Chapter 7: living in the woods

Once I came to I started making myself some food since I knew that I needed the nutrients since this body used a lot of calories yesterday. Speaking of this body, now that I have all the time in the world to study magic, I can actually try to figure out what is wrong with it and why my soul is not properly connecting with it. That and figuring out a way to sense Mana was next on my list to research. It’s probably best to start with trying to sense Mana since it’d make all subsequent research a lot easier.

I turned inward to feel the way the Mana flowed within myself. I felt it flow through my entire body, I could feel it be here and at the same time not almost like it was at a slightly different frequency compared to the rest of the world. If I could tune in to that frequency with magic, I might be able to sense it. The issue is, how do I describe that with words? I suppose I could try to use ‘my eyes are tuned to the frequency of Mana and therefore I can see it’ but I’d prefer not messing with my eyes. Because of that I chose to go with ‘my sense of touch is tuned to the frequency of Mana and therefore I can feel it’ once I finished writing it my entire body felt like it was on fire. An unimaginable pain spread throughout my entire body and I was about to faint. Painstakingly I wrote more magic into the air ‘the magic I just used related to sensing Mana will only last for another 5 seconds.’ The pain made it incredibly hard to write and as soon as I finished writing it, I collapsed.

When I came to the sun had already set and my stomach was making enough noise to wake the neighbours living 10 hours away. I quickly got up, felt that the sensing of Mana had stopped and grabbed some food. The village had a preservation method for food and especially meat that involved rubbing it with a certain type of berry. This made it so that the meat I had could actually last me for a decent while as long as I stored it away from the insects. I didn’t even need to cook it because that was already done since that was a necessary part of the process. The taste wasn’t very good but that is fine by me since I was never much of an eater anyway. I also went out to go get some water to refill my supply of that which needed to be done daily.

On my walk to the river I saw a rabbit hop by. Feeling that my Mana reserves had recovered mostly I quickly sent an earth spike the rabbit’s way and impaled him. That would serve as food for tomorrow. I would have to figure out how to butcher it but I did know that draining was step one so I slit its throat to let out the blood. Continuing on to the river nothing of note happened and I grabbed some water. This child body sadly didn’t permit me to take very much with me since a four year old child doesn’t have much strength. My strength is a bit above average since I have been moving and doing more than other children my age but it only allowed me to take slightly more with me. Going back to my hut therefore took noticeably longer than going to the river.

Back home I deposited the water I had collected and hung the rabbit from the ceiling in my shack, allowing it to slowly bleed dry so I could prepare it the next day. I decided to experiment a bit more and decided to try my hands on some healing magic. First I’d try speeding up the healing process but this had the disadvantage that small cuts took quite a while to heal so I had no idea how much Mana it would take. To test that, I made a small cut in my finger and wrote ‘the healing process of this wound will be sped up a thousand fold for 3 seconds’ I felt the Mana leave my body but it was a very manageable amount. Roughly 30 points of Mana left my body and the wound scabbed over and healed just a slight bit. Just taking off 50 minutes off a process that takes days was a bit ineffective though and I decided to experiment a bit more and used ‘The healing process of this would will be sped up 1000 fold for 6 seconds’ The amount of Mana that left me was roughly 45 points this time which led me to believe that extending the time was far more cost efficient than speeding up the process which made sense. What also made sense is that this whole process made me hungry so I ate a bit more before actual pangs of hunger could start to appear. The wound was starting to annoy me a bit so I used more magic, this time a long lasting but far weaker effect.  ‘the healing process of this wound will be sped up 10 times for 60000 seconds’ this took a huge chunk of Mana away from me but this should make sure that I would be pretty much healed overnight. I went to sleep right after to sleep off the tiredness of this body.

I was awoken in the middle of the night by rustling near my shack. I instantly became wary because I knew that there were some really big predators in these woods. I muffled my steps with magic and snuck out to see what was up. The light of the stars didn’t provide much illumination but I could still very clearly see it. There was a monster the size of a small car trying to enter my shack. It looked odd, like it was the mixture between a jaguar and a boar. A feline build but with a gray ish hide and tusks coming from its mouth. It also seemed to have the temper of the boar since when it found it could not easily open my shack, it started to go back a bit to charge at it. At that moment it started sniffing the air and that was when I knew that I had messed up. It looked straight at me and I quickly started writing out magic, another earth spike with a decent bit of power packed behind it. The beast started to charge at me and lunged at me. Just in time I managed to roll out of the way but this stopped me from writing. It didn’t relent however and kept up its attacks, claw slashes intermixed with bites and lunges didn’t give me much time to write and it took all that I had to dodge in which I was slightly helped by my short stature although that was cancelled out by my lack of agility and speed. In a desperate attempt I dodged another claw slash aimed for my throat and used the opening to grab the beast. I started to drain the Mana the beast had a surprising amount off and held on for dear life as it tried to shake me off. It clawed furiously and one of its claw swipes hit my leg. The pain was bad but I knew that faltering meant death and therefore I kept draining it, seeing it grow desperate enforced my idea that whatever I was doing, it was working. After a bit the beast managed to shake me off but instead of killing me, it fled. Glad that I survived but curious as to why it tried to get in my shack since there should be no smell for it, I realised that I made a nearly fatal mistake. The rabbit that I had hung to dry would definitely work as bait for any hungry beasts out in the forest. Deciding that this night was not over yet I quickly gathered some berries and started a fire to treat the meat. I first skinned it, removed the organs and started rubbing it with berries before cooking it. Due to my severely lacking skill I lost a decent bit of meat due to burning it and skinning it wrong. I buried the organs and the hide before realising that I was brimming with Mana. I checked and was shocked to see that my Mana pool had grown by a massive amount. I could now hold about 700 points of Mana which was far more than I could before. This was probably an effect from draining the beast. Was there something special about its Mana? This required more research. Tired, I cleaned everything up and used magic to speed up the healing process of the wound on my leg before going back to bed and collapsing due to a combination of mental stress, pain and just plain tiredness.