Feeling Mana

Ungrateful bastard. I think while leaving Haze's room. I go into mine, it is just across his, to the right. Mine is not much bigger than his, suffice to say that it is cramped, but I have all the tools I need for my work. I close the door behind me, activating the locking runes.

I sit at my desk and inspect the records, the runes composing the enchantments flare as it projects the data to my mind. I curse, this host might look composed, and he is already able to sense his body's mana response, he appears to be an exemplary individual. But with the spirit scanning array I can have a recording of his feelings and emotions.

On those few days he was quite unstable at first, unable to move and his mind wanting to focus on all of what happened to him. But he has a solid control on his mind, he can focus in something for quite long before his mind spikes with distractive thoughts. But then he does something, and all his thoughts just disappear for 10 to 30 seconds, and he resumes his previous thoughts.

Yesterday he had many such happenings, the distractive thoughts become more common, and their spike much higher. His response to them is quicker too, and I thought of giving him a 'focused mind' potion today. Proposed him with a good time, as the touch of the opposite gender is often soothing for stressed out individuals. But his response was violent, and I can now see how much hatred he felt at the moment.

I compare the results to the charts, and it give a result of murderous intent. I can not say if it was from the prostitution or slavery Haze talked about, but one or both of those made him respond with intense and negative thoughts. Another worrying thing is his sleeping condition, he is having nightmares, and they become worse each time. The readings show high levels of distress and anxiety, if it keeps going like so, we will need a mind mage to appease him.

I open my report book and write down the information, it is one of my duties to monitor the host and try to gather as much information on him as possible. Knowing that he hates slavery or prostitution, possibly both, is an information among others.

Once I have finished noting everything I have to, I go to the quest manager. He is the one charged with the responsibility of managing every quest, mission and other such tasks our guild needs done. Usually, to post a request, I would have just gone to one of the people at the reception desk to post a request for a common language teacher. But it is a request for a new host, and those take priority on nearly all other quests, so I need to give it to the highest authority of the quest hall.

Once with him I give him the request: A charming girl capable of teaching the common tongue, human if possible. Their is no need for intimate actions, but remain a possibility. Also, to prevent any spoil of capabilities, the person need to not have mana sense yet.

Once that is done, I am free to profit from the host. I return to my temporary room, the one across the host's, and I sit to absorb what I can from all the mana the Teneren is conjuring. Space and darkness mana fuse to form abyss mana, and I do what I can absorb at least a bit of any of the three. It is difficult to do so, the Teneren's draw on them is strong, and I am not used to those mana attributes.

This is the first benefit I get from my position, by getting this attributed mana, I can produce more of it and then use it. But for that I need more, and it is taking me hours to gather as much mana of the from those 3 attributes as I would in minutes if it was dirt, stone or metal mana.

Day after day I gather more data on Haze, and he seems to pick up the language with some ease. The girl chosen to teach him is around his age, and from the folder on her, she will not have the opportunity to gather abyssal mana. It will evidently help her in sensing mana.

What is of interest is that instead of her teaching the language to him, he guides her by asking questions. It does look like he has experience in learning languages. He was not boasting then? I ask myself. He did say something about being a scholar.

The next few days pass quickly, and I monitor every single day, recording everything I can about him and write it on my report. At the 1 week mark of becoming the Teneren's host, I make him take a test using enchanted apparels. With the amount of mana that entered him I can locate where the link between them is attached, as well as see if their is any kind of complications. Some hosts have been reported to have a bad reaction to abyssal mana.

I use the enchantments engraved inside the bead I was given and search for internal bleeding, signs of rotting flesh or anything else that needs attention. I find some traces of minor malnutrition and some amount of overworking exhaustion. Nothing that a healing spell is unable to fix, or what a regeneration potion can mend in a day or two. Mixing it with his food will modify the taste a bit, but he is not accustomed to the taste of things yet, so he will not even notice.

There is nothing much to do for now, until he awakens to his mana sense, or the Teneren finish adapting to our realm, I just have to wait and gather mana. I do answer to the host's demands, but I choose if they are accepted or not. Before going back to strengthening my mana, I check the enchantment monitoring his health.

