by S Bailey
“Jen, you ready? I’ve finished the rods.” Sam called out from his workroom.
Jen came running into his workroom and excitedly said, “I’m ready; let’s do it!”
“That’s what she said!”
Jen groaned as she went to lay down on the bed. “Whatever, with your boomer pervert jokes, as long as you have the rods ready.”
“That’s what she said!” cackled Sam. Jen threw her shoe at him.
“You’re no fun sometimes, kid,” Sam said as he placed the enchanted rods around Jen’s body.
“I bet these rods will amp up my mana enough to allow me to reach all the way across the city with my psych power.” Jen said as she adjusted her mind into multi-focus. She then began meditating, circulating, and powering her mana with one mind, while preparing her mind’s second focus. She wanted a single blast of psych power to reach across the city.
A few minutes later while still directing her focus on the mana in her body, Jen said to Sam, “My mana feels like a raging torrent smashing around inside.”
Sam replied, “Focus on your mana, slowly use up or push out your old dirty mana and reach for the purified mana coming from these rods. When it is completely filtered, try to stop letting it escape out of your body.”
Sam tried imagining he could see where the mana was entering Jen. He imagined looking in Jen’s body for her mana like he looked at his muscles and tendons when healing them. He could sense the mana, and his gut told him, if he just kept trying, he would be able to see and inspect her mana.
Several minutes later he received a message for learning the mana inspection skill. Now Sam was able to actually watch as her mana entered the channels in her body and flowed to a pool in the middle of her chest right beneath her sternum.
He noticed the mana was having difficulty being absorbed and it was running into a channel of hers that was clogged, but he realized he needed to focus on the experiment, and said, “Jen, your mana is almost completely pure now.”
With a strained voice she replied, “I know, I can feel it. I’ve stopped letting it escape.”
Just then Sam noticed something strange happening with her clogged channel, but before he could say anything, the mana pushed through the clog and through the channel like a volcano erupting from under the ground. The channel opened, releasing the pressure that the mana was creating insider her.
“I did it!” Jen cheered as she read the stat sheet of a bartender she knew was working on the other side of the city that night. She sat up looking flushed and excited, but said “If I hadn’t been in multi-focus with meditation running, I could have lost control of that spell and injured myself from all that mana I was pumping out. Thankfully, I was able to immediately push all the mana into my ‘sonar ping’, and it worked great!... Ohhhh I just got enough experience points to make it to level 10! Whoa…I just received an unusual gambling quest. I declined it of course, but read it.”
System Message:
The Greater the Risk, the Greater the Reward!
==
Gambling Quest: Open your mana channels!
==
Requirements: Open your mana channels!
Within one year, open 12 mana channels – odds of failing 74% Reward of 8 ability points and euphoria for every ability point gambled, maximum bet of 3.
==
Accept: Yes/No
==
They typically quickly read and declined a multitude of stupid gambling quests they received every day, but sometimes the content of the quest contained clues they could use. Jen said to Sam, “Look at the payoff. The quest indirectly confirms there is some significant benefit for opening these channels inside our bodies.”
Sam was excited too, but said, “First, I want you to review the message I auto-forwarded you on mana inspection. Get into double focus with meditation and then think about looking at where the mana enters your body.”
It didn’t take long for her to get the skill with Sam’s guidance and her natural affinity with mana. To Jen’s delight, she believed that as a result of constantly manipulating mana while using her psych skill, she received a mana inspection skill level of 3, which was already higher than Sam’s.
Sam gave Jen a smile and a wink, “Good work, now calm down, focus on your mana flow, and take another look at the mana channel you just opened.”
Jen concentrated on the mana in her body, found the channel that ran down her left arm and then flowed all the way back to her center. Her mana channels made loops from her ‘mana core’ out into her body and back to the core again.
As she focused on guiding mana down the opened channel, she tightly gripped the arms of the chair she was sitting in, as the mana in her newly-opened mana channel caused her to go pale and dizzy, and almost pass out from the pain as the mana passed the area that had been clogged. She was sure this was a result of just blowing it open the way she did.
Jen took a deep breath of air into her lungs and also took a deep pull of mana into her system, but this time she only let a tiny trickle of mana into her new channel. She grabbed Sam’s shirt with a manic look in her eyes, and said, “DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS! We can train our bodies to increase our ability points in mana and mana regen! I’ve researched, eavesdropped, and spied on everyone in this city trying to find out how to increase mana and mana regen, and I’ve gotten nothing. The only thing I’ve been able to find out is that in higher Decks, the mana is so much better than on the First Deck, that Deck Dropping is like water-boarding yourself.” I’m forwarding you the system message I just received.
System Message: Your mana regen has been increased by 4.
