“Where have you been!” Mina exclaimed. “You were only supposed to be gone for a week!”

She was sitting across a table from Sol in the outpost mess hall. They were eating a meal, and while Sol would never be ungrateful for free food, his palate would never be the same after having the food that royalty eats while staying in the Earls manor.

“It took a bit longer than expected to find what I needed.” Sol responded, poking at the food on his plate with his fork. He wasn't very focused on the conversation, and was busy trying to convince himself that he hadn't become stuck up and unable to enjoy normal food.

“Well, what did you get?”

Sol explained what he had gone out for and what he had ended up getting. He left out any details that might hint towards the enchantment being a modification of the church's holy enchantment, as he felt that was information that was better left unknown to anybody but him. Morrison already knew, but Sol didn't believe the healer would tell anybody.

“So the Earl, was he as ruthless as people say he is?” Mina asked, leaning in and whispering as if she was about to hear a secret.

“In some ways yes, and in others not really. He was pretty nice when I met him the first time, but he sent some gang leaders to the local mines to fight monsters as a punishment for stuff he has done. On that note, he also lets the gang operate because he sees it as choosing the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being monsters at the border and rival smugglers.”

“Well that sucks.”

“Yeah, overall I am not his biggest fan. I am grateful he helped me out though.” Sol finished up his meal as he stood up. “I think it's about time I started cultivating, so I am going to go and do just that. I’ll see you at training tomorrow.”

“Can’t wait for it!” She exclaimed, also standing. “I have been looking forward to beating my favorite training partner in another sparring match.”

“Cocky, aren’t you? Can’t say you didn't earn the right to be.”

“Damn straight.”

Sol left the mess hall, heading straight for his cabin. It had gotten a lot dirtier in the time he had been gone, and while the desire to clean up the place was strong, the desire to cultivate was stronger.

Sol coughed a bit as he inhaled some dust floating in the air. “Yeah, this isn’t the best place for this right now. I was only gone a few weeks. How did it get this bad?”

Sol decided that he wouldn’t be able to cultivate here when the place was so dirty. He decided now was the time to pull himself together, be a man, and go get his horse to find a better place to cultivate.

Yeah, he was pushing off his responsibilities, but he was just too eager to start his cultivation. While he rode his horse to the very same tree he had accidentally spent four days in, he thought about all the things he could do once he had the mana to spare.

Just about everything Sol has done with his mana so far has been entirely internal, and there was no loss of mana. This was intentional, as he knew he risked getting seriously sick from mana deprivation if he ran low on mana with no way to recover.

There was one way to recover, but it would have side effects even worse than the mana deprivation. If Sol ever ran out of mana and had absolutely no way to cultivate his four affinities on their own, he could always draw mana in from everything around him.

At first, this definitely seems like the obvious thing to do when you need a quick way to cultivate mana. There is a small amount of every affinity in just about everything, but if he drew from everything, that meant he would get everything, including the four elemental affinities for which he did not have the affinity.

When Sol first started cultivating, he had absolutely no idea what his affinities were. This meant that he had needed to draw from everything around him to force open his affinity channels. The results of that had been a less than pleasant week of recovery. The mana affinities he didn't possess poisoned his body, which in turn had to take the time to purge it out. It would be even worse now due to his mana being saturated and his channels being fully opened.

Sol arrived at the tree not long after leaving the outpost. It had taken quite a lot less time than last time due to Dawn being quite a fast horse. He used a long length of rope to tie her saddle to the tree, leaving enough length to allow her to walk around a good bit.

He climbed up the tree and sat in the branch he had been in before. Settling in just as he had before, he pulled out the cube and set it in his lap, placing one hand on each side.

He started the process of extracting mana, feeling it flow into his body and start to fill his mana pathways. He needed to take it slow, as he needed to separate the affinities as they came in to put into each separate affinity channel.

After he felt like he was holding so much mana he might burst, Sol decided it was time for a break. It was kind of like letting food settle in his stomach, but with the occasional spasm of his mana. Sol was curious though, just what was the maximum output this thing could release? It was likely a lot, and he was having trouble fighting off his curiosity.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He would just let it loose for a second at most, and direct it to send the mana straight upwards into the sky. That way nothing would be harmed by the release. He shivered slightly in nervousness, a creeping sensation crawling up his spine as he started to activate the enchantments on the cube. Once he let go of it, the enchantments would stop receiving power and should stop functioning. It was a failsafe for if things went wrong to prevent too much astral mana from leaking into the environment. As the final part of the enchantments was powered, Sol pointed the output upwards and let it loose.

Saying things didn't go as he planned would be a massive understatement.

The first thing that went wrong was that Sol had been suppressed by the amount of mana that was coming out of the cube. It pushed down on him, and while It didn't directly harm him, he felt much weaker while it was happening.

