Joining a sect

*Violent stomach growling* With the situation I am in, I did not give any attention to my thirst or hunger. But with my stomach making enough sound to awaken the dead, I am forced to acknowledge the fact that I am famished. The last time I ate was... I don't know how long ago exactly, being asleep or unconscious makes one lose sight of time. The last thing I hate was a ham and cheese escalope with rice and a yogurt. It is not the most filling meal, and now that I am aware of my hunger, I am also becoming aware of my dried throat.

"Um, it seems I am both hungry and thirsty. I don't know for how long I have been here, but before getting summoned it had been several hours since I ate anything." Don't say abducted or generally offensive words.

[Oh, I will ask someone to bring something.] Answers Omegon, standing up, walking to the door. He opens it, takes the earpiece off, say something I don't understand to someone outside, closes the door and goes back to sit at the desk.

"So, to go back to what you were saying. I have a Teneren linked to me, and either living inside of my body, or in a sub-space attached to me?" I ask for confirmation, trying to understand what kind of nightmare I got into.

[Yes, I am happy to see that you are more understandable than I anticipated.]

More understanding than anticipated? "What do you mean?" [You see, I am the one who coordinated the spell for the Teneren to enter our realm. It means that I was the one who got the best view of the pit, and the fact that you nearly killed someone so swiftly... It made me think of you as more, hot-headed if I might say.]

I did not want to think about that, I would prefer to just forget about it honestly. "It is not something I would do. I was in a predicament with someone dumb enough to search conflict in such situation." I don't know how to tell him I lost control at that time. The guy was just way too dumb, how can he act so when he does not even know if he will live tomorrow?

[What you did does not matter, as long as you don't try to kill a member of the guild or act against the guild itself, their will be no grudge.] The guild? Not a religion or a sect then? I should make my own mind on this organization is anyway. "The guild." I say in a neutral tone to taste the word and bait his attention. Now I'll see if I can get some info. "What kind of guild is it?"

[The Abyss seekers, that is the name of our guild. We are primarily a mercenary guild, we offer a wide variety of services, but that wont be of any concern to you before some time. As a host you will have many accommodations. You may have some difficulties adapting to this realm, but if you have anything to ask, I am here. Your room is next to mine, I have the one directly to the right. You can come at anytime, but I would prefer you abstain from coming in the middle of the night. Rest is important for many reasons.]

*knocking at the door* [Good timing. Enter!] Omegon says, glancing at the door and the man entering with a tray in hands. *Unknown language* The guy seem to be asking something to Omegon. When he entered he looked at me, but I can't judge what his opinion about all this.

[Place it here.] The man places the tray on the desk, next to Omegon whom takes it after the man has exited the room and closed the door.

Omegon closes his book and approaches the stool he is seated on, he takes a fork, uses it to take some food from a plate out of my field of view. I am still lying on the bed and unable to move, Omegon seems to want to feed me. And I let him do so, I am unable to eat by myself, and if he wants to force feed me, I can't resist. And so I just go with the flow.

I eat and drink, all the while thinking about what to do. What will happen to me, what I can do, what could happen to me, and little by little and despite all the time I spent unconscious, I feel more and more sleepy. Was there some drugs in the food or drink? I think to myself, but it is unlikely. While you are unconscious, the brain does not perform the resting processes it does while you sleep. Being unconscious is not the same as being asleep, a simple example of that is the reaction to pain. While you are asleep, if someone suddenly stabs a knife in your guts, it will wake you up. But if someone knocks you down and then stabs you, you might not regain consciousness.

All that to say, I am in need of rest, and Omegon is aware of it. After having finished to feed me, he tells me to rest for now and that nothing will be done to me before taking my earpiece and placing it on the desk. He places his there too, and walks out of the room with the tray in hand. The lamp above the desk slowly turns off, its light becoming progressively dimmer.

I can't well resist my sleepiness and soon fall asleep. As I rest, I manifest sleep hallucinations the common people call dreams. I have nothing against dreaming per see, but when those are nightmares about recent regrets I tend to not like them very much. Tonight I dream about me stabbing people with pencils, screw drivers and other such things. I also smash people's heads, throats or chest, making them cave-in and gurgle pleas of help.

