I woke up the next morning feeling a lot better. The previous night I had still felt like I wasn’t banging on all cylinders, but today I was feeling pretty good. Looking up at the sky through the window in the room I was in I could see that it was still a few hours before midday. The gang would probably be arriving shortly if they weren’t walking up to the room right now.
I stood up out of the bed and gave a good stretch. Although it felt practically unnecessary. There hadn’t been a single time with this new body that I’d noticed that I was ever underprepared for something physical.
Like my body was always in top shape ready for a 100m dash or something similar. But it still felt good to stretch, more than likely just a mental sentiment. After a minute I sat down on the edge of the bed and focused on the shoulder of the arm I’d lost.
Last night while Illesea and I had been talking she had said I should try forming an arm with my magic until my healing was capable enough to restore it. Now that I thought about it, why hadn’t she replaced it? Or for that matter any of the other healers? There was a lot I wasn’t understanding here.
Illesea said she had a healing ability that she used on me. At tier seven surely it was strong enough to replace limbs? Right? Questions for when I next met her. If I ever actually got the chance.
I removed my shirt and then redoubled my focus back onto my shoulder and started flowing my magic through it. I was just getting a feeling for the area of the shoulder that I was going to be connecting to. I flowed magic through using both [Mana Sense] and [Electric Sense] to get a feel for the anatomy and how the nerves were working.
I could see the dead-end of the nerves reaching the shoulder and just cutting off. I could see a faint outline of mana of how I imagined my missing arm to look. How long it was, how muscular it was, skin tone, durability, hair, fingernails, fingerprints.
I then realized I was looking at it like a human arm. I stopped to take a moment to look at the arm I had left and although they were almost identical. I started noticing small differences. The perfect curvature of my joints, the skin being perfectly smooth. My fingernails were the perfect length despite never having clipped them since I’d come here.
My palm prints were completely different as well. I hyper-focused on each detail doing my best to commit them to memory. I didn’t expect to get this right the first time, I expected this to take me months of trial and error. But that didn’t mean I was going to stop here. The effort here and now may save my life down the line. And that definitely made it worth the effort.
I don’t know how long I sat there intensely focusing on creating a picture-perfect memory of my own arm, attempting to replicate it and then mirror it in my mind to replace it on my missing left side.
As soon as I felt I had everything down perfectly I let my magic flow through me and out of me. It pushed out permeating the air around me, not overbearing but layering through everything allowing my senses to work like an aura of vision. In a weird way, I could almost see myself through it.
I cast away those unnecessary thoughts and refocused back on directing the magic. I could feel the Heart in my chest pulsing, answering to my efforts to direct my magic. It guided me, not taking control, but gently prodding me when my mind erred on construction.
I had known the Heart was sentient to a degree. I never knew quite how much though. Maybe that wasn’t entirely correct, it was sapient for sure. There was a keen intelligence I could feel behind the Heart. But maybe not sentient, lacking the capability for empathy and compassion. Rather it saw an opportunity to guide me and make me stronger, but not because it cared about me in particular, but that it had a mission it was trying to complete, and making me stronger helped it towards that point.
My magic built around me, layering through the air over and over and over again. Slowly I reached out to the mana permeating the air so thickly I could smell it, an overpowering scent at this point. It sat thickly in the back of my throat almost like a second layer of mucus. I condensed it slowly into the shape of my arm.
At this point, I had filtered tens of thousands of points of mana into this creation. Wood slowly started to build from my shoulder stretching out slowly, thousands of layers of wood intertwining building on each other to form something similar to a bone structure. All the while the Heart kept a steady hand over the mind, not entirely taking control. But also not letting me completely mess up and create something unusable.
I saw every instance of the arm being formed building up from miniscule to full size and strength. I could tell that the resulting arm would be usable, not perfect, but it was still a construct of worth. Not something the Elves would even consider as amateur artwork. But for a former human? I’d say I was at a good start for a first attempt. After minutes of hard arduous work, I finally reached my fingers. I noticed in the back of my mind I was sweating, almost profusely, from the effort.
I didn’t try to speed the process up though, I slowly developed each finger one at a time, not splitting my attention between the five extremities instead devoting unparalleled attention to each one individually. I made sure each one turned out the same level of quality as the rest of the arm, these would be the parts of the arm seeing the most use after all, it only made sense to make sure the delicate pieces were refined for fine motor use.
