Matt turned around, making his way out of the restaurant. He walked towards one of the cleaner looking tables outside and grabbed a napkin, using it to cover his nose and mouth. The bandana he was wearing was utterly useless in that regard, impeding none of his senses, as if it just wasn’t there. He had even forgotten about it completely until his hands touched it when covering his face with the napkin. Magic was truly something to behold.
He stepped back into the restaurant, pushing both the exit door to the pool and the one to the reception wide open, to air the place out. Make it more breathable.
El Gouna city had a large solar farm at its doorstep, which supplied most of its electrical needs. He doubted any power plant was still operational with no one there to operate or maintain it, but renewable energy was different, especially if it wasn’t connected to the grid, so he wasn’t all that surprised when he found the lights and air conditioning were still on. He wouldn’t say he chose to come here for that reason, but a happy little accident was always welcome. Thanks to that, the place was in much better shape than what could’ve been, which made the notion of finding something edible in the walk-in fridge much more believable.
He circled around the marble countertop towards the end of the restaurant—trying his best not to touch anything—and through the staff entrance, expecting to find himself in the restaurant’s kitchen, but instead it was a well-lit hallway. It extended on both sides, covering a large portion of the hotel. Small square red tiles covered the floor throughout the entire hallway, while cream-white rectangular tiles covered the walls. They appeared to be well-maintained and in an excellent state, if slightly aged. Some chips and cracks could be seen here and there, as well as some discoloration, but as far as restaurants go, especially one that was a buffet in a large resort with quite a lot of foot traffic, it was as clean as you’d hope.
A few steps into the hallway, that felt more tiring than they had any right to be, and Matt finally found what he had been looking for, the kitchen, with its metal double doors wide open, giving him a first look at what a buffet kitchen looked like, and what he saw, didn’t disappoint.
It was massive, insanely so. Larger even than the dining room. The sheer scale was mind-boggling. He could see more than a dozen different ovens, from convection to conduction, and even pizza ovens. There were also rows upon rows of wrapped trays ready to go, and oven rack trollies stuffed to the brim with what used to be glistening unbaked dough, now laying blackened and flat, and even a giant rotisserie oven with rows of chicken that were now charred beyond recognition.
Through the double doors, a wide walkway took you further into the kitchen, with a wall on one side and a stainless steel countertop spanning the length of the room on the other, lined with covered trays of food ready for the buffet.
He took his first step into the kitchen, the same red tiles greeting him, but this time in a diamond pattern, while the walls had rectangular white tiles that were spotless if slightly discolored. He appreciated the place and what it took to run it. It looked well-maintained, even if remnants of the lunch rush were prevalent, from cutting boards with half cut veggies to the countless pans and pots–now scorched–on burners, which explained the pungent burnt smell hitting his nose even through the napkin.
Nothing appeared to be burning or on fire, there were no flames he could see and no gas he could smell, but it seemed the burnt smell had lingered for a tad too long in the confined room that it was now stuck to everything, even with the very generous ventilation the place boasted. The smell of rotting food wasn’t helping either. No AC in the kitchen meant the dry hot desert weather was less kind to the food here than in the dining area, he just hoped he wouldn’t find the walk-in fridge’s door wide open or it would really complicate things and he was too exhausted for any complications.
Matt walked into the kitchen, navigating through the different counters and appliances, trying to avoid stepping on any weird sludge on the floor. It took him a few minutes of looking around to realize the walk-in fridge, somehow, wasn’t in the kitchen. He did, however, find a door towards the back leading to the pantry, with another leading out of it and into the hallway once more, which he promptly followed.
You’d think the smells he’d been subjected to in both the dining room and the kitchen would make him lose his appetite, maybe even keep him off of food for a while, but surprisingly his deprived brain had lost all rhyme and reason, even going as far as ‘urging’ him to rummage through the spoiled food in search for anything edible, which Matt had fervently refused. He knew there was good food to be found, and he was going to find it, even if right now he was walking more by instinct than anything else.
