After having second breakfast, Cain moved to a bench near the front windows and simply relaxed for a while. He was tempted to go explore Fellgrave, but he had done enough walking for one day. Not to mention it would make him harder to find when next he needed to talk with someone in the Guild. No, he would much rather sit here and enjoy his morning at his own pace. The few parties lingering in the lobby made small talk or browsed what were likely job boards, with more occasionally coming in to hand in a piece of paper at one of the kiosks. After that, they mostly got something to eat or asked a few questions at the front desk before going about their day, either leaving again or settling at a table to kill time like Cain was doing. A couple seemed to be getting drunk already. If they had just gotten back from dealing with monsters like the undead in the Flutewood, it was actually an understandable thing. Occasionally Cain heard snippets of the conversations, too. This one was upset about “worg” leather being practically worthless, that one was complaining about the reward for some job or another being too low… a mage was bellyaching about how low-quality the mana cores around here were… oh, go back to that one! Cain had an ethereal attribute called Mana Core, didn’t he? That was the mana ring in his heart that was responsible for his mana generation. Did the creatures these adventurers exterminated for a living have cores of their own? And that comment implied that they could be harvested somehow. Did mana cores materialize when a creature died? What were they used for? Would Cain’s core be harvested when he died?
Cain looked down at his hands. There were still black marks running across them, seeming to mark where he’d been burned most intensely. Corroborating this, they grew sparser and fainter the farther up his forearms he looked. They seemed to stop entirely just past the one-third mark, with the remaining two-thirds of his forearms still looking almost as factory-new as they had when they were actually factory-new. Focusing on his mana sight, a feeling that was slowly becoming more and more natural to him, showed even more lines beneath the surface. Glowing red mana that flickered like firelight ran through his flesh in branches. Blood vessels sprouted from the thick stem of the artery like roots from a seedling. Being able to see his own circulatory system was a weird and truly fascinating experience for Cain. Equally weird was his kinesthetic mana sense, which registered his mana as a flowing entity emitting a crackling warmth, again like fire. And following its flow back to the source led him to his core. A small chunk of space in his heart that was isolated from the rest of his mana, with a single ring of energy occupying its center, connected to the rest of him only by four output threads. An idea stuck him. Only a single ring…?
“I’ve been sent to inform you that your room is ready, Mr. Cain,” spoke a man in a green bow-tie ahead of him.
“Oh, okay.” Cain blinked in surprise. Had he spaced out again? “Lead the way, then.”
“Very well.”
The man led Cain up the same set of stairs as earlier, only when they reached the end of the hallway they went right instead of left. The scenery was largely the same. Windows. Curtains. Doors with plaques. Three-way intersections. The change came after they had passed three such intersections and found a staircase occupying what would have been the fourth. As they reached the landing, they turned right to see a recreational area of middling size, complete with couches, bookshelves, and coffee tables. There was even a chessboard on one. Cain was led past an open archway at the far end of the room that led down a slightly more spacious hallway than the ones he’d seen so far. This one also had carpeting. Numbered wooden doors with steel handles and heavy-looking locks lined each side. Cain now felt more like he was in a hotel than a guild office. There were no windows here, but the same presumably magic light fixtures from Simon’s office were installed on the ceiling at regular intervals. After a short bit of walking, the man stopped in front of a door marked ‘36’ and held out a small rectangular token towards Cain.
“This is your room key,” he elaborated. “When your stay here reaches its conclusion, hand it in at the front desk. Please do not disturb the other employees.”
“Alright,” said Cain, taking the key. “Thanks.”
The man nodded and walked back the way he came. Was this employee housing, then? Interesting. Cain examined the lock, and found that the ‘keyhole’ was in fact just a rectangular slot. Could be a magic lock, then. Observing the key in his hand with mana sight revealed an unmoving sheet of mana contained within the metal token. That confirmed the magic lock theory, but gave no indication of how it worked. Oh, that’s probably the point. Cain shrugged and slotted the key in. Upon hearing a heavy click, he reached for the handle and opened the door inwards, stepping into the room. The door was as thick as he’d expect from a hotel door, and surprisingly heavy. Closing it yielded another heavy click, making Cain think it had locked automatically upon closing. He turned and saw a typical hotel room. Seriously, this place looks nothing like I’d imagine an employee dorm to. A small side room to his right seemed to be a bathroom, and further in the room opened up to reveal a large wooden dresser placed opposite a queen-sized bed that admittedly lacked the copious amount of bedding characteristic of hotel rooms. An empty light installation was mounted on the ceiling, with the only light being that coming in from the curtained windows on the far wall. In the empty space next to the bed, closer to the entrance, there was a desk and chair with a complementary bookshelf to the side.
