Chapter 2: Failure

It was already nighttime when Zed started to follow the river stream. In the end, he reached an enormous waterfall reaching great heights.

He had been looking for a place to stay the night, but in every spot, he found there would be creatures hiding in it.

He had thought of building a tent or shelter for themselves but he couldn't afford to keep moving with a baby in his arms. Therefore, he settled with the gaping hole hidden behind the waterfall.

It was a large cave and the waterfall's sound filled the spacious hollow space inside the cave. 

At first, he was hesitant to enter the cave because there might have been another beast hiding inside.

But pretty soon, he knew that his body would collapse and he would without a doubt, faint.

He had already walked several miles just to arrive at this cave and even then, his body was already severely exhausted before he started his journey.

After gathering several leaves to make a makeshift bed, he and the baby finally rested inside the cold dark cave.

"Haa..." His sigh of exhaustion was left unheard due to the loud splashing of water from the waterfall.

'What's going to happen to me... to us?'

As he looked at the baby in his arms, his exhaustion reached his mind. Soon, he fell asleep while sitting but his arms never stopped moving to gently cradle the baby.

-

"GASP!"

Zed was woken up by a head-splitting pain. His mind felt like it was being split into two. Although he was experiencing inhumane pain, his first thought was still about the baby.

'W-what happened to her?'

He noticed that the sun had already risen and bright rays of line passed through the waterfall.

The baby in his arms was already crying, asking for food and the headache wasn't helping at all.

'D-damn it! God damn it!'

He began to feel frustrated and stressed out but he made the baby his priority.

Zed was desperate because he could tell that he and the baby hadn't eaten anything for days. Out of frustration, he bit his thumb and it began to bleed.

He was about to wipe it away but the baby's eyes followed his bleeding thumb.

'Hmmm... is it healthy for a baby to drink blood? It should still contain a fair amount of nutrients...'

Having no choice, he offered his bleeding thumb to the child, and almost immediately, she stopped crying as she sucked on Zed's thumb.

Just as he was about to calm down, his mind was rattled by a huge shock and instantly, unfamiliar memories poured into his mind.

He took several minutes to calm himself down before organizing the new information in his mind.

'I see... so this is a different world. A world of martial arts, cultivation, immortals, fairies, and so on.

And the reason I couldn't feel my mana circuits was because... this isn't my body but a child from a fallen nobility.

Li Zixin.'

However, despite being an heir to nobility, his parents were mortals and they were only rich enough to hire cultivators as guards.

Cultivators were worshipped in this world, meanwhile, Immortals were akin to Gods.

Mortals were considered fodders or ants since they could easily be killed.

'So that's why I couldn't feel mana. My mana circuits haven't been opened yet.'

As Zed was reviewing his memories, his thoughts were cut off by the baby, Lan'er in his arms as she cried once more.

He smiled gently as he asked, "What's wrong little Lan'er?"

The latter, however, kept crying. It didn't take long for Zed to figure out that his wound had already dried up, and blood refused to flow.

With a sigh, he bit his thumb once more, this time making it deeper so that Lan'er could continue drinking.

His face was barely irked despite the self-harm he did to himself.

Xue Ruolan.

She was the daughter of his uncle, Xue Zemin who was the lifelong comrade and brother of his father, Li Guang.

As it turns out, they weren't abandoned but were forced to escape because of several unknown enemies that attacked their family.

Zed was already sure that their parents died and now they were orphans with no guardian to rely on.

He sighed as he realized that they would share a similar fate to his previous life as a person who grew up in the slums.

'No... I can't let that happen to Lan'er.'

"Growl..."

Zed's eyebrow twitched when he almost mistook his stomach grumbling for another beast.

He sighed at his hunger and began to plan his next course of action.

'I should first explore the surroundings and familiarize myself with the forest. I have experience in hunting but that was when I was a mage.

But now... I don't even have a weapon or tools to help me hunt. So I'll be needing to learn how to improvise and adapt.

'The next concern is making a shelter for ourselves. We can't stay in this cave because there might be a chance of a beast slumbering deep inside the cave.'

Hopefully, we can find human settlements while exploring, but I can only do so little with this small body of mine.

As for my magic circuits... I'll need to open them myself, even without tools.'

When Zed thought of opening his magic circuits, he was referring to the old process of manually opening his magic circuits.

It involved stabbing a part of his skin and exposing the circuit to the air. From there on, he would need to keep gathering mana, and if he was lucky enough, then the process would finish faster with better circuits.

If he were unlucky, the process would be slow and he could risk dying of blood loss.

It was a gruesome process, but as a mage, he needs to open them.

Usually, though, there would be a less painful and much safer way of opening mana circuits back in his world, but that was only when they had the necessary tools to do so.

He inadvertently sighed when he realizes the pains he'll have to go through in the future.

Once he finished opening his magic circuits and consolidating his foundation, that was only when they could continue to travel and look for human settlements.