Exiting the pantry and into the hallway, another open door greeted him, and this time he saw what he had been looking for: the giant metal door of the walk-in fridge, closed shut and ready to be raided.
“YES!” Jackson exclaimed, raising both fists to the air triumphantly as he took in the—no larger than a golf ball—scorch mark on the training dummy. It hadn’t been a fireball, not yet at least, but it was tangible progress.
When he had started testing his theory, he thought he had everything planned out and accounted for. Extracting energy from blood was fairly straightforward. Imbuing said energy to mana was tricky and required more mana understanding than most books in the library offered. Still, it had taken him a day of practice to get it right.
At first, people were entertained by the novelty of blood spurting out of his palm, but a few hours in, once he could extract more energy, the spurt of blood became a stream, and that stream covered the hall in never before seen amounts of blood that the cleaning enchantments had failed to keep up with, breaking down all together. They had to shut down the hall to clean it and re-enchant the walls and doors, leaving Jackson with the task of finding a different training building, which he did, where he got to practicing, only for the exact same thing to happen, proving once and for all that he was the issue, not the enchantments.
At least he now had proof of the validity of his method. His mana was getting energized, but the energy had remnants of blood in it, causing his mana to become blood attuned. What was coming out of his palms wasn’t his blood, well it was but not the blood in his body, it was simply the attuned mana, which presented him with his biggest hurdle, where he needed to either un-attune, or re-attune the energy, which was easier said than done.
He couldn’t interact with the extracted energy, he didn’t know if it was even possible at any tier, let alone tier 9. Directing energy from his blood to his mana, was akin to trying to direct heat from a flame to a pan ten feet away, with a wall blocking your path. Difficult, but doable with the proper tools and understanding. Re-attuning energy, however, was like grabbing that heat from the flame, and turning it back to its original form, whether it was gas or electricity, and then forcing it into something that may or may not be able to use energy in that form. It bordered on the impossible from a physics standpoint, and extremely challenging and highly unlikely from a system’s.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
So what was the alternative, you might ask?
A workaround: infusing mana with the attuned energy, then re-attuning the mana or having his mana attuned before the energy infusion. Simple enough, skills re-attuned mana all the time, so he should be able to as well, right?
Wrong. Skill engravings and skill triggers were tier 6 territory for a reason. Mana hated… well, everything. It hated being told what to do, where to go, how to do something and, most importantly, it hated change. It was like a grumpy old man who wanted to do nothing but follow the same routine he’d been doing for the last forty years, threatening harm to whoever disturbed that routine. Mana wasn’t sentient, mind you, it was just really stubborn and extremely territorial, which was why the human soul was limited to only fifteen skills.
It was the upper limit of what a soul could handle without breaking or without the mana going berserk from ‘too many kids on its property’ kind of thing. The skill engravings and triggers needed a strong link to both body and soul in order to coerce the mana into doing what the skill wanted it to do, and for humans those ‘links’ existed in only fifteen spots, feet, knees, thighs, wrists, shoulders, forehead, chest, stomach, lower and upper back.
Controlling mana without a skill’s assistance was extremely challenging, and even then the results were… subpar at best. [Mana Control] helped immensely with controlling and guiding mana, but even then, it was very limited. Nothing could substitute a skill, the engraving and triggers were too specialized for free-forming to compete with, so unless [Mana Control] was Legendary rarity or higher, you’d only be able to mimic a fraction of a lower rarity skill’s power. He had thought about unlocking [Mana Control] to help him bridge the gap, but that presented its own set of issues, mainly with [Mana Control] itself. Its limitations weren’t the only reason people avoided it, it was also extremely difficult to work with.
Almost all skills leveled up by simply using them. Keep using a skill and it’d improve, no questions asked. Some needed more variance in their usage to progress, but the key word was still ‘usage.’
[Mana Control] was different. Using it didn’t matter, surpassing your limits is what did. Finding unique and imaginative ways of controlling mana and succeeding was its one and only requirement, which was the crux of the matter.
