The thought of a mana disorder was enough to send Ulric into def-con 4. He had to get this magic shit under control and he had to do it sooner rather than later. The feverish effects hadn't seemed to impact his health or stamina yet, at least not so he'd seen last he'd checked. Paranoia given free reign he immediately called up the magical window into his being.
[Status]
image [https://i.imgur.com/v7KVTGv.png]
"FUCK!" he yelled. There it was, mana sickness. He had no idea when it had set in or what specifically it represented. Most importantly he had no idea how he could remedy it. He had a suspicion that his body was somehow completely naïve to mana, his having been literally born yesterday. Dismissing the window Ulric's brain started chewing apart the problem and arranging the pieces.
The Watcher had said he was effectively operating an adult body with all that came with it including the magical bullshit end of things. The Watcher had further suggested that there were consequences to this. Apparently one such was that as he approached some kind of saturation point his body became increasingly unstable. He wasn't currently experiencing anything too debilitating but the lack of anything approaching restful sleep had had dire consequence for his stamina. He'd pushed hard yesterday, knowing that absent food he'd only be able to operate at full strength for a limited amount of time. It had been a good play, but now he was concerned that he'd missed something crucial in dealing with the new physiology of this body and its innately magical core. If this mana sickness progressed he might be rendered immobile or unconscious and that would spell death if he had no way to obtain food or get to his water supply.
"Okay, okay, okay." he chanted "Get your shit together and get things done."
"First, drink as much water as you can hold and gather firewood from those splinters. A bunch of firewood, just in case. Second, investigate roots and soil for worms or edible bugs, this is not the time to be a bitch about food. Third, gather samples of the non-poisonous plants, from flower to root, and start testing whether they can be eaten. Might try cooking them first, didn't that denature most toxins? Shit I can't remember anymore, that documentary was eight years ago."
Knowing that you're at the edge of panic and doing something about it are two different things. Ulric was getting adrenaline spikes that gave him the jitters and aggravated the waves of hot/cold cycles. He left the shelter and set to getting water. Hunger was there for real now but lost some of its edge as he drank. Ironically he had so little fat that there was no way he could sustain himself without caloric intake. Guess having a trim physique had some unanticipated downsides.
"Focus." he warned himself, trying to avoid mental tangents. A bad habit that had followed him from his previous life. Same soul, different body. "Don't lose your priorities in the noise." he finished centering his mind and gathered a heaping stack of firewood.
He'd lost a fair amount of the piss and vinegar that he'd had the day before. Still strong, still in great shape but there was an edge to things that hadn't been there yesterday, just ever so much more cost to the motions. Ulric knew that this was probably less about the mana sickness and more about the lack of sleep. You can't hike like that without eating. He'd almost certainly burned the equivalent of two days resting caloric intake and he'd done it while also building a shelter and existing in a heightened level of nerves due to the strange environment.
Wood gathering done he grabbed his spear and returned to the base of the roots to start digging around for whatever might be alive in the dirt. Stone had been broken by the roots which penetrated an unknown distance into the ground below. He suspected that they weren't as deep as might be suspected by drawing parallels to Earth trees like oaks. The taproot, while undoubtedly gargantuan, was probably being bolstered by the degree of load sharing and windbreaking made possible by the interlocked upper branches. If he had to bet, he'd eat dirt if a lone tree from the middle of this old growth wouldn't have fallen over under gentle wind. It was simply too tall, half a kilometer with all those branches made a hell of a top heavy object and no matter how strong the trunk itself was the ground would never hold up to that kind of torque.
The roots had sheared and twisted during the fall creating spirals in the fibers that indicated extraordinary tensile strength.
"Damn near metallic stress strain" he mumbled, investigating the roots. A glinting light caught his attention and he navigated to a ground level break where there appeared to be a small pool of yellow-orange glass. Gentle prodding with his spear gave a dull clink like a hard polymer or soft glass. Attempts to scratch the surface yielded little other than light surface traces confirming the hardness was similar to a quartz or silicate glass.
"So…" he said. "Probably a resin of some kind, given its location in these roots. No sign of heat shocking or char or any kind of high heat source so not a melted stone. Clarity similar to amber, but harder." It sort of made sense, any tree this massive would need a source of interior support and a viscous incompressible sap could allow transport of nutrients which mineralized on contact with air. Like pine sap on steroids. Providing both transport and structural function, he nodded his head, it checked out with what some buildings did using hydraulics.
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This was a gold mine. Worth deviating from his planned tasks. Ulric grabbed a large rock and struck the meter round bubble of maybe glass-resin near an edge, trying to start a fault. A few hard strikes and a stress fracture shot across the surface. Placing his spear tip along the crack Ulric used his hammer stone to drive the end of the spear down into the material causing the crack to deepen into a fault all the way through. From there it was a matter of using the spear to lever the piece away from the rest of the bubble.
Ulric carefully ran a finger nail across the edge and was rewarded with a shaving of finger nail that revealed what he'd been hoping for: exquisite sharpness. Now if only he could generate a thin, shapable piece to use as a blade or lens, he'd be in business.
