Problems are like plate-mice. Ubiquitous to all places, and if left alone for too long, likely to breed into more at a rate that beggars belief.

-Feifjin’s Guide to Proper Administration

With most of the night still ahead of me, I focused on controlling mana. I’d had no luck, so far, but after evolving my skill into Directed Mana Absorption, I was hoping for a better result. I accidentally improved my skill in a somewhat backwards manner, but now I was hoping to take advantage of the ability to improve in new directions and see if my control could be used in a different way.

Whereas before, I focused on drawing mana from a specific area, now I was inverting that principle. Now I was draining mana from my entire aura, with a single exception.

I was trying to make mana in one area stationary. Mana was already more resistant to moving in stone, so I figured that was a good place to start. Hopefully, I would get to the point where I could stop the mana flowing out of me, though I was starting elsewhere so I could both more easily track my progress and use a staggered and gradual approach.

Just like when I tried to stop mana drain, at first I didn’t notice any progress, but by morning the mana flowing naturally through my target area was moving a tiny bit slower. As a captive I had nothing but time, so any improvement I could make, without a change to my captivity, was a win for me. My dungeon half would insist on action every now and then, but that was not really a possibility now.

I still had to take a moment to clear my mind every now and then when it became too insistent.

What do you even want me to do, bite his ankles off? I don’t even have a mouth…

Then I would get back to work.

The next morning Tam returned again, but surprised me with change in routine. He was carrying a cage with bronze bars, and it had something alive in it. Honestly, no idea what that thing is. It had a black exoskeleton which reflected the light in prismatic colors, but in form it was closer to a mouse.

Oddly adorable, in a vaguely creepy way.

Tam held it out near me and I focused my senses on it. I attempted to drain mana from around it too, but felt nothing remarkable. It might have been emitting mana, it might not; Tam’s billowing clouds of mana obscured any fine details. My senses did not penetrate inside the thing, but living things blocked my senses, so it was hardly a surprise. Tam nodded to himself.

No idea what that was about.

Tam proceeded to cast some spells. These ones were different from any I had seen before. They soon hovered in numerous locations throughout the room. Then Tam cast another spell at me, but this one had more mana in it than usual, the usually muted glows of the spell looked more like molten glass. It penetrated into me and locked in place.

Aw… shit. Did he notice that I expanded my aura?

If he started monitoring me more closely, it was going to make things so much harder. It might actually make escape impossible.

I was still trying not to panic when Tam picked the cage up again. He held it near me. I ignored it and continued to try to study the more powerful spell cast on me. Tam frowned and shook the cage a little. Does he want me to focus on the cage again? I obliged, focusing my attention and mana absorption on the cage. Tam smiled. What’s the point of this? Honestly, I was interested in it because I had never seen anything like it, but alien life form or no, I had…

With a tiny gesture of his opposite hand and a word Tam sent a red ray of light into the cage and the creature was vaporized.

Holy Shit!

A warm feeling flooded into me. Mana. The creature’s death released a burst of raw mana that was greater than anything I had ever felt before. With a quick look I could see that I had five mana now. Attack. I shook off my other half and almost started to expand my aura under the floor again, but stopped abruptly. Tam had deliberately given me mana. He knew I had it. He was expecting me to do something with it. What would he have done if he had seen my mana go down with nothing apparently happening? I felt cold. I almost exposed myself. He was expecting me to use it, so I would show him I was.

I expanded my aura out, adding to the sphere around my core. My tiny sphere expanded out as swiftly as I could make it. It would be foolish to waste time and let the mana drain diminish what I had available.

My world expanded, my sense of self expanding with my aura. By the time the mana was spent, I was connected to a portion of the ceiling, most of the floor, and the lower middle of all the walls.

I could feel… everything. I had already felt the stone that I extended into, but despite the minute fractures and pressures, it had felt fairly uniform. I had seen this room for days on end, but now I could feel it. The smooth grain of the wooden chair that Tam had spent so many days sitting in. The roughness of the floor, unpolished and gritty. I could feel the faint heat in the air from the lights.

I wasn’t touching everything. I could not feel them like I used to, but it was more than what I had been feeling, which was practically nothing.

God, I needed this!

I would have cried if I had eyes. The sheer feeling was overwhelming and I needed it so badly. I lost myself in the bliss, simply feeling.

Tam seemed happy, too. He smiled slightly as he stared off into space and he proceeded to dismiss each spell in turn. Honestly, I barely noticed the first few fading, and might have missed the rest if my other half hadn’t inserted a strong instinct of hunger. Even as I realized the spells were being dismissed, I deliberately did not focus on them. Not going to give myself away. Some tiny fraction of mana poured into me naturally from the spells, but nothing like what would have happened if I had focused on absorbing them. The spell directly attached to me had not been dismissed and I had to assume it was monitoring my mana levels, even now. For the moment I simply waited and focused as much as possible on draining that spell, ready when for when it was dismissed.

