Once I had my bearings, my first act was to burn through nearly all the mana I’d just absorbed to stabilise the chapel. With both the discomfort of Mana Overflow and the persistent unease of my natural paranoia alleviated, I thought I might have a moment to reorientate my thoughts, but it was not to be. Even as the action was resolving, the mana was already flowing again, its foul taste only lessened by the reduced volume and a slightly more prepared mindset.

With how it was acting, the graveyard’s mana seemed less like a vein of ore and more like an aquifer I’d just tunnelled into.

Waste not, want not, I immediately tried to match its influx with a flurry of action, expanding both the room I’d just opened and the one at the entrance. I dug another corridor off from the mining room, then a cul-de-sac at its end, which became a room, expanded it, (Oh, what’s this option?) fortified it (neat), fortified the other rooms, fortified the tunnels, split the entrance tunnel’s half-tile drops into a proper stairway, lowered the step height, lowered it again, despaired at the lack of a guardrail option, considered turning it into a ramp, discarded that idea...

Then I stopped.

(Strictly speaking, I'd 'stopped' after that second step lowering, but it was then that I 'officially' stopped.)

> Quote:31 / 50 MANA

Forty five minutes (or so) of work and I had already lost a lot of ground against the tide of mana. Most of it while fretting over what to do with the entrance. I had easily met its flow while in motion, but that wasn’t something I could maintain. I’d never been an especially agile thinker and I’d always had trouble when forced to make plans on the fly. With each task completed, I had to centre myself and parse what next?, which took longer and longer as I slowly went down the most obvious options. No, this wasn’t sustainable. Especially not when I was eventually going to run into the non-mana limits of the system. I needed to staunch the flow and give myself time to think. I needed to dam the river, not drink it dry.

Which meant going through the manual and finding a proper solution. Which, unfortunately, meant I’d need to stop building and risk exceeding my mana cap again.

Minutes passed as I fruitlessly searched the manual for some way to store or bank the mana I was gaining. Though I studiously avoided the status screen, for once I started checking it, I wouldn't be able to stop myself, I swore I could hear it tick upwards in my head. As I approached what I estimated to be the limit, I braced myself for the returning sense of nausea.

...

...

Finally giving in, I checked on my current numbers.

> Quote:50/50 Mana

I continued watching it warily for about a minute, just to make sure. Certain that it'd actually stopped, I sighed in relief (menta-look, you get the picture already).

...

Wait...Where's it going then...?

The answer was blindingly obvious as soon as I took a quick peek at what I was quickly coming to call The Mortuary. The mana was flowing through the breach, just as it had previously, but rather than being directly absorbed into my mana pool, it was now leeching out into the room as a thick, pale blue fog. I observed it tentatively, but it seemed mostly harmless enough.

Now that the matter didn't seem quite so pressing, I was able to calm down and find a solution at my own pace. Usually, now that it wasn't immediately health threatening, I would've left it until I had no other choice, but I was still in a sort of active frame of mind.

Once I found it, it seemed obvious.

> Quote:Enhance [Room #3][The Mortuary] with a permanent construct.

> >Convert target tile into special terrain.

> >>Resource Tile – Holy Crystal

At my command, the earth drew upwards, reaching towards the breach like a flower towards the sun in time lapse. In my head, I imagined it following conductor-like hand movements and felt vaguely sad that I couldn't indulge in such fantasy. For now, it wasn’t much to look at. For now, it was little more than an oddly shaped spike, jutting out of the ground. In my own pseudo-sight, however, I could see the ghostly image of its eventual form overlaid upon it. Over time, eerily beautiful crystals of the same colour as the fog would sprout from its surface like the leaves of some alien plant. It was a precarious looking thing, each crystal far larger should've been feasible. If not for the structure's supernatural nature, surely such a set of crystals would collapse under their own weight.

> Quote:2 / 100,000

I smirked. That should hold things for a while.

Then, I backpedalled.

Wait a second, that wasn't...

'Enhance' hadn't been available from the status screen before. I remembered that. My options overall had be quite limited before now and even so, that resource...node, I suppose...was the only option I'd been presented with. For a moment, I wondered whether I was only capable of accessing options I was actively aware of…Except, I’d still been able to ‘Catalogue’, ‘Absorb’ or ‘Abandon’ things in the chapel, even before I’d known what any of those things were. Odd. Out of curiosity, I went to experiment with the enhance feature, only to find it'd vanished from the room's list of options.

It seemed I'd need more time with the Manual. A frustrating task to be certain. Beyond my initial luck with its basic functions, finding anything within it seemed unneccessarily difficult and finicky. At some point, I'd need to figure out how to use the accursed thing without resorting to what was likely just the ‘I Feel Lucky’ search function.

Without warning, a half-pained, half-startled wail punctuated my thoughts and shocked me back to reality.

> Quote:Your Minion has returned to the dungeon.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Very timely, UI.

