He was very glad he didn’t have to cross that sea at the end to get away because that would’ve been the end of the road for him. He was also glad that his injuries had disappeared after he completed the floor; the pain gone with it.
Lucas looked more closely at his notifications, and it looked like his despair to leave that prison as soon as possible had pay off, with a nice 2,000 bonus points. So that’s what it meant with the score also depending on performance, Lucas thought.
The 500 bonus points for not killing anyone, although also nice, made him think that the challenge didn’t overly care if the person taking it killed or not someone during the floors. It probably would’ve given me a way higher bonus if I managed to kill everyone, he thought. All in all, he was pretty satisfied with his performance and couldn’t complain after that shitshow that went down towards the end of it; he was lucky to even get out alive.
Diverting his attention to the room he was in, he saw a pretty nice place, with a bed, a bathroom, and even a fridge and a microwave. He also saw a trunk in one corner of the room and went there to check it out. What he saw when he opened it made his eyes shine; it was packed with all sorts of snacks, and the good ones too. It didn’t matter how much money he had; he was always happy to get some free stuff whenever he could.
He fetched himself a nice coke in the fridge before he went stumbling towards the bed, where he lay for a while. The physical exhaustion had gone away with the end of the floor, but the mental one had stayed, so he stood in that position for about thirty minutes before feeling better. He looked to the side and saw something he hadn’t seen before, on the wall next to the bed was a pretty standard TV. There was also something that looked like a VCR on a table below it, with a tape sticking out with his name on it.
How have I not seen that before? The free stuff must’ve clouded my eyes. Getting out of the bed, Lucas looked more closely at the equipment and the tape that had his name on it. It was lighter and smaller than the actual VCRs he knew. It was like if the DVD technology never existed and the VCRs advanced until this point. Why does it have my name, though? Lucas was a little hesitant to push the tape in; that seemed a lot like the start of some old horror movie. Would he only have seven days left if he watched the tape? Also, do Ponos have curses?
Going against his best judgement due to his curiosity he pushed the tape in, and soon an image started to form on the TV. It wasn’t a girl on a pit as he had expected. It was himself, waking up in the prison, exactly how it had happened a few hours ago. He was a little taken aback by that. He was positive there weren’t any cameras in the entire prison; he made sure of that while forming his plan. So it was pretty weird to see a camera view of the entire thing. But after some reflection, it shouldn’t have surprised him—what the system couldn’t do after all? Time and time again, it proved itself all-powerful.
Lucas looked around and found a remote control in one of the drawers of the table. He advanced the tape, and after a few minutes of him moving on the cell and talking with Marcus, he saw the camera follow him around, recording his entire progress wherever he went. After a while Lucas stopped the tape. If his assessment was correct, it was basically an opportunity for the person taking the test to evaluate what they could’ve done better. While pretty useful, it wasn’t something he needed at the moment so he turned it off and started to consider his situation.
He had been wondering if he should just go through to the next floor; an elevator door was staring temptingly at him on one side of the room, and it seem to be a good idea to do the floors as fast as possible. But after some reflection, he came to the conclusion that it would be really stupid to waste some free time in that time-dilation room—that thing was expensive—and all the benefits that came with it. He had his alchemy stuff with him, and also the necromancer books to binge through and try to learn something. It had been a long time since he took a look at those books.
It was nice to see the ring back in its place on his finger and to have access to his skills and all the system perks once again. Not wasting anymore time, he went through the necromancer books on his bookshelf, trying to find something that could be useful to him, and after a while, he found it: “Mana Manipulation for Beginners.” A pretty self-explanatory title.
Faruk’s journal was also very useful, but since it mostly contained his theories around mana manipulation and his office as a necromancer in general, Lucas thought it would be better to use it as support reading material instead of his main source of information. Thus, prepared with both books, snacks, coke and a comfy bed, he began his studies, feeling a sense of nostalgia for his college days, where he would shelter himself in his dorm room, and study for entire days. However, he soon found out that studying mana was very different from studying medicine, because theory and practice intertwine much more often, and while reading, Lucas ran tests on himself, making his progress much quicker.
A few of the words the old man from the tutorial had said to him were written in those pages, like the experiment with the fireball, which he didn’t dare to attempt in that closed-off space, and how to feel the mana inside the body. But it also had many more examples of things he could try to begin to understand how to properly control his mana.
The fireball was one of the easiest spells there were because it didn’t require any sort of specialized control or finesse at all. It was the most basic spell; channel your anger through the mana, shape it like a ball, and fire it, channeling through your arm and weapon, and letting it out like a bullet. The hardest part was shaping it like a ball, but even that was easy compared to the core of mana manipulation.