That spell was dismissed last, and as much as I hated the waste of the others, it was still a feast. Tam had invested much more energy into the spell than usual, and when he dismissed it, that extra mana was mine to take. By the time I was done absorbing it, I had seven mana, more than I ever had before. I used it immediately, expanding into the walls, ceiling, and floor, though I avoided expanding my aura to cover any visible space I didn’t already show Tam. I also decided to do all my future expansion in the direction away from the hallway. I had no idea what other rooms might be here, but I at least knew to avoid the direction of the hallway.

Expanding my aura made me think more about my aura. I had never felt anything like it when I was still human. The amount of information it gave me kept growing. I couldn’t feel the microscopic world, though I had no idea if that would always be true. I could, however, feel things from the stone of the walls. The small amount I had before had not told me much. Now, with stone in my aura above, below, and to the sides of the room I could feel the stresses in the stone. I could feel how additional weight was borne by the dome of stone that formed the ceiling and channeled to the sides of the room. I could feel the literal tons of weight bearing down. Some part of my other half seemed to find this soothing. Personally, it made me feel vaguely claustrophobic, even though I knew, from the stone itself, that it was in no danger of collapse. I could also feel imperfections in the stone. The grain of the stone for an entire section had sheared under pressure, formed improperly, or both. Where two different types of stone met, there was a disconnect in how they intermingled at the border, leaving a weak point. I could feel the faint buckling as each type of stone bent differently under the pressure.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

I lost myself in the joy of sensation. I traced the subtle temperature gradients formed between the air and the stone. Warm air constantly flowed from the hallway, pushing in and cycling out air cooled by loss of heat to the stone. Somewhere, Tam had heating. Not really surprising. Somewhere, in all of the sensation, I became conscious that this was another proof I was not human any longer. Not due to the strange feelings, though those were proof on their own, but the amount of information I was feeling and processing simultaneously. No human could feel and understand this much. I knew from learning about the brain that it was already cheating to maintain the illusion of continuity. We did not see as much as we thought we did. The edges of our vision were place holders with details added from memory. We had a blind spot in our vision where the optic nerve met the back of the retina, carefully filled in with previous data. We heard what we thought we should hear when our hearing was insufficient.

‘We’… funny… I start thinking I am not human anymore, and then think ‘we’ when I generalize about humans. I guess I am both. I am human, because I was born as one, and I have carried that part with me. My soul, or mind, or emotions, what have you, is human.

I was still a product of my culture, knowledge, and history.

My emotions stabilized. Increasing the amount of stimulus might have actually unbalanced my emotions temporarily. I would watch out for that in the future. Tam had wandered off somewhere during my distraction. I had a vague memory of the pressure of his footfalls on the floor vibrating through my aura as he left. Calmer again, I focused, pushing mana into stillness.

It was only a few moments before Tam returned. I was surprised when he cast another spell, which hovered, partially inside my aura, at the doorway. Then, Tam went back to his endless examination of his tome.

What was that spell for?

Well, it was at the border of my aura, so it probably checked for that. I would have smiled at Tam if I could. Well, no, if I had expressions I would be doing my best poker face. Don’t worry Tam, I won’t be expanding my aura that way.

I was half tempted to deliberately start expanding my aura through the stone in the hallway, bypassing his damn sensor. Not being an idiot, I did no more than consider it, briefly, before resuming my practice.

I waited, resuming my regular habits. The spell that monitored me was canceled, and drained it away, rinse and repeat. As I had decided earlier though, I used any new mana to send a horizontal rod of aura in the opposite direction from the doorway. As Tam continued to monitor me, and then cancel the spells, I sent the rod farther and farther. Eventually, after it had begun to strain, I widened it, discovering that as long as I kept the diameter at least three feet I felt no strain at all.

The irony of using the spells meant to keep me in check to further my own growth, did not escape me, making me hum with malicious joy. It had become obvious that Tam could not see what I did. Not just through walls, and so on. He couldn’t see the mana that I grabbed from his spells. And his spells were beautiful, but they were also… messy. I couldn’t tell at first, but watching the same spell get cast on me day after day, multiple times a day, I learned to tell. He was using the same spell, but it was never the exact same. The core structures were identical, but little drips and drabs of mana went askew each time.

If Tam was capable of seeing the spells, I expected that he would have fixed that. I could be wrong. I doubted he had to worry about the wasted mana. However, once upon a time, he probably did need to worry about the mana, if he had leveled up like me. And, even if he didn’t need to worry about mana, it showed a lack of control that felt foreign to my perception of this man; he was so careful with his precautions.