Or at least as close as I could get them at this current point in time.
And then, unceremoniously, I finished. The mana that had been so thick and cloying in the air had been completely used up. At the end of the operation, I had used over one hundred thousand points of mana in building this. If not perfect, it would at least be powerful if only for the quantity of mana crammed into it.
I noticed that I had missed a couple of pings while I was working.
‘Ping’ You’ve acquired a new skill [Wood Manipulation]
‘Ping’ [Wood Manipulation] Has leveled up 1 > 6
‘Ping’ [Disciple of Nature] Has leveled up 10 > 12
Interestingly, wood manipulation was a general skill and not a class one. I’d take it though, it left that slot free for something else more useful in the end.
“Alex, you good bud?”
I cringed and my vision instantly snapped up.
Garrus, Penny, Karif, and George all stood in front of me with slightly worried expressions.
I sputtered a bit before managing to get out, “Couldn’t you have knocked or something? Gave me a fucking scare!”
I took a deep breath to calm myself, it was more startling than anything, I hadn’t even heard them come in.
“We did… Alex, you've been sitting there forming that arm for three hours.” Penny said slowly.
“I… What…?”
Three hours? I turned around and looked up at the sun again, it was past noon at this point. Maybe. I wasn’t the best at judging time from looking at the sun.
It really had been several hours since I’d started. What even, how even? I faced forward again turning to look at my arm, I gave it a flex. It felt strange, it didn’t move as smoothly as I’d like but it would work well enough. I’d have to set aside dedicated time to practice with it and also practice making new arms.
Especially if it was gonna take hours for me to even form one arm and only get it to 75% efficacy.
“Hey! No! Don’t go focusing back on that arm again! Look here!” Penny slapped her hands on both sides of my face forcing my attention up to her.
“Focus here, Alex.” She stared intensely into my eyes.
I blinked and she smooshed my face a little harder, “Don’t blink, actually focus and pay close attention here. Trust me.”
I dumbly did as she said. Although I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me… Suddenly something in my mind snapped and it was almost like there was a fog in my mind that was suddenly wiped away.
She must’ve seen what she wanted to because she nodded and let go, taking a step back.
“There, feel better?”
“I… Yeah. What the hell…” I whispered mostly to myself, but they all heard me well enough.
“It’s like you were being controlled almost. I’ve seen similar effects in magic similar to hypnotism, although yours was… More refined? Different. Exceedingly strange and unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed before.” Karif stated to me.
I wasn’t sure how to take that. Now that I thought about it something similar had happened before, hadn’t it? I couldn’t quite place the memory right now, but I was certain something mildly similar had happened in another place.
I’d have to think about that.
“Well, we got everything figured out!” Penny loudly interrupted, “And you’ve been stuck in this room for long enough. So let's get you out of here and get something to eat to start with, 'cause if I’m starting to get hungry, you must be starving.”
She had me by the wrist and was yanking me up onto my feet. She was right about me being starving though.
My stomach let loose a rumble of epic proportions.
I let out a slightly exasperated sigh. “Yeah, I am pretty hungry. Let me get my shirt back on and we can split. I agree that I don’t want to stay here any longer as it is.”
“So you made yourself an arm replacement then? Do you actually plan to heal it at any point?” Karif asked me while leaning in a little to observe the arm.
“I would like to heal it at some point. Healing it when it gets ruined seems like it’ll eventually be more mana-efficient in the long run. I mean, this sucker took over 100 thousand points of mana to create. I’m still not even sure how durable it is compared to just my normal arm.”
I slowly fit my wooden arm through the sleeve just making sure nothing got caught on the fabric and tore. Given that my outfit hadn’t torn or burned up yet probably indicated it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, but I wasn’t going to start being careless now.
“Interesting, at the very least it should be extremely durable as it is. How did you even manage to fit that much mana into it? You couldn’t possibly have more than ten thousand points to work with?”
“I just kinda filtered mana through the air and then kept it compressed in the room before bringing it back and condensing it down into this form. I tried to just create a mirror image of my right arm and slap it onto the left side of my body. If you ignore color then I think I got pretty close. This is also ignoring the fact that while durable it’s not exactly capable of the same fine motor skills as my real arm is. Something to work on I think.”
