to say about my newly made Rune.
Runes: 1 Successfully Condensed
(+20 to all Physical Attributes)
Physical
Mental
Essence
Strength: 128 (0+108+20)
Grade 6
Intelligence: 89 (0+89)
Grade 4
Absorption: 118 (0+118)
Grade 5
Agility: 147 (2+125+20)
Grade 7
Willpower: 130 (0+130)
Grade 6
Manifestation: 126 (0+126)
Grade 6
Fortitude: 129 (0+109+20)
Grade 6
Perception: 115 (0+115)
Grade 5
Binding: 74 (0+74)
Grade 3
Alteration: 76 (0+76)
Grade 3
My physical abilities had all increased by 20 in my Status Screen. In other words, they were all one grade higher than before. After I had experienced the massive difference one grade of Willpower made, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud as I experimented with my physical abilities.
The difference of one grade in all of my physical abilities was huge. I could jump higher, lift more, and my body practically glowed with health. The effects were somewhat muted due to the fact I was currently four years old, but I could already imagine how much bigger the difference would be once I grew up and my body finished developing. As my body matured, I would be able to take better advantage of my Stats as my physical vessel finished developing and growing up. However, at this very moment, as a four year old I felt as strong and coordinated as a ten year old child.
I also realized that my rune had another ability besides just passively strengthening me. If I wanted to, I could tap into the rune and ‘spend’ the mana inside of it, boosting my physical abilities further. It was nowhere near as big of a boost as increasing my attributes one grade, but it could certainly tip the scales in a fight if I learned how to use it properly. However, the energy cost was pretty intense, so I would need to practice timing it if I didn’t want to waste the attribute boost. I could probably only maintain it for ten or fifteen seconds, so it was very much an emergency ability and not one I could use frequently.
With my inspection done, I turned my attention back to the System notification I had seen.
Power: Condense your first rune out of absorption essence
Achievement +100
I felt delighted, but I also felt confused. If the Achievement I had absorbed previously felt like a shot of addictive drugs jammed directly into my brain, this rush of Achievement was like eating delicious sweets until I was full - I felt a pleasant sensation, but it was nowhere near as difficult to control as it was in the Market. I didn’t know why that was the case, but I decided to take it as a blessing.
At least right now, even if I got Achievement I wouldn’t feel like a drug addict looking for another high. While it felt good to get more Achievement in the Market, I had always been a little wary of how much the ‘high’ of absorbing more Achievement felt might change my behavior, or distract me at a critical moment.
This System notification also told me that I could get Achievement in the middle of a reincarnation, which was very important for my future planning. No wonder people in the Market felt that a few hundred Achievement was just peanuts. I had gotten 100 Achievement just from learning the lowest entry-level magic of this world, and I was willing to bet more difficult and impressive feats would grant me even greater amounts of Achievement.
I had a much better idea why people in the Market focused on reincarnations now. Compared to fighting skeletons in the Market, the amount of Achievement I could get by reincarnating and growing in a world seemed to be much higher. And the downsides of getting Achievement were also seriously minimized. Even if I couldn’t spend my Achievement until we returned to the Market, it was comforting to know that I had just earned enough Achievement for another two permanent stat points, assuming I didn’t find anything better to buy once we returned.
I got up and started walking through the house, shaking off my excitement and trying to find my parents. When I found them, they were just as excited as I was that I had successfully condensed my first rune. After my mother and father both gave me tight hugs and celebrated, my mother brought up a topic I was exuberant to hear about.
“Now that you’ve condensed your first rune, you’ve shown that you have the patience and willpower to stay sane and alive when you go outside. We can’t keep you cooped up in here forever, right? Tomorrow, would you like to go outside and see a few other children?”