Cain brought his center of gravity down and propelled himself forward as fast as his tired legs allowed. The rabbit, sensing danger (and clearly seeing Cain in its periphery), sprinted forward itself. But it wouldn’t be enough. Cain was already fully accelerated; the poor creature just couldn’t get away fast enough.

Until it darted to the side.

The instant it turned Cain brought his own legs forward to pivot and catch the soon-to-be rabbit stew. For a few moments the world was a blur of white, brown, gray and red. The bark of the bleached oaks, the dying red leaves hanging from their branches, the gray of pebbles washed up by the creek and dying vegetation — it all ran together in broad strokes of color, painting across Cain’s vision a landscape that seemed to somehow be both dreary and vibrant. Then the strokes changed direction and he realized he hadn’t brought his legs beneath him fast enough. Instinctively shielding his head with his arms, Cain rolled over himself several times and wound up in the creek again, with a loud splash. When he managed to pull himself out of the shallow water and onto his feet, he coughed up a bit of water, looked around and saw that the rabbit was long gone.

He took a deep breath and—

Let it out in a long sigh. Cursing the rabbit’s mother wouldn’t help anything.

Dripping and hungry, Cain turned around and walked further downstream, not bothering to hide behind the trees this time. The back of his head itched a little so he scratched it. Things would probably go better if he just reached a larger body of water and set up an ambush. Actually, fishing would probably be a better way to source meat. The bones would be a hassle to eat around, but he liked his odds of catching fish swimming with a current better than those of catching a rabbit in the forest. He momentarily cursed himself for missing something so obvious when he’d been walking alongside flowing water for at least an hour now, but relented that he couldn’t expect himself to always make logical decisions in such an illogical situation. Dead people don’t come back to life. They also don’t pop into existence buck-naked in a grassland next to a forest with a strange voice speaking into their head. It just didn’t happen. It didn’t make sense that it had happened, but it did.

Cain’s stomach twisted and he felt much colder. He died today. He walked out under the barren canopy, laid down in the snow, and died. He cut into himself and waited to bleed out. Why was he alive? Where was he? Would he ever get to go home? This doesn’t make sense. Did he want to go home? Why was he trying to survive? What was he trying to achieve here in the first place? The back of his head still itched, and the now stationary Cain scratched it again. This doesn’t make sense! He shuddered, feeling the tremors pass through his legs, up to his spinal column, and out through the arms, making him aware of each individual muscle being affected. Just when he was about to continue panicking, the itch at the base of his skull came back three times as strong, causing him to spasm and nearly pull a muscle in his neck while his hand shot up to the back of his head.

[ Skill Manifested : Self-Awareness (Lesser) ]

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 lesser enhancements to all other existing bodily senses. The entity gains extra-sensory awareness of their surroundings in a one-meter radius around themselves, scaling with Sense (Kinesthetic).

[ Objective Complete : “Manifest a Skill” ]

The entity has given the excess mana within themselves direction, coalescing it into a Skill.

Cain froze, ankle-deep in the flowing water. Every part of him felt different. He felt the hairs across his body shift in minuscule winds, he felt the water lapping at his legs while his feet felt the pebbles and grains of silt beneath them — sometimes individually. He could feel his stomach trying to contract, attempting to digest food that wasn’t there, only succeeding in inching empty bile towards his esophagus. He could feel his pulse. He felt where his beating heart sent vibrations through his lungs. Every sensation was amplified farther than the human body was ever meant to experience. He even felt things that weren’t in contact with him. The surface of the creek, the mostly inert soil and sparse weeds near it, even the air around him. The sensory overload was overwhelming in the extreme.

