Chapter 7 - Mana sight

It was impossible to tell just how long it had been since Adam woke up in this exotic world. He must have spent close to a week unconscious in the cave. That being said, he was eager to get some new clothes. He has been running around this magical world in nothing but his underwear and his torn T-shirt. The air was cool and carried with it a fresh smell like grass on an early morning. The low light helped hide his underclothed body, but he desperately wanted a pair of pants and a jacket. Admittedly, his body had become a lot tougher now and the fact that he was walking around barefoot didn’t even faze him. His skin had become thicker and more durable to the point that not even the sharper stones underfoot did him any harm. Adam had entered the limit of standard human capability since his core advanced to middle-grade. The next step would undeniably make him a superhuman as opposed to a very strong ordinary earthling. However, not needing clothes for protection didn’t mean he no longer wanted them at all. He missed his pockets most of all. Adam decided that he should go down the survivalist route and use what was available to him in nature to create what he lacked. That is how we arrived at his current situation. He was out searching for some materials to craft a belt from vines that he could then use to attach pouches made of either sturdy leaves or carved rubbery wood. He already made a barely functional belt with some rubbery vine-looking plant and attached his blade claw to it to free up his right hand. That was when he discovered that not everything that looked like a plant, was a plant. A man-sized lizard was clinging upside down on the trunk of a large blue tree. It blended into the rough and uneven trunk extremely well and was staring right at him. He only noticed since he was playing with his magic to augment his eyes at the time. The two were standing face to face about five meters apart. The lizard was still barely visible to Adam but with his magically enhanced vision, he could make out its rough outline. To give you a better idea of how he had just spotted this crafty lizard, we need to understand what Adam had discovered about his mana practice not long before.

For the past hour, he had been wandering the outskirts of the jungle while intermittently trying to improve his control over his mana and diminish how much was wasted when it circulated in his body. Adam remembered back to the fight with the Sloth, and how his mind seemed to have slowed down slightly allowing him to easily dodge and outmaneuver the beast. This gave him the idea to focus his mana on his eyes to augment his vision, similar to how it had strengthened his muscles which might allow him to travel throughout the jungle with more speed since he wouldn’t need to keep checking for predators if he could spot them before they became an issue. He had marginal success at first as his mind began to work overtime to process his sight and time seemed to slow but it left him with a headache after only a few seconds. It would be useful in a fight to make quick decisions but not something to sniff out enemies. That was until messed with the mana to focus only on the front of his brain and his eyes instead of his entire head. Unfortunately, Adam was suddenly blinded by bright light encompassing his entire vision as if a flashbang had gone off in front of his face. Terrified that he might have permanently damaged his eyes, he stopped feeding his brain with mana and stayed still while his vision slowly readjusted to the dim light of the large planetary rings. The sounds of large creatures echoed across the dense jungle and in his determination not to get jumped again, he almost made himself blind. He reminded himself that magic is key, but magic is also dangerous. After his panic had passed, Adam had a surprising theory about what just happened. He hadn’t often condensed mana into a specific area of his body other than his rock throw and mana blast. Each of those times, his magic had a much bigger impact than basic mana strengthening. What if he had done something similar with his mind just now? He remembered the feeling of being blinded by the white light but it wasn’t because it was bright. It didn’t feel like he was being blinded by a huge lamp but more that his eyes and mind couldn’t process what he was seeing. The light he saw was reminiscent of the white mana clouds he could see when absorbing mana. Could he have attuned his eyes to be able to perceive ambient mana? If so then using magic outside his body would be a lot easier. After all, when he expelled the ball of mana back at the cave, he could only barely sense it after it left his pathways and his eyes only saw a very dim shape of flowing energies that seemed to slightly distort the air around it like a fire. If he could properly see what he had made, then improving it wouldn’t be nearly as difficult since it would remove the guesswork from the process.