He was also planning on becoming a cultivator along with his sister and the way to do that was to join sects.

He had plenty of information about them from his memories as Li Zixin. He also had a basic knowledge of martial arts and swordsmanship.

For now, he settled with those plans and rested his mind and body. His body was aching today and every muscle in his body was cramping so he couldn't do any movement.

He decided to rest for now and move tomorrow, albeit being extremely hungry.

-

A week passed and Zed made the entrance of the cave their temporary shelter. He had learned to hunt and forage through the use of Li Zixin's knowledge and his own experiences.

His first hunts were awkward and his prey kept escaping. Rabbits, deer, boars, and the likes kept escaping from his grasp.

Lan'er felt entertained most of the time while watching her brother kept moving and failing. She probably thought they were playing.

In any case, Lan'er's laughter was the one thing that kept pushing Zed to do his best.

While exploring, he gathered numerous fruits and herbs that he deemed safe to eat, based on Li Zixin's knowledge.

However, his exploration wasn't completely safe as he was met with danger several times and he would have died if not for his experiences as Zed Williams.

After another week of passing, Zed was finally able to hunt small creatures, earning himself meat. After skinning the fur, he would cook them on the fire.

During his hunts, he would use makeshift tools and weapons such as sharp rocks or sharped stakes made from wood.

After a month had passed, he had completely adapted to his new lifestyle and was able to hunt deer with an improvised spear that he made.

Pelts of his hunted prey were starting to stack in their temporary shelter while he had also gathered fruits and vegetables for his sister to eat.

However, despite all the different kinds of crushed fruit and vegetables he fed to Lan'er, her favorite meal was still his blood.

He was mildly worried about this and he knew that what she needed was milk, but even after a month of exploration, he had yet to find cows or goats.

He also failed in finding any nearby human settlements. Zed knew that the only way to find them was to leave this forest.

But he also knew that it would take several days and his small body wouldn't be able to last a journey that long.

And so today was the day he would open his mana circuits.

It was mid-day as Zed and Lan'er were hiding inside the spacious cave behind the waterfall.

After making sure that she fell asleep, Zed placed Lan'er between a stack of soft leaves that he tied together to make a pillow.

In front of the waterfall, Zed was shirtless as he straightened his back upright while his legs were kneeling. On his hand was a sharpened flint knife.

He was both nervous and excited at the same time. Make no mistake, he wasn't a masochist.

He was excited because the talents of a mage are decided depending on the mana circuits he or she was born with.

In his previous life, he was born with thin and brittle mana circuits which limited his mana capacity, making him remain a 3rd rate mage his entire life.

But now he had a different body, so he was quite excited at the thought of possibly being born with mana circuits befitting a 1st rate mage.

He aimed the knife beneath his left arm, directly towards his ribcage, and slowly made a deep wound.

Zed remained unmoved and continued to unhesitatingly slice his flesh. He made sure that the wound was deep enough to reach the circuits.

After five minutes of careful slicing, Zed's entire left torso was bleeding while he tried his best to calm himself in face of the unbearable pain. His entire face was sweating which showed the amount of struggle he was in and yet he was trying to remain quiet and focus on what he was doing.

"Haa... haa..."

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. With one of his circuits exposed, he tried to feel the mana.

However, even after a minute or so, he had yet to feel even the slightest bit of mana.

'Damn it... did I not cut deep enough?'

He thought something was wrong but then he felt a small tingling sensation from above his ribcage.

'This is it!'

Without wasting a second, he focused on the tingling sensation as if he was pulling it closer and closer to his body.

Soon enough, that tingling sensation stopped and was replaced by a continuous feeling, an inexplicable fluidity.

This ambiguous feeling soon began to spread from his chest towards his entire body.

Mana would keep flowing into his body, so this process required his full focus and concentration since a single mistake could lead him to injure one of his circuits.

'So far, so good.'

He also found out that his mana circuits were thicker than his previous ones. This brought him great joy, but he couldn't let himself lose focus and remained concentrated.

It took him a long and arduous process as he slowly opened the other parts of his circuits and spread them all over his nerves.

The stinging pain was also one of the reasons why he struggled to spread the mana properly. It kept distracting his sharp focus.

Zed had long forgotten his sense of time as he reached the peak of the operation.

He only needed to finalize the mana in his body by circulating it to the last part of the circuits which was located inside the brain.

As he let the mana flow from his chest to his neck and finally towards the brain, he was shocked to find out the last circuit was missing!

'What the-'

With the mana continuously flowing, that split-second delay of his immediately put him in danger.

'Shit!'

He hurriedly expelled all the mana that accumulated in his body, forcing it out the same way it came in.

This resulted in the wound in his ribcage widening and almost making him fall into shock because of the unimaginable pain that followed.

'Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!'

He was frustrated, despairing, and worried that he had lost too much blood.

He hurriedly ripped a part of a little cloth that his previous robes had left and used it to close his wounds.

"Damn it!" He growled.

Edited By: WorthyAdversary