Cain walked towards the bed, ready to take a nice, relaxing—
… Cain walked towards the bathroom.
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Lying on the Bed of Average Comfort, Cain was just about ready to get some proper rest. No, really. His eyes were closed and everything. There were no distracting sounds, no bright lights, and he was exhausted enough to be mistaken for having come out of a car’s exhaust. There was absolutely nothing preventing him from falling asleep. So why the fuck am I awake? Cain turned about under the covers. He wasn’t even uncomfortable, just restless. After what felt like half an hour of not sleeping, he sighed. This always happened to him, didn’t it? When he went to bed late, he couldn’t fall asleep until three in the morning. When he went to bed early, he woke up at three in the morning. When he went to bed at his normal time? Three in the afternoon. And it almost always took at least two hours just to fall asleep. At one point he’d started using the time to think about fun things, like games he’d played when he was a kid or books he’d read recently. But that just got him excited and made it take longer to fall asleep. Did he have insomnia or something? He’d read something once about mental illness having negative impacts on sleep schedule and quality. Maybe that was the problem? He had killed himself, so it wasn’t off the table. An itch rubbed up against his brain stem, and Cain realized what was about to happen. His stomach dropped.
[ Skill Refined : Self Awareness (Lesser -> Middling) ]
The entity is intimately aware of themselves, both inside and out. This Skill greatly enhances the entity’s kinesthetic senses or implements them if none are present. This Skill also provides moderate enhancements to all other existing bodily senses. The entity gains an extra-sensory awareness of their surroundings in a three-meter radius around themselves, scaling with Sense (Kinesthetic).
A familiar sensory overload enveloped him. It was somehow worse than last time, too, with a sizable area surrounding him now feeling as though it were brushing up against his skin. Shuddering, Cain waited for the overstimulation to become manageable again. At least he wasn’t standing in a moving body of water this time, that had felt horrible. Time passed too slowly, and each passing moment made him want to tear his hair out ever so slightly less. Occasionally, some invisible hurdle was cleared, and the burden lessened, returning bits of clarity to Cain’s thoughts. Finally, he returned to himself enough to receive a welcome notification.
[ Mind Attribute Increased : Processing ]
(Current Value: 6 -> 8)
Maintaining a train of thought was no longer a Herculean task, and Cain suspected that the remaining discomfort the skill left him with would eventually push processing up to nine and dissipate. Until then, he was still stuck in the same exact dilemma. He couldn’t sleep. There’s probably no point trying to rest now, let’s just try to do something productive. But what could he do, exactly? He could run around in circles to train endurance, but he didn’t want to. It would probably be ineffective due to the limited space anyway. He couldn’t train constitution or vigor without hurting himself, and he didn’t want to do anything else to sharpen his senses at the moment. That would be asking for trouble. That mostly just left magic. Come to think of it, he did have that idea for his core earlier… maybe that could work? If he was lucky, he’d pass out from exhaustion right after, too.
