“I don’t feel so good,” Janet groaned. Sugary fruit juice shone from her cheeks and leather in her pants and jacket was sticky from all the juices she had spilled during her eating binge.

She had not eaten for days prior. Could she really be blamed for gorging herself on the first food she found?

Every moment of her indulgent lunch had been heaven. The fruit was sweet yet tangy, and the crunch! Janet almost reached for another of the juicy wonders at the teasing remnants of the fruits still in her mouth, but she restrained herself.

Her taste buds could not get enough of the fruits. However, it looked like her body was not as welcoming to the jungle marvels.

Not her stomach, mind you. That was fine and contented, silent for the first time after days of incessant rumbling. It was the rest of Janet’s body that seemed to be reacting negatively to the fruits.

Her eyes, the very same that had allowed her to find the pear-things, were swimming with tears. Her ears were ringing. Pinpricks could be felt all over her skin from head to toe, like there were a thousand ants nibbling away under her clothes.

The worst thing was the itching. Every single organ felt like it needed a good scratch, including the inside of her mouth and nose, her throat and airways… and her bones?

What the hell had been in those fruits?

Janet had read about anaphylactic reactions, and how terrible an end one was due if they went without urgent treatment. Despite being dressed in warm clothes, she began to shake.

Janet was in the middle of nowhere with no soul in sight. There weren’t even beasts around, though for now that was a good thing. With her body immobilized by illness, she was like a shiny steak on a platter for the voracious predators who called this place home.

Minutes of unmitigated terror later, a realization struck her. She was still breathing with relative ease. Anaphylaxis, the little she could remember about it, disabled the airways within a few excruciating seconds after onset. And while Janet’s breathing was labored, it was not otherwise impaired.

She also wasn’t swelling up or filling with fluid, another argument against an allergic reaction.

Janet wiped off a tear in relief. That would have been a terrible way to die.

Yet, her body kept itching, her breath kept coming in short bursts, and her mana core…

Now that she was paying attention, the area around her stomach was not silent, or content as she had observed. It was like a dam ready to burst, the immense pressure within keeping everything creaking under heavy tension and stretched to the limit; a deathly stillness awaiting the slight change that would turn everything to shrapnel.

Janet knew nothing good could come out of her core exploding. Basic common sense was that any exploding organ was bad news. Not for Janet who could pretty much heal anything. In her case, such an event was just some mildly distressing news, not a disaster in any sense.

However, this was her core. The metaphysical organ through which a living being interacted with the magical energies around them.

Janet’s core up until her awakening had been silent, vestigial. Structurally important, but unused. She had never had to heal it, so she was not certain that she even could.

So, panicking just the tiniest amount, Janet hurried herself into a meditation pose so she could assess the situation first hand. Was the itching all over her skin caused by her core? What in the Spheres was going on?

Holy screeching balls of fire!

The picture of what Janet found inside her body was so shocking, her metaphorical eyes had to take a double-take to make sure she was not hallucinating.

Mana was everywhere. Not the ambient mana that swirled around constantly doing normal mana stuff and not bothering anybody. Somehow a colorless mana, unmarked by any elemental affinities, was saturating every cranny and space inside Janet’s body.

The feeling she’d had was not an allergic reaction. It was quite literally mana trying to escape. And since it did not find an outlet…

Janet needed to stall the explosion that seemed imminent as the seconds ticked by. She tried firing up her core to circulate the mana and ease up the pressure on her internal system.

With a light, gingerly mental touch on her core, Janet tried circulating her mana.

Holy smokes! Everything erupted into blinding pain.

Her head throbbed. Her ears drummed as her blood pumped past them, each beat sending lances of pain shooting everywhere. Her nose, her skin… everything was on fucking fire!

The motion of the core had triggered the mana to redouble its efforts to exit Janet’s internals, like a system that had been in an untenable equilibrium sent into entropic chaos.

What the fuck had been in those blasted fruits!?

Janet got out of meditation. She didn’t have to try that hard. Even momentary concentration was a chore, and the pain was not helping.

Janet’s foray into meditation had made everything so much worse. If before the countdown to her demise was an hour long, now she doubted if she even had minutes. Things were bad. Really bad.

Since there was nobody around to help, Janet gritted her teeth and came up with a plan. It was crude, but it could actually work.

Cycling the mana would hasten her death. But what about spending it?

Janet’s problem was that she was a dam overfilled to the point of breaking. All she needed to do was open a spillway.

There was just one glaring issue. Her only magical ability, [Mana Constructs - Shadow], was very resource efficient. What Janet needed was something to waste the mana. An ability to shoot the excess from her, preferably in a constant stream.

She had no such ability, and very little know-how on how to create one. So, Janet tried the constructs anyway. If she created a big shadow tentacle, couldn’t she cut off the mana and let it dissipate into the ambient energies?