I slowly flexed my fingers as I looked at the crafted arm I had. It still felt weird to use. Finicky, unreliable almost. Now that I had a few moments I wasn’t sure I was as proud of it as I was when I had just finished.
“You… What? You circulated mana through the air?” Karif had a completely dumbfounded look on his face, and so did Garrus, Penny, and George all kind of looked between us mildly concerned.
“Howdidyouevendothatthatshouldn’tevenbepossiblepeoplehavetriedtodosimilarthingsbeforebutit’sbeensaidtobeimpossibletocirculatemanalikethatunlessyoujusthavethemanapooltosupportitinthefirstplaceand-”
Karif had grabbed my shoulders and was rapid-firing sentences off faster than I had ever heard before. I inserted my good hand into his chest, getting him to give me some space.
“Whoa there cowboy, slowdown and maybe I can answer some questions. First, what do you mean it’s impossible unless you just have the mana pool to support the amount in the first place, isn’t that counterintuitive to mana control in the first place?”
Karif frowned, “What do you mean? You can only control what you have, how would you control what you don’t have to control? Once you fire an arrow it’s not like you can subsequently shoot it in a different direction.”
Ah, I see where the disconnect was happening. Maybe it was a less-than-stellar education on Karif's part. But I highly doubted I was the first to come up with this. If I wasn’t though, I had plans to not only revolutionize magic but to make a fat profit off of it as well. If they didn’t understand the concept of a mana-battery I could create those and maybe patent the idea if they had similar laws about things here.
I would have to see where the political differences between our two societies sat.
“I see what you’re saying. I’ll explain everything, let's do it over something to eat though. Sitting down will be nice cause I’m about to destroy your entire view of magic. Maybe. I at least see where the disconnect between what I’m saying and what you’re understanding is coming in, but I’m too hungry to get into a lecture right now.”
Karif looked like he wanted to say something and didn’t want to put it off, but he just sighed in turn. “Yeah, you’re right. Let’s get going.”
“Great! I thought this was never gonna end.” Penny exclaimed, clapping her hands together, “I’ve got a great place we can go to. The eggs there are to die for!”
Penny was right. The eggs here were killer. I was on my third serving and was inhaling them at record speeds. They had melted cheese over them and were even salted. I wasn’t sure how valuable salt was here, but in the Middle Ages of earth salt was an extremely valuable seasoning that only became commonplace due to more modern infrastructure.
Garrus was keeping pace with me eating just as much as I was although it seemed more casual for him rather than a competition. George looked amused at the rates we were putting them away.
The restaurant was essentially a breakfast-at-all-times kind of place. So there was sausage, bacon, bread, butter, all the stuff you could think would be breakfast foods were there. And it was divine.
Karif had an exasperated look, “Oh goddess, we have two of them. It was bad enough with just Garrus, but you too?”
Penny just laughed joyously. And that was certainly a pleasant sound to my ears.
“Hey, I haven’t eaten in several days from what I understand. I’m just catching up.” I snarked back to him.
That didn’t feel to be necessarily true though. While I had been hungry, it didn’t feel as ravenous as it would’ve been if I had still been human I would think. Normally just even going 12 hours without eating would’ve been enough to make me feel light-headed. But as it was I was just really hungry. Like I had just been waiting to eat a good dinner and had skipped a meal.
Karif just raised an eyebrow giving me a look that said he didn’t entirely believe me.
I just shrugged.
I quickly finished and ordered one more plate before leaning back, “Alright, I think I’m good to start talking now. So where was I?”
“You circulated mana despite having a mana pool below 10 thousand points?” Karif reminded me.
“Right right, if I remember your analogy at the time was if you fire an arrow you can’t subsequently shoot the arrow in a different direction as it’s already left, right?” I asked him.
He nodded slowly.
“You’re absolutely correct on that, let’s say that firing the arrow is the equivalent of casting a spell. I wouldn’t even say it’s impossible to alter a spell post-cast but it’s definitely not something I’m capable of currently to my knowledge. No, what I did was completely different. Instead of shooting the arrow, I juggled them.”
“That’s-” Karif very quickly interjected standing up before the realization dawned on him, “That’s… Insane… How would you even know to do that?”