A few experimental taps along the edge with wedge shaped rocks and his spear tip yielded mostly oddly shaped chunks that weren't useful. However, Ulric thought he was seeing a pattern in the fragments and changed the angle of his wedge, then struck once with force. A loud "Ping" resounded with surprising acoustic clarity and a 2 centimeter thick nearly flat piece fell on its side from his wedge.
"Wunderbar" Ulric whispered. It had been his mother's mothers' tongue and he'd learned from her until her passing, enjoying the joy it gave the old hell cat that one of her brood would carry on the language.
An edge check revealed that the twenty centimeter piece held singular sharpness. A few more careful sets and strikes had another two of the longer pieces and four or five smaller ones where they'd broken roughly in half. But each was flat and each was a razor.
Handling those pieces barehanded was a fools game and Ulric stacked the glass-resin shards and left to retrieve some leaves and vines so he could tie a package for transport. Wrapping the shards like presents he tied the leaves shut gently and carried them back to his shelter, refreshing the fire as he entered. This next part might take some high heat he decided, and pulled a lit stick out of the fire to start a new fire outside.
A few minutes saw a rather high flame from a rough pyramid of stacked sticks. As the fire got well and truly caught he retrieved the large piece of resin and carried it back to the fire place. A wave of fresh chills had him squatting close to the flame but only for a minute. Time was not a friend.
Small pieces of resin placed into the direct heat of the coals soon deformed and then combusted, releasing a bright yellow white flame that was, thankfully, smokeless.
Small pieces placed near the edge of the fire likewise deformed but did not combust, instead flattening along the ground and eventually liquifying, releasing an acrid black smoke that he decided smelled like pine tar and acetone. A stick rolled in this liquid and removed from the flame gently smoked under the heat and then the resin did what Ulric had been fervently praying to the Watcher's perfect tits it would do and re-hardened around the stick. This globule held the properties of the original chunk, similar color and hardness except for the cloudy smoke inclusions inside.
Ulric immediately disassembled his spear and replaced the stone head with one of the long glass-resin pieces. It fit better inside the partial split notch thanks to its smoothness and a light heat to soften it. Rapidly pressing the sides together before the resin cooled allowed it to deform slightly adhering the two sides. A coat of melted resin sealed it and he then wrapped the spearhead with vines to secure it.
Some light work with his old spear head and gentle heats had the new spear tip shaped and cutting a humming spin through the air. It would cut, as he proved by easily notching a piece of firewood. It probably wouldn't survive a strike against it's flat though, the resin was every bit as brittle as glass. But a stab would penetrate deeply and it made him feel slightly better about facing the source of yesterday's bestial roar.
Similar work at smaller scale produced a small variety of shaped knife blades, including a hook knife and long bladed dirk. About three hours after finding the miracle material saw Ulric holding a set of tools that would open up a host of applications in wood working, hunting, and general use.
Using his old spear tip as a hand shovel Ulric spent another hour and a half digging around in the soil looking for edible insects. He was "rewarded" with an earthworm the size of his wrist and around three quarters of a meter long. It released a sulfurous smell when attacked and he committed to cooking the ever loving shit out of it before choking it down. But it was food, the first he'd found in over a day.
The worm was exactly as disgusting as it smelled. Even after cooking in the coals of his fire, it was like chewing spoiled egg flavored rubber that extruded slime when bitten into. The taste/texture combination nearly made Ulric vomit three different times, resulting in the meal taking even longer than it needed to. About a month of subjective gastric suffering later, Ulric was finished and washing the loathsome taste out with more water.
Sunlight had grown substantially since he'd left his teepee and Ulric looked up to see, for the very first time of his life, the twin suns of this, his new and original world. Both were smaller in the sky than Sol, the star of the only world he'd known for forty years, the two orbs rose in tandem. One was clearly larger, nearly the size of Sol but reddish in color. The smaller of the pair had an intense blue white light and was currently in front of its larger partner.
"Binary star system?" Ulric was stunned. Binaries were notoriously difficult to form stable planetary orbits, they mostly tidally shredded their planets or blasted them with radiation. Unless these two were so damned far away that the planet was able to orbit their center of mass safely, well outside the reach of such tidal forces and destructive solar wind. The smaller one might be some sort of white dwarf, maybe being kept alive by the heat and gravitational pressure of its giant partner. A stable compression expansion cycle might lengthen the life of the dwarf and prevent cooling but Ulric wasn't well versed in stellar processes, especially not in the kind of subtle fringe case he was probably observing here.
In any case, the pair was glorious to his eyes, hanging in that cloudless blue sky. Their heat washed down over him, dispelling some of the fever chills. Which of course led to sweat starting to bead at his scalp. Whatever.
Ulric had been up and working for most of the morning and, unlike the day before, he could feel the exertion in his limbs. But. He'd gotten something to eat and he'd met two of his three goals for the day, with a bonus achievement which had substantially upgraded the range of his operations. Progress settled the panic he'd felt growing earlier and Ulric decided now was the time to retire to his shelter and start trying to figure out what the fuck this magic was all about. His manic avoidance of thinking about his body maybe eating itself due to strange magical shenanigans had to end, at some point.