It’s been a week now and I still haven’t sensed my mana. I feel like I’m getting close, but that could just be me imagining things. I’ve probably spent at least four hours a day trying to sense my mana.
The rest of the day I’ve either spent walking around Tulip or helping dad. He was really happy when I asked him if he would show me how to help make medicines and heal people. There would only be so much I could do without magic though.
He started by giving me a book on basic human anatomy and another book on common plants and herbs that can be used for medicine. I already have a decent understanding of human anatomy from my last life. The book he gave me showed that the basic structure of humans in my last life and the humans here seem to be the same.
I never studied anatomy thoroughly, but I did take a class on it before and I still have some of the basic structures and understanding in my head. I’m going to take my time with the book though. For one I don’t want to make it look like I’m some genius, because I’m not. Secondly this world has magic so that could easily mean part of the human body has changed because of that.
The book on common plants was rather interesting. One section was based around the plants themselves. Where and what conditions they grew in. Appearances described along with pictures. Even how to handle, harvest, or preserve them. Then there was the section about storing or using the herbs.
Dad had given me a list of plants in the book that could be found around Tulip so I focused about learning those first. That way if I saw them while I was about, I could notice and gather them.
It helped that dad had examples of most of the list he gave me. Seeing a drawn image in a book and the actual physical thing was very different. The pictures and words don’t always describe the scale or look precisely. Even then some plants look different depending on the region they grow in too.
The books and talking to dad about them help to break up the boring monotony of trying to sense my mana.
Getting back into the detached state is getting easier now that I have been doing it for a week straight. This time I’m doing fairly well.
I feel like I almost have it. Like a word that you have on the tip of your tongue.
I can feel something vaguely warm. It’s really faint though. This could be mana! What do I do next? Dad only told me how he sensed it. He didn’t tell me what to do afterwards. I could just keep metaphorically staring at it, but I want to take a more active approach.
Dad said that mages use their mind to move and shape mana. That means if I can see this mana, I could try moving it. Moving something with my mind might be a challenge.
I need to keep it simple first. Let’s just see if I can move it at all first.
Focusing back on the warm feeling I tried to imagine moving it to the left. Right now it feels like it’s just in my chest, so I figure a general direction would be the best start.
Nothing happens the first few tries. On the eight attempt I feel a slight change in the warmth. Instead of the center of my chest it feels a little to my left now.
That means it’s working! This means I can use mana! Super mage powers here I come!
In my excitement I lost focus on the mana. Just like that I lost track of the feeling. Now that I know what I’m looking for though it only takes me a few minutes to find it again.
This time I try and move it to the right. After only five attempts it moves. That means I’m at least getting better at this. I only have very rudimentary control of my mana but I’m loving it.
After trying to do nothing for almost a week I can actually do something. After several minutes of moving my mana around in random directions I start to lose focus more often. I figure that I need to take a break.
I can come back and practice some more once my mind has recovered. Just like how solving a bunch of math problems can make your brain tired so can mana manipulation apparently.
As I exit my room, I can see dad reading one of his books while sitting in the living room.
“Dad! I did it! I can sense my mana! I even got it to move around a bit!”
He looks up at me in surprise.
“That’s pretty fast! You’ve only been practicing for a week or so. It took me more than two weeks to find my mana. It seems you might really have a good affinity to magic. Can you describe the feelings you had to me?”
I did my best to describe the vague feeling of warmth and how I tried, and had limited success, moving them around.
“You should have the start of it. I can almost guarantee you gained the Sense Mana skill. Maybe even the Mana Manipulation skill as well. From here you just need to practice. Start off practicing in shorter lengths. It sounds like you already learned what it feels like to get mental fatigue.”
“Yeah. I realized at some point that I was just getting worse and worse so I came here to take a break.”
“That was a good choice. Some people get so focused on training they don’t realize they are hurting themselves. A little fatigue is alright, just rest for a bit and you’ll feel better. If you start pushing too hard you start to get headaches. Since you aren’t using your mana for anything yet you don’t have to be worried about mana depletion.”
“Mana depletion? What happens when you run out of mana?”
“It’s similar to what happens when you run out of stamina. If you keep pushing your body you can case temporary or even permeant damage. It’s always recommended to have a few points of stamina and mana left.