[ Mind Attribute Manifested : Processing ]

Affects the speed and efficiency with which an entity processes stimuli. Increases the ability to process sensory input as well as increasing the speed of conscious thought. Lesser improvements to the speed of reflex arcs. (Current Value: 5)

The world around Cain seemed to slow down a touch, and while the amount of information flooding his consciousness didn’t abate in the slightest, it became vastly more manageable. Beginning to relax, Cain focused on taking deep breaths to slow his heart rate. After a few minutes, he was significantly calmer and started to go over the prompts that had manifested themselves. The source of his meltdown seemed to have been the Self-Awareness skill, which was probably a result of his existential crisis. Fun. The objective he’d completed said that it had coalesced from excess mana, which was probably the fault of the manajuana. It had passed out of his awareness pretty quickly, but now that he was paying attention the buzzing feeling in his core that he had gotten from eating the flower was nearly gone. He assumed that was his excess mana. Finally, there was the new attribute. This seemed to confirm the No Pain No Gain Theory of Attributes, as he had dubbed it. Just as walking more than he was used to raised endurance, extreme sensory overload had given him processing. In fact, it had catapulted him directly to level five of the attribute, which was probably why the feeling was manageable now. Uncomfortable, but manageable.

Cain, having been shocked out of his panic, decided it would be best to continue walking while he thought.

And there was a good deal of thinking to do. The objective completion wasn’t really anything special, but the information its single sentence had given him was worth pondering. The “Natural Mana” tidbit had said mana was directly subject to influence by will. Now, the objective had told him that his skill had coalesced from mana when he gave it direction. Could he just… will skills into existence with enough mana? It would make some amount of sense. But that also seemed too easy. He would have immediately picked up a skill to magically tear up tree roots if that were the case. It would also make skills an incredibly common thing. You could reasonably expect any ordinary person to have fifty or more if mana and will were the only requirements. Maybe it took after the attributes in some ways? It would also be more in line with the traditional definition of the word “skill” that way. You increase attributes by straining that attribute, so it makes logical sense that you gain skills by putting in effort towards them. Assuming the logical solution would usually be highly illogical in this situation, but the tidbit on Order had openly stated that they essentially existed to categorize and sort reality into logical pieces. The ‘notifications’ that kept harassing Cain seemed logical if nothing else. Concise where possible and detailed where needed. Organized. The skills recognized by Order were probably just mana-empowered versions of actual skills a person develops like any other.

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All it needed were classes and this world would basically be an action-RPG. Wait… “classes.” Classifications. Cain almost laughed out loud. The Manifestation of OCD probably had something exactly like that, didn’t they? A way to categorize people into groups based on the skills and attributes they developed… it was almost guaranteed. Cain was in a magical video-game fantasyland. Because of course he was.

Actually, the evidence of it had been in his face for a while, but he wasn’t giving much thought to the nature of his world and his existence in it. That turned out rather badly. But now that he was thinking about it, maybe he needed to give some serious thought to magic itself. He had a picture of the basics; mana was energy directly influenced by will, which was straightforward in concept but likely difficult to master. It was by imposing your will on mana that one would presumably cast spells in the way most people imagined when they thought “sorcery.” That probably meant your emotional state would have a significant influence on the proficiency you could cast spells with, and to what effect. For example, if someone tried to cast a healing spell on someone they hate, the spell might be less effective, or downright harmful. But that’s pure speculation on his part, Cain basically only knew what the tidbits had told him about magic so far. He should probably start where he assumed most people would when learning magic: sensing mana.

He had picked up a mana sense attribute from observing the manaflower, which had specifically been classified as an ocular sense, implying he could use different methods to perceive mana. Since Cain had just gained a skill multiplying his kinesthetic senses, trying to physically feel mana might be a good objective.

[ Objective Manifested : “Can You Feel It?” ]

Entity-generated objective: develop a kinesthetic mana sense.

