Chapter 48

I collapsed to the ground unceremoniously. I had to rethink the whole fighting with the staff, it looked so seamless how the Skills morphed into my fighting technique, but Clare had just said that they hadn’t been as seamless as I had thought.

I placed my staff down and stared at my hands, would they alone be enough to push me through the Counties? I thought not. I looked back at my staff, what was wrong with it? I knew what was wrong, just not the why. I had seen other competitors use their weapons, or accessories, to channel manner; there was the dagger in my first fight, then came the sword and the shield, Mesily, even my semifinal opponent had clearly used a staff like me!

It hadn’t exactly been the same though, I could remember thinking about how hers was an actual Mana staff, unlike mine.

‘Clare, is there a way to make my staff a good conductor of Mana?’

‘Yes.’

‘And!? What is it?’

‘Mana attunement.’

‘Is it like my Skill [Enhance Plant Growth]?’

‘No. The idea is similar, but the principle is not. Mana is part of all living things, making a plant grow faster and yield better is just merely helping it process Mana more efficiently. Attuning something with Mana is creating channels in an item where none existed before, to allow Mana to be channeled through it. They are completely two different things in practice.’

Wow… that was something. And yet another topic I needed to start reading on. With the way Clare spoke about it, paying someone to attune my staffs would cost me gold I didn’t have, and Xan wasn’t an option. I already had an aptitude for Mana, Clare’s words, maybe I could learn the Skill needed for that. I’m definitely stretching myself thin. Or is it trying to be jack of all trades? No, this is still part of my purview.

‘So, I cannot use [Enhance Plant Growth] to attune the staff?’ I asked for confirmation.

‘No.’

And even with that, I picked up my staff and activated [Enhance Plant Growth]. I got nothing; when using the Skill on the soybean plants, once it was activated while I was in contact with the plant, I would usually feel the extent of where my Mana flowed through stretch as it connected with the plant, then I would look for the attributes I wanted to enhance before focusing my Mana there. Thinking about it, I had already encountered Mana channels already, I just hadn’t understood them to be so.

The staff just felt like a dead wall, and nothingness at the same time. The Mana at first met resistance before it completely ceased to be. After a few more attempts with the same results, I gave up.

‘I see.’

I first needed to understand what Mana channels were, and how to go about creating them before I could even begin to attempt attuning my staff. Another visit to the library was warranted, sooner rather than later, and another couple silvers I would be losing. The first prize, or last depending on how you looked at it, needed to be worth the amount I would spent for the library.

I stood back up, leaving my staff on the ground. If I didn’t really use it when working with Mana, then there was no need to tire myself more than I needed to using it unnecessarily. It was time to go commando.

I tried repeating the Mana slash before, using my right hand as a conduit and to provide the arching motion. And it worked, it actually worked. But it was nothing to write home about though, it had been a pale blue wavy thing less than a meter across, that barely made it past five meters before it dissipated to nothing. Not even enough to be called a Skill of its own right.

But I had successfully created something that wasn’t the basic [Shield], or the [Staff Shield]. I went to try another slash before I remembered I was there to work on shields and not slashes. I settled into a more defensive stance, preparing for what I assumed was an attack.

I began coalescing and channeling Mana like I remembered the books talking about; from the start of the coalescing, the Mana needed to have the properties it would finally showcase when finally expressed. Thinking of the energy I had used to create the Mana slash, I thought hard enough about the kind of energy that would be needed to stop such an attack.

When I finally thought I had the right idea down, I channeled the gathered Mana as I pushed my right hand palm out.

A slight sense of draining and exhaustion washed over me as I saw something pale and vaguely circular flicker into existence a few centimeters in front of my outstretched hand before disappearing. I breathed heavily as I felt my body recover somewhat, trying to think about what had just happened. I knew I had done something right; I just hadn’t had enough time to figure out what kind of shield I had conjured up. I had crammed several basic designs and runic glyphs to help me understand a little better the next shield I came upon.

But I was on the right track, and that was all that mattered to me.

I tried a few more times before I was forced to take a break when I nearly collapsed to the ground. The books had stressed how much of a drain it was, I just hadn’t thought it would be so bad. It wasn’t even a Mana drain, but Stamina. The authors of the books I had read, all claimed that the drain was usually worse when the shield was actively being used, like when I was hammering at Shota’s shield with [Hurtling Projectile]s. It still cost Mana to maintain, but that was manageable, so they claimed.

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My body felt like it had undergone a very demanding sprint. It wasn’t that I had ran low on Stamina, quite the contrary, my Stamina was still high, but it was as if I had used up all the immediately accessible energy and my body needed time to recover from that.

The worst part was that I had only managed to create flickers of the shield, and none had stayed long enough for me to pick up its details.

I used the break to try and understand the shield better. Based on what I had felt like, creating the shield was very different from my other Skills, even the other shield Skills. My other Skills always required the initial Mana gathering and once that Mana was released, the Skill came to be, requiring nothing else from me. The new shield felt like it left a tether connecting it to me as long as it existed, and the tether needed something to stay alive. It is the lack of input that made the shields I had made nothing more than flickers.

Five minutes went by while I tried my best to think of a way to keep the shields going for longer. I knew all that was needed was for me to input Mana continuously to the tether I could feel. The question was, what kind of Mana was needed for that to happen? Would any formless Mana do the trick, or was more required than just force-feeding the shield Mana arbitrarily?