“But how will I know that if I can see my status? I only get to use the focus once a year. And I wouldn’t ever be allowed to carry it around with me all the time.”
“You just need to learn your limits. If you exert yourself physically you can feel yourself getting tired. The same is for magic. Once you can sense your mana all the time you will be able to tell when it’s getting lower. You will also feel some mental fatigue as well.”
So, nothing has really changed then. I was kinda expecting some video game logic here. In games as long as you have at least one point usually nothing changes. It only changes things if you hit zero. Those rules were a bit broken though.
“How long until I can learn some spells?”
“Ten levels in Sense Mana and Mana Manipulation are the minimum. At that point you should be good enough to for simple spells and get some practice with them.”
“I can’t see my skill levels though, how will I know when I get to level ten?”
“When I think you are proficient enough, I can show you how to do some simple spell you can try them out. If you have to much trouble with the spell, just go back to practicing Sense Mana and Mana Manipulation.”
I can see how people who live in the towns and cities have a large advantage. Since they can always go to a focus they can save lots of time. I could have a high enough skill level and not know it. That means I might waste too much time. They could also spend their stat points more often.
“Do my stat points affect how fast my skills level? I only have a handful in each.”
“Yes and no. They give you the raw material to practice with, but not direct experience. You gain levels by being more proficient in that skill. You are rewarded more experience for a skill if you try different things. Doing the same thing over and over will still give you a little experience, but you can gain a lot more if you improve and do new things. You also gain more experience from figuring things out yourself rather than being told.”
Noted. I don’t really want to cast the same spell thousands of times anyway.
After a few more minutes and a light snack I go back to meditating. I sense the mana relatively easier now. Roth said that if I do the same thing over and over, I only gain a little experience. That means I should try new things.
I start with a simple push left and right. I get the same sensations as before. Just warmth moving through my chest.
Let’s see if we can spin this stuff.
This is a bit trickier. Pushing is a simple straight movement. Spinning requires me to grab it on two sides and rotate. The problem is it feels like I’m trying to grab a cloud. The hands I envisioned feel like they just slip right through the cloud of mana. Weird.
When I was pushing it, I just imagined my hands flat and it worked. Why do they slide right through now? What if I try to think of something besides my hands? Let’s go with that for now.
Since I’m trying to go simple here, I just imagine a wall. The wall is splitting the cloud of mana in half and doesn’t let the mana pass through it. With the wall there I now have something to grab onto and rotate.
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At first the wall is stiff, but soon enough it starts to rotate. It’s really slow and a lot of the mana slips around the wall, but the cloud of mana is rotating. I can only do it for a few seconds before I start to get dizzy.
Once I stop trying to spin the mana the dizzy feeling fades in a couple dozen seconds.
I wonder if my mana is tied to my other senses? I can’t think of a reason that spinning it would make me dizzy. I know some people can get dizzy from watching a rotating video, maybe its something like that?
I want to try some more things, but my head is starting to feel tired. Spinning the mana took way more effort than just pushing it. If my stats affect how long I can practice, which they almost certainly do, I can see how someone with more stats can make way more progress.
Being able to practice more often and for longer greatly adds up over time. Dad did say that trying new things and figuring out new things myself can give me more experience. All those stories I read in my past life can give me plenty of things to try here. That means I can make my practice more effective than everyone else here. I wonder if any of the science of my last life works the same here?
Everything about this world seems to follow certain rules. Just like physics, chemistry, etc. back on earth. The only difference being here you have stats, levels, and skills, and magic, but they also seem to follow certain rules. That means it should be the same for my mana as well. If I could see my status and track my mana precisely it would be easier to do this.
For now though I’ll just have to practice and test out a few things. One of those is if this could thing is all my mana. Also, can I pull just a single part off?
I give it a try. As I thought when I tried to mentally grab the mana it slipped right through my fingers. Next, I tried to imagine a box around a small part of the cloud. Once that was in place I grabbed the box and tried to move it. While this was much easier than moving all of my mana than before the box broke apart quickly.
When I was moving the box around my constant concentration on maintaining its shape loosened. Because of that some of the mana started to leak out. Then I tried to patch the holes and then because of that my concentration on all of it as a whole went down. Then the whole thing just fell apart.
While a box isn’t the most complex shape it still isn’t the simplest.
