Chapter 12: a young boy
It has been a couple of years and I am now a young boy, nearing his teenage years. I have managed to make excellent progress with researching runes. I got to the point that I felt that I was ready to start making a magic system in earnest and I had learned the runes of quite a couple of elements including fire, earth and air. These all seemed to be basic elements and I supposed that made sense. Something had to be the basic elements. I had also done a bunch of research into how I could create spells and I came to the conclusion that the best way to go about it was to use circles. The runes would be in the primary circles and in between those primary circles would be small rings which would show the degree of amplification. The issue with creating spells was that while I could in theory, I needed to A) memorise the exact way a spell work B) imprint the composition of the spell and lastly C) have the Mana to use the spell at least twice. Especially the first and last step were hard since memorising the way the spell works requires extensive knowledge since the way runes worked was insanely complicated. As for the Mana requirement, while this wasn’t as hard, it did mean that even if I could understand it, I would not be able to use any super powerful magic.
I had decided to create tiers of magic to differentiate between different levels of power. My current magic was between tier 0 and 2 and the spell that I wanted to create was a tier 1 water spell that would cleanse wounds but not heal them. While I knew that water could heal, it wasn’t perfectly suited for it as opposed to cleansing which it was very suited for. That was going to be an issue probably, water was extremely versatile and quite potent but it lacked the punch in a lot of situations. While I wouldn’t have chosen this element for myself, if it was mine I was going to make the most of it. The advantage that my runic magic would have is that it should cast a lot faster than my writing so it would be more suitable during combat. I might still have to use written casting every once in a while because it was more versatile since it didn’t require knowledge of runes, just a lot of Mana. I wondered why Mana behaved like this but I had no way to study it currently, I was way too weak for that.
I also made some progress with alchemy with a cauldron I had made myself. I found out that I can use my own Mana to draw out the elements of a substance that I wanted and if I combine them with some plants that can focus them, I can brew potions. It was still mostly theory though because I was stuck on the step of drawing out the elements. I had made one somewhat successful attempt a while ago but that just managed to draw out a tiny bit of in this case healing Mana. Today I’d be seeing how well it would go if I tried combining some healing herbs with water and drawing out a bit of that Mana, then combining it with the Mana of a herb that seemed to contain a Mana type that enhanced. I couldn’t feel exactly what type of Mana it was but it reminded me of earth Mana a bit, it could be that they share similar traits just as healing and water Mana do. The cauldron problem I fixed by making one of clay and while it wasn’t the greatest and it made diverting Mana through it quite the challenge, it’s what I had right now and I’d have to live with that.
Getting the ingredients I required and my cauldron, I made a small fire underneath it. I filled the cauldron with water and waited for it to start boiling. While it was heating up, I used my Mana to stir it and to condense the water Mana more. Once the water was boiling I added some of the healing herbs and started pulling out the healing Mana slowly. Once that was done I mixed it with the water Mana and the mixture took on a light purple hue. I lastly added some of the enhancing herbs and did the same as with the healing herb. Pull out the Mana, combine it with the other present Mana and start mixing. This was the most important part since I now had to combine the two quite different substances. While water and healing Mana were very compatible, the combination of those two and the enhancement Mana weren’t. As I started mixing them I saw that the water and healing Mana weren’t mixed fully but I still pushed on hoping that I could still make it work by splitting my attention. After about a minute of struggling I felt the Mana unbind and all I had left was water with weirdly coloured spots, the process had failed.
My next attempt I paid more attention to the fusion of water and healing Mana and this time I managed to fuse them perfectly or at least I thought so. The next step was still a massive pain and as I introduced the enhancement Mana it started to become instable once again. I used my Mana control and forced the two together but they still started to fall apart. I used all of my concentration to fuse the two but it wasn’t working. I then realised that I was trying to simply push them together which wasn’t working. I tried combining the two more, letting it flow through each other not against each other and it started working. They joined and the liquid formed a darkish purple colour with a quite high Mana concentration compared to regular water. To test out the effectiveness of the potion I just brewed I made a decently large cut in my arm and poured some potion on the wound. It healed the wound quickly enough but I wanted to test out if ingestion was more effective. To that end I cut my other arm and this time I drank a far smaller amount. The healing was about as fast as pouring it on there which confirmed my suspicion of ingestion being a better way to go about it.