My 'dreams' are questionable, am I inclined to commit violence? False question here, I know I am. But I would not resort to mortal violence that easily, my kind of violence is more akin to verbal abuse. I know how to kill because of the fact that I know how the body works and how it is built. But I don't want to have to use this knowledge, in case of a life or death scenario? Yeah, I will use it, I prefer to live thank you. But again, I don't want to be in such situations.

My time asleep is full of me mauling, killing, stabbing people. I don't like it one bit, and when I awake I am freed from the morale torment my subconscious was subjecting me to. I look around me, just to see if everything was just a dream. I am still in the small room with just a bed, stool and a desk. At least a part of it was only dreams.

I try to move, and my body moves, but really sluggishly. I don't even have enough strength to move my own body on my own, I feel drained, a bit sore, and when I get on my side some of my lumbar articulations crack. I breath deeply, just getting on my side was way harder than anticipated, and my bladder demands some emptying. I refuse to piss myself, at least not without have tried something first.

I grab the headboard and push as much as I can to make me sit, and I fail my first attempt. I try a second time, this time rising my legs a bit to act as a counter weight to more easily lift my torso, and after what must have been 30 seconds of intense efforts I am finally sitting on the bed. Wow, I truly am pathetic right now. I can't stand it, in both meanings.

If I let go of the bed's headboard I will fall either on the ground, or back on the bed. Instead of trying something on my own, I should at least see if I can use someone to help me. "Hey!" I say loudly, I don't know how thick the walls are here, but I don't hear anything. I wait a few seconds to see if there is any response, but when there is none, I repeat myself louder.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

*knock knock* I must have been heard this time as someone is knocking at the door. "Come in." I half say half cry. I turn my head to look at the robed figure open the door and ask something in a language I still can't understand. The lamp above the desk is barely illuminating the room, I am not sure he can see me clearly, but I point to the earpieces anyway.

As he enters he let the door slightly ajar, and with a gesture from his hand, the lamp somehow lights up. Does he have a remote in those sleeves? As he approaches and the lamp light the room up, he goes to the desk, takes the earpieces and hands me one. I struggle a bit to place it on, and before I can ask for help, he speaks.

[How may I be of use.] His tone is respectful and kind of make me feel uncomfortable. It feels more like he awaits instructions than him asking a question. "I need to relieve myself." I just say. He just nods and goes out of the room, closing the door behind him. What? Why did he just leave? I am confused, why would he just go like that? If I need to go to the toilet, you take me to them! You don't them to... Oh.

It suddenly hits me: for toilets to work, you need a plumbing system. Without plumbing, you either use latrines, or a chamber pot. If I am in another realm, what is their technological level? They could supposedly take me from another realm, so they should be really advanced, and what about the earpiece that can instantly translate words to concepts?

I am pulled out of my thoughts when the man from before comes back with what I assume is a chamber pot. [I am back.] He says and places the chamber pot at the foot of the bed.

[Is there anything else I can do to help?] "No, thank you." He nods again, places the earpiece he had on the desk. He then exits the room, letting me do my stuff in peace.

Now that I am alone, I check my pockets, and wonder why I have extra ones. I did not connect the fact that when I got shredded in the pit, my clothes got teared and shredded too. And they are bloodied, how much blood did I loose? In retrospection, I must have been badly hemorrhaging, it is a wonder how I survived and am able to move right now.

*knocking at the door* "Yeah?" I say and watch as Omegon enters the room. He takes the earpiece on the desk and says hello.

[Hello, how are you feeling today?] I look down to my clothes, then at him. "Quite bad."

He was going to sit on the stool, but he stops. [Can we talk? Or do you need more rest?] He asks more seriously than I would have thought. "We can talk now, it's okay, just let me a second." I tell him as I lie back down on the bed.

Omegon watch me get comfortable on the bed, and after I stop adjusting, he asks: [Can I begin?] "Yes"

[Okay, from what you told me yesterday, I assume you do not know much about magic?]

"Well honestly, it would be better to assume I don't know anything about magic. What I know of does not come from reliable sources, and even if some of it is correct, a big part of it should not be." I tell him, thinking about all the different systems of magic I read about in all the novels and manga I enjoyed.

[Okay, then let us begin with the basics. Magic energy is, as it's name says, an energy. It is peculiar as it is an energy able to be influenced by the will, that means that not only intelligent being such as humans can use it, animals can do so too, even if in their case it seems more instinctual.]

