That’s easier thought than done, of course. However, with my recent experience of managing to touch my mana pool, I find that it takes me less time to access my health pool than it might have. In fact, most of the difficulty is trying to work out where to find it.

My mana pool, I’m used to accessing – I know it’s mostly held within my Core and have become relatively adept at pulling it out and directing it through my internal matrix. My health pool is a different story.

I’m aware that it drops when I am injured, and is replenished when the injuries are healed. I’m aware that it increases slowly over time even if I don’t actively heal myself, my injuries knitting together with my natural health regeneration. I’m even, unfortunately, aware of how a severe enough injury can permanently reduce the pool I have to draw on – that’s what happened with my eye when my natural regeneration and potion were unable to heal it.

Thinking about more recent experiences, I managed to see what happens to my Core space when I add a Constitution point, the stat which determines my health pool itself. Most of the Energy was fed into the blackness around my internal matrix rather than the golden weave itself.

All of that together implies to me that my Health is very much grounded in the body. That might seem obvious by the fact that it’s what’s most affected when I sustain an injury, but I feel that it’s an important foundation point to make clear.

So, instead of trying to touch on my Core as I did before, I do my best to touch my body. In this strange grey world, my body feels very far away and difficult to access. It’s a bit like I’m reaching for something, but can’t see because of a blind-fold and can only feel the most obvious aspects because I’m wearing thick gloves.

It probably would be easier to leave the space, work out how to access my health pool, and then enter it again, but I’m uncertain I’ll even be able to make it back to this exact space. I should – it seems like it’s part of Dominate, but what if because I couldn’t take the ‘challenge’, I’m barred from entry until my soul is whole again?

It’s probably unlikely, but not impossible. Having finally found a way of properly accessing the damage to my soul, I’m reluctant to do anything that might jeopardise it. So I choose to take the harder route of fumbling around blindly.

Eventually, after a lot of trial and error – mostly error – I manage to grasp the fact that my health seems to be held in an opposite manner to my mana. My mana, as far as I can make out, is kept under pressure in my Core along with the Energy I absorb. That makes sense when I consider that when I was force-fed Energy it threatened to fracture my Core, and then actually did damage it when I levelled up too many times. I have to guess that the Core didn’t have enough time to adapt to the greater amount of mana it was being forced to hold. Perhaps I wouldn’t have done as much damage to myself if I’d chosen physical stats instead of my mental and soul ones on each level-up then.

Or maybe I would have – I guess that rapidly increasing the number of points in my physical stats could do just as much damage in a different way.

The effect of this compression within my Core is that when the mana comes out, I have to actively work to keep it together. If I don’t, it will quite happily either dissipate or rush out of my Core space entirely.

My health appears to be the complete opposite. It’s already diffused throughout my body. That’s probably why I lose health when I have an injury: the energy is lost with the blood, or damaged in an impact, or poisoned by venom. It seems to take on the state of whatever part of the body it’s in: if the body part is rendered useless, so is the health within it, dropping from my bar.

It makes me wonder if I could change that: if I could make the body part mimic the health energy within it? So, an attack would have to affect the health energy itself before it impacted my body? For later experimentation, perhaps.

The most important discovery I’ve made is that my health is just another form of energy, no doubt deriving from the Energy I absorb. It suddenly makes so much more sense! My body naturally absorbs Energy, the connection I have with the outside through my internal matrix (or should I call it ‘external’ matrix, since they’re the tendrils which extend outside me?) determining how much I gain.

If my mana pool isn’t full, some of this Energy is transformed into mana. Kalanthia has indicated that it’s linked to the soul, but I don’t know if that’s a difference between beasts and humans. Equally, if my health pool isn’t full, some of the Energy I absorb is transformed into health, replacing what was lost with my injury.

I suddenly start wondering if my stamina is actually the same. Though why then would its pool size be determined by Strength and its regeneration by Dexterity? I decide not to pursue that line of thinking at this moment – it will probably make more sense to do it when I’m not in my soul space and might be able to examine myself a bit better.

Pausing for a moment, I consider the implications of the fact that at least two, maybe all three of my resource pools are derivatives from Energy.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Shouldn’t I have noticed something about my Energy absorption rate fluctuating? I think to myself. Or, maybe not my actual Energy absorption rate, but the amount of Energy I’m actually accumulating in my store. After all, if I’m absorbing, say, thirty units of Energy per hour, but I’ve got a deficit of three hundred units of mana and fifty units of health, then wouldn’t I earn less Energy towards my next level?