I was ecstatic with this new creation and I could finally take a bit more risks. While I didn’t know the exact limit, this potion should be enough to heal quite severe wounds so I as long as I had potions on me, I would be fine even when I got hurt. Pain also wasn’t an issue since I still had not found a way to fully connect with my body. While I had been searching for it these past years I probably wasn’t going to connect regardless since the advantages were too great but it was worth looking into. As for my survivability, it still wasn’t perfect but I had also been training myself and I had above average strength for my age. The herb with enhancement Mana also got me to think of a way to utilize either that or earth Mana to reinforce this body, hopefully permanently. I wanted to increase this body’s capabilities since then I could truly become more than human and hopefully conquer death.
This was all far into the future however and before that I was planning to visit civilisation for a multitude of reasons. First I needed a proper metal cauldron that could conduct Mana properly to help with the brewing process. I also wanted to buy some bottles made of glass to store the potion in so it wouldn’t get contaminated by the clay it was currently in. As for getting money, I still had the hide and bones from the baguar which had very little Mana in them so I would sell that. The language barrier would be something I’d have to investigate but I doubt that the difference would be insurmountable for magic, especially with my enlarged pool. As for combat power, I wanted to finish my first attack spell and for that I had an… interesting idea although it would be a bit cruel. I was going to shoot a water ball filled with my own Mana to directly interfere with his own Mana. What this would hopefully do was disrupt his Mana and in turn disrupt his body which would more than likely hurt a lot. While it wouldn’t do very much damage, I was quite certain that it would be a rather powerful spell for an only 2nd level spell in terms of actual combat ability since no one likes pain.
I had already started work on it but the issue that I was currently facing was how to keep the Mana within the ball. I had the spell matrix enlarged in front of me and I marvelled for a moment at how beautiful it was. It was a gigantic circle with two other circles within it, divided by a thin red line. The circles themselves were filled with a lot of runes, most of them blue, the same colour as most of the array, but some of them were red. The red runes were blood magic and were introduced to get the corrupting effect once the Mana enters the body. The blue runes were obviously runes attuned to water. Some of them stabilised the ball, others made it fly, others simply created the ball. The rune that I wanted to change was the rune that was supposed to keep the Mana within the ball. I wracked my head over what could be wrong about it, it was a Mana containing rune connected to the rune that created the ball. Hmm. I thought a bit more and quickly arrived at the conclusion that I was being stupid, the way I had it set up the Mana was contained within the ball as it was created but then would immediately leave it since the creation was over. I quickly rectified the error by also connecting the rune to the stabilisation rune and tried casting it. A decent amount of Mana drained from my pool and a small array appeared in front of my hand. For stability I also incanted the spell [ball of disruption] as I had called it for now. The ball of water appeared in front of the array and flew out, hitting a tree where it burst. If the spell actually worked, I didn’t know but I planned to find out.
I went out to the forest in search of an animal. While I wasn’t a fan of animal tests, what needed to be needed to done. Since the forest was teeming with life I quickly found a squirrel who hadn’t seen me yet. I wrote in the air ‘the target will be immobilised for 20 seconds via paralysis of the muscles within the legs’ the squirrel quickly dropped to the ground and I grabbed it before it could hit the ground. I put it in a cage I had brought with me and walked back home. Once I reached the clearing in the forest, I observed the squirrel for any anomalies and when I saw none I quickly used my spell on it. [ball of disruption] I incanted and I saw the ball hit the squirrel and the Mana enter his body. Once it entered the squirrel started squirming and making noises of pain. I quickly put it out of its misery and noted down my findings. The spell did indeed mess with a creature’s Mana but the effect of the pain was outside of the expectations. I expected pain but not to the extent the squirrel displayed. No matter, this was a positive thing and I felt ready to go to civilisation once again.
