[“I see you got it way faster than I initially thought you would, but you took a bit wrong approach. You use too much mana to fuel the auxiliary muscles, and while it makes them sturdier and stronger, it makes fine control almost impossible. Try using less mana, then steadily increase it so you can get accustomed to the power.”]

When I got back, in the corner of my sight I saw Felicia shooting uncontrollably into the air, seemingly having the same issue as me, but I ignored it for the time being. I’m not sure if it was only the mana she used, because she got much more powerful results than me. It was a good thing that before we started training we actually moved to the entrance of the cave entrance which was lacking the ceiling or she would just splat on it.

I briefly looked into the air, but I was unable to see her. I returned to tuning my mana input on the muscles I created, this time making it much thinner, which presumably made it easier to control. When I tried moving again, I didn’t lose control like before, but that didn’t mean I succeeded.

After one step, my auxiliary muscles shattered, unable to withstand even the slight movement, causing me intense pain in my whole body. It lasted only for a second, but still managed to send me onto the floor.

[“Now it seems like you decreased the input of the muscles too much. It requires a lot of tries to get the perfect minimal amount, so be prepared for many more fails like that. Unless of course you manage to start with the medium input. The output of power then should be manageable, but still much harder to control.”]

As he said that he briefly caught Felicia which fallen from the sky with slightly shocked expression. Her hair was ruffled and standing a bit, but excluding that, she was perfectly fine. I had to admit, I would have trouble catching her like that, killing all the force while simultaneously not bringing her any harm.

[“You little girl, on the other hand have to stop using any energies other than mana. You seem inclined to use the pure energy itself, but you need to know that using it too much can result in you losing levels, including the levels of skills. So if you don’t want to cripple yourself, better not use it too much.”]

So it works like that huh? Maybe it’s better I can’t really do that, since if it really requires you to sacrifice your levels to use, but looking at the results, and counting the time Felicia was in air, it could come in handy if we met a really strong enemy.

I tried forming the mana muscles again, succeeding after a couple of minutes, and this time I loaded it with small, but still possibly excessive amount of mana. This time I nearly managed to move with some control, but I’ve chosen a wrong direction to move in, resulting in me faceplanting the wall.

Wow, that seriously hurt. I knew that it was due to my carelessness, but if I had humanoid form, my nose would certainly be broken now. I got up on my legs, and decreased the mana input again by a small amount. My next movement was better directed, but I still didn’t manage to stop before hitting a wall.

A cave, no matter how big certainly wasn’t a good place for a training like that. An open plane would be optimal, but here in the mountains the only relatively flat surface was this cave’s floor. Sighing mentally I kept decreasing the mana input, until I stopped hitting walls, which helped me to estimate the amount of input actually needed for precise control.

I have to say, if one took into account their own strength, with the power of auxiliary muscles of this output, he would probably gain absolutely nothing. The amount of mana I had to put in was small, but the output was even smaller, and without it, the control was extremely hard.

But if I managed to accurately control my increased strength, then along with increased mana input the power given would at some point exceed the mana loss. This was power an individual could acquire outside of the system, and was exceptionally powerful for something as unsupervised by gods as it.

Okay, so back to increasing the amount of mana again, I need to get a hang of the higher speed.

[Proficiency reached. Gained skill [Mana manipulation lvl. 6] ]

And this was definitely going to help, since the amount of mana that I put into the muscles would be easier to control with it. It was like changing the size of the thing I was trying to use. For example if on lower levels of the skill, one mana point could be compared in size to a tennis ball, when it increased it could split into two golf balls, and then these could split into marbles.

Going by that, a much finer control could be achieved, since every one of these points was equally easy to manage on every level. It being smaller, didn’t make it harder to pick it up and put in place, it just made easier to have less of it in place where the rest wasn’t needed. 

Aaand another faceplant…