It took a couple of long, boring marks before the pain in my head cleared enough for me to attempt any magic. My first attempts at the water gathering spell proved almost entirely unsuccessful. I couldn’t even manage to weave a single one of the detection forms. They were simply too complex for me to craft with my level of mana manipulation.

With a bit of trial and error, I managed to get the tiny invisible force mana form working. It didn’t do very much without the targeting form, but I was quite pleased anyway. It wasn’t everyday I learned a new spell after all.

After only about a mark of practice, I had to stop. Not only was my mana pool running low, but I could feel the new construct under my skin starting to grow painful.

I hoped that it wouldn’t get as painful as the mild mana poisoning in my head had been when I had first woken up. I took a glance at my current progress.

Name: Kyo —-----

Class: Novice Mage

(1/10, 92%)

Mana Pool: 1/100

Codex: 72.47%

Boons:

System Initiate: 10

Novice Mage: 1

Environmental Conditions: Low mana, integration speed reduced

MR:242

TPEL:10

Normally, I would have been disappointed by the reduced integration speed message. With the pain slowly building across my body, I welcomed it.

Digging through my pack, I rationed out the last of my food. I only had enough for about a day, but that was better than my water situation. My waterskin held just a few more mouthfuls.

Without mana to continue practicing spells, I turned to my codex. I still needed to find a way out of my situation. None of the mana forms I knew would be of much help.

I wasn’t sure where to start looking, so I decided to assuage some of my earlier curiosity. Hoping that my new boon would grant me more success, I once more tried inquiring about the mana forms used in the door. This time, I was given exactly what I had hoped for.

Looking over the mana forms from my codex, I was pleased to find that I had correctly identified the use of each component in the door. Looking at the one mana form in the center of the door that had stumped me, I learned that I didn’t have any way to activate it correctly.

It was somewhat similar to the mana form I was trying to get working that would identify substances. The mana form for the door would examine a person’s fingers and try to match them to a list of patterns. That wasn’t anything I would have ever considered as a possibility, even if I did somehow have a way to match the pattern.

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Looking at how the mana was bound to the door was quite interesting. Instead of layering mana receptive materials over the door to form sigils, the villagers had used a very different technique. They had used something that my codex informed me was called a rune. By carving a mana form into the door itself, the mana was anchored into the surrounding material.

Unlike sigils, it looked like runes wouldn’t be easy to stack on top of each other. Trying to place a second rune within a certain area of another would likely cause some unfortunate interference. The runes on the door were spaced apart from one another, so that they would only overlap slightly at the edges of their effect.

It was certainly interesting, but not particularly useful. I could see myself carving many runes in the future, but only if I could escape the titan waiting outside.

I tried seeing if the codex had better versions of any of my existing spells. I immediately found improved versions of my invisible force and fire bolt spells that I was going to have to try later on. Both of them used additional mana forms to more carefully direct the direction the heat or force would flow in.

After studying the new mana forms in my codex for a while, a familiar purple symbol floated at the edge of my vision.

Trying to ignore the burning ache across my body, I called up my available boons.

Physical enhancement: improved concentration

Strengthens the user’s mental concentration. Physical enhancement level: 5

Physical enhancement: improved mana perception

Strengthens the user’s ability to perceive mana. Physical enhancement level: 5

Codex: Mana form implementation

Enables the system to automatically craft simple mana forms when prompted by the user.

Mana pool expansion

Increases the amount of mana a user has available in their mana pool.

Minor boon

Minor boons available:

Physical enhancement: Improved mana control

Both of the new boons were appealing, but I was quite curious about the second one. I already had the improved mana control, but it looked like I was being offered it a second time as a minor boon. What exactly was a minor boon?

Minor Boons:

A minor boon may sometimes be selected in place of a major boon. Minor boons are typically reduced versions of already obtained boons. A minor boon will not be as strong as its major boon equivalent, but it will still offer further gains.

So, instead of being forced to take boons I didn’t want, I could somewhat improve boons that I already had. Certainly useful for later, but I still had major boons I wanted.

One such boon was the expanded mana pool. Its applications were very easy to see. My limited pool of available mana had already halted my practice with new mana forms, so that would provide immediate benefits. Beyond that, with a greater amount of mana to work with, I would have access to even more powerful spells. My invisible force spell could already pack a punch with even half my mana pool, how strong would it be if I dumped all of my mana into it?

Tempting though I found it, I highly doubted that it would increase my mana to the point where I could fight the monster waiting outside. If I wanted any chance of escape, I would need to figure out something clever.

After a regretful glance at the expanded mana pool, I selected the improved mana sense. I needed to improve the finesse of my weaving if I wanted to take advantage of the new mana forms available to me. More mana wasn’t going to achieve that.

On the topic of finesse, I still needed to test my improved manipulation.