For my next attempt I go with a ball. With no sharp edges or angles it’s much easier to imagine and keep steady. The ball probably has a little less than a tenth of the mana cloud in it. The effort required to manipulate it much more manageable.
After my amusement at moving the ball around started to fade a question came to mind. If mana is like a cloud and I have it trapped in a ball, does it have a pressure? Can I change that pressure? Does anything about the mana change?
Now that my curiosity got me, I tried to answer the questions. Now I have this ball off mana. If I want to increase the pressure I either need to add more mana to the ball or make the ball smaller. The first option sounds too complicated. It I want to add more mana I need to make an opening, force mana inside without letting any out, all while maintaining the no longer perfect ball shape.
The second option seems far simpler. I try to imagine the ball shrinking. To my surprise it actually does shrink. It’s slow and there is a good deal of resistance but it happens. In my quest to find how much I can compress the mana I focus as much as I can.
The ball is now almost half as big as before. This state isn’t stable though. With the strain of keeping the ball small I can feel the ball shape starting to loosen. Now to test my second question.
I make a small hole in the ball, but prevent it from spreading and watch the mana come out of the ball like air out of a balloon. Neat. So I can compress the mana. But looking at the mana coming out my newly termed mana balloon all that seems to have changed is it looks darker and less see through.
Something might happen if I can compress the mana enough, but I can’t do that yet. Maybe with more levels I can do that. I’ll have to save that question for later then.
Now, I can compress and release mana, but can I decompress or expand the mana more?
I start off the same as last time, with a small ball of mana. This time instead of smushing it I try and expand it outwards. To this there isn’t as much resistance as shrinking. Most of the effort goes towards pushing the rest of my mana away to make room for the bigger ball and the mental effort to maintain a bigger ball.
The mana inside the ball just spreads out over the space and gets wispier. I let the ball fall apart and watch the outside mana mix with the lighter previously captive mana. Soon they are back to normal.
So mana act similarly to a cloud or air. I can compress it, but if I want to expand it, I have to fight the outside pressure to do so. I’m not sure if this will be helpful, but it nice to know at least.
I’m feeling a little tired, but I want to try one more thing before I take a break. It shouldn’t be to straining. What is the smallest amount of mana I can separate? I mean my stats showed mana in definitive points right? Does that mean that I can only separate my mana down to one point?
To me my mana feels like a cloud or mist. Clouds are millions of tiny bits of water so small they are suspended in air by the smallest air currents. At least if I remember right they are. I haven’t learned about clouds since like middle school. It’s probably not too far off if it isn’t perfect though.
So, can I grab one of those impossibly tiny bits if mana? How much mana is a single point of mana?
I certainly won’t be able to answer any questions like why that amount of mana is one point, or why that measurement is used. Maybe one day I will, but I just became able to see mana. One step at a time. Questions about the structure of the universe come after being able to read and write.
I make another ball with some mana trapped inside. This one is much smaller. I think it’s less than a twenty-fifth of my mana. It’s hard to tell though. I don’t have some exact measuring system. I’m going off intuition and educated guess here.
My last experiment gives me an idea though. Making a super small ball is harder to picture. What if I just expand the ball like before and make a smaller one inside of this one?
Last time the mana expanded evenly through the ball, so I should be able to get a tenth of this already small amount of mana. That would definitely prove I can separate out less than a point of mana.
I expand the ball to test my idea. I have to fight the slight pressure from the outside mana so I don’t make it massive, just kinda big. Once it’s at a good size I imagine a smaller ball inside. This is a bit harder. Mostly because I’m concentrating on maintaining the larger ball as well as making the small one.
As soon as I think the smaller ball is stable, I let the larger one fade away and the outside mana spreads in and mixes with the previously captive mana. I inspect my new ball and can barely tell there is any mana inside. It’s there, just hard to see.
This means I that one point of mana isn’t the smallest measurement. I let go of the ball and watch my mana mix back together.
As I stretch from my previously sitting position, I can feel the light strain from earlier developed into a full-on headache. I take that as a sign that I pushed it a little and decide to not practice for the rest of the day. I can try out more tomorrow. I’m not in a rush.
When I come out of my room, I can see dad working in the living room. He had pulled out and is going through his stored medicine and herbs. Some of it is too old or has gone bad and needs to be tossed out. With spring here there should be more plants and herbs to find about to replace what was tossed.
