Chapter 56

‘Clare-san, how do I compare to the other people in the Realm of Mesily?’ I asked, as politely as I could manage.

‘You are Level 35.’

‘I know that! But how do I compare to other people?’

‘You can check that by using the Skill [Identify] on them.’

What kind of answer was that? Did Clare expect me to go all over Mesily [Identify]ing everyone just so I could get a sense of where I ranked?

‘Are you deliberating dancing around the answer?’

What was I asking? Of course they were. It was Clare I was talking to after all, they had proved to be pretty good at withholding information that I would consider invaluable.

‘No.’

Of course you would say that. Time to change tactics.

‘What is the highest Level attainable?’

‘I am not at liberty to tell you that.’

I blinked a few times, nearly losing control of the flow of Mana I had been circulating through my Mana channels. Clare had gone right ahead and said it, I couldn’t recall them ever straight up saying I was asking for information above my pay grade, or was it privilege grade?

But how was what I was asking privileged information? I needed to know the highest Level so that I could have a goal in mind as I trained. Something like 70, 100, maybe higher.

‘Then tell me the Level distribution and in what percentile I fall under.’

‘I do not have access to that information.’

‘What do you mean you do not have access? Where does it come from when I use the [Identify] Skill?’

‘That information is accessible to the System only. When you use the Skill [Identify], I issue a request and get data in return based on the number of prerequisites you have.’

‘Well, issue that request then.’

‘Whom do you want to [Identify]?’

‘Everyone.’

‘You do not have the necessary prerequisites to access that information.’

I gave up trying to determine where I ranked in the whole of Mesily and put my all into the [Mana Cultivation] I had been doing. I had made what I would consider progress in mapping out the Mana channels I had as much as I possibly could. It had me wondering if they worked like the chakras I had read about, though not much, back on old earth. Would I lose my ability to work with, or use Mana through the channels, if precise attacks were made targeting particular points in my body? I didn’t see anything that could be construed as a chakra, or acupuncture, points, but it was always possible. I was sure that at some point during the Baronies, one of my arms had been hit by something and I temporary couldn’t use it for Mana channeling. I just wished I remembered what had actually happened.

I was working on channeling Mana from the Mana surplus areas to the Mana hungry areas. Over the days since I began [Mana Cultivation], I had managed to learn how to control the flow of Mana towards the Mana hungry areas. The secret was to just give it a nudge, and the Mana would promptly get going. I had discovered that Mana tended to move towards those areas more often than not. I usually began the nudge at or near an area that was Mana hungry and then move backwards from there, further and further away from that region. That way, I could go as far as the main Mana channels of the extremities. But that only worked if I followed that procedure to the T. If I tried to begin at the Mana dense areas, then the flow never obeyed me at all. In fact, it sometimes grew more turbulent, leading to those crippling headaches.

But I was still far from perfecting the whole process, in all honesty, I only had assured control over the main channels and some of the major sub-channels. Well, except for the torso area, there I had more than gained control over half of all the channels I had managed to map out. But that could be because resistance to my control there was minimal, almost like the Mana was begging to find a way to get out of it. I was scared a little by the fact that, that seemed to point to the notion that the more Mana was concentrated at a certain point, the more unstable it got. I had of the yet to read on the Mana instability phenomena, I wasn’t sure whether it was an explosive kind of instability or that the Mana would just dissipate freely to the aether. Given the kind of headaches I got from working with Mana, cultivating, improperly, I was beginning to suspect that it was the explosive kind; that or it drove one crazy. Both of which were unpleasant eventualities I wanted nothing to do with. Not that they would dissuade me from increasing my pool, all that only meant that I needed to learn control ever faster, much faster.

Unlike [Mana Cultivation], Mana attenuation was proving to be quite challenging for me to work with. In paper, it was really easy; take a material without existing Mana channels and create them, voila, you have a Mana attuned material.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Well, voila it was not for me. Every time I tried creating channels in a piece of stick I was working with, no way I was going to practice on my staffs before I knew what I was doing, I met a dead wall and the Mana disappeared into nothingness.

/*WorkingPrincipleAttenuation_500*/

Not having managed to create a single channel, or even get Mana to penetrate the stick I was working with, I decided to first get a complete understanding of how exactly channels existed in other living things. Since I wasn’t all that interested in going around hunting for critters to work with, no matter how easy it would be, I decided to focus my research and experiments on plants, or more specifically the grass around my training area. After all, I would be building channels in my wooden staffs, working with plants would prepare me more aptly for the job ahead.

Working with the grass brought back memories of long ago, less than a month, when I used to work on Silas’ farm, and my attempts at enhancing plant growth. I had managed to gain the [Enhance Plant Growth] Skill, blame my lacking imagination for the name, and the first time I connected my Mana with that of the grass, I found myself searching for the attributes we had worked with back then, trying to get the grass to grow faster, maybe even yield better. Yea, more grass everyone.