It was worth a try.

Janet marshalled all her focus into injecting mana into her shadow. At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then, like a dark specter, her shadow began to float off the ground.

Good. The excess mana with no place to go was funneling into the new construct, making it look like a pudgier, bigger Janet. It was a bit unnerving, but Janet felt the pressure on her organs ease up a bit.

With the pain in her head reduced, Janet managed to stretch her shadow into a gigantic tentacle, this time tens of meters in length. More mana streamed into it, allowing Janet even better control of the mana.

Janet tried letting go of all the mana inside the tentacle. She pushed away at the mana willing it to separate from her. And just as she usually did when a construct’s role was complete, she let go of the ability, allowing the construct to dissipate.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

It was akin to releasing a tight fist so the contents of the palm could fall away.

That had been a mistake.

Rather than vent into the atmosphere, the shadow did as it always had done every time Janet released it. It shrank back to its usual size at her feet. The mana, just as it always did, came barreling back towards Janet’s core.

The pain this time was ten times worse. For a second Janet thought she had gone blind, and her ears picked up a crack or two from inside her. That did not bode well for her health.

Janet needed an ability that could waste mana, and she needed it right then. There was no time to dally any longer. She could no longer sit upright, and she might have spotted the tiniest hint of red on her skin.

Her pores were beginning to bleed.

Janet held immense regret for the fact that in all her research into magic, she had neglected knowledge about spells. She had felt that that path was forever closed to her, rather focusing her attention on runes and lore.

Her only option now was to draw from memory. Janet thought really hard about all the spells she’d heard shouted out loud. She particularly decided to focus on those that ended with ‘Blast’.

[Fire Blast], [Water Blast], [Wind Blast], [Mana Blast], they were all wasteful spells only good for showy exhibition fights and dealing barely-controlled multidirectional damage. Those could work very well for Janet in the moment, but she had zero clue how one cast them.

Her elemental affinity was another hindrance too. Shadow was not known for blast spells. At the very least, Janet had never heard or seen anyone use [Shadow Blast]. Not that it would have helped, anyway.

There was one spell that could work. [Mana Bolt]. It was the first ability any magic practitioner ever learned due to its ease of casting, which was why Janet deemed it feasible.

What the spell did, as Janet understood it, was allow a novice to trace the movement of their mana from core to the outside.

With Janet’s mana currently misbehaving, she didn’t really need to trace her pathways. Every single part of her was saturated with excess, affinity-less mana she could barely control. All she needed to do was show it a way out.

Janet needed a [Shadow Bolt]. [Mana Bolt] would have been better to vent the colorless mana, but she had zero training or knowledge on how to handle it.

Without giving second thought to how she was trying to teach herself a spell, or the dangers of self-taught magic, Janet jumped into action.

Her vision field was filling up with stars. She did not have much time left.

Janet recalled how every time she deployed a shadow construct, her first step each time was to inject mana into her shadow. Since magically speaking her shadow was part of her mana system, all she was doing for [Mana Constructs - Shadow] was shunting mana around.

Her mana system was a closed balloon, and all [Mana Constructs - Shadow] did was stretch and contort it into different shapes. Some mana was spent, since every action that involved magic was a net negative when everything was balanced out at the end of the day, but what Janet needed was something superbly wasteful.

She did not need to shunt the pressure to one end of the balloon. Hers was filled to the brim, and even the slightest prick would lead to an explosion.

A prick! That gave Janet an idea.

No, she wasn’t going to perforate her already taxed mana system. Her plan was to use the already existing openings into that system, the pores that were even now stinging like fresh pin pricks, to vent out the mana.

How to do that? Well, mana, like water, would flow forth if given a route of escape. Uncontrolled flow led to explosions. It was the reason why people used spells.

Since Janet did not have an actual spell formula, she would do things the crude, borderline suicidal way.

First, Janet utilized the pores on her palms for their intended use. They were easy to spot, covered in beads of blood as they were.

She pulled in some mana.

It was foolhardy to add more pressure to the system, but her plan went perfectly. Her core was aligned to only the element of shadow. What it pulled from the atmosphere was mana of the same alignment.

Like attracted like.

Normally that mana came tainted with other affinities and needed to be purified, but Janet only needed the attractive effect. It worked as intended.

Janet now had in her pore mana that resonated with her core. Before it joined the rest of the system, she forced mana from within towards that singular point on her palm by forcing her core into motion in one painful jerk.

Suddenly, the world from Janet’s point of view tumbled once, twice, thrice, then came to a stop.

A second later, she felt an impact – not a sound, but a rippling sensation within the ambient mana.

Within Janet, she felt the pressure ease up, but only by a fraction of a percentage.

