I sit in the dim morning light on an outcrop before my new cave. The weather has calmed down, but inside my mind, a storm cloud presses me down with the memories of my actions, refusing to lift. When I close my eyes, I see the faces of my victims, staring at me with clouded and static eyes, judging me. The dawning sun paints the horizon in red blood. My hands are tainted.

I had no other option—or did I? It is the law of the streets, of the jungle. You must be tough and resilient to survive, clever and fast, unscrupulous. Soft people become prey. We always aspired to become predators, to cease being scavengers. But now that I am, I only feel anger and regret. Each time I close my eyes, their faces twist the knife deeper.

So, I keep them open.

The first rays of the sun reveal dozens of columns of smoke tarnishing the sky in every direction I look.

Fuck! I need to focus. Stop wallowing in self-pity.

Why are there so many now? Well, maybe there always were, but I was unaware of it because of the rain.

My pursuers seem unaware of all the hideouts high up in the canyon walls for now. Or maybe they know about them, but there are too many to check them all. Either way, I am a sitting duck. Hemmed in here. Somebody is going to see me when I try to break through. Shit! Those two men I murdered were talking about killing me as soon as they found me. Will the others do the same? I may not even be able to surrender.

Breathe! Breathe and calm down.

What options do I have?

I have plenty of food, preserved in the spatial ring I got. There is no rush anymore.

Do I need to break through right now?

Not really.

The mouth of my last cave is very narrow. I barely fit through. It should be easy to block it with a big enough stone and hide inside for a few weeks. Maybe by then, the danger will have passed. There even was a light-sphere rune in the utility section of my rune manual. I will not even have to languish away in the darkness.

What else do I have? Let us go inside before someone sees me and take stock.

Mountains of cooked rice and different stews. Check!

More fruits and vegetables than I can eat in a year.

The carcass of a deer, three goats, and some canid. All are still fresh. Their blood has not even started to coagulate. Nice! I can replenish my dwindling stocks of beggar’s mana ink.

What else?

I see two spears and a dozen swords, some polished and shiny, others rusty and cracked. What did that guy need so many swords for? Did he collect them?

Four skinning knives. Wonderful! I need one of those out here. But why did he have so many? Did those guys kill someone? Maybe I should not feel so regretful about them.

A bunch of different robes, shoes, cloaks and headbands. One pair of shoes even fit me. I could dress up as a boy. They are searching for a girl, are they not? It could make it easier to slip through without being questioned. Thought for later.

There is also the head of a woman, toothless and swollen blue. What in the seven hells? I will throw it out as soon as I can. It is not the first time I have seen a dead and beaten person. You can find some out in the streets each winter. But eww! Maybe I can bury her in some corner of the cave.

There are also a few glass bottles full of cherry-sized pills. Those two men had money to throw around. But the pills are useless for me unless I can get someone to identify them. Everybody knows that you should not mess around with unknown alchemical concoctions. Well, some don´t, but they do not last long.

Speaking of money, they had a few purses full of it. Coins with different mint marks I have never seen before. But gold is gold, and silver is silver. And there is a lot of it. There are even some platinum coins bundled together with tiny mana-laden crystals of uniform size. Currency I don´t know about.

My hand catches a shoddy black pendant made of cloth and leather. Wait, I know these pendants. The Crow makes them. The street rats that fish for information in the market back in my home city use them. They are supposed to be enchanted to make you more inconspicuous. Well, maybe it was enchanted a long time ago. There isn´t any mana in it left. The runes are faded and smeared. But still. How did those guys get it? No street rat would ever part willingly with it. Which one of the young ones did they kill?

Yeah, fuck those guys! I don´t even feel sorry for them anymore. But there is still a knot in my stomach left. Is it my fault that they killed some kid? If the heist went how it should have, nobody would know my description nor where to look for me. The Crow should have warned us better. The item he wants is way hotter than he made us believe. He acted like it was just another random operation when he told us the plan. Dogface and Dante should never have been there. Was he afraid I would cut him out if I knew the value of that compass? Well, I suppose it has value. What to do with it is another question.