_______________

I wake up and begin my new daily routine, which consists of some exercises to stretch my muscles and improve my flexibility. While I do that, I focus on the feeling in each of my limbs, and how they stretch. It is weird, as some times I can feel them, perfectly normal, and then I feel like a raindrop touched a part of my body and numbs it. It would be more accurate to call it anesthesia drop, but we better hope those are never an actual thing. Overdose of anesthesia is lethal after all. I chase the random thought away and finish my routine by cleaning myself.

Their is no shower here, there are baths but they are impractical. So I wash by emptying a bucket of water above my head to wet myself, then wash and rinse in the same way. I do not wash in my room though, I go to the washroom, one that is seemingly reserved for me? I am not sure and don't really care. Washed up, stretched and in clean clothes (which makes me look like a sith lord by the way), I return to my room where I sit down and meditate.

I have always multi-tasked what I do, so much so that I work much better when having multiple tasks to do at the same time. It does not work well if I try to learn multiple things at once, but if I have to feel up my body while mentally reciting the common's vocabulary? Then I am up for the task, I move my tongue, mouth and throat as if I was speaking the words, but I don't talk, I just emulate the movements to create some muscle memory.

Now, it is evident that while doing multiple things at the same time, you will not have the same capacities with those tasks compared to when you are doing them without anything else to distract you. And that is true, I focus the most on the feel of the mana, I don't feel it yet, but I feel the zones where it is concentrated and entering my body.

Once my language teacher arrives, my focus is shifted to the language. She refused to tell me her name, as well as a reason why. It could be for multiple reasons, but most likely because she was ordered not to get close to me. As I understand it a host can become really important in the guild and they want to keep control over the new ones. If a girl exerts too much influence, they would act by either making use of her to manipulate the host, or just evict her to sever the relationship.

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

By 'they' I mean the ones responsible for the whole 'let's abduct people from every and anywhere to attach some Lovecraftian horror to them and make them have a mental breakdown.' I am likely being monitored, I do not know how, as I found no camera or microphones. But this world has magic, and as long as I do not have the ability to sense mana, I can not find what is hidden.

Once the day has passed I take mental notes of my progression before trying to fall asleep. For example, at first I could only feel the 'numb' regions on my body, and only when they were affecting an area as large as one of my palms. But now I can feel them forming, enlarging first quickly, slowing down, and then dissipating. As for the common tongue, it is a rather simple language, maybe even easier than english. There is no conjugation in common, all of conjugation's use if carried by grammar and subjects pronunciation. In just a few days I can already ask simple questions, but the pronunciation is a bit hard to manage, and I have difficulty understanding talking people. The written part is easy enough, the alphabet is not made up of letters, but of syllables, much like Japanese, a language I will never have the opportunity to finish learning.

I fall asleep, just to find myself bond by the blackest tentacles you could think about, and all along them are sharp fucking spikes tearing and stabbing my flesh. I wake up and realize it was all just a nightmare, but I am now in a void: No light anywhere, and yet I see and feel the tentacles coming from every direction. There is no up nor down, just endless murder feelers. My nights are like that since that time in the pit, I make nightmares inside nightmares. I don't wake up from them, and it has always been like that for me. Except I don't have any good dreams, only bad ones those times. Even without thinking about it, it is evident I have a trauma because of what I experienced. But I am a man, nobody would care about how I feel, the only answer I would get by showing weakness is Man up.

Once I wake up for real I get up, do my exercises to empty my mind of all the torturous thoughts floating there, and after washing up I am fresh and ready to begin the day. And it all repeats, the only variation I have are the questions I ask, the answers given, and the clarity with which I feel the mana's effects.

My language teacher does not only teach me common, I ask her many things about how the guild works, hierarchy, resources, politics with other groups. She refuses to respond to some questions, but i just ignore it and follow up, if she does not want to give an answer, then I will not lose time trying to pry something from her. I have too much to learn right now, and my mind is not on how I should trick her to have her reveal something.

I have times when I think about my family... I was never much of an empath, and could spend months without thinking about my relatives. But as the saying goes: You realize how much something counts for you only when you lose it. I am experiencing this right now. My teacher just left, I am alone in my room.

