Chapter 53

The following day of training was very different, I focused more on Strength Endurance training, not Strength and Endurance individually. During my stay at the library the previous day, sadly, I hadn’t managed to read on Halle and his exploits, but I managed to get hooked on another historical text that talked about strapping chunks of earth on oneself to perform a kind of weighted training. That seemed like a perfect substitute for me than going to the training facilities for my weight training, and I berated myself for not thinking of it before. I already had the [Hurtling Projectile] Skill, it would have been a matter of adjusting the usage of the Skill a little and I would have had weights to work with.

The initial run to the field was done without any weights on, but on arrival, I quickly began strapping some on myself. It took a while to get the chunks well weighted to be balanced on my body, then I had to come up with ways of tying them up. I resorted to using my clothes to get the job done, mostly my long coat and shirt. I also had to reshape them such that they fit snuggly to my body while leaving room for movement.

The final product was a heavy torso weight for both my front and back, and then there was the forearm and leg weights. I wasn’t sure what the added weight totaled up to, but I was sure it was several tens of kilos. I had had to tear up my shirt for the limb weights to find binding material, leaving me only wearing my vest for my upper body. I thanked Mesily for not agreeing to burn up my old clothes as it would have been very difficult to convince myself to do that to the Xan-supplied set of new shiny clothes.

But after I was done butchering up one of my precious old shirts, I realized that I could have just tied up all the weight in the long coat and carried it all on my torso. It would have worked nearly the same, after all, all I wanted was for my muscles to work through the extra weight. It didn’t matter where the weight was located on my body, as long as it was on it, it would be serving its intended purpose.

I began with sprint training, then the cones exercise, and other power exercises such as frog jumps, squats and general body exercises before I began shadow fighting with the staff. It was awkward and uncoordinated as all the weights threw my balance askew as my body responded slower than I was used to, my muscles having to work that much more to move the extra weight on me through the motions I was forcing my body through.

With the added intensity of shadow fighting, on top of the exercises I had gone through before it, it wasn’t long before I ran out of usable Stamina, leaving me nothing but a near husk as I collapsed to the ground.

Since I had read that working on Mana didn’t consume any Stamina, I decided to work on that as I waited for my Stamina to build to levels I could train a little bit more before calling it a day.

Before I could successfully do that though, I needed to find the channels, or vessels, of Mana within myself and trace them back as far as I could go. The more detailed I could get with the vessels, the better and more efficient I could be with my Mana.

After working with Mana for several months, it didn’t take me long to find my first channels, the ones in my arms that I used for expressing Mana. Trying to follow them to what I would consider as the source of my Mana proved not as simple as discovering them had been. Looking at the channels was like staring at a convolution of roads with no clear sign of which lane led in which direction. As much as I tried following the flows I could feel in the channels I could maintain focus on, the flows tended to change directions as they willed. One moment, the flow would be going towards the rest of the body, then it would suddenly do an about turn and flow towards the hand, and that was before taking into account what I felt like sideways flows that didn’t seem to stick to the boundaries of what I thought where the channels, like motorists who thought their lanes, or roads, weren’t traveling as they liked or had decided to change their destination altogether, and simply jumped from one road to another as they willed.

I couldn’t even comprehend how I would go about bringing order to the kind of chaos that I was witnessing. I wasn’t even sure whether bringing that chaos under control was what I was supposed to be doing in the first place. Why wasn’t Mana behaving like blood, or the lymph, if you are in this vessel you go one way, never any other.

I decided to try to manipulate Mana for something that didn’t exactly qualify as a Skill, that way, I wouldn’t consume too much in terms of Stamina. I went with creating a glob of water since I was feeling a little patched, kill two birds with one stone and all that. Creating the glob of water while I watched what was happening with the flow in my Mana channels wasn’t as hard as I had expected it to be, I barely even felt like I had done anything at all.

The change in the flow in the Mana channels was dramatic though. The moment I consciously moved Mana through the right arm, the central most channel, and the largest in the arm, all of a sudden thickened slightly, but still noticeably, as all the sideways flows were completely cut off and everything in it was directed towards the hand where it quickly left the arm altogether as it coalesced to water. I had been able to even keep track of some of the Mana for a short while as it began turning into water. The glob of water hung in the air for a few seconds before I directed it to my mouth.

Throughout all that time, there was a little stream of Mana constantly being fed to the globe. It had me wondering, was that what I was supposed to be doing with the [Mana Shield]? I hadn’t paid attention to the kind of Mana I had been funneling into the glob, so I decided to create the glob again, paying more attention to what kind of Mana I was using throughout the whole process.

I wasn’t surprised to see the Mana form change as I switched from creating the glob of water to keeping it floating in the air. The underlying principles were entirely different from those of the [Mana Shield]. For starters, if I stopped feeding Mana into the water, it would still exist, but it would drop to the ground. I wasn’t maintaining the existence of the water, but using the Mana to perform a different kind of manipulation altogether.

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I decided to experiment with feeding the same kind of Mana to the water as the one I had used to create it. I managed to create a glob of water that consequently began falling to the ground because of the lack of the control Mana, but since I had expected something like that to happen, I didn’t panic as I maintained the Mana form through the channel, keeping the flow slow and steady. The results left me mesmerized as a stream of water began where the first glob had appeared at, dropping to the ground continuously. I was pulled out of my mesmerization as Clare alerted me that I was beginning to use up Stamina, immediately cutting off the flow of Mana.