Jen complained, “It’s so frustrating, the level 1 skills are easy to get, but if you don’t know to look for something, or to even try something, you don’t know what skills you are missing. I literally just gained two skills, the one skill for mana inspection, and another skill for mana manipulation, because just now, when I was inspecting my mana channels, I focused on controlling the flow of mana in my open channel to try and ease the pain.”
Sam responded by nodding and staring at his own core and channel for a few minutes. And then he said, “Yeah, I just got the mana manipulation skill, too.”
Jen looked uncertain as she said, “I know that if anyone learned we knew this much about mana channels, it would likely lead us to being kidnapped and tortured for this knowledge, but I would really like us to think about helping Tamako with her mana channels.”
Sam could tell that Jen was taking a real liking to Tomako and said, “I know she has been helping you train your fighting skills, and I’m not against the idea, but I think we should first wait and see what we learn about opening more mana channels, before discussing it with her.”
Jen knew that Sam was sincere with his answer and said, “Let’s get started on more channels!”
Chapter 35:
Mana Flow
Jen used her mana inspection skill to watch while she circulated her mana through her newly-opened channel.”
Sam was also inspecting her mana system, and said, “Right before you broke open your mana channel, I noticed your mana was just an uncontrolled torrent of power smashing around your core. When you kept pulling mana in without releasing any, your core and your channel filled until your channel burst open like a sewage line being cleaned out. I think this happened because the channel was mostly open, and the clog was a very small one at the end of the channel. You basically used brute force to smash open a small clog that was keeping you from circulating mana through the entire channel.”
“Do you see my other two channels that were already open and working?” replied Jen.
“Yea, what about them?”
“See how the walls of the channels are not smooth, but have some sort of grime building up that is slowing the flow of mana.”
“Yea, I see it.”
“Well, I think the grime or corruption that was blown out of my new mana channel has spread throughout my mana system impeding the f
low of mana elsewhere.”
Sam thought for a second as he watched her mana coursing through her channels, and asked, “Maybe there is a way to clean out the grime, or maybe there is another way can you open channels without smashing them open?”
Jen replied, “The gambling quest gave me a year with a pretty high return on my bet, but I still had over a 70% chance of failure, so I can’t imagine that there is some easy way to open them. Also, I can see another channel coming out of my center, but it looks like it only extends out an inch from my core and is 95% blocked with grime. I can’t see any other channels at all. There is so much grime along the walls of my core, it’s like looking for hidden doorways to find where the channels start.”
“How many channels do you think we even have?” Sam asked.
Jen replied, “Lay down; I want to look at where your mana channel is, and compare it to where mine are located.”
Jen grabbed the enchanted mana rods and placed them around Sam and said, “I’m going to try to talk as relaxing as possible, like a hypnotist, just listen to the sound of my voice. I want you to start meditating, don’t try to break your mana channels open and don’t try to bloat yourself with mana. I want you to simply focus on bringing in pure mana and pushing out the unfiltered dirty mana.”
After about an hour, Jen could see that Sam’s mana was about as pure as it was going to get, and she said, “We need to focus on the mana entering our bodies and start self-filtering all the time. Your mana looks very clean and pure, but your channel has gunk or build-up in it. It’s like someone’s artery that slowly fills up with cholesterol. Every time your unfiltered dirty mana bumps into your channel, a fractional amount of corruption is building up and thickening the channel like cholesterol blockages. If you burst open a channel, and that “dirt” is not removed from your mana system, I believe it just flows throughout your mana system, clogging everything up. It makes me wonder about how much build-up people who have lived here all their lives have.”
Jen made some adjustments to the location of the rods around Sam’s body, then said, “Now just relax all your muscles again and focus purely on the mana flowing through your body. Look at your center, where most of your mana is, it looks like a tangled fishing line of mana. Work on that fishing line. Try to untangle it and turn it into a smooth coil of line that runs from your center and smoothly spools out into your channel, through your channel, and back into the spool. Also, imagine your purified mana flowing through and against the sidewalls of your mana channel picking up the dirt and pushing that dirt out of the pores in your body. Make sure the corruption is pushed completely out of your system, I don’t want any of it clogging up other areas in your mana system.”
After a few hours of focused effort by Sam, Jen said to him, “I think you have removed all the loose dirty corruption in your channel and in your core. All I can see left is the hardened build-up in certain areas on your channel walls.”
“But look at my mana center along the walls where mana channels should be!” replied Sam.
“Wow, now that you’ve cleaned the major grime out, I can see the grimy circular spots indicating the entrance to where more mana channels should be. Their everywhere. There must be hundreds of them!”
“I know, and some of them are much larger than others. It’s a network of channels that make the circulatory system look simple!” replied Sam.
==
System Message
==
Mana filtering skill - level 1 Novice.
Mana system cleaning skill - level 1 Novice.
==
“Nice skill messages! Come out of your meditation and tell me your thoughts.”