Well, for now, that is it. I need to get some light in here before I block the entrance.

I take my rune-book pencil and mana-deer blood out. The rune takes form on the back of my right-hand stroke after stroke. It is so easy when you have quality tools and are just copying from a book. A child could do it. Why people find it hard, I will never understand. Maybe it is a lack of patience.

The finished design is even pretty, full of circles and flowing lines. It reminds me of the tattoos with which the Bahadian desert tribes cover their bodies. Do they also use body runes?

I channel a bit of mana into the rune. A soft glow reveals a curtain of columns and stalactites that hang from the ceiling like frozen daggers. The cave continues behind them, yawning deeper than I thought. The tunnel widens after a while until it opens into an ovoid chamber. There are even more stalactites here. Tiny droplets flow down their sides until they reach and cling to their sharp tips. They remain there, trembling for a timeless moment. The next drop shoves them into the emptiness, and they fall onto the washed stone floor with a soft, echoing splash. A bit further down, they coalesce into mirrorlike puddles carved into the rock. Some overflow into a small stream that disappears between two shimmering columns I can not pass through. A faint breeze blows through them. There must be another exit where the stream flows into the river. I increase the mana I channel into my light but do not make out much more. There is only a winding tunnel, too narrow for even a child.

Well, this is great. It is a bit too humid for my taste, but that only means I don´t need to get outside to drink. Or maybe it is the mana-density in here that is suffocating. It feels even higher than outside. Let us get back to the relatively dry entrance and continue.

I wonder how many different runes I can activate at the same time. Channeling as much mana as I can into the rune on the back of my hand makes the light sphere brighter. It is not as bright as daylight but too bright to look directly at it from close. Even so, the speed at which my core replenishes itself outpaces the mana I can channel into the rune.

How many runes can I activate simultaneously without slowly draining my core? I have no idea. Let us find out.

I channel the light-sphere rune and my seal-sound rune at the same time. My mana recovery still outpaces my consumption.

I draw another light-sphere rune on my other hand and activate all three runes. The mana in my core starts dipping at a snail´s pace.

So, I can continuously channel three runes at full power. Maybe a few more, depending on the complexity of the rune. The seal-sound rune consumes about half of what each light-sphere rune does. They seem way too fancy and complex for what they do. I should be able to trim them down a bit. Why have I not thought about it sooner? I don´t need a glowing orb. I only need light.

I get out my sketchbook. Let us get rid of all those modifiers. Color, shape, limits and size. What for? Just the feeder, the connectors, and the transformer. As simple as it can get. Can I sketch another design for a not-body-rune? Create a lantern that I can attach to the ceiling. Sure. The design isn´t even that hard. Just replace the feeder with a gathering component and throw in a regulator. The last thing you want is for it to overload. The problem isn´t the design. The problem is that I have nowhere to draw the rune. The ceiling is way too muggy and uneven. It is not like I have a lot of material I could use. Maybe one of those swords. The problem is that the mana-rich blood I use instead of ink is awful for such a smooth surface. At least it stays on my skin way better than I would have thought. It is denser, stickier, and more viscous than normal blood. When you activate it for the first time at full power, the blood seems to burn itself into the epidermis. Drying up but leaving a mark behind that still works. Branded into the skin. Metal is too polished. It is hard to draw a straight line on it without leaving smudges halfway. Yeah, a bit too risky.

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I draw one of my simplified light runes on the palm of my hand and activate it. A beam of light erupts between my thumb and index finger, refracts on a shimmering pool, and impacts the far wall. Something screeches and flutters away. More bats. Small and harmless.

