I gently tugged on the strand of blood and watched as it listlessly floated through the air. I stood there entranced by how the blood stretched, yet it seemed to clump together like mud. Yet through the trace, I couldn’t help but feel repulsed. This came from within me, and here I was, swinging it around as it was nothing more than a toy.

I pushed the feeling away and instead focused carefully on shifting the liquid. Sweat poured down my forehead as a mental haze pressed in on me from all sides. Whatever allowed me to manipulate the blood here was clearly a mental muscle, and using it for the first time was stretching it to its max.

A warm liquid trickled out of my nose that I quickly identified as blood based on the connection that snapped to it. A headache unlike any other slammed into the depths of my mind like a freight train, and the blood that I held in the air slipped from my control and splashed onto the stone floor. I lurched forward as my world swam, and nausea settled into my stomach like a giant rock.

Congratulations! You have unlocked Blood Manipulation II !

The harsh white light of the text burrowed into my vision, and at that moment, I wanted to do nothing more than strangle whatever created this foul thing. Seriously though, whose idea was this? I pushed myself off the cold ground and did my best to suppress the desire to vomit the contents of my stomach, which was nothing more than liquid at this point. I took a hesitant step towards the cot before I paused as my world spun around me again, forcing me to close my eyes and take a deep, steadying breath.

Once the episode passed, I navigated the barren room, slid myself onto a nearby cot, and quickly wrapped myself up in the blanket. I nestled into the firm surface, screwed my eyes shut, and watched as even the darkness that existed behind my eyelids spun in constant circles, taking my stomach with it.

A whimper left my throat as another wave of nausea assaulted me. What more than likely was happening was that using Aether for the first time was so far out of the norm that my body was suffering from it. But that was just my hypothesis on the matter. All I could do now was just wait for whatever this was to pass.

A few hours later:

Sleep drug me into its gentle embrace and helped me get over the last bit of whatever the hell that was. When I opened my eyes, the headache was gone, and my mind felt a little clearer than before, but it was hard to explain how or why.

Through training, your Attunement stat has increased by 1.

My eyes were drawn to the blinking words, and I studied it for a second before I asked the system what Attunement was.

Attunement was how well your body is adjusted to using the Aether. It is mostly attached to the Arcana skill, however, it also allows you to more efficiently manipulate Aether and magic.

I skimmed the text that came at my request and nodded my head. I see, so there was more to stats than I had assumed at face value then. “What stats affect the use of magic?” The words left my lips as I sat up from the bed I was lying on. Now that I was feeling better and a lot of the harsher emotions had subsided, I could now think more clearly. I needed to learn how to take advantage of this system.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Attunement, Acuity, Insight, and Arcana.

I read through the small list and nodded my head. “Alright, so what does each of these stats affect?”

Attunement is how well your body can adapt to the use of Aether and the manipulation of it. While increasing it can increase how much your body can hold, it also makes using it slightly more manageable.

Acuity is how fast your brain can process incoming information. However, because you can think faster does not increase overall intelligence.

Insight allows for seeing how Aether operates. You will discern magic, runes, and other ways that magic functions much more clearly with your mind’s eye.

Arcana is the measure of how much mana can exist within your body at any given time.

This was all interesting. So if I have high levels of attunement, then I can more easily use magic. I’m also assuming by reading this that the system uses Aether to talk about the base magic and mana being the usable version of Aether. Insight was also fascinating because it was equivalent to your mind’s eye regarding Aether and magic. Acuity was both valuable and scary in my eyes. If I pumped stats into it, I could have supercomputer speeds of thoughts, but it wouldn’t help me if I could easily mess everything up faster.

I returned to the notifications resting on my vision and saw that I still had two free stat points from when I had earned my Blood Sorceress path. Resting on stats was wasteful, then. I quickly opened up my stat menu and glanced through it to see where I could place them. For now, I would not stress too much about ensuring they were adequately spread since I could raise stats in most of these fields by myself for the time being.

My eyes drank in the information on the page, and I noticed something as I looked it over. My arcana resource tab was still full, while my health bar was still ticking upwards slightly. I felt my lips purse slightly as I thought about it. Was it likely that using blood magic negated the use of arcana?

While I could ask the system if that was the case, I didn’t want to. It felt like it would ruin the sense of discovery. If there was one thing I really enjoyed, it was the sense of wonder that learning new things brought me. Taking the time to experiment, and learning about the world through my own actions, was one of my favorite things.

I pushed myself off the cot, walked a short way away from it, and sat down on the ground. As much as I hated the idea of getting scars, unfortunately, my choice of magic left me no other option. I picked at one of the scabs and forced the blood to surface. Once it ebbed out of my flesh, I caught it in my grasp and used my mental force to pull it from me.

My eyes were locked on my resource tab as I did so. Let’s see here, my health bar drops in relation to how much blood I draw, which was to be expected. However, my arcana resource remains unchanged. That was odd. I had figured that using magic would drain the resources in some amount.

I pondered on the thoughts for a moment, at least until a thought floated across my mind. What was it that the system told me when I selected the path for blood magic? Something about everything having a price? I glanced between the orb of blood and my resource tab, and it hit me. My life force was the price.

It was both dangerous and incredibly useful all at the same time. If I had taken another source of mana, then that means I was subject to my mana pool, or in this case, my Arcana. However, with blood magic, that means that I’m trading one shortcoming for another. Which was both good and bad.

For starters, that means for now, I can spec heavily into my health and constitution, so I have a large pool of resources to draw from while I try to figure my way out of here. However, there were a few downsides to that path of action. The first is that I am using my own health as a weapon. The second is that once I get out of here, I would need to spread my stat points more evenly if I wanted to use other magic. There were also a few other prominent downsides; however, before I counted those, I needed extensive testing.

Since I was using my health as a weapon, did that mean that I could restore it? I condensed down the few drops of blood that I held in my mental hand into a tight sphere and glanced at it. The idea of pushing the blood back into me felt a little gross. I mean, god knows what was in the air here, and I definitely did not want it inside of me. Blood poisoning would lead to sepsis, and that was a tree I wasn’t willing to bark up. If I got something like that here, then I was fucked.

But that is what experimenting is for, especially now that I could control my blood. Even if it was magic, I still didn’t believe in it esoterically. To me, magic in the sense that most people believe in it, wasn’t real. There was always an explanation, and I was going to find out why.