Huh. Cain probably should’ve tried that earlier, but that was a cool feature. But just jumping into trying to develop an abstract, ethereal sixth-sense wasn’t likely to yield much. That would certainly be a goal, but his immediate focus was using his already existing mana sense to observe mana. He hadn’t noticed anything strange or unusual in his environment from it, so the attribute was probably pretty weak at a value of just one. Still, his best bet was some literal introspection. He held up his hands in front of himself and studied them with as much focus as he could muster. Not noticing anything, Cain came to a full stop out of frustration and held his left palm up directly in front of his eyes, squinting menacingly at it. Giving in to fear, his more expendable appendage now showed faint lines that seemed to run against those naturally occurring in his prints. Trying to focus further, he observed that they seemed to run through his fingers, converging throughout his palm and eventually exiting the hand as a single, more solid line through the wrist. Following it down his arm, he noticed that there were several faint offshoots but most of the mana seemed to be running along his arteries. This was corroborated by the thick strand running through each of his legs. Cain then put his neck at a very uncomfortable angle, pressing his chin to his collarbone, to look down at his heart.

What he saw was wondrous. His chest seemed to be buzzing with energy, the large amount allowing him to visibly observe the flow of mana through his body. It actually was running along his arteries, because it was going through his circulatory system all along! Slow, ambient swirls of blueish-white energy speeding up to expel itself with each pulse of his heart, while tributaries returned the mana to his core. His eyes weren’t actually seeing anything, but he could still see the mana somehow. He supposed that was the difference between an “ethereal” attribute and a “body” attribute. Sitting down in the shallow water, Cain just stared for a good while. Then his neck hurt too much to ignore, and he lifted his head. Figuring that was good enough, he lifted his hands in front of his face again. Once more focusing on the mana in his hands, and finding himself able to see it more clearly now, he tried to feel it.

… How do you ‘feel’ magic?

Cain didn’t know. He puzzled to himself for a good while. Then, another blindingly obvious solution stuck him upside the head. He had already felt mana. He consciously noted the buzz he felt from eating the magic flower by that tree stump earlier, and again noted that the buzz seemed to die off in intensity when he manifested the skill — which the objective told him was manifested from his excess mana! Shaking his head, Cain closed his eyes and tried to focus on that same feeling again, which he now figured was the higher concentration of mana gathered in his heart. After a few moments, he found it, a static humming in his chest. He continued to focus solely on that feeling for a little while, observing its movements and feeling it grow a little clearer. When he was satisfied, he broadened his focus, first sending his attention down the artery in his arm, feeling the flow of mana through his blood and attempting to observe the smaller offshoots in his arm and hand. He couldn’t make them out at first, so he kept repeating the action, sending his focus down his arm to his hand and back up. Eventually, he tried to extend his focus in that direction and hold it there, observing his heart and arm simultaneously. It took a lot longer to get right, but Cain managed to pull it off and started looking for the smaller strands of mana once more. After what felt like a few minutes, he found them. He then kept slowly expanding his focus until he was observing the mana in his entire body at once.

Cain opened his eyes to two new notifications he had somehow ignored during his experimentation.

[ Ethereal Attribute Increased : Mana Sense (Ocular) ]

(Current Value: 1 -> 3)

[ Ethereal Attribute Manifested : Mana Sense (Kinesthetic) ]

Affects the entity’s ability to detect the presence and behavior of mana, typically manifesting as some equivalent to the entity’s most actively used bodily sense. (Current Value: 5)

Cain supposed he did put a good amount more effort into his kinesthetic mana sense than his ocular, but he didn’t expect one meditation session to get a full five points. He was also concerned that he was able to miss notifications. Trying to will his attributes into existence, Cain was mildly surprised when it worked. It didn’t manifest as a notification like changes to his attributes did, but he could sort of feel the attributes he had and what their values were. Endurance had apparently bumped up to four while he was walking, while dexterity increased to two and constitution made the final push to five. Oddly, he hadn’t manifested a body attribute for kinesthetic sense yet. But he supposed he hadn’t really been trying to push its limits at all. Said limits may have been significantly expanded by his skill, but that was the only thing of note. His processing skill seemed to have also increased to six while he wasn’t looking. Now that he thought about it, the lingering discomfort from Self-Awareness did seem to have faded.

Although, he thought, the skill should probably be renamed since the sky seems to have turned red while I was distracted.