I shrugged, “It just makes sense, I highly doubt it’s the most effective method in the book, but if I’m correct here there are a lot of ways I could make money off of this knowledge assuming someone else hasn’t already figured it out and capitalized on it.”
“What do you mean?” Garrus interjected, leaning forward and lacing his fingers together.
“Are you all familiar with the concept of a battery?” I asked.
They all shook their heads.
I nodded, “A battery is a thing that stores surplus energy to be used at a later point. That’s a gross oversimplification and not entirely accurate, but it is a facet of how they work and for our purposes will be enough.”
“I think I see where you’re going with this, is your plan to store surplus mana in these batteries to use to cast stronger more powerful spells than you would normally be able to do?” Karif was tapping a finger to his lips as he spoke.
“Bingo.” I snapped my finger and pointed finger guns at him.
“I really doubt I’m the first person to have come up with this idea, but if I am, let's try to keep it on the down low for now until I can capitalize on it. I’m not entirely sure how I’d go about storing mana in something. From fiction in my world, normally it’s done in crystals of various types with some being able to hold larger amounts than others. But that’s not a universal trope either.”
Garrus nodded slowly, “That seems like it could pan out, what do you want to do in the meantime then, if you are not working towards that?”
I lifted up my wooden arm to him, “I want to get this up to snuff. Right now it’s my first attempt, and while I’d like to think I did a first good attempt, I’m positive I can do better. I even got a skill that’ll help me with wood manipulation so my attempts will only get better. Especially as I get stronger and tier up.”
Garrus nodded approvingly before digging back into his food, “I’d definitely like to be around to help you with that. I’m interested to see what else you can pull off if you start thinking creatively.”
George also gave an emphatic nod towards me. Seemed like he was interested as well.
“Well, that can be put off for another time. For the rest of the day, you’re coming with me.” Penny said with a mischievous grin.
I frowned slightly around my eggs and toast.
“What do you mean? What are we doing?”
Her next words were the bane of nearly every man in existence, they struck fear into my heart as I realized my window of escape had already closed and I was being abandoned to fate. There would be no saving me from the torture that awaited me.
“We’re going shopping.”
I was doomed.
I woke up the next morning feeling a lot better. The previous night I had still felt like I wasn’t banging on all cylinders, but today I was feeling pretty good. Looking up at the sky through the window in the room I was in I could see that it was still a few hours before midday. The gang would probably be arriving shortly if they weren’t walking up to the room right now.
I stood up out of the bed and gave a good stretch. Although it felt practically unnecessary. There hadn’t been a single time with this new body that I’d noticed that I was ever underprepared for something physical.
Like my body was always in top shape ready for a 100m dash or something similar. But it still felt good to stretch, more than likely just a mental sentiment. After a minute I sat down on the edge of the bed and focused on the shoulder of the arm I’d lost.
Last night while Illesea and I had been talking she had said I should try forming an arm with my magic until my healing was capable enough to restore it. Now that I thought about it, why hadn’t she replaced it? Or for that matter any of the other healers? There was a lot I wasn’t understanding here.
Illesea said she had a healing ability that she used on me. At tier seven surely it was strong enough to replace limbs? Right? Questions for when I next met her. If I ever actually got the chance.
I removed my shirt and then redoubled my focus back onto my shoulder and started flowing my magic through it. I was just getting a feeling for the area of the shoulder that I was going to be connecting to. I flowed magic through using both [Mana Sense] and [Electric Sense] to get a feel for the anatomy and how the nerves were working.
I could see the dead-end of the nerves reaching the shoulder and just cutting off. I could see a faint outline of mana of how I imagined my missing arm to look. How long it was, how muscular it was, skin tone, durability, hair, fingernails, fingerprints.
I then realized I was looking at it like a human arm. I stopped to take a moment to look at the arm I had left and although they were almost identical. I started noticing small differences. The perfect curvature of my joints, the skin being perfectly smooth. My fingernails were the perfect length despite never having clipped them since I’d come here.
My palm prints were completely different as well. I hyper-focused on each detail doing my best to commit them to memory. I didn’t expect to get this right the first time, I expected this to take me months of trial and error. But that didn’t mean I was going to stop here. The effort here and now may save my life down the line. And that definitely made it worth the effort.