A creative person could push the skill to Epic, Royal even, before it became prohibitively difficult to advance further. Nothing was satisfying enough to warrant an advancement, as if being able to do it meant it wasn’t good enough. It was as if an artist had used oil to paint his entire life, honing his mastery and skill for decades, becoming a master of their craft, and then one day, out of the blue it was just not be good enough, instead you were asked to discard the oil paint and use toast… in the bottom of the sea… where the toast was invisible, the canvas was invisible and you yourself were on the moon. That’s what it took to approach the level of control the skills afforded you at higher rarities. They simply facilitated too much. They were invaluable.
All was to say it wasn’t a viable long-term option. He would be on the back leg for the rest of his life if he went down that path, and in truth he didn’t need absolute control over his mana, he just needed the mana to… want to change to fire. That’s where the second hurdle came into play.
Mana by nature was unattuned. When evolving for the first time at level 5, mana turned more… volatile, making it easily influenced by the class selection, slowly attuning itself to that class’s mana attunement.
An ice mage would be better at using ice magic as time went on even without any practice, simply due to their mana slowly turning into ice attuned mana. Physical classes could stay unattuned for longer, but once they got their first attuned skill, the same thing would happen. It was limiting, but also turned people into powerhouses in their classes once their mana was in attunement with said class, no power loss, delay or energy transfer needed, which was a huge power boost. It was the same for every class and every race, with only one known exception.
Healers.
Some accounts mentioned that healers could keep their mana unattuned for longer, some could even attune it to something other than Life mana. Most of it had been attributed to their skills being defensive in nature and thus being less aggressive with mana usage, hence why their mana never attempted to attune itself, but one researcher, Andial Lerany, disagreed fervently, claiming Spirit was the reason.
Spirit was the healer’s main stat, and little to no information was known about it since it had no tangible properties, making researching it not worth the effort. And with only healers using the stat, and, well, no healers around, researching it became useless. Andial Lerany disagreed with that premise, claiming Spirit was the reason healers had unattuned mana. They had a lot of Spirit, and Spirit had something to do with mana attunement, that was the summary of his research. He didn’t know how or why, but he had bet his academic career on it, which was probably non-existent now considering this was the only paper Jackson had found by him or her. But it did make sense since Spirit improved the soul, and mana was the soul’s domain, and it was enough to give Jackson the push he needed to invest his 8 free points into the usually ignored stat, making it his second highest attribute behind only Vitality.
He had been close to investing his points into Intelligence or Wisdom on more than one occasion, but he held on. No matter how many research papers or personal accounts he read, attunement was never mentioned in relation to both those attributes, but once he saw the paper by some abstract researcher claiming Spirit was the key, he decided to pull the trigger. It was risky, and he could be wasting 8 points, hindering himself for the next few levels, but now was his only chance to do what he was about to. He was level 4, and each point was that much more impactful, so if he wanted to test that theory to any successful degree, now was the time.
Jackson felt no rush of energy nor power flooding him. The world didn’t seem brighter or more digestible. It felt like absolutely nothing. So he moved to step two of his plan.
He took out a dozen fire crystals from his pouch, using them to form a circle before sitting in the middle. He then tried to imprint the fire mana attunement onto his mana and mana signature by bathing in the aura the crystals exuded, letting it come into contact with his own mana.
Nothing felt different after the first hour, only a burning sensation within his soul, but nothing else seemed amiss, so he continued for a few more hours until the burning sensation was too aggravating to ignore.
Sensing now was as good a time as any, Jackson got up, pointed his palm towards a training dummy and started channeling mana while imbuing it with the energy from his blood.
To his astonishment and elation, a one-inch ball of fire shot out from his palm and onto the stationary dummy. It was slow, lacked power, and the mana conversion was abysmal, but it was proof. Proof that he was on the right track. That his mana was attuning, which was all the incentive he needed.
He was going to stay inside that circle until his entire soul was set ablaze. He could finally see the finish line, and he was on the final stretch.
Patreon. Chapter 74, which marks the end of volume 1, was just published there, so if you wanna know what happens with Matt, check it out. Also I've posted an announcement there with my thoughts and what follows the end of volume 1 for those interested.