Sam opened his eyes, but he didn’t look very rested, and said, “You can see I’m almost out of mana. I would have run out long ago without these enchanted rods. The good thing about almost running out of mana is that I was able to make more improvements to the tangled mana in my core as the total amount of mana decreased. The mana system cleaning skill allowed me to identify all the corrupted and dirty mana sticking to my mana system and scrub at it with my pure mana. My open channel feels raw but mostly clean.”
Jen nodded, and replied, “I see that, but look again at your open mana channel. Some of the areas that look dirty are actually clogged smaller channels that branch off your open channel.”
“My god this is going to take a lot of work to open all these channels. Well, anyways there is still some grime on the walls that is going to take repeated scrubbing, but I think it will eventually come clean. The corrupted dirty mana is ‘sticky’, and as I would get it to break free, I had to focus on getting it out of my system before it had a chance to stick to other areas in my mana system. However, I think it would take years to simply scrub at a clogged mana channel to get it open.”
Jen nodded her head in agreement while waving her hand in front of her nose and said, “Man! You stink like 2-week-old sweaty underwear from all the grime and corruption you pushed out of your body. Go shower and rest. I need to lay down, purify my mana, and start scrubbing the corruption out of my system.”
Sam showered, but he didn’t go to sleep. He said to his empty room, “Kelly, I need to use those rods I was holding back for that other experiment to immediately make more of these mana purification rods, and then place them around our bodies while we sleep. I think after all that Jen has done today, there is no way she is going to be able to focus on mana purification while she is sleeping.”
It was almost morning when Sam finished the purification rods. He had heard Jen head to the showers about an hour earlier. Sam went to Jen’s room and found her passed out asleep, and he placed the rods around her body before heading to his room and placing some around his own body, and then going to sleep himself.
The rods were not really staying in place too well, but Sam planned on enchanting some gold bracelets and chains with a mana purification enchantment, to wrap around their wrists and necks until they could train themselves to naturally purify their mana all the time.
Gold was a great conductor of mana for enchantments. “Kelly, Jen’s going to go through the roof when I tell her how much we are going to need to spend!”
The system informed Sam his mana regen had increased by 4 points, and his mana pool increased by 2 points for partially untangling the pool in his center. He saw a system message Jen forwarded him where she had increased her mana regen another 3 points from cleaning up corruption and also increased her mana pool by 2 points. Sam thought, “Good, she is untangling the mana pool in her center as well.”
Chapter 36:
Garbage Disposal
Jen woke up before Sam, and she thought, “I need to expand my multi-focus skill from double focus into triple focus. I need to be able to use part of my mind for mana filtering 100 percent of the time.”
Jen sat still and split her mind between meditation, which was almost second nature to her now, and her new mana purification skill. She found that she could keep these two skills going indefinitely with her speed of mana regeneration. The problem was, she thought her mana regeneration should have been much higher after opening a mana channel, but the filtering of her mana slowed down the regeneration and made her pull harder at the surrounding ambient mana.
She had to draw much more dirty ambient mana to filter out enough clean mana to fully operate her mana system.
Jen thought, “My mana system is much more powerful with the purified mana and clean mana, but even with my new open channel, I am only drawing in about 90% of the mana I drew in before. With Sam’s purification and mana collection rods laying around my body, I can get close to full regeneration going, but I can’t simply tape those on my body.”
After a few hours of simply meditating and mana filtering, Jen split into a third focus to simultaneously use her mana cleaning skill. The meditation was calming; the mana filtering was repetitive and boring, but the mana cleaning required constant focus of her mind to guide her mana through her mana system to scrub and
remove corruption deposits.
It was kind of like driving a car, while listening to a very boring book on tape, and also, eating a taco without making a mess. At first, you’re making a mess, but then, as you eat tacos while driving and listening to the book over and over again, you eventually figure out how to eat the taco without making a mess and then eventually, doing all three becomes second nature.
Several hours later Jen was getting mentally tired keeping up her triple focus and took a break. She noticed Sam walking around the house and said, “You are so country; did you really just tie those rods around your chest?”
Sam responded with a grunt. “You’re just jealous you didn’t think of it!”
Jen laughed at him and said, “You just keep telling yourself that, Boomer!”
Sam did feel stupid and didn’t even try to think of a comeback; he just changed the subject. “I feel like I have been taking half breaths all night and morning. I just can’t keep my mana regeneration up without these rods right next to me.”
Jen walked over to Sam and started to inspect his mana channel and told him, “We are going to open another one of your mana channels today. Yesterday, when my mana channel burst open, I shoved all my mana into a spell. Today, if we are able to smash open one of your mana channels, I want you to be ready to take that built up mana and push it into your “mana system cleaning skill” and sweep up all the corruption from the opened channel, and expel it from your system as quickly and completely as possible.”
Sam nodded his head in agreement but said, “Before we start, I was thinking about how surgeons use stints to allow blood to flow through blocked veins, or how plumbers use augers to open clogged pipes.”