A simplified light rune creates a beam. Why is it a beam? Strange. It seems to burst out of the point of the transformer component of the rune on the opposite side of the connectors. It is very bright at that point, hard to look at, too white. It punches through your eyes and overwhelms your mind with searing hot brilliance. Until you only see a blazing star. I feel a bit dizzy, even though I just glimpsed it for an instant before closing my eyes in reflex. Lingering afterimages pulse and swirl behind my eyelids. I breathe in slowly until the nausea passes. Yeah, I do need the light-sphere rune to read inside the cave. The simple light rune could be handy to blind someone in a fight. Assuming that I can get the orientation right and not blind myself first. With training, it may even be a versatile tool for fighting, signaling over a distance, or simple illumination. But I may need to redraw it to make it burst parallel to the orientation of my palm.

The next step is testing how much more efficient the light rune is compared to the light-sphere rune.

I point my palm away from my face and channel mana through both runes on that hand. For some reason, they seem dimmer than the last time I tried them. What is happening?

I follow the flow of mana through my arm. A strong river that forks into two smaller streams after reaching my wrists, feeding both runes. I cancel the stream to my palm and send it all to the rune on the back of my hand. The light-sphere brightens. I also send mana through my other arm into the rune on the back of my other hand. Both spheres shine bright. I redirect the flow from my first hand to the rune on the palm. Now, my remaining sphere and my beam shine bright. Both consume the same. The beam is just more focused. Huh?

I´m an idiot. It is not the limit of mana the runes can use that I have reached. It is the limit of what I can channel through each arm. Both runes don´t have regulators. You theoretically could channel a lot more mana through them. Well, as long as the connectors can handle it. But they are designed for way more throughput than I can subject them to.

What does that mean for me?

Well, a few things.

First, if I can increase the speed with which I channel mana, the effect of both runes will grow stronger. That is something that supposedly comes with practice. Fun, more things to train.

It also means that if I want to use different runes simultaneously at full strength, I need to inscribe them on independent body parts, far away from each other.

Well, what else do I have? I take my rune book and browse through it. There are less than you would think there should be in a manual. It is unsurprising if you take into consideration that runes are expensive. Mages and artificers tend to be stingy with their knowledge. They are very reluctant to share it. Knowledge is power. Which runes do I have? What else can I make out of them?

Let us start with the utility section. There is the light-sphere rune I already tested.

There are two alarm runes: the thermal alarm ward and the mana alarm ward. The first one detects sudden changes in temperature on the perimeter of a circle around you and alerts you by sending a jolt into your body. The second one does the same thing. But instead of temperature, it detects changes in free ambient mana.

They also introduce a type of specialized component that had not appeared before in the book called a sensor. There is a whole chapter about them. They work by detecting a change in the environment and emitting a signal when they do. Which change they are attuned to depends on the modifier.

I don´t think I will use any of them for now, but I may need to study them in more detail later. I may need to trick similar alarm runes someday.

There is also a rune called deflect rain that would have been useful these past days.

A very fancy and complex rune called eternal spring. I would have called it a thermal regulation rune or something more precise. It is supposed to let your body always remain at a pleasant temperature, no matter what is happening outside.

A very similar rune does the same thing but for humidity. The book calls it a dry breeze rune.

The last utility rune is the real crown jewel that calms a lot of my lingering fears and anxiety. It is a healing rune called body restoration. The book claims that it can even regrow lost body parts as long as there is no damage to the soul. The downside is that the mana costs scale with the complexity of the wound and can get astronomically high for low-level mages. Whatever low-level mages are. I am sure I am considered one, but even so, better than nothing out here.

In the defensive section, there are just two runes.

The first one is called an immovable mountain rune. Another fancy name. It lets you absorb kinetic energy and transform it into heat and free mana that dissipates into the air. That should be useful in a fight, but I have no idea how well it would work against piercing or cutting attacks. The book doesn´t mention them. It could be nifty against boxers, maces, or clubs. The book also does not tell how much damage it can mitigate before it fails. I am going to have to experiment with it.