I don’t know how long I sat there intensely focusing on creating a picture-perfect memory of my own arm, attempting to replicate it and then mirror it in my mind to replace it on my missing left side.
As soon as I felt I had everything down perfectly I let my magic flow through me and out of me. It pushed out permeating the air around me, not overbearing but layering through everything allowing my senses to work like an aura of vision. In a weird way, I could almost see myself through it.
I cast away those unnecessary thoughts and refocused back on directing the magic. I could feel the Heart in my chest pulsing, answering to my efforts to direct my magic. It guided me, not taking control, but gently prodding me when my mind erred on construction.
I had known the Heart was sentient to a degree. I never knew quite how much though. Maybe that wasn’t entirely correct, it was sapient for sure. There was a keen intelligence I could feel behind the Heart. But maybe not sentient, lacking the capability for empathy and compassion. Rather it saw an opportunity to guide me and make me stronger, but not because it cared about me in particular, but that it had a mission it was trying to complete, and making me stronger helped it towards that point.
My magic built around me, layering through the air over and over and over again. Slowly I reached out to the mana permeating the air so thickly I could smell it, an overpowering scent at this point. It sat thickly in the back of my throat almost like a second layer of mucus. I condensed it slowly into the shape of my arm.
At this point, I had filtered tens of thousands of points of mana into this creation. Wood slowly started to build from my shoulder stretching out slowly, thousands of layers of wood intertwining building on each other to form something similar to a bone structure. All the while the Heart kept a steady hand over the mind, not entirely taking control. But also not letting me completely mess up and create something unusable.
I saw every instance of the arm being formed building up from miniscule to full size and strength. I could tell that the resulting arm would be usable, not perfect, but it was still a construct of worth. Not something the Elves would even consider as amateur artwork. But for a former human? I’d say I was at a good start for a first attempt. After minutes of hard arduous work, I finally reached my fingers. I noticed in the back of my mind I was sweating, almost profusely, from the effort.
I didn’t try to speed the process up though, I slowly developed each finger one at a time, not splitting my attention between the five extremities instead devoting unparalleled attention to each one individually. I made sure each one turned out the same level of quality as the rest of the arm, these would be the parts of the arm seeing the most use after all, it only made sense to make sure the delicate pieces were refined for fine motor use.
Or at least as close as I could get them at this current point in time.
And then, unceremoniously, I finished. The mana that had been so thick and cloying in the air had been completely used up. At the end of the operation, I had used over one hundred thousand points of mana in building this. If not perfect, it would at least be powerful if only for the quantity of mana crammed into it.
I noticed that I had missed a couple of pings while I was working.
‘Ping’ You’ve acquired a new skill [Wood Manipulation]
‘Ping’ [Wood Manipulation] Has leveled up 1 > 6
‘Ping’ [Disciple of Nature] Has leveled up 10 > 12
Interestingly, wood manipulation was a general skill and not a class one. I’d take it though, it left that slot free for something else more useful in the end.
“Alex, you good bud?”
I cringed and my vision instantly snapped up.
Garrus, Penny, Karif, and George all stood in front of me with slightly worried expressions.
I sputtered a bit before managing to get out, “Couldn’t you have knocked or something? Gave me a fucking scare!”
I took a deep breath to calm myself, it was more startling than anything, I hadn’t even heard them come in.
“We did… Alex, you've been sitting there forming that arm for three hours.” Penny said slowly.
“I… What…?”
Three hours? I turned around and looked up at the sun again, it was past noon at this point. Maybe. I wasn’t the best at judging time from looking at the sun.
It really had been several hours since I’d started. What even, how even? I faced forward again turning to look at my arm, I gave it a flex. It felt strange, it didn’t move as smoothly as I’d like but it would work well enough. I’d have to set aside dedicated time to practice with it and also practice making new arms.
Especially if it was gonna take hours for me to even form one arm and only get it to 75% efficacy.
“Hey! No! Don’t go focusing back on that arm again! Look here!” Penny slapped her hands on both sides of my face forcing my attention up to her.
“Focus here, Alex.” She stared intensely into my eyes.
I blinked and she smooshed my face a little harder, “Don’t blink, actually focus and pay close attention here. Trust me.”
I dumbly did as she said. Although I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me… Suddenly something in my mind snapped and it was almost like there was a fog in my mind that was suddenly wiped away.