It had worked. Her idea was proven correct. Janet sighed in relief.

More than that, Janet could now add another mana ability to her mental skillbook. Magic once learned once was forever etched in memory.

Janet added [Shadow Bolt] to the list of her capabilities.

The reason why it was not [Mana Bolt - Shadow] was because there was zero involvement of pure, affinity-less mana. This was unlike the [Mana Construct - Shadow] that just pushed around all the mana in Janet’s system, without regard for affinity or nature, into her shadow.

The construct was one of shadow, but the mana that animated it was multi-elemental. Just like a person was made up of a varying, unique blend of elemental affinities.

Anyway, the thoughts of expanding her list of abilities aside, Janet still had a shitload of mana to discard.

She stood up with a groan, every muscle screaming in protest as Janet dragged herself back to the shadow of her fruit tree.

Once seated, Janet repeated her back-alley [Shadow Bolt].

This time she got to see as a tiny seed of black mana gathered on her palm from the mana around her, before mana from within her body diluted it to cloudy, then foggy, then barely grey. By that point the ball was completely unstable, its edges wavering like the edges of a flame.

Janet was not keen on blasting herself away again. She sat with the tree to her back and watched as the mana blasted outwards from her outstretched palm in a semicircle.

Once again Janet was rattled by the impact, but not as violently as the first time. Oddly enough, the blast did not appear to leave the confines of the tree’s shadow.

Janet cast an endless chain of [Shadow Bolt] spells. The mana within her went from ready to explode to extremely uncomfortable, eventually settling at mildly unsettling.

Janet had blasted out hundreds of her makeshift spells by that point. In magic practitioner terms, that was a very fruitful training session. And it showed. Her bolts by the end were more structurally sound, and their impact at rupture was almost thunderous.

She should have been smiling with joy for surviving her ordeal. The scene in front of her, however, told her of what would have happened if her first idea had worked.

The fruit tree’s shadow was in tatters.

Janet could not believe her eyes either. The [Shadow Bolt] did not have any noticeable impact on the physical world – the grass was unshaken and the tree’s bark uninjured.

Upon the tree’s magical fabric however? A quick look through meditation showed Janet a picture of absolute devastation. In the mana-sense Janet had while meditating, the tree, previously bursting with energy and filled with mana, was perforated in multiple places and leaking its lifeblood into the surroundings.

This was not a simple bolt, Janet shuddered.

Her bolts were silent, other than the ripple through the ambient mana. Janet thought the ripples were caused by mana redistributing itself into the ambient mana, like a drop falling onto a bowl of water.

The ripples had been impacts into the tree’s mana-shape.

Janet looked at the tree that had sustained her in muted horror. Its fruits had almost killed her, but was that really cause for the devastation she had unleashed upon it? The tree would not survive her ministrations, of that she was certain.

The sun was setting. Janet needed to find a safe place to rest for the night, preferably away from the evidence of her chilling new power.

What would happen, Janet wondered, if a [Shadow Bolt] was fired into a person’s shadow?

hours prior

“Do you guys feel that?” Pireus asked. He had stopped swinging his sword as soon as the reverberations rippling through the ambient manascape began.

“The girl’s discovered [Shadow Bolt],” Sylthis reported. In her voice could be heard admiration, and a hint of a tremor.

“Don’t tell me…” Brian began as he let his levitation spell dissipate, depositing him before the scout. “What did she use as a sacrifice for the spell?”

“Please tell me she’s not one of those self-mutilating shadow freaks we’re usually sent to terminate.”

Pireus turned towards the party leader. Darius did not look up from his book.

Seeing that no answer was forthcoming, the warrior turned towards the only other warrior in the party.

Sylthis shrugged, took another glance at her distant charge, then turned around to explain to her party what had happened. Her retelling of the girl’s gorging herself on Spiny Pears earned her a few chuckles.

After the short tale, Brian gathered a bead of fire-affinity mana onto his palm. “I never knew you could use ambient mana as sacrifice for a spell.”

“Neither did she, I don’t think,” Sylthis answered. "I doubt she even understands what a spell sacrifice is."

“So, either she’s the most talented spell-weaver we’ve ever seen, or she’s the luckiest child in the history of Luck.”

“Is that jealousy I hear?”

“Really, Sylthis? She’s a child who stumbled upon a spell. We’ve all done that at some point, even you two muscle freaks,” he pointed at Pireus and the scout with the scarlet spell focus in his hand. “I’m just hoping she doesn’t come to realize the true capabilities of that spell before we make contact.”

“Why did her element have to be Shadow?” Pireus lamented. “Nothing good was ever born out of that vile power.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Sylvia intoned, momentarily letting her eyes drift away from the [Shadow Bind] spell formation keeping her busy. Her work was almost finished.