[You will receive books and parchments about how to use and control magic energy, and in those texts you might come upon 'mana', 'maen' or 'MAN'. They all signify magic energy, there is just no consensus about it's abbreviation.]

[You will also encounter their attributes, those are also called elements or alignment. Again, those all refer to the same thing. It is easier to understand them as mana with an added property. For example, we are currently underground, that means we will primarily encounter dirt or stone magic energy. If there are metal deposits, we could allegedly find metal mana too.]

[Attributed mana is everywhere, as well as unattributed mana. Finding a location with only attributed mana, or the opposite, unattributed mana, is exceptionally rare. I will not go into details about this for now, it is enough to know that mana does not stay with the same attribute for long if it move to another surroundings.]

I am tempted to ask if 'dirt mana' could become 'fire mana' if you move it into a fire, but I will just ask when Omegon will have finished. I don't want to interrupt him, that could make him lose what he wants to say, or in what order he wants to say it. Instead I just nod to confirm to him that I am listening.

[Now, to manipulate and use mana, one first needs to be able to sense it. But to sense mana is both the first requirement, and something many fail to ever achieve in their life. There are many ways to force it, to make someone feel mana even if they would never have been able to do so on their own. But it requires resources that would be better invested into people who can already sense mana, as those generally have a better capacity overall.]

[That is also the reason why I would like for you to try and sense mana as soon as possible. Because while the Teneren is linked to you, you can feel a part of what he feels. And more importantly, he is currently learning how to resist to this realm's pressure. While he is in this state, he needs to channel all of his strength to anchor himself to you. And that means he is channeling a big amount of mana through you. Do you feel anything? Something unusual?]

I am surprised by this, and to try and sense something I close my eyes and try to feel if anything is out of the ordinary. But if I take away the fact that my body healed abnormally quickly, and that I can barely move on my own now, then I feel no anomaly. "I can't sense anything, no." Wait, maybe... "Little question here. Do you know if every hosts have the same issue as me? I talk about getting this weakness."

[As far as I know, yes. More or less. It is deduced that while the Teneren is getting familiar with it's host and the realm's pressure, the host also needs some time to get used to the Teneren. Why?] "i was just thinking that maybe, me feeling weak is because of the mana now going through me. I am more or less certain I had never had mana do that before. But me being weak could also be because of how the Teneren cut me all over in the pit."

[What you say makes sense, but does it change anything? Can you feel something now?] Omegon asks, and he has a point. Even if my current weakness is due to the teneren's mana going through me, it won't suddenly make me feel something. I move my right arm a bit and try to feel how weak I actually feel. "No, I don't sense anything. But I at least have some clue now, if it is mana that make me feel weak, then by studying the weakness, I could perhaps feel the mana. That is my train of thought at least."

[Mmh.] Omegon rubs his beard, thinking about what I said.

[That could perhaps help. But feeling mana is done with the mind, not the body. Try what you think will do, you have days before the Teneren awakens and stops channeling through you. And even if you can't feel mana by then, materials have been prepared for you. So don't press to hard, haste will imped you here.]

[I was not finished though. Because being able to sense and manipulate mana is great and can make one achieve many things. But even if mana is everywhere, it is not everywhere in the same quantities or quality. That is why the capacity the absorb and then generate mana is the most important valued skill for mages. That is what magic energy users are called by the way: mages.]

[Once you are able to not only sense, but to accurately control mana around you, you will be given an accretion technic. Those are deeply valued, and should never be handed to people out of our guild. And the one you will have access to is the best we can provide. Kingdoms have gone to war for less than that, do take time to take those words in.] For the first time, Omegon does not sound amicable. This time he sound down right threatening, and if what he says about kingdoms going to war is true, then it is understandable.

As to make it clear I understand the value of what he said I am going to obtain, I must say something. "I... Can't say I entirely understand. But if it is to be considered valuable enough for kingdoms to war against each others... Yeah, I can keep that a secret." [A secret? You underestimate it way too much.]

"Or not, for me secrets are things I will go to the grave with." He gives me a bit of a side eye at that.

[You will come to understand it's value with time. But enough talk for now, I have work to do, and you have mana to sense.] With those words, Omegon gets up and leave the room.