Collecting my bag from where I had dropped it, I sat on the side of the river. Everything hurt, but my leg was the worst of my injuries. I considered myself lucky that the beast’s claws hadn’t managed to sink any deeper, but I really didn’t want to do any more walking for the day. Dragging a few waterlogged branches closer to the clay deposit. I started setting up my shelter for the night.
I still had several marks before nightfall, but I needed a chance to recover. Besides that, I was fairly sure I recognized some of the plants by the water’s edge to be edible.
I was much more careful to keep an eye on the jungle as well as the water as I set up my shelter. After a few marks of foraging, I crawled in and tried to make myself comfortable. Though still present, the ache in my limbs was starting to fade. The gash on my leg was definitely still painful, but not as bad as I would have expected.
Looking through my interface I spotted a likely reason why.
Mana resistance level:
User’s Maximum safe mana threshold prior to system integration: 182
Mana resistance from System Integration: 45
Mana resistance from Mana Pool boon: 5
Mana resistance from System Codex boon: 5
Total: 237
Total Physical Enhancement Level: 10
Emergency Physical Augmentation (Improved Regeneration): 10
Total: 10
I was too distracted the night before to consider the implications of this emergency boon. Before I could sort through the ramifications, I wanted to see if I could pull up more information.
Emergency Physical Augmentation (Improved Regeneration):
Internal mana construct which accelerates cellular regrowth in the user.
Physical Enhancement Level 10.
Physical Enhancement Level:
To prevent mana poisoning, a user’s total physical enhancement level cannot exceed their mana resistance level.
I had been quite excited when I first saw the message about physical enhancements. Somehow, as I had dreamed of incredible strength or impossible quickness, I hadn’t considered something like a healing ability. Fun though it would have been to be able to out wrestle a drake, the ability to survive crippling wounds was far more appealing to me.
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Examining the slowly mending wound on my leg, I tried to figure out how fast it was healing. The wound wasn’t a simple scratch, but it wasn’t bad enough to leave me unable to walk. I estimated that it would have normally taken about five or six days to heal as much as it had already. Considering that the wound wasn’t even half a day old, it was healing at least ten times faster than it would have without the system. Such a dramatic increase in someone's recovery was beyond even the strongest healing spells I had ever seen.
Casting mana sense, I tried to see if I could figure out more about this new mana structure. I felt a subtle warmth throughout my body, as though the mana was diffused throughout. The warmth from the mana seemed focused on my nerves and around the gash on my leg.
If the mana was most focused on injured locations, that probably meant that my lingering pain from before was some sort of minor nerve damage. Perhaps it was mana poisoning from the phantasmal flame spell I had been hit with the day before? It did pack a lot of mana into a very small area, so it was certainly a possibility.
Since I was looking at the mana within my body anyway, I tried to feel out the edges of the system in my head. It was still a little ball of flame to my mana sense, but it seemed a bit bigger than it had the first time I looked at it. Most notably, there was a large protrusion of less dense mana at the bottom. Perhaps this was the codex? Regardless, mana sense gave me too little information for me to make any real detail about any of the system’s components.
Disabling my mana sense, I once more looked at my interface.
Name: Kyo —-----
Class: System Initiate
(8/10, 87%)
Mana Pool: 21/100
Codex: 99.98%
Boons: 8
Environmental Conditions: Unchanged
MR:237
TPEL:10
There was no indication of additional abilities like the emergency augmentation or trauma mitigation. Where did those even come from?
Emergency Physical Augmentation: Subfeature of interface status boon
Automatic Trauma Mitigation: Subfeature of system interface
Well, that explained where the extra features came from. Evidently, the descriptions I had been looking at when selecting my boons had been incomplete. It looked like each boon came with a number of previously undisclosed subfeatures. Why wasn’t I able to see these before?
Subsystem Analysis: Enabled
Allows the user to view details from any level of the system’s implementation. Subfeature of interface customization. Enabled by default.
Yet another question to which a subfeature was the answer. I was starting to get the impression that I had only seen a small portion of what the system was actually doing. Perhaps it would be a good idea to change that.
The subsystem analysis’ message said that it would let me view details about any level of the system’s implementation. Did that mean that it would let me view the exact mana forms that the system itself was built from? Excited by the possibilities, I tried to prompt the system to show me exactly how it was crafted.
Sudden, intense pain flooded my head as my mind was overwhelmed with information. The ludicrously complex mana forms were painful to even consider. While simply remaining conscious was an accomplishment, comprehension was not even a remote possibility.
It only lasted a moment, but that was enough. The brief peek into the system’s inner workings left me huddled on the ground clutching my aching head.
Trying to examine the entirety of a massive, multidimensional pattern of mana all at once was definitely not one of the brightest ideas I had ever had.