It was then that I discovered menu pop-ups and alerts appeared behind the Manual text box. Rushing towards the sound, I found Faryea in that small entrance room, hunched over and retching, as though about to throw up. Though I'd stopped the flow of the Holy Mana into the dungeon, the fog already present had diffused across the entire first floor, eventually settling as a faint tint in the air around chest height. Human chest height, that is. With the height she usually defaulted to, Faryea's head would've been well under it.

I spent a few moments paralysed with panic, unsure how to even interact. The shock was cleared by a thought; get her out of there. Without thinking, without even really knowing what I was doing, I took Faryea in my Grasp and Shunted her back up to the Chapel, away from the obviously toxic mist, before gingerly laying her on the ground.

Faryea! Are you o-?

"W-what-" she covered her mouth, as she was accosted by her gag reflex. While she dropped to her knees, retching, I quickly examined her stat page. No health lost. No icons or effects noted on her status bar. As far as the system knew, there was nothing wrong with her, which only lead me to think that the status page I was looking at wasn't as reliable as I'd come to expect from video games. Hopefully, my gut feeling was wrong and I was being overly panicky as usual. With a little bit of time, the initial rush of panic decayed into a less acute sort of worry, as things remained stable and it seemed she wasn’t in immediate danger.

"Wh-" she tried to start again, before she dropped to her knees and continued dry heaving. With no clue what the underlying cause was (beyond the blindingly obvious idea of 'Holy magic probably doesn't agree with demons', which I should probably have considered previously) or whether this would even appear in the numerical system part of this reality, I couldn't even really use the manual to figure out what was happening without likely flipping through fifty irrelevant entries.

Will you be okay?

I immediately cursed myself for asking the question when she was having trouble speaking (WHAT DO YOU THINK, IDIOT?!). Still, she did her best to struggle through it.

"Yeah...It's..." she pushed herself into a sitting position, still visibly unwell, but growing more stable with each passing moment, "Mmm, I'll, uh, be fine. In a day or two. I’ll be-urgh, I’ll be okay. I've seen some of the other imps get Mana Poisoning before, when they...they did...mmph. It's...Not fun."

I latched onto that phrasing with a vengeance.

> Quote:Mana Poisoning

>

> The colloquial name for the negative effects that absorbing incompatible mana has on a monster. Certain elementally aligned monsters such as Angels, Dryads and Demons don't have the ability to convert mana from one element to another and rely on absorbing mana already converted by another being. Absorbing any mana that doesn’t match their alignment will Stun and Sicken the monster, with the duration and virulence based on the amount of mana absorbed. As long as no additional mana is absorbed, this mana will eventualy decay and be expelled.

>

> If you were looking for the side effects caused by the fallout of Rank 9+ spells, go to Arcanic Poisoning

>

> If you were looking for the Mana equivalent of Poison, go to Ennervation

Where were those helpful alternative links when I actually bloody needed them?

> Quote:Sick

>

> A negative status effect with variable consequences. Extended duration. Hidden (Minor).

Oh, very helpful. And very specific. Still, I let out a metaphorical breath I hadn't know I'd been holding. Obviously, it wasn't nothing, but it didn't seem dire enough to still be fretting over it. Hopefully, I'd just triggered the monster equivalent of Lactose Intolerance.

Managing to fight passed whatever sort of nausea and other ill-feelings she was suffering through, Faryea had a moment to parse what exactly had happened and realised just who was likely at fault.

"Wh-…Ughc…what did you do?" she choked out, voice tinged with a mix of frustration, shock and 'I'm really trying not to throw up'.

…I opened up a tunnel to the cemetery and I wasn’t quite fast enough at placing down something to catch it, sorry.

That earned me an exasperated, vaguely sceptical glare as she tried to push herself into a position to more comfortably direct her ire towards my orb.

“By-mmph-by Vedrunn’s great knobbed staff, how does that have anything to do with the fact the first floor is flooded with holy mana?”

At first, I hesitated, mostly out of confusion regarding the unfamiliar turn of phrase (Is that literal, or is that a euphemism?), until I realised what she was specifically asking about. I bit back my first answer (‘Excuse me? I was under the impression this was exactly the stuff you’d asked be to go after’) and calmed myself. Obviously, she had no clue what this was about. Obviously, it wasn't her I should be irritated at for not having all the answers when it was likely her boss who organised this entire setup. Even if it seemed whatever happened wasn't necessarily my fault (which was always the first thing I was drawn towards proving), that didn't mean it had to be her fault.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t help but let a little irritation bleed through.

How would I know? You’re asking someone who doesn’t even know how mana works. I opened up a hole to get to it, and that’s what poured out. Maybe it has to do with the fact it’s a cemetery next to a chapel?

A few moments passed as we stared each other down (well, I stared her down, and she stared through me at the orb), before Faryea flopped forward, sprawled on the floor, likely having run out of adrenalin or whatever else she been running on. Silence reigned for a time as she lay there and I hesitantly kept an eye on her, immediately feeling vaguely guilty.

After some time, she shifted, struggling to pull herself back up. Failing that, she craned her neck upwards.

“Oh, uh…right…I-mmph- got the stuff.”