She must’ve seen what she wanted to because she nodded and let go, taking a step back.
“There, feel better?”
“I… Yeah. What the hell…” I whispered mostly to myself, but they all heard me well enough.
“It’s like you were being controlled almost. I’ve seen similar effects in magic similar to hypnotism, although yours was… More refined? Different. Exceedingly strange and unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed before.” Karif stated to me.
I wasn’t sure how to take that. Now that I thought about it something similar had happened before, hadn’t it? I couldn’t quite place the memory right now, but I was certain something mildly similar had happened in another place.
I’d have to think about that.
“Well, we got everything figured out!” Penny loudly interrupted, “And you’ve been stuck in this room for long enough. So let's get you out of here and get something to eat to start with, 'cause if I’m starting to get hungry, you must be starving.”
She had me by the wrist and was yanking me up onto my feet. She was right about me being starving though.
My stomach let loose a rumble of epic proportions.
I let out a slightly exasperated sigh. “Yeah, I am pretty hungry. Let me get my shirt back on and we can split. I agree that I don’t want to stay here any longer as it is.”
“So you made yourself an arm replacement then? Do you actually plan to heal it at any point?” Karif asked me while leaning in a little to observe the arm.
“I would like to heal it at some point. Healing it when it gets ruined seems like it’ll eventually be more mana-efficient in the long run. I mean, this sucker took over 100 thousand points of mana to create. I’m still not even sure how durable it is compared to just my normal arm.”
I slowly fit my wooden arm through the sleeve just making sure nothing got caught on the fabric and tore. Given that my outfit hadn’t torn or burned up yet probably indicated it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, but I wasn’t going to start being careless now.
“Interesting, at the very least it should be extremely durable as it is. How did you even manage to fit that much mana into it? You couldn’t possibly have more than ten thousand points to work with?”
“I just kinda filtered mana through the air and then kept it compressed in the room before bringing it back and condensing it down into this form. I tried to just create a mirror image of my right arm and slap it onto the left side of my body. If you ignore color then I think I got pretty close. This is also ignoring the fact that while durable it’s not exactly capable of the same fine motor skills as my real arm is. Something to work on I think.”
I slowly flexed my fingers as I looked at the crafted arm I had. It still felt weird to use. Finicky, unreliable almost. Now that I had a few moments I wasn’t sure I was as proud of it as I was when I had just finished.
“You… What? You circulated mana through the air?” Karif had a completely dumbfounded look on his face, and so did Garrus, Penny, and George all kind of looked between us mildly concerned.
“Howdidyouevendothatthatshouldn’tevenbepossiblepeoplehavetriedtodosimilarthingsbeforebutit’sbeensaidtobeimpossibletocirculatemanalikethatunlessyoujusthavethemanapooltosupportitinthefirstplaceand-”
Karif had grabbed my shoulders and was rapid-firing sentences off faster than I had ever heard before. I inserted my good hand into his chest, getting him to give me some space.
“Whoa there cowboy, slowdown and maybe I can answer some questions. First, what do you mean it’s impossible unless you just have the mana pool to support the amount in the first place, isn’t that counterintuitive to mana control in the first place?”
Karif frowned, “What do you mean? You can only control what you have, how would you control what you don’t have to control? Once you fire an arrow it’s not like you can subsequently shoot it in a different direction.”
Ah, I see where the disconnect was happening. Maybe it was a less-than-stellar education on Karif's part. But I highly doubted I was the first to come up with this. If I wasn’t though, I had plans to not only revolutionize magic but to make a fat profit off of it as well. If they didn’t understand the concept of a mana-battery I could create those and maybe patent the idea if they had similar laws about things here.
I would have to see where the political differences between our two societies sat.
“I see what you’re saying. I’ll explain everything, let's do it over something to eat though. Sitting down will be nice cause I’m about to destroy your entire view of magic. Maybe. I at least see where the disconnect between what I’m saying and what you’re understanding is coming in, but I’m too hungry to get into a lecture right now.”
Karif looked like he wanted to say something and didn’t want to put it off, but he just sighed in turn. “Yeah, you’re right. Let’s get going.”
“Great! I thought this was never gonna end.” Penny exclaimed, clapping her hands together, “I’ve got a great place we can go to. The eggs there are to die for!”
