Chapter 90: The lightning thing
Felix Sythias’ POV:
I woke up in darkness. There was a small moment where I didn’t know where I was, but I quickly remembered. I was deep underground, stuck in a cave. It was cold here, so far away from the sunlight, but my magic kept me warm. Alex felt warm, too, his Skill working hard to keep his temperature just right. I hoped being away from the sun for so long wouldn’t have too harsh an effect on him.
Right now, he was snuggled up in my arms, and I couldn’t help but smile at him despite the situation we were in. He was still asleep it seemed, or maybe he was too comfortable to get up. Either way, it wasn’t like we had anything to do and I enjoyed his comforting presence, so I let him be.
From the corner of my eye, the armband was glowing again. It had stopped vibrating sometime during the night, though, which I was glad for. I looked at the crystals on the band, and sure enough, the eleventh crystal was lit up. I pulsed a little bit of mana into the control-rune that reset the armband to my new mana-total and the crystal faded out.
With that taken care of, I focused inward to my mana-pool. It was indeed a bit larger than before. Not much, maybe a percent or two at most, but it was still larger. It might not be a lot larger but every bit counted. I still didn’t know why it had happened though.
Alex said the armband only lit up after he had fed me the potion, so it was likely that was the cause—though, I couldn’t be entirely certain. For all I knew, it was something I’d done earlier and it had taken a while to affect me. But if that was the case, there was nothing I could do right now to find out what it was. So, for now, I’d just assume it was the potion and if that direction proved fruitless? Well, I could think of the other possibilities later.
So, was it an ingredient in the potion? Or was it the potion itself? Probably not. Potions had no effect without the System. They were just concoctions of rare ingredients, mana, and water without it. It was possible that the mana in the potion was responsible, but I didn’t consume any foreign mana the first time either. In any case, it would be easy to test later. We had other potions left, and not all were really useful to our current situation. Still, you never knew when you needed something. I’d wait with testing this until we were rescued.
Anyway, it was much likelier that one of the ingredients was the cause. I had no idea what went into health potions, though. Plants and monster parts, probably. If Tiki were here, I would’ve asked her—she would probably have known. I was glad she wasn’t, though. It was bad enough the two of us had gotten stuck, let alone if it had been three of us. I wouldn’t want that for her. And who knows, maybe if I had to carry her as well, it would have slowed us down just a bit too much.
In any case, I had to write my new ideas down. I went to grab my notebook and pencil and noticed that unlike before I went to sleep, I could actually move around again. I still felt weary, but it was a manageable tiredness. The kind you felt after a day of being out and about.
I scribbled my ideas down and thought about the similarities between today and the day of the dire-bear fight. On both days I fought with monsters, but that couldn’t be it. I’d been fighting with monsters all week and it only happened now. And if I was right about the healing potion being the cause, it would have to be something I digested both times. I don’t remember eating any plants that day, so that probably wasn’t it. So, a monster part? I certainly bit off a large amount of flesh that day.
This was all assuming monster parts were a part of the recipe, of course, but if that were the case, was that it? Eating higher-level monster parts? No, it couldn’t be. I ate high-level monster meat all the time. Our fridge at the dorm and mine back at home were both stocked with it.
I sighed, but scribbled down the theory anyway. I was close to figuring it out, I just knew it. But it probably wasn’t happening today—I was missing too much information—and even if I did figure something out, there was no way to test it. In any case, I’d think about it more later—Alex was waking up.
I put the notebook away just as he was stirring in my arms. It was a funny feeling, but not an unpleasant one. Not too long later, Alex opened his eyes. He yawned once, then noticed me. A smile overtook his face, and he leaned forward to give me a kiss.
“Good…” he said, then trailed off, the kiss forgotten, “morning? Afternoon? What time is it even?”
I chuckled and finished the kiss for him. “I have no idea. But it was about afternoon when—” I paused, looking for the right words. “—when the things happened, and we’ve slept a bunch since, so I think it’s night or very early in the morning.”
Alex nodded, then nuzzled back into me. I wrapped an arm around him and we laid there for a long time, just cuddling and talking. Mostly we shared our experience of what had happened. Of how close we’d gotten to dying. I also apologized to him for freezing up while we fled, but he understood and accepted my apology. Then we talked about what we were going to do now. We considered finding a way out, but the entrance was solidly blocked, and even if we did get through it, the tunnel behind it was blocked too. We talked about maybe using my magic, but it was pointless. There was simply too much rock. Knowing we were really stuck here, we turned our focus to our resources.
“We have a few days of food and water, but that’s it,” he told me after he’d sat up on my stomach. “I think we can stretch our water supply if I… ‘recycle’ my portion of the water. Luckily, your body is a whole lot more efficient with water—”
“You mean I don’t pee,” I said, interrupting him.
“Yeah. It means whatever water you drink can’t be recycled, but on the other hand, you waste a whole lot less. In any case, I can only drink my own pee so many times before the downsides outweigh the benefits, so it stretches our supply for a day at most,” he said. “Unless you can use your magic to filter the water. That would be neat.”
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I sighed. “Sorry, my control over water is not that fine. I just end up moving both the water and the stuff that’s already in it,” I said, then grimaced. “I do have another possible solution though. If we don’t get rescued before we run out of water, we can always swap our portions. You’ll take my clean water and I’ll take your… recycled water. My body can handle the toxins a lot better than yours can.”
Alex made a disgusted face. “I’d really rather not. Hopefully, it won’t come to that.”
