Chapter 51

I was up around hour an or so later. As much as the workout had done a number on me, it was just the wrong time for me to be asleep, and my body was having none of that. I went through another mini wakeup routine before descending to the restaurant for a light meal, but only after confirming that I wasn’t running out of my meal quota; apparently, the number of meals wasn’t a fixed thing, only the total cost of food consumed by the end of the Counties. I guess that meant that I could eat however I wanted, sometimes gorging myself and other times barely ingesting anything, as longer as I remembered to stay within the quota allocated to me.

After that, I went to the library. I hadn’t recovered much in terms of Stamina to do much training, and I wasn’t interested in loitering around the city. I had different objectives for my visit than I had during the previous one; for starters, shields wasn’t the only topic I wanted to read about anymore, I had several other topics to research on, things like protection penchants, different kinds of armor, other common Skills people had, and most importantly, working with Mana, as Clare had called it.

It took me precious minutes to gather the books I thought would help me in that regard, and that was after I was forced to admit defeat and seek help from one of the library attendants, I wasn’t even sure if that was really their title, but they were there and unless I wanted to waste my precious silver-hours, I had no other choice. But the biggest culprit had been the fact that none of the topics were located in close proximity to each other, Mesily, some were even on completely different floors of the library. I pitied the poor soul that would be stuck with returning the books to their proper places.

I began with shielding since it was the one that I had considerable prior knowledge about. I had finally created a basic Mana shield, it was time to do thorough research on how to actually work with and on it. If it was going to be helpful to me during the competition, then I needed to add the necessary properties to it, and rise them to levels that would actually be capable of stopping anything meant to hurt me.

I also needed to learn how to incorporate the shield into my fighting, and I didn’t have the knowhow to do so. I didn’t think that just throwing it around would work that great for me. That was why I chose a book that not only talked about shields, but also on how to incorporate them into everyday use, not that I thought they were of much use in the day to day activities of the average denizen of the Realm of Mesily.

I soon moved on to Skills. I had thought that it had been a while since the last time I learnt, or gained, a new Skill, but when I finally thought about it objectively, I realized that barely two weeks had passed. And that was without taking into account the Skill [Enhanced Hand], it didn’t qualify as a new Skill in my rule book.

I had two books in that regard, one that talked about Skills common to the average person, and another that talked about the more common and not so common Skills that had showed up in The Grand Competition. The last one was more akin to the one I had read about shields the previous day.

The most basic distinction of Skills was whether they were in raw Mana form or that they had been expressed as the more common things found in life. There were other more sophisticated classifications that talked about things like whether the Skills were attack based, defensive, enhancement, control, and so on, but I left those for future me, who would have the time.

There was a plethora of Skills to be found in both books, and I soon gave up on the common Skills for the common person and focused on the competition Skills. Most Skills either had very majestic sounding names with rather simple descriptions, or just plain misleading names altogether, but I had come to realize that I needed to stop paying attention to the name of the Skill and focus more on what the Skill could actually did.

With how cautious I was, I didn’t think that competitors would openly share their Skills, which had me wondering if there was a Skill to help someone actually see the Skills someone else had. Then I remembered that the Skill [Identify] could be used on other people as I used it on myself. If it showed other people what it showed me, then it was reasonably okay to assume that at some level, it could give away everything, even the most useless Skill I had. But that begged the question, what about the Skill descriptions?

The idea behind armor was to work as the last line of defense when all else failed. In that regard, depending on one’s choice of fighting style, they could forgo the armor completely or be completely covered in it. Of course, one’s pocket also was a factor to consider on how much armor one wore. Penniless idiots like myself were fighting armorless as it was and doing just fine, well, until something did eventually catch us, then it was game over.

The grade of the armor and how much protection it offered was as I had expected; it ranged from bare cloth, padding, leather, to metal. The metal grade was further divided into its own grades depending on what metal was used. Mana enhanced armor also had a higher grade than unenhanced ones, but it was in relation to what the base material was. It was possible to enhance leather until it was as good as metal, or maybe even better, but that was only true if the metal stayed unenhanced, or didn’t have the same degree of enhancement.

But that all was pointless to me, with the kind of fighting style I was leaning towards, I would only ever wear light armor, if I wore armor at all that is. I could get strong enough that wearing heavy metal armor didn’t impede me too much, but all that weight would still take considerable Stamina that could be used to do something more productive.

Protection penchants was a very interesting, and confusing, read. There was the initial mumbo-jumbo about the underlying principles, that sounded a lot like enchantments to me, before we got to how the penchants actually worked. The user only needed to add a little of their Mana for the penchant to work, of course, the more protection it offered, the more Mana the penchant consumed. For example, protection from a pebble would consume less Mana as compared to protection from a human-sized boulder hurtling one’s way. Also, the kind of attack determined whether the penchant would offer effective protection, they were a lot like shields in that regard.

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But it was safe to say that enchantment would never be my thing, not in the near term. With the looming competition, I would never find the time to spend cramming glyphs and sigils for enchantments on top of the ones I was sure would be needed for the shields. Not unless they used the same kind.