Then again, I continue the thought, given that all I have to work on with my Energy store is a percentage progress, perhaps it’s happening, but I don’t even realise it. I resolve to pay better attention to what I can actually see on my status screen. Because if getting injured and using my mana actually slows my progress to the next level, I need to know about it.

Then again, I don’t generally intend on getting injured, and I need to use my mana – either to keep myself alive, one of my Bound alive, or deal with an attack, for the same result as the first two options. I suppose I could use mana less for things like skinning a carcass, but if I avoid using it too much, my Skills won’t increase much. So maybe it doesn’t matter too much if my progress to the next level is affected. It would still be good to know, though.

Returning more to the question of drawing on my health, in opposition to my mana which is already condensed, I find that I have to actually condense the energy within my body to draw on it at all. I find myself wondering what would happen if I was able to transform Energy into health and force more of it into my body. Could I increase my health pool that way? Or would it damage me? Perhaps worth an experiment.

But not now. For now, once I figure out how to access the energy stored as health, I start trying to apply it to my soul damage.

This proves to be the easiest part of the process. Now using the correct ‘material’, all I have to do is focus on expanding the mist into the areas which need it. The most difficult bit is multitasking – keeping my hum going even while I also focus on pushing the boundaries of the mist.

I realise at one point that I’m not actually breathing; apparently in this space I don’t need to do so to speak. I suppose that it’s additional evidence of me not actually being here physically.

Too soon, my health runs out. It becomes harder and harder to draw on the energy in my flesh, like what happens when I continue sucking on a straw when only the dregs of the drink remain. I feel a sudden weakness take over me, even in this non-physical space, an ache filling every inch of my being.

Guess that’s my signal to stop, I think to myself weakly as I fold to half-lying on the floor. As I look at my efforts, though, I’m a little dismayed. I’d felt like I was making progress.

Actually, I have made progress. Just not as much of it as I’d thought. I’ve filled in the tip of the pyramid, but not much more. From what I can see, I’m going to do this many, many more times.

But my health pool is pretty tapped out, from what I can tell. I sigh. At least I’ve discovered that there is a natural limit stopping me from killing myself, though what if I continued pushing past the weakness? Not that I’m intending on doing that. Actually, it was probably pretty reckless of me just to keep pulling at my health like that…. Hindsight and all that. More to the point right now, if I wait for my health to refill naturally, this is going to take a very long time. Though, do I have to wait for it to fill naturally?

I push myself more upright as I consider that thought. If my theories earlier about health just being another form of Energy were correct, could I use mana to replenish my health directly?

Certainly, Lay-on-hands and now Flesh-Shaping are able to replenish my health when I’ve lost it through an injury. But does that mean that I can replenish my health energy even when I haven’t actually sustained an injury? It would be focussing on doing something that usually only happens incidentally, but the fact that it happens at all means that it should be possible, right?

All I can do is try. And that’s what I do indeed.

Once more, it takes me a fair bit of time to figure out how to convert mana into health, but I eventually succeed. By that point, my health pool has actually regenerated almost halfway by itself, indicating that a good couple of hours has gone past in my testing, but when I figure out exactly what I have to do to turn mana into health, I can’t help cheering.

The conversion seems to be two mana units per health unit, but I’m pretty sure that that’s only because I’m being inefficient in the transfer. After all, I’d got Lay-on-hands to offer over twenty points worth of healing per cast, the cost of which had reduced to five units of mana, by the end. And that was with some of the mana being used for the actual healing bit, not just replenishing the health which had been lost. I set myself a goal to get the conversion to at least one mana for three health units by the time I finish this task.

With a feeling of achievement, I quickly refill my health bar. And then I proceed to empty it again. And then refill it. And then empty it.

Time passes without me reckoning, caught in the repetitive actions. Draw on my health, push the boundaries, draw on my health, push the boundaries. Empty on health? Convert mana into health. Full health? Draw on health, push the boundaries….

I only come back to myself when pushing suddenly becomes far harder. Not impossible, but harder. Coming out of my fugue state, I blink, realising that the whole pyramid-shaped wedge has been filled in, and I’m now pushing at the boundaries of my soul itself rather than just filling in what had been damaged.

Stopping, since I suddenly feel incredibly fatigued, I nevertheless make a mental note to come back here if I can and test further. After all, although it feels a lot more difficult to do, it doesn’t feel impossible. Could I improve my Willpower or soul without actually levelling up?

Exiting the space is easy. However, my exhaustion is so great that I barely even register that it’s full dark around me before I drop like a stone into sleep.