Devi sat in a narrow tunnel, struggling to maintain her focus. She had a massive headache, was covered in bruises and cuts, and was dying of thirst. She was also starting to feel ravenous. After gathering all the scattered equipment, she had made her way back up the tunnel, wary of every shadow, until she found an offshoot that was too tight for the spider to enter.

She had squeezed her way into it, and it opened up a little bit after the entrance, only to terminate a few meters back. It was a great place to hide out and work on the last five array disks without worrying about the monstrous spider descending on her while she was distracted.

The only problem was that she couldn't focus on the array disks; everything else was too distracting. Especially her thirst. She had never been this thirsty before. Her throat felt so dry that it hurt to cough. Her lips felt like sandpaper when she ran her tongue over them, and she felt like if she tried to talk, it would only come out as a rasp.

Having just escaped a burning cavern did nothing to help either. Her eyes still stung from the acrid fumes that came off the conflagration of burning webs, and her lungs still burned from breathing it all in. Not to mention all the running she had just done.

I've probably run more today than in the past year she thought to herself as her mind wandered to thoughts of sports drinks. I really need some water.

There was probably a source of water in the caves; she assumed even the monsters needed to drink occasionally. But finding that would mean venturing out into the dark tunnel system full of monstrous bats and flesh-eating spiders. Something she wanted to keep to a minimum. If only she could make water out of thin air.

She thumped her palm on her forehead as she remembered a symbol she had been experimenting with the other night. The symbol she felt fairly sure meant water. The symbol that she had been able to create water with.

Or should I be calling them runes now, like the journal was referring to them as? Devi shook her head. She could worry about the proper vocabulary later. Water first. She dug through her pack and found the piece of wood she had carved the rune into and held it in her hand. A small bead of water formed on the surface as she channeled her mana through it.

She eagerly sucked the water droplet up, only realizing afterwards that she had no idea where it had come from or if it had any contaminants. The next bead of water coalesced on the rune, and any thoughts about waiting to test the water flew from her mind as she drank the small bit of water.

Each tiny sip didn't really quench her thirst, and it took a bit for each drop to form. Getting anywhere near the amount of water she wanted would take ages. She thought about making multiple symbols, but she didn't have anything to carve the runes into.

Devi kept channeling her mana into the rune as she placed it into one of her metal pots. Only a tiny trickle of mana was necessary to have a few water droplets appear every minute or so. She had tried to push more mana into the wood, only for it to rebuff her attempts. It seemed like the symbol would only take so much mana.

She growled at it as it sat in her pot, unaffected. The few droplets of water she had obtained had only made her thirstier. The rune taunted her with the prospect of water, only to dole out its hoard of liquid as slowly as possible.

If only I could make it bigger.

Maybe I can make it bigger. The rune is just a pathway for my mana to follow, I could probably force my mana into the same shape as the rune. That should do the same thing, right?

he had no way of telling if her idea would work except to test it, so she stopped channeling mana into the rune and closed her eyes. Devi pulled her mana from her core, the ever-moving mass of mana in her chest that always seemed to want to be used, through her arms, and out into the air.

The second it exited her fingers, she had a much harder time controlling it, as she had been realizing lately. Her connection to it seemed to diminish the moment it left her own body, requiring exponentially more effort to make it move the way she wanted. Though when she used her [Enhance Attribute] skill, she had no problem forming the complex shapes needed for that, all within seconds. She couldn't even get a sense of the shapes needed before the magic was finished, enhancing whoever was the target.

I wonder why that is. Do the skills help that much with shaping my mana? Would I even be able to enhance an attribute without the skill helping?

She shook her head, trying to refocus her mind away from the tangent. Those questions could be dealt with later, once she had hopefully gotten some water.

It was a struggle to form the rune; the mana seemed to interact with itself, pushing and pulling in odd ways she didn't expect. It was like playing with a whole lot of magnets, but each one had six poles instead of two, and no one had bothered to mention how they interacted with her.

Shaping the rune was very reminiscent of making the magic item, except quite a bit easier. She had to keep parts of the rune in place while she focused on others until, all of a sudden, everything snapped into place.

She could feel the rune pulse with power, drawing even more mana from her before collapsing in on itself. In its place was a bubble of water that hung in the air for a moment before splashing down on the ground. The water soaked through her pant legs and started to pool on the rocky ground.

It wasn't her finest moment, but she eagerly bent over the puddle and started drinking. Water was water, right?

After she had sucked all the water she could, getting a mouthful of grit and dust in the process, she sat back, her throat and lips not as dry as they were moments ago. She dusted off the bit of rock that stuck to her lips and looked at her status, curious to see how much mana that had cost.

A full twenty mana, she found out. More than she had spent on anything besides the few desperate fire bursts she had shot at people. Twenty mana for only about 200 milliliters of water. A bit pricey, but right now, she would have paid pretty much anything for some water.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

It did drop her mana quite low, and she hadn't had her mana completely full since she had been teleported into the clearing. She had been running on half a tank this whole time and was quite annoyed by it. It even regenerated far slower than both her stamina and health. There had to be a way to fix that.

Now that she had a problem, it was going to bug her until she figured it out, unless a different, more interesting problem reared its head. But for now, she was determined to figure out how to make her mana regenerate faster.

The first thing she looked at was her attributes. It seemed like a good place to start. Out of the ten, only four seemed likely to be responsible for how fast her mana pool refilled: Wisdom, Presence, Intelligence, and Willpower. The other stats appeared to be more focused on the body, and while her mana could possibly depend on them, it seemed unlikely.

