It takes a few tries to reach the same space I had before. Not that it takes any real effort to enter Meditation – that’s easier every time I try it. The issue is in finding the twist to make it an internal rather than external view. I’ll admit that the first time I enter Meditation this evening, I find myself thoroughly distracted. It’s the first time I’ve engaged my Skill with an external view since gaining all those points and the difference is stark.
Before, I’d seen connections spanning between me and those closest to me, as well as some vague links between other things and the world around. The connections between the vine-stranglers and the earth below had been the strongest. I guess that those had been the trees’ links to the thick Energy density of the tunnel, explaining their rapid growth. Now I realise that I’d only been seeing a fraction of what is present. In fact, I could probably only see a fraction of a fraction, as I doubt that I can see everything even now.
What I see as I stare with wondering mental ‘eyes’ at the world around is like...roots. Luminous, intangible roots. Before, all I could see were the tap-roots, the thickest and most obvious of the plant’s network. Now, I can see far more of the intricate links that stretch all around me. If they were solid, I would be unable to move because of their number. I wonder whether somehow I could gain control over the links...and if I could, what would happen?
Drawing from the link with River had led to me draining the mana from him to replace my own. Actually, thinking about it, how did I replace my mana? I gained about half my mana pool which, at the time, was around two hundred mana units. River only has seventy mana units. Even if I’d drained him dry, which I’m sure I did, it wouldn’t have replenished my pool to almost halfway. My experience with the Pure Energy makes me wonder whether it might be something more nefarious. Could I have started draining his health and converting it to mana? If so, no wonder that even the System was warning me about being careful….
But this wasn’t what I started meditating to think about. I return to trying to switch to an internal view and succeed a couple of minutes later. It turns out that it’s mostly about willing myself inside myself, though that makes little sense when I put it into words. I find that, like when going into a healing trance, I lose almost all sense of my physical body, becoming able to see the light within me that has to be my mana. Like when I accessed this space after the debacle with the Pure Energy, I am able to see both a bright light at the centre and a network of much dimmer light everywhere else – except in one place: my hand, of course.
As I ‘zoom’ in towards the centre, the network undergoes a change: no longer does it appear to fill the shape of my body, but instead becomes a spherical shape. Has it changed, or is it just that I’ve changed the way I’m looking at it? Or both? I can’t help but feel that physical rules hold little sway in this space.
Deciding to start at the centre, I ‘zoom’ in further. My Core is a mini-star – burning like a sun. A sun contained within a glass bubble. How do I know it’s contained within something? Because the surface of the bubble is fractured, the hair-thin lines creating a beautiful, if disturbing pattern. This must be the source of at least one of my reductions, though whether it’s affecting my mana pool, mana regeneration, or health regeneration, I’m not sure.
The sight is disturbing, something within me knowing at instinctual level that if that container were ever to completely break, the centre would truly act like the sun I’m likening it to, burning through me. Whether that would simply destroy my ability to use magic, or actually kill me, I don’t know, and don’t want to find out.
The light inside is a bit calmer than it was last time. Its glow is mostly constant, with a few flares every so often accompanied by a commensurate dimming afterwards. It’s all still feeling very tender, but I don’t feel quite on the point of disintegration as I did back then. These are all good signs. The fact that the actual cracks in place on my Core do not seem to have changed, is not so reassuring. In fact, if anything, they’ve got worse. Is that an argument for the cracks being the reason for the reduction to my mana pool intermittently increasing?
I suppose it would make sense if my Core is where my mana is stored that cracks to it would worsen when I’d accessed and drawn out some of that mana. It would also make sense that damage to it could lead to a reduction in the amount of mana I could store. The pain I experienced when I activated Lay-on-hands would also make complete sense in that context too. Following the same logic, if I wish to be able to cast magic without pain, I’ll need to find a way of healing the cracks in my Core. Plus, I don’t want to find out the hard way how much damage my Core can sustain before it collapses.
Well. Not like I was planning on leaving it the way it is, anyway. Not if there’s anything I can do about it.
Before I start trying to work on solutions to my Core situation, I look at the rest of the damage. The last time I’d entered this space, I’d seen light throughout my whole body, only noticeable because of the sheer lack of it in my hand. Now I’ve ‘zoomed in’ to the point that I don’t see my body any more, I realise that it’s more than just light. Instead, like what I recently saw when I accidentally engaged in the external view of my Meditation, the light is created by a myriad filaments of light. They spool away from my Core, forming an intricate weave that at first glance just looks like a single piece of unbroken fabric, barely visible thanks to the sun at the centre obscuring them with its sheer brightness.
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Getting closer to one of the hairs of light takes little more than a thought. It’s impossibly thin, more like spiderweb than anything else. Yet I sense that it’s far stronger than spider-silk, despite its thinness. I try to trace a thread from the Core, but quickly lose track of it as it disappears among the mass of others. Trying to get a better view of the whole, I move back outwards again. Mentally ‘frowning’, I try to block out the light from the Core so I can actually see the details.