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As Lucas learned while reading it, mana manipulation was all about control. In this sense, it was quite like alchemy, where you had to have precise control of the flame and the timing of the ingredients being place to have a good outcome. Likewise, mana required a precise control, and the basic ingredients were emotions. But when the cauldron was the body, it could get extra dangerous. Thinking about that, Lucas decided to start small, and after he had grasped the basic concepts, he began his tests.
It took him nearly two hours to produce the faintest flame in the palm of his hand, but he was very happy with it. According to Faruk’s journal, the necromancer went through two days of intense training to produce the same effects. Of course, he didn’t have his journal, which helped Lucas understand how he should go about it, but it was still a pretty big difference, and he was satisfied with his progress.
Little by little, Lucas began to increase the intensity of the fire in his hand. He was especially interested in this, because of what Hilda had told him when he began to learn how to do alchemy. She said that the best alchemists used mana to produce their flames that went into the process of making potions, and that was what Lucas was aiming for.
In reality, Lucas was still a pretty mediocre alchemist, not even close to the amount of knowledge Hilda had acquired over the years. But he believed that making potions using his own flame might up his game a little and help him produce better quality ones later on. However, for this, he needed to be much better than he was, and after an hour of controlling the intensity of the flame, his mana was fully depleted, and he was left exhausted. Fortunately, he had a bathtub with warm water to rest his body in.
In the bathtub, he mused about the things he had learned during his studies. The first one being that Faruk wasn’t originally a mage and had become a necromancer late into his journey on a system world, probably to try and bring his wife back from the dead. Where her corpse was, however, he didn’t know and didn’t want to find out. But the fact that he wasn’t originally a mage became obvious when Lucas took a closer look at the things that were written there.
If Faruk had picked the mage class at the start of his journey, he wouldn’t have needed to go through all this work of trying to understand how to properly control mana, simply because this was the basic knowledge every mage had, and the advantage of picking that class was that all this knowledge came way easier to them, along with the free skills related to the class.
On the other hand, if Lucas wanted to do what the other mages did and still keep his class, he would need to work hard for every single skill and even grasp the basic concepts of it—apart from the odd magic skill that might pop up during his skill selection—like Faruk did on his time. Similarly, if a mage wanted to learn warrior-class skills, he would have a way harder time doing it, but it wasn’t impossible. So to have Faruk’s journal was a huge help to him, because with it, he would have the insights of someone who once was in the same situation as him, as he tried to figure out how to do magic without being a mage.
Another thing that became clear to him was that the old man from the Dark Forest must’ve really sucked at being a mage despite his high level at the time, being the highest amongst his peers. From what Lucas could tell, the old man didn’t know how to produce a flame without the aid of his staff. Otherwise, it would’ve been way easier for him to escape than it was for Lucas. He would simply need to channel the mana through his arm and out of his hand, burning the web and setting himself free.
“I guess there are some downsides to having it all handed out to you instead of having to learn it yourself,” Lucas murmured, deep in thought. If the old man hadn’t picked the mage class and had to learn it by himself how to control it, he inevitably would’ve hit a wall if he didn’t manage to properly control it even without a staff. But Lucas thought he was being too hard on the old man. When they met, it was still early days on Ponos, and people were still figuring stuff out. He was indeed stupid for trying to kill him, but not for this.
Lucas thought about all his journey up to this point, from a weak boy towards a man who could stand on his own. He was pretty proud of himself, but for some reason his thoughts ended up stopping on the ancient tree he had met in the Dark Forest. It was in a somewhat similar situation to the one he was in the beginning, being limited by its body and all. But in the tree’s case, it was even worse, as it couldn’t even move to control its own fate.
Lucas had tried to look for information that would help the tree, but he found nothing in the library or anywhere else. Maybe I can find something in the higher floors of the library, Lucas thought. For that he needed merit points, and so far he hadn’t even set foot on the city hall, much less gain any merit points. He was embarrassed by this oversight, but in his defense, he had been pretty busy with all that had been going on, and it wasn’t only his duties towards the tree that he had neglected.
He took his orb out of his ring and took a look at it again. It was really pretty, and he could really see himself using it to adorn his future house one day, but apparently its value wasn’t in its shape but in what was inside. The librarian, Alva, had said to him that he only needed to find the right key to open it, and Lucas understood what she meant by it. She wasn’t talking about any specific key but the right way to open it.
That could mean many things; it could mean that he needed some sort of password, or key words, or it could mean he needed to be in a specific environment or just find the right tool to do the job. The problem was that he had no idea what to look for, and without any further information, it would be hard for him to do anything with it. He could still feel that slight connection between them, but that was it; no further development has happened ever since he acquired it.
Lucas sighed but didn’t feel disheartened. He was only at the beginning of his journey, and both the orb and the tree had waited a million years already, so they could wait a little longer while he figured stuff out. With that thought, he dozed off, letting his body be embraced by the warm water, washing away all his concerns.