Not wanting to incapacitate himself with another flashbang while he was standing exposed at the edge of the jungle. Adam sat down behind a couple of large trees and focused all his attention inward toward his mind. He carefully extended a strand of mana from his core and gently stretched it out to be a thin line that separated into two threads and connected to his eyes. The other end of that split thread was fed into his brain to finish the makeshift circuit. Nothing happened so far, since the threads didn’t send any mana into his eyes and brain but instead acted as a new pathway. When he was satisfied with his handiwork, Adam started to pump a little more mana from his core and willed it to use his new mana bridge construct as it would any other pathway as he attempted to push mana through them. This didn’t work as well as intended since his little mana bridge was made of the same white energy as the mana he was trying to push through. He had no idea what his pathways were, all he knew was that when he pumped mana out from his core, it naturally traveled across his body the same way each time. That made his body light up with white lines all over in patterns reminiscent of blood vessels. Since he was trying to make his own custom mana pathway, the only way to feed more energy past it would be to push the mana out of the way or go around it. Adam decided to push his mana along his construct as if it were a slide into his eyes and frontal lobe. Only a trickle of mana at first, but when nothing happened he pushed more. It was hard to keep the mana construct that connected his brain and eyes from dissipating as it required constant concentration. Splitting his mind to focus on the mana construct, the quantity of mana he needed to get from his core and feed along the construct, and the result in his eyes in the real world, was not an easy thing to balance and required several minutes to get the desired result.

He had originally unknowingly attuned his mind and eyes to be able to perceive mana, but this sudden change overwhelmed Adam since his eyes could now see the abundant and ever-present mana all around him. He was able to fine-tune the process by using his construct to carefully recreate his mana sight with greater control over what gets filtered out. It was similar to squinting so only the mana of a certain density was visible. By looking down at himself, he was able to calibrate how much mana the new method was displaying. He got it to the point that it didn’t register the ambient mana but anything slightly denser would show up in his vision like a ghostly filter. If he looked down at himself then he could see a small black object just below his chest. It was obviously his core, but he was surprised to know that his core showed up as a black ball instead of the usual white all the other mana appeared to be. He could sense it when looking inwards with his mind's eye so it shouldn’t have been too surprising in retrospect. Adam had essentially taken his mind's eye vision to observe magic inside his body and extended it to his real eyes to be able to see the rest of the world's mana.

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

That brings us back to the awkward stare-off between the man-sized lizard and Adam. The lizard must have been using its mana to help blend it into its surroundings since with his mana sight, he could see a white outline of the whole creature. If it were an ambush predator then he wouldn’t have been able to avoid it only hours ago. His mana sight didn’t require much mana so he could technically keep it up forever, except it required active concentration to use. Before he had time to really think about what the next step would be, a strange sensation rang in the very back of his mind. He had a strong urge to see his status window and quickly willed it to open.

Adam Hartwell

Mana core: [black - middle - (???)]

??? (???): [???]

Spells: [Mana sight - crude - common]

(???)

Adam finally learned his first spell. It came at the right time too but he would have preferred something to use offensively, to be honest. He grabbed the blade claw from his side and started circulating mana in his body. Ever since his mind received that strange sensation that indicated he had learned mana sight, Adam now didn’t struggle to keep it active nearly as much. Whereas before he needed to constantly focus on how much mana he was sending to his eyes, now that crude spell seemed to have affected his pathways as a new path seemed to have been formed where he had made his mana construct. Essentially his wish of having a pathway there had been made real and he was too busy to question it any further. He gladly used any new boon that would help him survive this encounter. Having his mind freed up enough to focus on circulating his mana to boost himself, Adam only had to send occasional pulses toward his eyes and the pathway seemed to take what it needed to keep the spell active automatically. The rest simply stayed in the pathway near his eyes until it was needed.