I didn’t have enough Stamina to try out a full-on shield, but I was sure that I was finally heading towards a breakthrough in that area. I decided I would be working on the [Mana Shield] the next chance I got. With that in mind, I went back to [Mana Manipulation] training, what I had decided to call the working with Mana training.

Since the little experiment had shown me how the Mana should theoretically be flowing within the channels, I decided to try my hand at making it move in a certain direction. I chose to move Mana in my right arm towards the hand and back. The first hurdle I faced was actually getting hold of my own Mana within the central channel. I had gotten used to moving it from my torso, it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be a little different for the other parts of the body.

It took a while before I managed to get hold of a small portion of Mana, but when I tried to move it along the channel, it quickly dissipated as some of it escaped through the sideways flows. Of the Mana I had managed to get hold of, I only managed to get less than one percent of it to the hand. So I had to first learn how to secure the channel to prevent the sideways flows from happening. I didn’t know how to do that, normally it happened subconsciously, so that would have to wait until the next library visit.

I focused on trying to map out the main channels as I activated a few minor Skills and other [Mana Manipulation]s. By the time I had gained enough Stamina to actually think about going back to training, I had nearly fully mapped the central channels from the extremities of my limbs, to the torso and finally to the head. I had even played around with controlling the Mana flows in them to little success, but there was success nonetheless.

The second round of physical training involved the same shadow fighting, but first, I had to get off the ground with the weight I had on me pulling me down. It was a whole exercise in and of itself, I was literally perspiring by the time I was completely upright. With that mountain surmounted, I began working with Skills more, focusing on using raw Mana to actually create my attacks.

During the second round, I also managed to get the [Mana Shield] to hold for more than a second, with the longest lasting for around ten seconds before I felt my Stamina drop too much. I settled back down for another session of [Mana Manipulation] training. And so the cycle went for the rest of the day, sessions of physical activity that nearly depleted my Stamina before settling down for [Mana Manipulation] training sessions while I recovered some modicum of Stamina to repeat the cycle again. I went through five such cycles before I called it a day when the sun finally started dipping below the horizon.

I didn’t have any Stamina I could use for running back to the city, or any for that matter to use for carrying the added weight. Removing them brought me a sense of relief that lasted for a few minutes before the body was back to feeling the general tiredness it had acquired during the day. I might have dozed off on my way back to the city, but asking Clare had gotten me no answer. The least they could have done was say no.

When I arrived at the restaurant, I finally realized just how much famished I was as I was assaulted by the aromas coming from the dining area. Had the place always smelled so tasty before? The degree of salivation I experienced as I waited for my meal to be delivered broke records for me.

I still had the usual bread, meat broth and eggs, not because I wasn’t adventurous or daring enough, but because I was just too tired to try and order something different. When the first meal failed to do in the hunger, I ordered a second one, going for the meal I had gotten used to in Sjuma, chapattis and meat stew. I don’t know whether I was finally out of hunger or I just got tired of eating, but after I finished my second meal, I slowly shuffled my way into my room, took a shower, cleaned my clothes and dropped dead on my bed.

…

I woke up several times during the night for different reasons: one, I hadn’t covered myself with the blanket; two, for when I had to pee; three, for when I had to go for number two; four, for when I had to drink water; and finally, when the hunger pangs that had started again became too much for me to convince myself to sleep through them.

It was around 0300hrs and I wasn’t sure the restaurant would really be open then, so I went through my morning routine a little slower than normal. Of course there was the soreness I was going through to account for too.

‘Clare, do you know how I could actually work on blocking off the sideways flows when trying to manipulate Mana in my channels?’ I asked, looking for something to help me pass the time, and get my mind off the hunger pangs.

‘Through training.’

Simple, and straight to the point. Clare, you never disappoint.

‘I know that! What kind of training would that be?’

‘Isolation control. Once you are able to distinctly feel each channel, you can start giving it an attribute that would make its walls sturdy and impervious to the sideways flows.’

I didn’t really understand what Clare had just talked about; the general idea, yes, how to implement it, no. I decided that I would find other ways to gain that knowledge.

‘Then I will be able to achieve the basics of [Mana Manipulation] training.’

‘I feel the need to point out that as much as what you are trying to do does contain elements of [Mana Manipulation], it is not at all what you are doing. The name you have assigned the training is highly misleading, I thought it something you would want to know.’

Me and my stupid ass know-it-all attitude, my comment about the Attribute [Intelligence] came to bite me back in the worst way I could think of. Now, if only Clare had announced that to all of Mesily, it would have been the perfect shutdown.

‘What would you suggest then?’

‘[Mana Cultivation].’

And all over a sudden, I felt that the title had already existed, which begged the question, why hadn’t Clare told me that in the first place? But I didn’t like the cultivation word, it gave me the feel of those Manhua and Donghua. I didn’t hate them at all, they actually had some of the best fight scenes that I knew of, but…

Looking at it objectively, the name actually fit with what I knew cultivation meant. At least the little I knew about it.

‘[Mana Cultivation] it is then.’

‘Also—’

‘What now?’

‘Blocking off the sideways flows from the main channels is not what you should be trying to do. The proper way involves taking even the sideways flows into account as you try to move the Mana within you. Being able to manipulate all the Mana in all the channels is your goal.’

Well, fuck.