I would not, could not, deceive myself, not if I wanted real chance to escape. The only reason I had a good chance at escaping, eventually, was because he didn’t know I existed. He assumed I was just a set of instincts. And, if I had been, his current precautions would have been more than sufficient. It was hardly Tam’s fault that I represented an outside context problem.

When Tam left for the evening I had made good progress on expanding a long cylinder of my aura deep into the back wall. Well, deep was relative. Maybe thirty to forty feet deep?

In addition to that expansion, I had continued my focus on holding mana still. I had gradually seen the mana grow more and more sluggish. I continued through the night and, by morning, the mana had stopped moving entirely. I switched to the next planned step, moving on from practicing on stone, to working on air. The mana in the air barely slowed down at all, but it did slow down.

Oh well, progress is progress.

Tam soon arrived for the morning; he entered and he cast his usual analytic spell my way. After he got the results, he simply stared at me as he leaned forward in his chair.

Uh… why are you staring at me like that?

I checked my status really fast, no change. If I could sweat it would have been dripping down the stand and forming a puddle underneath me.

Stop staring… please.

Has he just been watching the whole time, making me think I was hiding stuff from him?

After an endless silence, Tam started to mutter to himself. His tone was shifting back and forth. It sounded like he is arguing with himself. I thought harmless thoughts and tried to send them his way. Just a harmless core here, no murderous instincts. Nope, not one. No need to try and destroy me. I’m practically harmless. Why were there no language skills available for purchase in the AP store? Watching Tam argue with himself made my mind more and more frantic. Without being able to understand, I was coming up with worse and worse scenarios. After a few minutes Tam nodded to himself and left the room.

Please don’t come back with a hammer…

When Tam came back he was carrying the same chalk he had used to fuse me with the dungeon core. Unlike last time, now I could sense the incredibly dense mana packed into the chalk. Tam didn’t walk towards me, though, he went to one of the walls and started to draw in an area my aura didn’t cover.

A diamond shape appeared, followed by a circle perfectly centered inside it. The two shapes did not touch. With precise strokes, Tam drew out runes. Runes? Characters? Symbols? Wingdings? It took him only a brief minute, despite the precision of the lines. Wonder if he draws as a hobby? He carefully inspected each rune, then nodded when he finished. With a word, and a gesture, the inscribed chalk flared with light, burning itself half an inch into the stone. I could still see the mana left behind in the traces. He pulled out a hunk of silvery metal, it looked like the same metal that he had used as a powder before. Unlike the chalk, it didn’t appear to have any mana of its own.

I tried to imagine what it was for. Unfortunately my thoughts kept focusing on the idea of a larger and more powerful mana drain. Something that would suck all mana out of me the moment I got any. I was barely managing anything as it was, and if he did that…

Tam spoke and gestured. Thus spake that annoying mage… Mana flowed out from him in a stream and formed constantly shifting spell-work. Metal droplets drew off from the hunk, flying to coat the indentations left in the wall. Even as he put the metal into a pocket, he gathered mana together. The mana brightened from a will-o-wisp, to sunlight, to staring at the sun. It looked like hundreds of times more mana than I had ever seen Tam use to cast any spell. The mana fed into the metal, causing it to glow. With a flash, the runes lit up before they faded from blinding down to a faint glimmer.

Tam headed out of the room, though only after casting a few spells at the runes on the wall.

Diagnostics? And what the hell it that thing even for?

As far as I could tell, all that mana had simply disappeared. I was fairly sure, however, that like the runes covering the stand I sat upon, it had simply become invisible. I could feel mana moving gently toward the rune structure on the wall, but it was barely noticeable. It certainly wasn’t enough to cause me any problems, and it was not draining me directly. The rune was simply maintaining itself, presumably. I make more assumptions than I like, these days. I didn’t know what it was actually for, but at least it wasn’t a new and improved mana drain.

Should try to see what it does.

I concentrated mana to cover me, but didn’t see anything new. Wait. There. A flicker of something, but then was gone immediately. Then it happened again. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Threads, maybe? Little strands of magic drifted through the room. I feared the worst, and checked all of my aura. It was not monitoring everything, it seemed confined to this room, extending only a tiny distance into the walls.

Okay, now I really had no idea what it was for. It didn’t seem to be measuring me, or my aura, my mana, or anything else I could detect. It just constantly passed over the room.

Tam returned with a cage. This time there were three of the strange creatures inside.

What should I even call these things? Mouse-bugs, no, mice-bugs would be the proper plural. Yeah, guess I will go with that. Wonder if he is going to sacrifice those to me too?

Wait. If he does that I will get a little more than five mana each. I checked my status to be sure. Yep, holy shit, there it was. If I got fifteen mana, I could level up!