The second thing to go wrong was a result of his suppression, and it was that he dropped the cube. Sol watched in horror as it bounced off the branches down towards the ground, with the output now facing directly towards him.

The extreme concentrations of mana pushed against him and he had to grit his teeth to keep from passing out. Having an affinity for those mana types, along with the mana having no intent to harm behind it, is the only reason he wasn't turned to dust.

The third thing that went wrong was that his poor, unfortunate horse was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Dawn neighed loudly as the cube landed on her back. While Sol had been unharmed by the mana flow, Dawn had not been quite as lucky.

The horse was immediately unconscious magic plowed through her body, ripping through her man pathways with great speed and intensity. It would be comparable to if Sol had completed the first stage of his cultivation all at once, a long with all the backlash coming in at the same time.

The cube finally shut off, having only been ejecting mana for 3 seconds, but that was enough. The damage was done.

“No, no, no!” Sol shouted as he hopped down the tree and kneeled next to his horse. She was still breathing, but large chunks of skin and hair were missing, and she was in very rough shape.

Sol didn't hesitate to infuse his muscles with mana, straining to pick up the heavy horse. When he found himself unable, he made a dead sprint back to the outpost. When he made it back, he immediately went to Morrison's office.

“I need you, someone's hurt.” Sol said.

The veteran healer didn't even hesitate, following Sol as they sprinted right back out of the outpost.

“Where are they?” Morrison asked.

“Straight ahead, my horse is lying under a tree and-”

Before Sol could even finish, Morrison took off. The healer ran far, far faster than Sol could hope to match. When Sol was halfway to the tree, Morrison blazed past him, running back to the outpost with Dawn slung over his shoulders. Sol turned around and followed after him again.

When he got back to the outpost, Dawn was laying on the ground near the entrance and surrounded by healers. Morrison was at the center of it all, performing what looked like quite a complicated healing spell.

Sols attempted to trace the lines of mana with his eyes, but he wasn't able to understand a bit of what was going on. He stood there with bated breath for an hour while also feeling frustrated that there was nothing he could do.

Morrison was the only one left attending to Dawn by the time he finally stood up. “Done.”

Sol stepped forward and looked over Dawn's body, both with normal and magical sight. “What exactly did you need to do?” He asked, sitting next to his horse and stroking her mane.

“Well, her mana channels were nearly destroyed. They are intact now, but it was not an easy process putting them back together. I had to reconstruct them from the ground up. On a side note, you have a level of luck that I am starting to become suspicious of.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have four mana affinities. Super lucky, and rarely ever seen. This horse of yours must have been affected by your idiotic release of mana in some unpredictable way, because she has three affinities, but four affinity channels. She has fire affinity, air affinity, and light affinity. The light affinity takes up two channels, making it far stronger than it should be.”

“But is she okay?”

“Yes, she is fine.”

Sol sighed in relief before looking at Morrison again. “So, you aren’t mad that I dragged you away from the outpost to save a horse?”

“When you are a healer for as long as I have been, you tend to take on the belief that all life has value.”

Sol thought about that for a moment, respecting Morrison even more after hearing it. “I am guessing you are going to give me another lecture on not being dumb?”

“Not this time. I have a feeling that you know damn well how this time was different from the others, and how you can keep something like that from happening again.”

Sol leaned against Dawn, who was now breathing steadily and not as shallow as she had been before. He knew that Morrison was right. He knew exactly what had been different this time around.

His own curiosity had not just put him in danger. It had put another life in danger, and that was unacceptable. He was perfectly fine risking his own neck to do something experimental, but he really didn't want to drag anybody into that again.

While Sol mulled over his thoughts, Morrison walked away. Sol sat with his horse for a while longer, resting his eyes and soon falling asleep. When he woke up, it was night time and the full moon was high in the sky. Dawn was finally starting to stir and wake up. When the horse finally got to her feet, she shook the dirt off of her hair and looked at Sol.

“You better be ready to clean all of this off.” A voice echoed in Sol's mind. “I don’t care that it's the middle of the night.”

Sol looked at the horse for a moment before turning around and walking away. He was clearly having some kind of dream at the moment, and he didn't want to spend it talking to a horse.

“Don’t ignore me.” The voice echoed again as Dawn trotted alongside Sol.

“Horses can’t talk.” He replied, not breaking stride.

“I’m not talking. I am communicating with you.”

“Same thing.”

“Very different. If you would bother to listen, we could figure out how this is happening.”

Sol stopped and turned to Dawn. “So, you can actually talk to me now?”

“It appears so. Your little ‘oopsie’ appears to have flooded me with mana that was partially yours, and our souls are now linked. At least, that's the best I could come up with in my time asleep.”

Sol sighed heavily as he headed for his cabin to pick up a brush to clean her off. “Fine. I really don’t feel like doing some kind of great investigation to find out why this happened, so lets just clean you off so I can get some sleep.”