I know I should not show any weakness, but I just don't have enough will to ignore this emptiness right now. I sit on the side of the bed, my back straight, my hands placed on my thighs. I just close my eyes and let my feelings crash onto me, I focus all of myself into how sad, lonely and pathetic I feel. It hurts so much, to not have the possibility to show how much I truly love my family, I could have done so for so long, and just never did it. It rips my heart, to never have the possibility to tell them all I feel for them.

I feel all of my regrets choking my heart, and I embraces the sensation. It hurts and I deserve it, every one bit of pain I feel is deserved and justified. I knew someday I would lose the ability to tell them, but thought I had time to say it later, but it was always for later. Until my summoning, when it passed from 'I have time' to 'It is too late'. It angers me, profoundly so, and this anger is aimed at myself because not having used the time I had to say how much I loved my family is entirely on me.

Yes, I was summoned by mages from another world, but I could have just been killed in an accident, robed and killed because I would have obviously done the dumb attempt to refuse to cooperate. There is so many things that could have cut my time, and being summoned to another world is just one of them. Admitting the probability of this happening was likely really low, but it is only one such occurrence, aiming my grief to the guild would make me more of an hypocrite than I already am.

I just stay there, sitting on my bed, my eyes closed, tears falling down, and torturing myself with my own feelings because I feel like shit and feel that I should feel even worse. After some time my heart aches numbs up, and my tears stop coming. I do not move until I have recovered enough of my logic mind and just sends all of my pains to the back of my mind. I stand up, stretch my legs and arms to get the blood to flow again, dry my tears and return to my routine.

I recite more of common, and feel more details in the numb drops, but I am not very efficient right now, sadness wants to come back to the forefront of my thoughts. I do not let it happen, I will always have my loved ones in the back of my mind, but I will not let this ruin me. I will mourn this for some time, but as everyone does, I will recover from this.

The days pass, Omegon comes every second day to ask about my progression, and my teacher seems to hate me for some reasons. She only responds to questions now, and stop at that, she takes no initiatives to give comments like before. It was the only human contact I had, and now it feels professional. There is no feelings in our words, only meanings devoid of sentiments. I lean in it, just getting the most out of her time teaching me, questions after questions, answer after answer.

The days are repetitive, they pass both quickly and agonizingly slowly. It aggravates my sadness, but I do what I have always done: I pass it up to the back of my mind where it will wait to explode together with the other thousand things I send there.

On the 23rd day since I am in this room, which I know it is because I kept track of days by noting the days. I would have lost count otherwise, I feel something different in myself. Where I felt numbness before, I feel... something. At first I feel confused, I should be feeling the prick of an itch, then the pop of it, like a bubble rupturing and propagating it's content around. Then the content agglomerate back and passing as if evaporating, but now I instead feel this thing, like a frayed rope made of an elastic material. I feel it passing through my skin, then cutting itself and redirecting to another part of my body to repeat the action.

The feeling I get from it is strange, it feels like something near and far at the same time. The best example I can think about would be when you hover you fingers above something. You don't touch it, only barely so, you keep only millimeters between your fingers and the object? You can feel something, and yet you don't touch it. That is the feeling I get, at the same time as if I could never get near the object I am nearly touching. As I said, it is strange.

But this strangeness is something new in my routine and something I am happy about, it keeps my morale up, which is getting harder unfortunately. I put a big part of my focus on feeling up what should be mana, and try to exert my will on it. I have little success for that, but for the feeling part I am ready for the course. At the end of the day I am able to feel 3 different kinds of mana. The first being the one I first felt, the second feels like an endless pit, but this description does nothing to really describe the feel I get from it, I have no way to really convey how it feels. It is like trying to describe colors to a blind man. The third and last mana kind feels like a total absence of light. It not so much feels like darkness, as darkness can exist in light, a shadow can be seen. No, this one feels like NO light at all, absolute darkness, totally lightless.

I can deduce that I can now feel mana, and I don't think that hiding it from Omegon is a smart thing to do. So when I go to sleep, I think up of many scenarios of how I will tell him. In some I talk to him in common, in others I let the meaning slip with a metaphor, and I also think about what it would entail to not tell him. I find sleep while doing so, I would have liked a restful night, but my mind does not let go of my regrets easily, and the next time I open my eyes is after I exit one of the many nightmares I had during this rest.