The last rune is very similar, but instead of absorbing and dissipating kinetic energy, it absorbs and dissipates mana from incoming magic attacks. Or something like that. It specifically says: “The deep calming pool rune strips the intent from incoming hostile mana and converts it into free mana that, instead of damaging the user, can be absorbed or released into the environment. Proceed with caution because even though it may be able to strip the mana out of incoming spells, destabilizing them. It does nothing about possible elemental effects that may come with them, which still can injure the user of the rune. Because of those reasons, it works well against neutral aspected spells, or, in conjunction with the immovable mountain rune, against mana-reinforced physical strikes, but poor against everything else.”

Can someone please explain to me what intent is? No? Nobody there? The annoying book assumes that I went to a mage school or something. Frustrating. It seems to insinuate that the mana mages release and control while casting a spell is somehow different from the rest of the mana that flows around us. Why? You ask me, but who do I ask? It is the first time I heard about something like that. Well, I have heard speaking about self-attuned mana. Do they mean something like that? I thought that it just meant that it changed its composition.

At least I still can use body runes. A few of them. I could use a lot more of them simultaneously if I upgrade the gathering spiral of my core to one of my new core-rank. But I don´t know how, I need a manual for that. Maybe I can find one on the black market if I manage to reach a city. I have a lot of money to spend. Copper-grade gathering spiral manuals should still be affordable. But that means breaking away from all those pursuers first. Who knows how long I will need for that?

I could try tempering my body. That is what I know you are supposed to do at the copper-rank. From what I know, you need to suffuse every cell of your body with mana. It is a gradual process that starts with your skin, continues with your muscles, then your tendons, then bones and marrow, then organs, and finally the brain. You do that by pressing mana into them with every ounce of your willpower until they break down and are rebuilt stronger, or absorb it and grow stronger, or something similar. Depending on who you ask. The process is supposed to be very intuitive.

I could try it. I have time right now. After focusing so long trying to decipher different runes, my thoughts are dancing wildly through my head. I need something calming. Why am I so stressed?

I sit down in a cross-legged pose and try to relax. Thoughts race through my head like a thunderstorm. I observe them. My childhood, the orphanage, the street rats, the Crow, Dogface, Dante, my friends. Were they friends or just colleagues? Who cares? Let it flow. The castle drifts by, the forest, endless canyons, and more canyons float by until everything dissolves into a blur that fades away. Only I am left.

I can feel the mana pulsing through my body with each rotation of the vortex in my mana-core. Responsive like never before. I forgot about advancing with all the stress these days. Focus. Tempering the skin comes first. Should I do it all at once or in stages? Let us try a small section first to see what happens. I concentrate on the skin that covers my left knee and start channeling mana into it without letting it back out, more and more with each pulsing cycle.

The patch of skin starts getting warm. It tickles. The tickles ramp up in intensity. It vibrates. Ripples of pain sting through it with each pulse. Whippings of nettles. This should be okay. It is supposed to hurt a bit. It continues to ramp up. Is this normal? I feel like I am pressing my knee against a scalding forge and holding it there. There are only waves of pain left. The agony threatens to make me black out each time it crests. This can´t be normal. Stop this!

I open my eyes. The crests ebb out without a hurry. But there is still some pain remaining. It is distant now, a dull roar buried under layers of shock. I look at my knee. A canvas of angry red and blistering yellow flesh greets me. I look at the grotesque, blistered patchwork of exposed muscle and charred fat, stunned into inaction.

I must be missing something. I know a few copper-grade people back in the city. The locksmith who makes our lock picks and duplicates. Most of the temple priests. The herbalist. None of them spoke of something like this.

I take my pencil and draw a body restoration rune on my thigh just above the wound. Gritting my teeth to ignore the pain. Well, I wanted to test this rune out anyway.

I start channeling mana into the rune. It sucks it in greedily. But I can´t see much of an effect. Should I keep channeling for a while? How long will it take? An hour? Two? At least it is soothing the pain. There is only a dull throb remaining now.

Let us get something to eat in the meantime. I am famished.