Adam wanted to strike first since he had no information on this thing, nor did he want to find out what it could do. He kept his eyes on the white outline and forced mana into his legs and arms. With a sudden burst of power, he rocketed forward with his blade aimed at the lizard's head. He was upon it in the blink of an eye and slammed the weapon into what he assumed was its neck. The creature hadn't moved since he noticed it and was too late to escape when Adam attacked. Its skin was hard to penetrate but with his currently boosted physique, it barely posed any resistance as he plunged it into its neck. Suddenly the world started spinning as the smell of blood reached his nose. He found himself lying on his back. He lost focus in the confusion so his spell was disabled. The lizard was nowhere to be seen but it must have struck him back as it fled his attack. He checked his body for the injury but didn't find any. His chest was a little bruised from the hit but everything else was in working order. After that was confirmed, Adam got back to his feet with a jump and frantically looked around while reactivating mana sight. He thought he had dealt it a death blow but apparently not, since it was no longer anywhere in sight. Adam really needed a powerful mana core to advance and that guy seemed like a great choice. Adam had been experimenting with his mana a lot and one thing he knew was that anything impressive or powerful he could achieve required a large portion of his mana. If this creature could use its mana to hide its entire body then how big was its capacity? Luckily, it hadn't completely gotten away yet since Adam noticed a few spots of mana-infused blood. He only saw them because he was recasting his mana sight spell and fine-tuning it to be able to better detect the creature's mana. The blood was in a very thin line across the ground so he followed it as it zigzagged from tree to tree in the opposite direction he came from. It appeared to be looking for a place to hide or was simply desperate to get as far away from him as possible. Adam plowed forward deeper into the jungle in pursuit of his prey. He was no longer the weak and defenseless person he was when he first got here. The idea of venturing into the deep unknown of the alien jungle would have terrified the old him.

The sounds around him were more intense here. Adam was following the lines of blood along the jungle floor as they became larger and more dense splashes. At first, the blood was like fin lines since the lizard must have been moving at rapid speed, now though the thing was obviously slowing down due to blood loss. It wasn’t hard to follow anymore and before long, he found it again. It had stumbled its way into a large patch of greenish vines and bushes that seemed to form a dense wall of vegetation. The lizard was currently hiding inside this natural barrier ofter haven and pushed some of the smaller vines aside to squeeze in. Even with his mana sight off, Adam could have spotted this beast since it had blood everywhere. Its invisibility ability only seemed to work on its skin as its entire neck area and lower body were drenched in light pink blood and clearly visible to the naked eye. He was confident in getting its core but not stupid enough to rush in and put himself at risk. The beast would bleed out and be dead in minutes so he just had to wait. Adam carefully observed the desperate lizard when he thought he saw the vines move around it. There were so many different types of plants and shapes in the dense mess of vegetation that it was hard to really make out, but something long and green with spikes had just wrapped itself around the dying lizard's neck. The creature weakly thrashed and clawed to try and escape, but it was to no avail as the magic that kept it hidden started to fade. The vine latched onto the lizard's neck and limps and burrowed into its body, cutting and slashing it with the sharp spikes before plunging its vines into the wounds. The gruesome sight made Adam take a step back. If there are carnivorous plants that don’t have cores, then he wasn’t actually as safe as he thought even with his new mana sight spell. After a brief moment of fear, he tightened his grip on the claw blade and carefully stepped forward. He needed that core and wouldn’t let some bloody plant steal from him. The claw he was using was great at cutting the local vegetation so he decided to see how it would hold up against these spiky carnivorous plants. When he got close, Adam noticed that the abundant blood from the creature had nearly all but disappeared. The vines seemed to be drinking it like some sort of herbal vampire and they developed a pinkish color the closest the vines were to the wounds. The lizard was dead by now but with mana sight, he could see that the core was intact. The vines looked very sharp but they moved very slowly as well. The was no way they could have caught it if not for Adam fatally wounding it. The question was, could he retrieve the corpse without becoming a dried-up skin husk himself?