“Damn it!” Sol hissed as he struck yet another dead end with untangling his mana. His initial plan to unravel from his hand to his eyes had not panned out. The mana pathways in his hand connected right back to the large spheres in his abdomen, which meant he would still need to start there to get to his eyes. Unfortunately, the mana in his abdomen was so tangled up that he would need to untangle his way from his feet and hands just to get that started.

So, that was exactly what he did. He tediously separated his mana types in each of his limbs, leading all the way back to the spheres and absolute mess of magic that was in the middle of his body. Even after getting the magic all the way back there, he still felt like it wasn't going to be easy to get started working his way up to the head.

He was right.

It had taken longer to untangle the magic in his abdomen than it had taken to do it for each of his limbs combined. When he finally finished, he had gotten so much practice that he practically raced his way up through his chest and neck to get to his head. There, he found something even more complicated. All of the mana pathways in his brain were even more tangled than in his abdomen.

He was starting to understand why people didn't usually do this at such an early stage of cultivation, as his grip felt “slippery” on his magic, for lack of a better term. He felt like he could control his magic well enough, but it was like there was so little mana to grip onto that he struggled to keep his hold on it when it came to the smaller threads of mana.

Eventually, after much annoyance and manipulation, he had all of the magic in his body separated into their appropriate affinities. When he finally opened his eyes, he saw that the sun had risen and was shining directly into his eyes.

He squinted and raised an arm to block the harsh rays, but found his arm to be extremely sore. He also had a pounding headache, definitely not helped by the sunlight. It was almost likely a side effect of moving the magic in his body so much. His skin all burned from the stress of the magic as well. Actually, giving his skin a good once over, he noticed something that he only now realized he should have been expecting.

Nearly every bit of skin was glowing from the mana that lay just beneath his skin. He quickly tried to pull it back away from the surface of his skin, but it was a slow process moving so much of it. Eventually, it was all gone. The only reason he knew how to do this was because he spent some of his time in this tree trying to figure out how to make his fingers stop glowing.

He hopped down from the tree he was in, beginning the walk back to the outpost. He would have tried to infuse his eyes with one of his mana types, but his head was pounding so bad that he didn't even want to think of trying it.

When he finally managed to get all the way back to the outpost, he saw one of the guards get startled at his arrival. The guard quickly ran off to who-knows-where. Sol just wanted to sleep right now, as he had been up for an entire night. It had kind of felt like rest when he was sitting in the same place with his eyes closed for so long, but it wasn't quite good enough for him.

Just before he entered his cabin, two pair of very fast and very upset sounding footsteps started stomping their way towards him from behind.

Sol quickly opened the door to his cabin and slammed the door shut, not wanting to bother with whatever that was. When he heard a heavy knocking at the door, he was about to give the person a piece of his mind until he heard Morrisons voice.

“Open this door kid!” The healer yelled. “You have some explaining to do!”

Sol opened the door, letting the healer, and surprisingly Mina, into his cabin. They both stood with crossed arms as they looked at him, a scowl on each of their faces.

“Where were you?” Mina asked, clearly not happy with him. “I had to train all that time without a partner!”

“I was just doing some cultivation stuff in the forest.” Sol explained. “It wasn't even that long.”

“Since when is four days ‘not that long’, huh?” Mina replied, huffing.

“Wait, four days?” Sol asked, stunned. He knew it had been a while, but he assumed he had only been working on his magic for a night. Did time really fly by that quickly?

Morrisons eyes glowed after hearing it was cultivation related, before shaking his head. “Tell me you didn't…” He muttered as he looked at the ground.

“I couldn’t help myself.” Sol responded. “I got too curious after hearing what I could do with my magic split up.”

“Well you shouldn’t have.” Morrison said. Mina looked between the two of them.

“What did he do this time?” She asked.

“Damn near killed himself is what.” The healer responded, sitting with a thud on one of the chairs in the cabin. “That also explains why you hadn’t realized four days had passed.”

“Okay, start from the beginning. How did I almost die?” Sol asked.

“When you untangle your mana, it changes your body. Your body then needs time to recover from that change. That is why whatever part you untangle is extremely sore for a while after, and isn’t as strong as it usually is. When you untangle the parts in your heart and brain in the same day, that can be extremely dangerous because neither are working at full functionality.”

“Oh.” Sol said. “Well I am still feeling fine. I am sore but other than that nothing is really different.”

“That's because your body shut down to keep itself from dying. Your heart wasn't working as well as it should have, and your brain was busy rewiring and recovering from you messing with all of the magic in there. In other words, you fell unconscious for several days as your body struggled to survive.”

“Why didn't you warn me that could happen?” Sol asked, suddenly feeling nauseous knowing he had been defenseless in that tree for so long.

“I shouldn’t have had to!” Morrison shot back. “What you did is something that only Disciple rank cultivators should do. Hell, usually it's something only disciple cultivators can do. I don’t know how you managed to do this, but it was extremely reckless of you.”

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“Well, I am fine. No use in fussing any more about it.” Sol said. “Besides, now that I know how dangerous it is, I will be much more careful messing with those areas in the future.”

“You shouldn’t be doing it at all.”

“Well, that is for me to decide.”

Morrison sighed and stood up from the chair he was in. “Fine. All I ask is that you please do not kill yourself doing something really stupid.”

“No promises, but I’ll do my best.”

With that, Morrison left. Mina stayed a bit longer, mostly asking questions about if Sol was okay, before also leaving. Sol went to sleep after she left, finally getting some rest that was more substantial than the unconscious slumber he’d had before.