Mind made, Cain focused on his mana. His core was still doing core things, and his mana was still moving around. No changes there, it seemed. He began trying to pull some of the flowing mana into the empty space in his core. Remembering his previous mistake on that front, he didn’t try to pull a thread away, instead settling for more of a shoelace. It was unwieldy, but it worked. Pulling the strand around in a circle, he fed it back into itself and began trying to pinch off the loop. He soon succeeded, creating a second, more squiggly mana ring above the first. It was much thinner and had only a lazy rotation, and seemed to be constantly trying to diffuse back into the rest of his mana. Cain then began the next step of his plan, and willed the flow of the ring to speed up like he’d done to the other ring before. Except he sent this one counter-clockwise, so that the two rings would flow opposite directions. Not for any particular reason, just because he could. The movement of the ring slowed and reversed, before picking up speed once more. Then, when it started approaching the level of speed his original ring had started with, it grew unstable. It wavered and tried to undo itself like rope that had been untwisted. Cain clamped down on it and watched it accumulate mass. The structure wasn’t quite as large as the other ring’s, but it was getting hard to control now. He let some of the mana that was trying to pull loose do so, and directed it to flow out towards his mana pool. Then, when it connected, he clamped down on that too, trying to forcibly form an output thread to stabilize the construct. After a moment, it took.
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[ Ethereal Attribute Increased : Mana Core ]
(Current Value: 6 -> 8)
Mental fatigue washed over Cain as he stopped to appreciate his work. A second ring sat above his first, flowing against it, connected to the rest of him by a single strand of mana carrying off the excess. He felt a weary satisfaction at his work. He had a feeling that his channeling attribute would interrupt his spell casting long before his mana pool could. Considering that he could use magic to heal debilitating injuries, he doubted too much mana could be a bad thing. In fact, why not just keep refining my core until I pass out? If getting to sleep was the end goal, he might as well speed up the process by wearing himself out further. Having justified it to himself, Cain began focusing on the new ring in his core. With an effort of will, he amplified the speed of its flow, causing a new thread to emerge. A second came with more effort. A third. And finally, the fourth he was waiting for. Five total threads. He repeated his experiment on the first ring, snipping the fifth output thread and destabilizing the construct. Preventing the thing from collapsing was quite the ordeal, but after a minute or so of struggling, the ring began to stabilize as the other had, growing larger and denser. The end result was two spinning discs of mana with four outputs each, stacked atop one another. And a splitting headache.
[ Ethereal Attribute Increased : Mana Core ]
(Current Value: 8 -> 12)
[ Ethereal Attribute Increased : Channeling ]
(Current Value: 8 -> 9)
[ Mixed Skill Refined : Mana Control (Lesser, II -> III) ]
(3) more ranks until (Middling, I).
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Cain awoke to orange light peeking through the curtains, head still throbbing. He groaned and rolled about under the covers. They felt unreasonably comfortable. There was no helping it, he would just have to stay in bed and… oh, great, is it that late already? He realized that the orange light meant the sun was going to set soon. After stretching liberally, he threw off the covers and began slowly standing from the bed. He walked over to the window and threw open the curtains, squinting slightly as his eyes adjusted. People could be seen milling about on the main street. They seemed rather lively. A couple individuals in leather armor dragged their feet towards the Adventurer’s Guild building. Maybe they were part of the raid. He noted that he could only see humans in the crowd. That was rather odd; he’d established there were other species, so where were they? Cain scanned the crowds and scoured the stalls from his window, and found nothing. Just more humans. Then his attention was caught by something he recognized from his history books. His insides went cold.
A small crowd was gathered in front of a wooden stage. On it stood a cross between a ringmaster and an office worker. The man sported an ornate cane that he didn’t seem to need, and wore a neat yet eye-catching suit, complete with a top hat. One look instantly told Cain that the man’s clothes were far finer than anything he’d seen so far; this was a rich man. He limberly paced the stage, facing the crowd and gesturing in an exaggerated fashion. If that had been the extent of what Cain saw, it would have been innocent. Perhaps it would have seemed like the man was a performer of some sort. But what Cain fixated on was the stage behind the man. Seven individuals stood wrapped in barely enough clothing to preserve their decency, and certainly not enough for their dignity. None of them looked quite emaciated, but all were visibly malnourished and weak. It was to the point that Cain could only guess at the gender of any given individual. And all seven of them sported some variety of inhuman feature; animal-like ears, a tail, claws instead of nails. Cain had found where all the other species were. They were being auctioned off as slaves.