Penny was right. The eggs here were killer. I was on my third serving and was inhaling them at record speeds. They had melted cheese over them and were even salted. I wasn’t sure how valuable salt was here, but in the Middle Ages of earth salt was an extremely valuable seasoning that only became commonplace due to more modern infrastructure.
Garrus was keeping pace with me eating just as much as I was although it seemed more casual for him rather than a competition. George looked amused at the rates we were putting them away.
The restaurant was essentially a breakfast-at-all-times kind of place. So there was sausage, bacon, bread, butter, all the stuff you could think would be breakfast foods were there. And it was divine.
Karif had an exasperated look, “Oh goddess, we have two of them. It was bad enough with just Garrus, but you too?”
Penny just laughed joyously. And that was certainly a pleasant sound to my ears.
“Hey, I haven’t eaten in several days from what I understand. I’m just catching up.” I snarked back to him.
That didn’t feel to be necessarily true though. While I had been hungry, it didn’t feel as ravenous as it would’ve been if I had still been human I would think. Normally just even going 12 hours without eating would’ve been enough to make me feel light-headed. But as it was I was just really hungry. Like I had just been waiting to eat a good dinner and had skipped a meal.
Karif just raised an eyebrow giving me a look that said he didn’t entirely believe me.
I just shrugged.
I quickly finished and ordered one more plate before leaning back, “Alright, I think I’m good to start talking now. So where was I?”
“You circulated mana despite having a mana pool below 10 thousand points?” Karif reminded me.
“Right right, if I remember your analogy at the time was if you fire an arrow you can’t subsequently shoot the arrow in a different direction as it’s already left, right?” I asked him.
He nodded slowly.
“You’re absolutely correct on that, let’s say that firing the arrow is the equivalent of casting a spell. I wouldn’t even say it’s impossible to alter a spell post-cast but it’s definitely not something I’m capable of currently to my knowledge. No, what I did was completely different. Instead of shooting the arrow, I juggled them.”
“That’s-” Karif very quickly interjected standing up before the realization dawned on him, “That’s… Insane… How would you even know to do that?”
I shrugged, “It just makes sense, I highly doubt it’s the most effective method in the book, but if I’m correct here there are a lot of ways I could make money off of this knowledge assuming someone else hasn’t already figured it out and capitalized on it.”
“What do you mean?” Garrus interjected, leaning forward and lacing his fingers together.
“Are you all familiar with the concept of a battery?” I asked.
They all shook their heads.
I nodded, “A battery is a thing that stores surplus energy to be used at a later point. That’s a gross oversimplification and not entirely accurate, but it is a facet of how they work and for our purposes will be enough.”
“I think I see where you’re going with this, is your plan to store surplus mana in these batteries to use to cast stronger more powerful spells than you would normally be able to do?” Karif was tapping a finger to his lips as he spoke.
“Bingo.” I snapped my finger and pointed finger guns at him.
“I really doubt I’m the first person to have come up with this idea, but if I am, let's try to keep it on the down low for now until I can capitalize on it. I’m not entirely sure how I’d go about storing mana in something. From fiction in my world, normally it’s done in crystals of various types with some being able to hold larger amounts than others. But that’s not a universal trope either.”
Garrus nodded slowly, “That seems like it could pan out, what do you want to do in the meantime then, if you are not working towards that?”
I lifted up my wooden arm to him, “I want to get this up to snuff. Right now it’s my first attempt, and while I’d like to think I did a first good attempt, I’m positive I can do better. I even got a skill that’ll help me with wood manipulation so my attempts will only get better. Especially as I get stronger and tier up.”
Garrus nodded approvingly before digging back into his food, “I’d definitely like to be around to help you with that. I’m interested to see what else you can pull off if you start thinking creatively.”
George also gave an emphatic nod towards me. Seemed like he was interested as well.
“Well, that can be put off for another time. For the rest of the day, you’re coming with me.” Penny said with a mischievous grin.
I frowned slightly around my eggs and toast.
“What do you mean? What are we doing?”
Her next words were the bane of nearly every man in existence, they struck fear into my heart as I realized my window of escape had already closed and I was being abandoned to fate. There would be no saving me from the torture that awaited me.
“We’re going shopping.”
I was doomed.
