Both were a warm brown in color and glowed slightly. They had large round eyes that took up most of their face, but the only difference they had from the rest of their body was that they glowed even brighter.

One of them beckoned me with their little arm and the other seemed to open up a hole in the ground.

Mezu tugged at me, trying to drag me towards the entrance in the ground.

I wasn’t sure how much I could trust these little sprite things.

A stryant researcher I had met had described some of the low level spirits to look similar, but spirit manipulators were the only ones able to see spirits. So why was I able to see them now?

Was it just an effect given by the tower?

Mezu pulled even harder when he noticed I hadn’t moved at all. He growled and glared at me.

Should I just trust them? Mezu hadn’t caused any of the others any harm. And sure, the tower did seem like its sole intention was to kill us, but it wasn’t like it went out of its way to. It simply had scenarios and was having us play them out.

I took a step and the glare subsided immediately.

Going into the hole was probably safe. I took the cloud under Mezu away and let him walk on his own, before I stepped into the hole following the small spirits.

At first the tunnel was rough, the spirits seemed to be digging it out and replacing it behind us as we went. Their soft glow was the only source of light until we entered a tunnel with a completely different structure.

Instead of the completely dirt walls surrounding us, it was now a wooden tunnel with a slightly sparse stone path. They lead us down the tunnel, for a bit before turning off the tunnel into a rougher path, but we were with the roots.

They passed through the tunnel at different heights. It was easy for the spirits to just fly around them, but I had to climb, crawl, and squeeze myself through some very tight holes to keep up with them.

Eventually the path became less and less of a struggle to walk through and there was one root that we seemed to be following along.

I ran my hand along it without closing my eyes since I needed to see in front of me, and from the feel of the air alone I could tell that this was the infected root. At a certain point, when the tunnel seemed to turn abruptly the spirits stopped.

They seemed to flitter, and they pointed to the corner. I pushed Mezu behind me and gripped my bow.

I turned the corner and holding it up in the firing position. Around the corner was the source of the infection.

A collection of purple gushy masses was bubbling and hissing.

I fired off three flame arrows each landing in one of the masses.

With the hand that released the bow string I clenched it into a fist and commanded “Duseu.”

The bubbling became more excited before the blobs themselves finally caught fire.

The flames didn’t spread from their targets, so once the three in front were dispatched, I released three more to the group behind them. They seemed to be aware of their surroundings and dodged it.

My arrows landed in the wall behind them but with their focus on me, I pulled the mana within the arrows towards me, pulling them back into all but one of the blobs.

The final arrow returned to my bow, and I let it go, with a second air arrow.

The blob dodged the flame but was hit with the wind.

“Duseu” I commanded and then unclenched the hand and pointed two fingers at the final blob.

“Quevre” and the fire arrow that missed was pulled to the air arrow.

A fist again and “duseu” and the final blobs were dealt with.

Well except the one connected to the tree. It wasn’t reactive and I figured I should me more careful with it.

I looked back around the corner, but the spirits were gone. Leading me here was more than enough.

I went towards the blob connected to the tree. It hadn’t reacted to any of my attacks and didn’t seem to react to me being near it.

Beneath it, and around it where the other blobs were congregated was a mana circle etched into the ground with a similar dark purple glow to it. At opposite points around it, that were equidistant and seemed similar to the spacing of the defeated blobs appeared to be the markings for mana input.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

If the blobs were supporting the circle, it should’ve run out of fuel on its own. But as it was still pulsing with light, the circle was still in effect.

With my feet on two of the points and my hands on the other two I pulsed a small bit of fire mana into the points at the same time.

The color shifted and then the light dulled. The blob deflated and fell off of the root before deforming and seeping back into the ground.

Well source of the infection has been dealt with. But that didn’t mean that the tree was just fine.

I slung my bow over my shoulder, knelt by the wood and put my hands on the root closing my eyes.

The state of mana was still the same, the sliver I had seen at the trunk though was now about the size of the root in front of me.

I took one of my hands and stuck it into the wound. Now I could see both the infection and the tree, separated and clearer. I didn’t spend too much time in our flora and fauna department. Growing things really wasn’t interesting, though now I wished I had taken at least one class about magical plants.

My understanding of mana should help me through this. I mean theoretically.

If this were a mana circle, I’d say that it’s failing because the wrong type of mana is being injected into one of it’s input channels. The fix would be to cut off the source of the mana and then to remove it.

But the mana that was here wasn’t one that I could manipulate. At least not in its complete state. Leaving any bit of the mana behind would be a waste of any efforts in cleansing it.