The longer I focus, the more I concentrate, the more I am able to see those glimmering lines weaving through the space. A bit like stargazing after having just left a bright room, at first I can only properly see the most obvious threads, but over time the rest fade into view. They were always there, but it’s only as my eyes adapt that I become capable of seeing them. Such is the sense of discovery as slowly, bit by bit, the whole design is revealed. And what I see is an impossibly intricate design, something far beyond the capabilities of any human even to conceive, let alone make. Perhaps a computer could have, but even then, there is a life, a vibrancy to this network of threads which would surely not have been present in that case.
If the shape of the mass had remained in the shape of my body, I would have thought that the lines of light might act like the magic equivalent of blood vessels, transporting mana instead of blood cells around my body. Even when it shifted into a more spherical shape, I’d half expected to see some relation to my organs. My brain and heart, at the very least.
What I actually see is more like an impossibly intricate 3D mandala formed in the shape of a sphere with my burning Core at the centre. I move slowly around the edge of the sphere, looking at it carefully. Every position I take shows different aspects of the sphere, and slowly I start to realise that a few small areas are far more intricate than others. In fact, some areas are practically simple in comparison to others.
As I take time over examining the lines, sensing that this is something important to understand, I realise that the areas which are particularly intricate look...different from the rest of the design. And some more than others. I move around the whole of the design several times, verifying that what I had noticed is correct. Finally, I’m pretty sure of my observations.
There are nine areas of particular intricacy, each self-contained. Three of them have a similar...character to the whole sphere. The lines move in similar patterns. They are more detailed, but they fit with the rest of it. The other six areas are different. Each of them has a different character both from each other and the rest of the sphere.
One is full of flowing lines which somehow manage to never intersect with each other; another is hard to truly identify, the lines seeming to move a little every time I look at them. Another is full of dead ends, Energy seeming to double back on itself from one angle, but from another I can see that instead it’s travelling at right-angles to where it had been originally. I can see that each section links to the ‘body’ of the sphere around it. The Skills which better match the character of the surrounding sphere link up with it flawlessly, connections flowing from the centre of the intricate area to the sun at the centre of my being. The Skills which are very different from the character of the surrounding sphere are a different story. In three of them, there are several loose ends where the line just...stops.
It’s hard for me to conceptualise: I observe through some sixth sense that the lines aren’t truly lines; I’m just identifying them as such because I can’t truly visualise what they are. Some lines are more sounds than visible lines; others are like the brush of a hand to my cheek, or a feather’s touch. It’s uncomfortable to think about exactly how I sense these things, or what they really are; I stop thinking about it when instinct tells me that if I question too much, I will lose the ability to do it at all. I simply return to my observations instead of wondering how I can observe them.
Over time, I can’t help but wonder whether these areas are in some way linked to my Skills. It would make sense: three Skills are linked to my Class, and therefore have to have some similarity between them; six Skills are not and therefore the disparity would be explained. If that’s so, the corollary would be that the rest of the intricate web is somehow linked to my Class. Or maybe it is my Class. I’ll have to think more about the possible consequences of it being one or the other.
Either way, my time spent touring the web and trying to work out what it is has been useful in also working out why I’m suffering from a reduction in both mana and health regeneration rates. There’s a big hole in the side of one section of my sphere. It’s a bit like an ice-cream scoop has come and taken out a chunk of it, leaving fraying ends dangling in a blackness darker than any other area.
The frayed ends don’t look at all healthy, the bright gold of the Core dimming to blackened copper and then to nothing at all. Even if I hadn’t spent so much time admiring the intricate design of the rest of the sphere, I’d know that this was wrong. Beyond the fraying connection, beyond the disturbing blackness, there’s a sense of something missing. Is this what the Pure Energy did to me? Is this why I was in so much pain? It wasn’t consuming my flesh, but something else that is integral to my Class?
I suppose that if my theories are correct and that the overarching sphere is my Class, and the areas of particular intricacy are my Skills, then I suppose it might make sense that I can’t choose any more Skills while I have the problem. What if a Skill needs to connect into lines which are currently ending in a frayed end? Or what if the Skill needs to be placed in the spot where there’s just blackness? Or maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way: perhaps I can’t access the Skills because my Class needs to be completely present in order to be able to access my choices. A bit like computer programming where one error may cause the whole program to crash: I certainly remember experiencing the blue screen of death more than once.
Well, it’s one thing identifying the source of the problem – since I’m ninety-nine percent sure that this is the reason for my reduction to my regeneration rates – and a completely different thing to fix it.
Zooming into the space, I find myself literally unable to enter the blackness. If I try, I am shunted around to the closest frayed end of a connection. Trying to enter from the direction of the sphere, I can’t move past where the connection fades away into nothing. Concentrating on the connection itself, I sense...something. Hmm, I might have an idea….