Soon enough he asked me how my practice was going so I told him. He didn’t interrupt me and let me talk about how I moved the mana around. Then my initial and flawed attempt to spin it. Then to my attempts to compress and expand the mana. These got a raised eyebrow from him, but when I told him how I gave myself a headache from all of that he chuckled and headed for the kitchen. He said he was going to give me something to help.
After a few minutes he was back with two cups of tea. There is still a slight chill to the air so the tea was quite nice. Since there was nothing added to the tea it was a little bitter, but still good.
Not to long after I started to drink the tea my headache started to fade.
“How are you feeling now?”
“Better, but what did you make this tea with? It work’s really well.”
“Want to take a guess? It’s in the book I gave you to read last week.”
Hmm. There were a lot of plants in the book, but I read about most of the ones he put on the list for local plants. I didn’t see the tea before he added it to the water, but something that helps headaches would probably be recorded.
The only thing that rings a bell is Angel star. A light-yellow flower. It gets it’s name from the flower petals that are pointy and look like a star. It grows in small clumps with up to three or four flowers on a plant. The leaves can be dried and made into a tea to calm the mind while the petals can cause some light hallucinations.
Calm the mind isn’t the exact same thing as stop headaches, but is close enough. I don’t remember anything else having a similar affect either.
“Is it the Angel star?”
“Yes. Good job. This tea was made from some Angel star that I found last year. It’s not as strong as it used to be, but still works well enough.”
My headache isn’t gone, but it is much lighter now. I’m impressed on how fast it started to take effect. Most medicines from earth could take anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour depending on the medicine.
The Angel star took at most a minute to start being felt. That’s really quick. Is the short time due to magic then? There are always legends of some magical plants in legends and fantasy stories back on earth. Here though there is actual magic, so it could be real.
“Is the Angel star a magical plant? I don’t remember the book saying anything about that. It only talked about location, appearance, and effect.”
“No. While the plant does have some mana inside it, there is barely any more than every other living thing. The small increase in mana isn’t enough to make it be considered to be a magical plant. That’s why it’s considered a regular plant. Most every magical plant needs more mana to grow so are harder to find in most places.”
“Do any of those magical plants grow near here?”
“Then hunters can find one on occasion. They usually bring it to me to see if I could use it. Most of the time I can’t though so they sell it to the merchant that comes every now and then.”
“Why can’t you use the magical plant? Wouldn’t it being a magical plant make a better medicine?”
“Only if the plan has medicinal properties. Just like not every normal plant is useful for making medicine, the same is true for magical plants as well. Besides, while I am the village healer that’s only because I know some simple healing magic. I use what plants I can to help, but I am no alchemist.”
“So alchemists can make better medicines from magical plants?”
Pictures of people refining pills for wuxia stories surfaced in my mind. Using magical plants to make all sorts of pills.
“Yes, but not just medicines. Alchemists use magical plants, animals, and materials to make all sorts of things. Some specialize in making medicines. Some specialize in enhancing materials for enchanters or smiths. They usually pick one area to specialize in. Otherwise they wouldn’t have enough time to lean and make everything.”
Interesting. It sounds like they are this world’s versions of scientist. Using materials to make all sorts of things. They even specialize in fields like medicine or weapons.
“How much do they sell the magical plants to the merchant for?”
If I could specifically look for these magical plants I might be able to make some good money.
“Since the merchant only comes about every two to three months the plants usually aren’t fresh when he gets here. The hunters also don’t know the best way to harvest and preserve various herbs so they might only get a small silver or a couple large copper for them.
That’s not a lot. The money here is divided into coper, silver, and gold coins. There is a small and large coin for copper and silver. Ten small coins make a large coin. Ten large coins make the next higher value type. So, a small silver is worth a hundred small coppers or ten large coppers. A gold is worth a hundred small silver or ten large silvers.
A couple large copper could buy you a few meals. If the hunters killed a deer and kept the pelt in good condition, they could get that much money for just the hide. Sounds like it’s not worth it to the hunters to look for the plants then.
If I can figure out some way to identify the magical plants, I might be able to find some. Dad also has several books on plants. The methods of preserving the magical plants shouldn’t be too different from normal plants either. The idea might not be so bad.