She had already figured out that Wisdom was directly responsible for her maximum mana, much like how Vitality and Endurance determined the maximum for health and stamina. If her regeneration had something to do with the size of her max mana, it probably would be orders of magnitude higher than what it was now. The same could be said for Intelligence, since it was even higher than her Wisdom.

That left her with two options: Presence and Willpower. Presence had been her lowest attribute from the onset of everything and was still the lowest, two points lower than Willpower. She didn't have any definitive proof, but out of all the options, Presence seemed like the best candidate.

There was really only one way to test if her hunch was right. Her hoard of free points was staring at her, waiting to be used. She could just use her [Enhance Ability] to test it out, but since it used mana, she didn't know how that would affect things. And she could only raise it by two points, which might not significantly affect anything. It was much better to dump quite a few points and see the results.

She could always earn more free points.

With just a small bit of hesitation, Devi mentally confirmed her choice, putting ten points into Presence. The familiar wave of energy washed over her, filling the small crevice with its multi-colored light.

Devi sat back as the light faded. The sensation was starting to become familiar, something she never would have imagined happening back when she first experienced it. But since then, she had gone through it multiple times and was starting to get a bit desensitized to it.

Now that her experiment was underway, all she had to do was wait a while. She wanted to use the time to keep working on the array disks but decided against it. The whole point of this test was to see how her mana regeneration rate was affected, and playing around with her mana seemed to be counterproductive.

And so she just sat there, trying to pass the time without using her mana, which was quite a bit harder than she thought. She wanted to experiment with forming runes with her mana or go poke around her finished disk and compare it to the original. But both of those used quite a bit of mana. She even refrained from using her magic tool as a light source, instead rereading the journal in the light of the two disks.

She mainly went over the technical notes of the disks, rereading how the magic was supposed to work and what she needed. After finishing with all the disks, she needed some mana-conductive materials to draw out the array itself. Thankfully, she wouldn't need to draw a massive circle, but she would have to create a few runes on the ground to connect the seven disks.

The mana-conductive material could apparently be made from a few ground mana crystals dissolved in some sort of liquid. Even water would work. The crystals were the small, clear stones sitting in the middle of the array disks and could apparently be harvested from the local monsters in the area. The ones in the array disks were apparently taken from the corpses of a few bats that Aks'ta had defeated.

They had complained about their bad luck, only finding five crystals in a group of twenty-five bats, which was apparently quite rare. However, the journal did not mention what would be considered a normal amount. Because of course, why would there be actual helpful information?

All that meant that Devi was going to make a trip to the cavern full of dead bats and cut them open, trying to find a few more crystals. She was looking forward to that so much. The journal didn't even specify where the crystals were supposed to be, just that the dead monsters had them.

Just wonderful.

~ᵥ----ᵥ~

Devi had never been good at telling time, especially when she was focused on something, like studying a journal. So she had no idea how much time had passed when she looked at her status page again, but it had probably been around an hour, at least 30 minutes.

With a bit of trepidation, she opened her Status. If her guess had been wrong, she had just wasted ten free points. Even if she assumed no Attribute was worthless, it wouldn't help her situation if the points didn't directly increase her mana regeneration. So when she saw that her mana had refilled a full 34 points compared to her health only gaining 20, she felt relieved.

She had been fairly confident in her choice, but having it confirmed was always a good feeling. And now that was out of the way, she could go back to crafting the last few array disks. Well, she would have to go and retrieve the bat corpses for the last two, but she was putting that off for as long as possible. She didn't want to run into the giant spider anytime soon.

The challenge of crafting the array disks quickly pushed any thoughts of butchering dead bats out of her head. There was no room for errant thoughts as she carefully manipulated her mana to create the intricate structures mentioned in the journal.

It was significantly easier the second time than the first, mainly because she knew what to expect. There were still close calls where the whole thing almost collapsed in on itself, but she managed to stabilize everything at the last moment. She had no idea if that would have made the entire disk unusual or not and didn't want to experiment with her only samples. If she found any more of this mana stone, she had so many things she wanted to try.

A blue box appeared in her vision, announcing that the array disk had been completed. And it didn't come a moment too soon. Devi felt as if she had stayed up all night, trying to digest one of her philosophy textbooks and then writing a full paper on it. But she hadn't passed out afterward, which was a good sign.

Her leading theory as to why she had passed out last time was that she had been enhancing her Wisdom, which made her mana pool larger. The only problem was that she had then stopped enhancing it while her mana pool had been less than the extra she had. She couldn't be sure since she had been unconscious, but she assumed her mana dropped to zero, and maybe even lower, and that had knocked her out.

She had learned her lesson and wasn't going to repeat that scenario until she was in a safe environment that was. Devi couldn't just pass up an opportunity to learn something about the frustratingly opaque laws that governed everything.

After a brief pause to give her overtaxed brain a break, Devi went back at it, crafting the next two disks. The process slowly became easier as she learned how to manipulate her mana better. It was by no means easy, with each step still demanding her full attention, but by the time she finished the third array disk, she felt as if she had a handle on it.

She had by no means mastered the odd ways the mana would twist and turn, but she was growing to anticipate them. It wasn't that her control over her own mana had increased, but she was figuring out the best way to move the mana. It was like she had just gotten a new game, and she was learning the controls. Her character could do so many things, and she was still figuring out which moves were the best. The controls were there, and she was learning how to use them.

Devi reached for the next array disk, only to see that there were only two left. The two that didn't have a mana crystal.

Guess it is time to go butcher some bats then.