I stood up and took my previous defensive stance, feeling well rested and ready for another round. I went through the process of creating the shield again, but it was gone long before I could coalesce the Mana needed to keep it going.

I tried again, making sure that I already had the maintenance Mana ready to go before I could release the shield. Even before I could create the shield, I began feeling a headache setting in, and on top of that, the two Mana forms were already colliding against each other. I tried releasing the one for the shield first but it somehow pulled the other one along, and the resultant shield was no different than the ones that came before it. Maybe it had flared out a bit as it flickered out, but I couldn’t be certain.

I tried again, and again, and again. But the results were always the same, the shields flickered out just as fast as the others. Sometimes, the Mana for the shield pulled the other along with it, or when I really tried to control the flow of Mana out of me, then it was never enough to create a shield, and the remaining Mana did nothing when I let it out.

After a few more failed attempts, I took a break. Only, unlike before, I wasn’t just tired, I also had a throbbing head to go with the tiredness. I lay down on the field, staring up at the cloudless sky, wondering when the last time it had rained had been. Right before I left Yange? After? I couldn’t remember seeing any rain while in Sjuma, nor any signs that it might have rained while I was otherwise unconscious.

‘Clare, what am I doing wrong? I feel like something should have worked by now,’ I asked my resident advisor.

‘You have only being practicing for around half an hour, be patient and give yourself a little more time.’

‘Is that why I feel like my head wants to quit being part of me?’

‘No. That would be because you are doing it wrong.’

‘The shield?’

‘No, the Mana. You are creating two different forms of Mana inside you at the same time, making your overall Mana unstable, which is where the headache is coming from. Besides, the shield needs the same kind of Mana as the one that created it to maintain it.’

‘The same? But…’

‘The Mana you are trying to use to maintain the shield is raw Mana, the shield cannot work with that.’

I had suspected that would be the case, but I had hoped it wouldn’t be. Having to create and maintain two Mana forms, even if they were of the same kind, would require too much concentration from me. Was it possible to acquire a second brain that would help with that? I was sure I had seen something like that in a story or anime back on old earth. That would be super-helpful right about now.

I rose again to get back to the shields, it didn’t feel like the five minutes I had hoped for were over, but I already knew what I needed to do, and I was rearing to go. Besides, I felt relatively fine. No pain, no gain, they said.

I created the first Mana form, and quickly proceeded to the creating of the second one as I began channeling the first one through my right hand. Though the headache hadn’t subsided completely, at least it didn’t feel like it was getting worse. As the second Mana began taking form, I felt my control of the first one become tenuous; as I tried to regain control of it, I ended up nearly losing the second Mana I had been coalescing.

I quickly pushed the first Mana form out while immediately pushing the little I had gathered right after it, not that it needed that much pushing, more of a nudge and it was out of me faster than I could control it. The results? The shield stayed, but barely for a second more than the flickers. The most surprising part was that it didn’t feel as Stamina demanding as the first attempts had been.

With such promising results, I dived all in into trying to create a working shield, setting a goal of not going back to Choska without one. Most preferably as a leveled up Skill.

I really did put in the effort. After I learnt how to create the shield and maintain it properly, albeit for a second or so, the Stamina demand dropped noticeably. Not by much, but it was enough for me to extend the number of attempts I could do before I had to take a break. Due to that, and my inherent stubbornness, by the time 1800hrs came about, I had finally gained the Skill [Mana Shield].

But try as I might, I never managed to get it to level up at all. As it was, it was just slightly better than [Staff Shield] was, and [Staff Shield] was at level 7, not that I had tested it though, but I would. It showed just how much better the Skill was compared to the others I had.

‘Clare, why do I have three shield Skills when they are all basically the same thing?’

‘Because you see them as three different Skills.’

‘Well, I now know they are one and the same. Can you not combine them into one?’

‘Only after you fully acknowledge them to be so.’

‘What!? What about the projectile Skills I had at the beginning that you combined into the [Hurtling Projectile] without me even thinking of them as one Skill?’

‘Did you not?’

I tried arguing about that, but Clare had gone silent. There would be no getting them to talk again unless they wanted to. With that sour end to the training period, I began my trip back to Choska. I had slightly more than a third of Stamina left, and though I didn’t know how much I had consumed during my run to the field, I assumed it would be enough. But just to be on the safe side, I rechecked that the alerts I had set with Clare were still present. Those questions, they answered.

I set off with a pace that would allow me to cover the distance in around fifteen minutes, from my previous run, I estimated it to be at around seven to eight kilometers. I would definitely be pushing myself way past my limits given that my comfortable pace for such a distance would be around twenty-five minutes.

I started fine, with the psych to carry me through and back again if I wanted to, but after the first kilometer, things went south very fast. My lungs began to feel like they were open wounds being rubbed raw with salt, and breathing itself became painful. Every gulp of air felt like I was inhaling fire as the air burnt its way through my windpipe and into my lungs. I was forced to take short sharp breaths that barely did anything for my oxygen deprived muscles, and by the time I made it to kilometer number three, I was forced to slow down.

I didn’t drop to the twenty-five minute pace, no, I still kept a high pace, pushing through all that pain as I tried to see how far I could go before my body said enough was enough. Apparently not far, as Clare gave me my first warning at around the five kilometer mark, forcing me to slow down to a jog if I wanted to reach Choska with the energy to take myself to my own room.