As Cain watched on, hands raised from the crowd, and the auctioneer gestured wildly, waving his cane in wide, sweeping motions. Eventually, hands stopped being raised, and the auctioneer paused. A few moments passed, and he exclaimed something before gesturing at a member of the crowd to come up on stage. A woman in plain but well-made clothes walked up the stairs at the side of the stage. The auctioneer pulled the first slave in the lineup forward, then brought the head of his cane against their knees like it was the business end of a mace. They fell to a kneeling position in front of the woman, and the auctioneer handed her a small knife. She made a thin cut along her palm and pressed it to a tattoo just below the slave’s collarbone. When she pulled away, Cain could see the tattoo glowing red for a moment before returning to ordinary-looking ink. The woman walked away, and the slave shambled after her. The auctioneer gestured to the next of the remaining six slaves. Hands were raised.
Cain wanted to throw up. He wanted to burn every member of that crowd alive. He really wanted to throw up. All he had to do was raise his hands and think it into existence and they would burn. Cain was nearly hyperventilating at this point. Pain washed over his fingertips and crawled up his hands. Why was nobody doing anything? Smoke burned his nose. It was wrong. Visions of burning flesh teased his imagination. It was evil. Cain couldn’t make up his mind between hatred and disgust, both emotions vying for center stage. The headache didn’t help. He agitatedly scratched the back of his head. What kind of world was this?
A knock at the door startled Cain out of thought. He took a deep, shaky breath, and calmed down. He was going to watch every slaver, slave owner, and auctioneer alike burn alive for their misdeeds. Later. The back of his head itched. He put out the fire that had taken hold on his hands and healed the burns. He walked to the door and opened it, donning the fakest smile he’d ever worn.
“Yes, how can I help you?” He beamed maliciously.
“Hello!” The oblivious staff member beamed back. “I’ve been told to deliver this to Mr. Cain in room 36, is that right?”
“Why, it most certainly is!”
“Wonderful!” He held out a softly clinking pouch and a thin letter. “One letter from a Simon K. Wells and your reward. Have a lovely evening, Mr. Cain!”
“Thank you!” Cain took the items. “You have a wonderful evening yourself, sir.”
Cain closed the door as the man smiled and nodded. You can murder people later, Cain. The back of his head itched again. Wait, didn’t that mean—
[ Objective Manifested : “The Price of Freedom is a Pound of Flesh” ]
The entity has decided to end the practice of slavery on Tersaulis through any means necessary, regardless of the consequences.
[ Skill Manifested : Boiling Fury (Lesser) ]
The entity receives lesser to massive amplifications of all body attributes excluding Sense, depending on their emotional state. The entity receives a lesser to massive amplification to their fire aspected magic, depending on their emotional state. Effects scale slightly with the strength of the entity’s fire aspect.
[ Skill Refined : Boiling Fury (Lesser -> Middling) ]
The entity receives lesser to massive amplifications of all body attributes excluding Sense, depending on their emotional state. The entity receives a lesser to massive amplification to their fire aspected magic, depending on their emotional state. Effects scale with the strength of the entity’s fire aspect.
[ Skill Refined : Boiling Fury (Middling -> Mighty) ]
The entity receives lesser to massive amplifications of all body attributes excluding Sense, depending on their emotional state. The entity receives a lesser to massive amplification to their fire aspected magic, depending on their emotional state. Effects scale rapidly with the strength of the entity’s fire aspect.
[ Skill Evolved : Boiling Fury (Mighty) -> Tempered Fury (Lesser) ]
The entity receives lesser to massive amplifications of all body attributes, depending on their emotional state. The entity receives a lesser to massive amplification to their fire aspected magic, depending on their emotional state. Provides lesser to massive resistance to effects impairing the entity’s senses or altering their emotional state, depending on their emotional state, slightly scaling with the entity’s Control. Effects scale rapidly with the strength of the entity’s fire aspect.
[ Mind Attribute Manifested : Control ]
Affects the level of control the entity’s soul can exert over the body. Governs how well the entity can resist impairing effects resulting from bodily hormones or external sources such as poison, venom and hallucinogens. (Current Value: 6)
[ Milestone Reached : Skill Level Interface Unlocked ]
Allows the entity to view the Skill Level Interface, including the next milestone available. Allows the entity to view the Skill Level of other entities that have unlocked this interface.
Cain’s headache returned in full force as he tried to absorb all that information at once.