After a few tries, I finally managed to control myself from going through to the enhancement part of the Skills. Was I losing touch of how to work with the Skill? I hoped not. I focused on trying to get a feel of how the Mana channels in the grass worked, how they operated, how they maintained themselves. The channels weren’t that different from the ones I was used to working with, mine. It felt like they worked the same too, like how all rivers worked the same, following the path of least resistance to channel water from high altitudes to low lying areas regardless of where they were located.

Pushing and prodding with my own Mana in the grass’ channels, I could feel my own awareness streak through the grass, feeding me with information about the grass as a plant, but when I tried to actively pay attention to what it actually felt like to have my Mana in those channels, how the grass’ Mana was different from the one traversing through my own channels, I usually lost the awareness, and the connection altogether. It felt like I was grappling at straws, and the longer I worked on it, the more frustrated I got. I didn’t get a headache from improper working with Mana, but I wished I had, the resultant frustration from not understanding even the least bit on how to go about creating channels was worse for me, way worse.

But I was as stubborn as they came, and I kept at it. With the current level of competitors, using a mere stick as my weapon wasn’t going to cut it. I knew that once I activated Mana channels in my staff, the things I would be able to do with it would be worth all the effort I put in learning it. Maybe it would be worth paying someone else to attune the staffs for me. I pushed thoughts like those out of mind as fast as they appeared. I didn’t have the luxury to think like that.

Incorporating the knowledge I had gained in the library wasn’t that helpful. I knew that Mana channels helped funnel already existing Mana from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration, kind of like diffusion, but with restrictions on the routes to take. Something without Mana to begin with wasn’t going to have channels.

I tried forcing the Mana through an area without preexisting channels but the Mana resisted, only seeking out the nearest branch to cross over to the other channel. In frustration, I pulled Mana from the area, so much that I thought I might kill all the cells within that area as I felt a pullback as if I were trying to draw air from an already vacuumed bottle. But as it became Mana dry, small Mana began trickling in from the surrounding areas. At first, there was no clear path, the Mana seeming to seep in from all directions, but after a few seconds, small streams began forming that quickly coalesced to form minor channels. I stopped drawing when the pull-back completely disappeared with the arrival of the new Mana.

I expected the new channels would disappear after I stopped drawing, but they persisted for seconds, then minutes, and I assumed that they had become permanent parts of that grass. The flow slowed down though, but it never ceased completely. I had finally created new channels in an area that didn’t exist before, or more like I had encouraged them to come to be.

As much as that had worked for the grass, I was more than certain that it wouldn’t work with the dead stick I was working with. For starters, there was no Mana to siphon off the stick, or Mana that could try to reoccupy the depleted areas. The stick being dead meant that it didn’t have Mana of its own, nor was it capable of processing it. Storing it was another matter altogether, it could store Mana, but only if it had a way of stopping Mana leakage to the aether, and that was the purpose of attunement; creating channels for Mana to use, and attributes to help the material keep the Mana in it for a while longer. In other words, it was akin to bringing the stick back to life, albeit like a zombie.

I spent a considerable amount of time playing with creating new Mana channels in the grasses found in the field, I even cutoff a blade of grass and watched as the Mana in it slowly and gradually decreased as the Mana channels decayed. I tried maintaining the channels for longer by feeding the blade my own Mana, it worked in a way, but without a way to keep the Mana in the blade, it was still delaying the inevitable.

I soon moved on to working on my other Skills to chase away the monotony of what I had been doing. More specifically, new Skills. After reading a ton of books in the library about [Mana Manipulation], and Skills that were more aligned to fighting, I was finally able to claim that I had made leeway in my pursuit for new Skills. I was beginning to think that I wasn’t as Mana attuned as Clare had previously made me believe.

I had studied and tried a bunch of Skills just to try and gain a new one, to no avail. It was possible that me being from a different Realm altogether made the process that much harder, maybe growing up with Mana made them capable of thinking in ways I couldn’t even imagine, being used to the scientific way of life as I was. Not that they didn’t have their own share of scientific knowledge.

But my efforts were not in vain entirely as I managed to gain one new Skill, [Chains]. It was a bit like [Earth Grab] in that it was an immobilization Skill, only it used raw Mana to form what looked like chain links to me that extended to my target and wrapped around it forming a tight hold. I wasn’t sure how it would actually work against competitors in the fights, but I knew it was as strong as the amount of Mana I put into maintaining the chain. Too little and the chain would snap, too much and I could literally pull the target towards me. It was a nice supplement to my [Earth Grab], especially for when I met with a jumpy opponent, I could easily latch onto them and draw them closer for a beat down, theirs hopefully, otherwise it would be embarrassing to draw an opponent close to me only for them to deliver a harsh thrashing to me. Note to self, unless you are sure that you can beat up your opponent, don’t use [Chains] on them.