I really rather wouldn’t either. Drinking urine didn’t sound fun or pleasant in the least, but if it came down to it, I’d rather have a bad taste in my mouth than have either of us die of thirst.
“Anyway, the food situation is better, right?” I asked, switching the topic. “I can refrain from eating, so it should last us a long enough time for a rescue party to get to us. By now, Scott or one of the other professors should’ve gotten back to the Academy to get a stone mage.”
Alex shook his head. “I don’t want you getting hungry on my part.”
“It’s fine. I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about this before, but my body doesn’t work quite the same way yours does. When I eat something, the nutrients are stored away almost like a mana-pool. I don’t understand the details of it, but I do know I can go at least a week without food before I need to eat more. The researchers speculated it has something to do with hibernation, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll get a little weaker while I do so, but it’s not like I’m going to need that strength here anyway,” I said, gesturing to the cave.
Alex still looked skeptical, but didn’t say anything more on the topic. “Anyway, that’s food and water handled for now,“ I said. “You said you explored the cave right? Why don’t you show me? It’s not like we have much better to do anyway while we wait.”
And so he did. He showed me all the mushrooms, patches of moss, interesting stone formations he found, and anything else that had caught his attention when he explored the cave yester—before he went to sleep. In any other situation this would’ve been beyond dull, but right now there was nothing more important in the whole world than understanding our surroundings. If we could figure out where the water that fed the plants was… Or if one of the mushrooms was edible… Then our chances of getting out here alive were just that much higher.
I did try extracting the water from the plants, but again, my control wasn’t that fine.
Sadly, I didn’t spot anything Alex hadn’t already spotted. And as far as I could tell, none of the mushrooms were edible. I did recognize one of the mosses, though. We could eat it and it wouldn’t even be that bad in terms of calories. It was still moss, however, and looked as appealing as Alex’s admittedly good idea for recycling our water sounded—not at all. If it came down to it, we could eat the moss, but we’d definitely save it as a last resort. Especially since some of the food we had with us would spoil if we didn’t eat it soon.
Speaking off, I bet Alex was getting really hungry.
“Have you eaten yet?” I asked, and he shook his head, just like I expected. “Let’s have breakfast, then. We’ll look at that crack in the wall after.”
Alex’s stomach rumbled. “Alright,” he said sheepishly.
We sat down in the cavern and I took out some jerky for him to eat. I handed it over and he nibbled it right up. He looked like he wanted to ask for more, but held back. That didn’t stop him from asking about my own breakfast, though.
“Are you really sure you don’t need to eat? It doesn’t feel right that only I get to eat. You should be able to do so, too.”
“I’m sure,” I said, even as I ignored my empty stomach. It would be an unpleasant few days until we got rescued, that was for sure, but I didn’t strictly need the food. I’d be fine, if a little hungry.
After breakfast, we continued to the last thing marked on the map—the hole in the wall. The crack really wasn’t that large, maybe five centimeters high and fifteen centimeters wide at the most. I looked into the crack and there definitely was an open space behind there. The light of our floating light orb illuminated the crack well, but the stone just sharply turned into darkness at the end of the hole. If it had just been a deep fissure, we would’ve seen the stone continue for a while, not cut off suddenly. So there had to be a larger space behind it.
There was also the fact that there was an ever so slight flow of warm air coming into our cavern through the gap. It smelled less stale, too.
Sadly, the light orb was too big to fit through the hole. Not that pushing it through would’ve been a good idea—we only had one and neither of us wanted to risk being stranded in the dark. So we had no way to know what was behind the wall. For all we knew, it could be a tunnel leading straight up to the surface, or it could just be a larger space, isolated from the rest of the world like the rest of this cavern.
In either case, it didn’t really matter, and I told Alex as much. “I’m definitely curious, but aside from risks of the ceiling collapsing in on us, we just don’t have any way to smash the wall. Tiki’s explosives are in her bag, which we don’t have, and body slamming the wall sounds like an excellent way of breaking a bone or getting a concussion.”
Alex cocked his head at me. “Why don’t you just do the lightning thing again?” he asked.
“The lightning thing?”
“Yeah, you know, the thing you did when we were running. You spat out a bolt of lightning and exploded that boulder into tiny pieces.”
I frowned and thought back to our escape. We’d been running, and I’d come up with a plan to reinforce the walls with my magic, but we’d needed to be in a smaller space for that. I had spotted a side-tunnel and dashed for it, and then… right, the boulder, I remembered now. The boulder had been falling right in our path. We would’ve run into it, and then we would’ve been buried in the cave-in. So I had channeled lightning mana into my throat on instinct, right to where the new organ sat, and spat out a lightning bolt. How had I forgotten that? No, I knew. The extreme headache right after.
“Sorry, give me one moment,” I said to Alex. “I need to check something.”
He waved me to go ahead, so I focused inwards. I took some mana from my pool and channeled it through the lightning core. At first, it didn’t want to go in, but through some quick trial and error, I managed to figure out how the organ wanted the mana. I needed to split it up into four smaller streams and lead it into four small mana pathways that led deeper into the organ. From there, the organ took over, and through some incomprehensible twists along an axis I couldn’t possibly begin to imagine, it gave me back lightning mana.
I played around with it a bit, guiding it through my body, and finally to my talons. I held them up for Alex to see as electricity arced between my claws. It was an invigorating feeling and it took effort to keep my talon still.
I grinned at Alex, whose eyes were transfixed on the small lightning bolts jumping in my claws. “I can finally make my own lightning mana.”