I decided to call the pathways “meridians”. All of my meridians started at my heart and looped around a limb, then it flowed back into my heart. As I followed the worm I learned more about what it was. It was a semi-physical manifestation of my mana. Just like a muscles, I could move my mana with my thoughts. I pulled out of my self inspection and tried to feel the mana in the air. The heat of the mana had different flavors, the only two flavors I could feel were lightning and force. With this realization I saw a whole new world that lay hidden under the visible world.
Personal alert: You have gained the skill: mana sight. +2 levels to mana sight. You have gained +2 free stat points.
Mana sight let me see lightning and force mana. I could see the electricity in the world around me, and in all the living things around me. Force mana was a bit different then lightning, force mana let me see force. Gravity, drag, fraction, even the nuclear forces all became visible to me. Even though I couldn't move the mana around me by thought, I could still l move it with my own mana. Just like I could move someone else's hand with my own, I could move the environmental mana with my own. I put all my focus on my spear, I sent out tendrils of mana from my heart and out into the world to gather up as much mana as my body could handle. Titania merged back into my soul to give it as much resilience as possible.
My thoughts sped up as my body pulled in all the environmental mana, I observed my status to see how my mana points fluctuated. In a matter of seconds my MP dropped to forty, then jumped up to one-hundred, then two-hundred, then four-hundred, then well over a thousand. My body felt like an overfilled water balloon. My hair was standing straight up, and there were arcs of electricity jumping off my body. My MP jumped up to almost two-thousand as I pulled all the electricity out of the nearby plants and air. The bear sized weasel lunged at me as It realized I was a threat, but it was too slow. In my empowered state, I channeled nearly all of my mana through my scorpion strike ability. My arm that drove the attack forward exploded into a fine mist as my attack turned into pure lightning and broke the sound barrier.
My spear shattered at the power I had channeled through it. before it was completely destroyed, the weapon modifier split the lightning bolt into three. My thoughts continued to speed up until it seemed like time itself froze. My lightning bolts had touched the weasel and created a bridge from my core to its core. I grabbed its mana with mine and ripped it out of its body. Time slowly sped up to normal and I saw some of the mana backlash at my own core, but I couldn't do anything besides endure the soul wrenching agony. Right as i thought my soul was going to unravel, titania wrapped a comforting presence around my soul and kept me from dying. Nothing happened at first. After the lightning bolts hit, they just disappeared into the big weasel. Then the weasel detonated with enough force to make a nearly eight foot deep crater under it. The detention created a wall of static electricity that launched me back and tried to worm it way into my skin to get at my core. In a moment of clarity I dumped all my free stat points into willpower. The pain pushed back a little and I regained my senses. The arm that had exploded was just a jagged scared stump at my shoulder, but I would need to worry about that later. The attack I had unleashed had been devastating, it vaporized at least 10 tons of dirt and rock, and leveled everything within 100 feet. I got a few notifications in the form of blue boxes in my vision but I pushed them to the side as I stumbled over to the people I was starting to think of as friends. It was a miracle that the attack hadn't killed them, but I could see all of them were still injured.
“What did you do?” Max ran up beside me to help support my weight.
Physically, I was perfectly fine, but my soul was still trying to unravel from the amount of mana I had pushed through it.
“I don't know yet, let me sit down so i can go through my notifications” it was a strain on my focus to even talk, the soul deep pain was like nothing I had ever experienced.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
After Max helped me to the ground I pulled up the boxes I had ignored. There were a lot of blue notification,
Personal alert: you gained understanding about the underlying world of mana. +5% effectiveness to all skills and spells the use mana.
Personal alert: You have overloaded your mana core, this can lead to permanent soul damage if not rectified soon.
Personal alert: you have touched upon a divine concept. you have shown determination, motivation and a gift for shaping mana and destiny to suit your whims. The heavens are granting you a gift worthy for someone of your potential. You owe the heavens a great debt.
That last line was concerning for multiple reasons. What were the heavens, what was a divine concept, and why did I owe someone or something a debt, when I didn't do anything. The next few notifications were just errors. But near the end there were a few important notifications that took my breath away.
Personal alert: you have gained the skill: domain: lightning and thunder (heaven forged).
Personal alert: you have unlocked two of five deific paths.
Deific path of body: as you reach for the top, you temper your body to the peak of mortality.
Deific path of mind: as you reach for the top, you temper your mind to the peak of mortality.
Personal alert: reaching the end of a deific path creates part of your deific foundation. Once all parts of your deific foundation have been assembled, you will be considered a true immotal.
Error: mana core insufficient to support deific paths. Creating an auxiliary divine class. Divine class has been set at level 1
The agony I had been in before was nothing compared to this. This felt like every part of my body and mind were being ripped apart and remade thousands of times each second. Titania was forcefully ejected from my soul and the extra rigidity she gave my soul left with her. My body started to turn into pure energy as I felt the divine class weigh on my soul. My mind was twisting and expanding in ways it shouldn't have.
Divine class creation: 1%. Time elapsed: 00:00:08, estimated time to complete creation: 16:15:26.
I couldn't last through another 16 hours of this agony. I didn't know if delirium was setting in or if the power that was making my divine class was showing me visions. I saw massive primal beings made of the space between worlds, they were so massive that they would eat entire galaxies as light snacks in between when they clashed and tore each other to shreds. Worlds were born and died from the shockwaves of each of their colossal strikes. Not all the world died when most did, from the world that survived, mortals arose to power. The power these mortals wielded was more limited than the massive primal beasts but they could work together to overcome any obstacle. From the most powerful of the mortals rose the 10 immortals. I witnessed the creation of the heavens, the group of 10 immortals banded together to control the abundant power just floating around space and with the heavens came magic as I had experienced it. I hadn't noticed until now, but the agony of being remade had retreated until it was just a buzzing in the back of my thoughts.
Divine class creation: 5%. Time elapsed: 00:01:48, estimated time to complete creation: 16:13:45.
As time passed, I saw more visions of the creation of everything but none were as important as the first. What I did learn was that the heavens were built as a hard counter to the primal beasts. Within a thousand years of the heavens being made, all but one of the primal beasts were killed and their spines were used as the back bones of what humans would call physical reality. The one surviving primal beast was hunted for a hundred years and was only captured after it killed 4 of the 10 immortals in a fight that killed billions of realities, each reality contained trillions of galaxies, each galaxy contained billions if not trillions of life forms. I lost track of time as the visions passed faster and faster. With a pop, I was back in my aching body. My divine class creation having finished during the last vision.