So, while I could just pull what I can manipulate, there was a better way to do things.

And I’m glad I saved up almost all of my mana for this. I crossed my legs and sat in front of the wound. I placed my bow in my lap. And unbuttoned the small flaps of fabric just above my knees.

My bow was my staff, and so it acted as away to help stabilize any complicated calculations done in my head. As long as its something I’ve done before, I could do most calculations in my head. I rarely needed to draw out circles anymore. But that was just thanks to my age and years of research.

Whether it was a quick calculation or a longer one, it was easier for me to maintain thinking of the next step if I could hold the sequence in my determined order within my staff. Though without mana sight you wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing, even with it for the most part you wouldn’t have enough time to decipher what I was writing to counteract it.

And with all of my arrows, those were second nature now. I just had to think about them to do it. With their different forms thought it was helpful to speak out their command words. The words are connected to the calculations in my head and once spoken the image is drawn and I can send it off easily.

But this would be a bit different. Cleaning out something would mean surrounding it with my own mana and pulling it out into a separate container.

I put my pointer finger down on the far right tip of my bow.

So, I’ll need the container, water is best for that. I slid my finger along slowly, the markings appeared in order.

The container, it’s structure that of water, would inflate as the new mana was brought into it. Only my mana could escape or enter it. It should float, from a small tether to my bow.

Now that I was at the end of the small calculation, I ran my finger back over it, and pulled my mana from my leg, through the bow and into my finger.

I pinched and pulled the blob and tether from my bow until it was up and out of the way. Then I left it there.

The next calculation I could do in my head, and so I collected water mana from the air and created a cast over the open wound of the root.

The next part would be only slightly complicated. I needed a tunnel connecting the cast and the blob. And the tip needed to be attached to my finger, that way I could pull the mana from the wound and replace it with water mana. For now, the gap would need to be filled with something, and water mana was the more stable of the types I could manipulate.

The front of the tube should filter out my mana. And only accept external mana. But I didn’t want to accidentally pull out the natural mana.

I tried to think back. Mana filtering wasn’t something I needed that often. When it came to healing the others to was more of a mixture of cleaning out the wound, which wasn’t that hard, just running water mana through it to collect any impurities, since water mana seemed to stick to foreign particles the easiest.

But if the mana was the same as the material of the blobs, maybe it would be better to use fire mana?

If I did that though, I’d have to contain the mana so that it wouldn’t spread to the healthy parts of the tree.

The corrupted path is too long for me to make one casing to surround it and keep it from reaching the other parts. If it acts like the way I normally cleans wounds, then I should just be able to do a continuous cycle.

Flush in my mana pull back whatever it sticks to, separate my own mana from the contaminated parts and restart. So there needs to be one connection tube and I just need to keep my other hand on the floating container. There I can pull my mana out and cycle it back.

I shortened the floating container’s tether and then pinched one point of it. I stretched it down and tethered it to my left hand.

Then I stuck my fingers through the cast and into the wound. With my left hand in the container, I started.

I closed my eyes and moved my mana out and into the channel. The soft move didn’t do anything, so I added some air mana to create more of a pressurized stream. I started at a low percentage, before raising it and then stopped when my mana began to pick away at the infection.

All the air mana I used wouldn’t be able to be recycled. And I could only use a certain amount of the natural air around me to compensate for it before it became dangerous.

It now wasn’t a race against time, but a race against the capacity of my stored mana.

I cleaned out a long but small distance and closed off my air mana. I wanted to see if just pushing the water through the small channel I created within the contamination would do anything.

It didn’t.

But now with my mana in the space I had a much better understanding of the dimensions of things. Instead of air mana, I mixed in fire mana and heated up my water mana as well as the contamination. The contaminated bits started to bubble and separate from themselves. This separation of it from its main clump was much faster than the air mana.

But the way that the contamination is traveling is interesting. Despite it being heated up, instead of it trying to float it sunk. I don’t think I’d ever seen something exhibit such behaviour.

Maybe changing the shape of the channel would help things. If the entrance was bigger than the end and focus of fire mana was at a small point maybe it could chip away chunks.

I created a thin tendril of fire mana and put it against the furthest point of my cleared channel. I focused on just the tip being activated and it was better than I hoped. The contamination bubbled up but didn’t catch fire, instead it flowed to the bottom of the channel and then out and into my created container.

This would conserve my stored mana a bit. If I wasn’t using my air at all then I could convert it to whatever I would lack later on.