Working with Mana turned to be one of those interesting things I could completely lose myself in. It was all about internalization, and getting to the basics of basics in terms of what made everything work. It, in no uncertain terms, meant making things easier, but more about getting to the fundamentals. Like understanding how genes worked and how they influenced the functioning of the cell, or better yet, learning machine language programming for computers.

The book I had chosen began the way all books about understanding systems did, with the top layer. And gradually went on peeling layer after layer, on its way to the core, and the more layers were removed, the more engrossed I became.

Mana was as ingrained into living things just as much as genes were, without it, then what resulted couldn’t exactly be called a living thing. It was found in every cell of the body, and there were even organelles dedicated to processing and storing Mana. From the cells, the mana was transported throughout the body by Mana vessels. Mana was actually needed for the proper functioning of the cell, and given that some cells tended to process more Mana than others, the vessels were necessary.

The vessels also came in handy when one wanted to use the Mana to perform feats of magic, otherwise known as Skills. Working with Mana involved actively encouraging the Mana in the more capable processing sites such as everything in the torso area, to get moving to the more Mana hungry but less capable sites, I’m looking at you brain. To even accomplish a modicum of increase in the speed the Mana moved along required a high level of concentration and willpower, something akin to meditation. No, it was most definitely meditation.

The more Mana was moved away from the more processing capable sites, the more Mana they processed, and the more they processed Mana, the more efficient and resilient the sites became, leading to a higher Mana state which would directly correspond to a higher overall Mana available for use. It had me thinking about the three categories of internalized Mana I had encountered in stories back on old earth; gaseous, liquid and crystal Mana.

Trying to see if I could actually effect a change in speed of my own Mana flow led to the headache I had experienced while trying out the Mana shield to return with a vengeance. I went around the library looking for books to help me actually understand what I was doing wrong, because from previous experience, that was the reason for the headache.

In due course, I found myself caught up reading a book that had nothing to do with any of the subjects that had brought me to the library in the first place.

It was about the accounts of some of the early elven explorers, empire builders to be exact, in an area called Khudonia. I had begun reading the story about halfway, so I didn’t really know where Khudonia was located in Mesily, or even the time frame of when the events in the story took place, but based on how the accounts were recounted, I was sure it had to be long before the current era.

It was about an elven commander, Halle, who was having trouble dealing with the natives, that was what they were called, their species might have been stated earlier before where I began reading the story.

After the natives made a determined effort to storm one of the satellite command centrals of the garrison, and despite the local sub-commander’s efforts to keep them at bay, the central was besieged for over a week before Halle arrived to their aide, noting on arrival that the local garrison had been reduced to nothing more than prisoners in their own camp.

Halle was able to root out the natives from the central, but it was only a short reprieve, as the natives would most definitely besiege another central. They had been doing that for close to a year by that time. They had only been able to maintain influence in the region by sending out daily looting and raiding parties to burn the surrounding villages and seize the crops and livestock for their own use.

With how futile their efforts seemed to be, Halle decided to take drastic measures against the natives. On top of the looting and pillaging, he ordered his troops to kill any resistance they encountered, going completely contrary to the general mission of the force, which was for the subjugation of the natives without resulting to the use of deadly force.

There were dissidents among some of his senior officers, but he somehow managed to get the troops to follow through with the orders. What followed was a near systemic massacre of the natives, with their primitive weapons and Skills proving to be near ineffective when the kill-cap was removed. The few casualties Halle suffered almost all belonged to the dissident senior officers.

Through the period of the excursion, Halle had grown solemn and though temperamentally jovial, he became despondent and freely used the whip on friend and foe alike. He felt that there was only one way to improve the natives, and that was to wipe them out. He didn’t like the fact that they had to rely on them for food, sometimes even threatening to wipe them all out and bring in more complacent people into the region.

More and more expeditions followed with even increasingly more devastating results for the natives. They lost their livestock, their land, and many, many of them were killed in the fighting. The natives did accomplish a few successes in the skirmishes, but in the grand scheme of the engagement, it was too little to be of note. And each of those successes were usually followed by such ruthless responses from Halle and his troops that it was never worth it for them.

In due course, the resistance of the locals was weakened by a series of natural and unnatural disasters, the nature of which were never recorded, but this demoralized them and sapped their will for further resistance.

The final stroke that marked the end of the resistance was when Halle aptly exploited the rivalry and enmity inherent in the natives between the different factions. He was able to convince some of the natives to work with him, actively helping Halle to further subdue their fellow natives by serving as part of his troops, or offering essential information that made it that much easier for Halle to accomplish his goals.

Further resistance seemed hopeless faced with such superior arms and Skills, and the fighting came to an end when the natives sued for peace, surrendering to Halle and acknowledging his authority in the area.

I was forced to leave the library when my silver-hours ran out without finding out what happened after, the natives had surrendered yes, but what then? How did Halle go about administering the area? I had so many questions the story had raised and I knew that I might not have the time to read further on it anytime soon. I also regretted not having checked out the title of the book before I left the library. But I remembered the name Halle, and Khudonia, maybe I could ask Xan or the others about those?

It was well past sundown, with the streets only illuminated by the street crystals. Thankfully, it wasn’t late enough for the Inn to be closed. When did it close? I wondered as I had another light meal before retiring to bed.