The next day, he was back to his usual routine. Training in the morning, gambling in the evening. The day was mostly for him to recover from the burnout his entire body had been suffering. The day after that, Sol was ready to start with what he had done all of this for. It was time to learn to mix mana in his eyes.

_____

Far away from Sol and his experiments, there was another who was busy with experiments of their own. Sirelle prepared the ingredients to his latest alchemical mixture while humming a song he had heard a passing bard sing. It had been quite a good song in his opinion. Too bad the bard had met his end when Sirelle had… acquired him.

Dozens of various ingredients found their way into his pot as he hummed happily and took mental notes of how the mixture changed with each added item. When he finally reached the last ingredient, he called out to one of his servants.

“You,” he said to the nearest one, who was standing at their post in the corner of the room. “Fetch me one of the reagents.”

“Yes sir.” The servant replied before quickly running off to get the requested ingredient.

When the ingredient was brought in bound with chains around their feet and hands, Sirelle was pleased to take note of how well the infused mana had taken to their body.

“Excellent.” The alchemist said, his eyes glowing a dark purple as he inspected the young man in chains and rags. “I see that you have been hard at work.”

The young man simply nodded, not making direct eye contact with the Sirelle.

“Well, you know the drill.” Sirelle said.

The young man walked up to the cauldron, placing his hands on the edge. He infused every drop of mana in his body into the cauldron before collapsing on the ground, unconscious. The veins in the man's arms were turning black from the sheer amount of death affinity mana that he had been moving around. No matter, he would heal in a week's time and be ready to funnel more mana.

“Take him off.” Sirelle said to the servant, who obediently dragged the unconscious man away.

He mixed the cauldron for a bit longer before he felt it was finally ready. He took a bottle and filled it as much as he could before putting a cork on top and placing it on a shelf. He did this with many more bottles until the entire cauldron was once more empty and ready for the next batch of product. He went through the motions once more, adding ingredients and throwing in some mana here and there.

He felt the room was already starting to become unsafe for any non-cultivator to be in due to the toxic fumes hanging in the air. He didn't care though, as there would likely never be a base human here anyways. He turned to his servant once more when he was nearly done with his batch.

“Bring in the next ingredient please.”

_____

“Woah!” Sol exclaimed as he finally discovered yet another working combination of mana. He quickly scribbled down the mana types and ratios in the notebook he had bought while he looked around the room in amazement.

The combination he had figured out was one of Light and dark mana, at a ratio of 2 to 1 respectively. It gave him the ability to see through shadows as if they weren't even there. He scribbled the word dark vision next to its recipe in his notebook before closing it.

He had tried so many combinations today that his eyes were burning from how much mana had been infused into them. He had been too excited to let that bother him until now, where it had reached a tipping point.

Of the combinations he had discovered, only three were particularly useful to him at the moment. The first of which was the dark vision he had just gotten. The second one he didn’t really have a name for. It made everyone he looked at glow slightly, with cultivators glowing much brighter. It was how he figured he would be gauging the strength of other cultivators.

The third one, well that was a far more interesting mixture. The reason for this was that he still wasn't fully certain what it actually did. The ratio had also been crazy specific, and he had only discovered it by accident when he was removing life mana from his eye while also infusing death mana into his eye.

The ratio had come out to 7 parts life, 9 parts death, and 15 parts darkness mana. When he held that exact combination of mana in his eyes, it made people glow red. The problem was that for the life of him he could not find any rhyme or reason behind what made people glow. Almost everyone had their mouths glowing a dull to bright red, while some people had other parts of their body glowing varying degrees of red.

The only person in the entire camp which did not glow red at all was Morrison. Sol had asked the man if there was anything different about him that could set him apart, but the healer had no answers in that regard. After hours of trying to figure it out, Sol made a decision.

He would try to keep the sight mode active for as much of every day as he could until he could find out what it did. Much to his surprise, it barely took a day from when he started this plan to when he figured it out.

He had been in the middle of a game of cards with the usual group, when the person across from him swore under their breath. “Bad hand?” Sol joked, knowing damn well the man was about to try and bluff his way to winning the hand.

“Yeah.” The guard sighed, still matching the standing bet. Sol looked at the man as he said this, which was precisely the moment when he saw it. The man's mouth started glowing a brighter red while he had said the word, and dimmed again when he was done speaking. Sol wasn’t sure, but he thought the man's mouth was glowing just ever so slightly brighter than it had been before the man had spoken.

Sol had a bad hand, but he wanted to see the man speak more to confirm his theory. He raised the bet, and the man matched it.

“Might as well not leave any coins to rattle around in my pocket.” The guard said while he raised the bet. Once more, his mouth glowed.

“You are a terrible liar!” One of the other players said through a laugh as he folded. “You really have to work on that.”

When the next card on the table was revealed, the lying man had raised the bet again. Every other person at the table folded, except for Sol.

“You aren’t folding?” One of the other guards asked Sol. “I think it’s pretty obvious that you should.”

The man who raised the bet kicked the other guard's shin under the table, and when he did so Sol noticed his foot glowed red during the motion.

Sol didn't care about winning this hand anymore. He folded and gave up the hand. He knew he had been made to look a fool, but that didn't stop him from smiling. He had finally found out what his brand new way of seeing did, at least he thought he did.

From what Sol could gather, somebody glowed red when they were doing something “wrong”. He didn't know the full scope of what that really meant, but he had seen enough that he felt that was a good enough definition for now. More importantly, when somebody repeatedly did something wrong, whatever part of their body involved in doing it would have a lingering glow on it. That was, if he hadn’t just been seeing things when the man's mouth looked to have gotten permanently brighter.

Sol stepped away from the table to write the new name for this mana combination in his notebook.

He could think of no better name for it than “Sin Sight”.