Sitting down he focused on the feelings inside of him. There was a tingle, just like on his skin. Harder to sense, but definitely there. Pushing and prodding at the feeling, he eventually worked out that it would respond to his thoughts. That confused Nate. Why would it respond to his thoughts? How could the act of thinking influence it? Or was it just his imagination? Either way, he kept pushing at it slowly building up the feeling in his finger with the silver ring on it. His finger slowly started to feel like it was burning as he pushed at the mana and Nate got the sense that it wasn’t enough. Instead, he willed the mana from his finger into the ring.
In his mind bloomed a sense of the ring and its dimensions. Multiple thoughts went through Nate's mind immediately. The first was that he was no longer a poor kid from the suburbs. Nate wasn’t sure what Arikanvil thought was needed to fund a human but the pile of gold in one corner of the dimensional storage would’ve been enough to buy a house with change to spare back on Earth. He’d have to see how far that would stretch on this planet, but he figured he was pretty well off for the time being.
Beyond that, there was a closed book, likely the one with details about where his Dead Realm lay. Finally, Nate counted twenty thumb-sized, diamond shaped gems in a small pile, all glowing with mana. The mana gems glowed in the colours of the rainbow, and he focused on a pale blue one. As he did so he felt it vanish from his mental perception before appearing in his hand.
Nate had expected it to burn his skin, being concentrated with mana, but whatever the gem was made from seemed to be able to seal the mana inside. Bringing the pale blue gem close to his face, Nate looked over it. Inside he could just barely make out some shapes that must be runes. So that was how it worked he thought. Then how do I get the mana out? It had just been pushing on it mentally when the mana was inside of him. Could it be that simple?
Nate focused on releasing a sliver of mana from the gem, pushing mentally against the mana. After a minute of nothing happening he brought the gem back up to his eyes, turning it over slowly. It didn’t take long to find what he was after. There were two small runes, joined by a line, carved into the outside of the gem near one of the tips. Reading them it was easy to tell what they did.
The first had a few sigils that amounted to Rebuff and Mana . The second had the sigil of an up and down arrow connected by a line which Nate could tell meant Both Directions and a sigil that meant Release . So, clearly, the second rune, when activated, would release mana from inside the gem. The first rune Nate realised was to prevent the second rune from activating due to ambient mana. Nate liked that idea. Seemed basic to him but clever at the same time.
The lines also showed him how he could connect runes and make them interact with each other. Nate focused on the second rune and put his finger near it, trying to mentally pull at the mana around his finger and draw it towards himself. As he did so the tingling on his finger increased slightly at first. Moments later he felt a torrent of mana come out of the Both Directions rune. The rush of mana made him lose his focus and the gem instantly stopped releasing mana. For a moment Nate basked in the joy of figuring out how to work with the mana gem. The moment passed quickly, and he looked back down at the two runes on the mana gem.
That little experiment had given Nate an idea and he put the gem down gently before climbing up to his nook to grab his pocketknife. Picking up the gem from the stone floor, he moved over to a decently intact piece of vine that was close to the size of his hand. Nate got to work on it, slowly carving the wood till it was flat enough for him to carve a rune into it. Taking his time to recreate the Barrier rune again, Nate made the rune smaller so he could fit two runes on the wood.
Sweating slightly by the time he had finished, Nate wiped his forehead with his arm. He was going to need another bath in the lake at this rate. The rune looked the same as the last Barrier rune he had drawn, and no System message popped up to tell him he’d improved the quality. He was clearly missing something on that front.
Nate shrugged and got to work on the second rune. Copying from the rune on the gem that blocked mana from entering the rune, he recreated the lines connecting the two rings as he carved the geometric shapes and tiny sigils into the wood. Nate took his time, and his arm was aching by the time he was finished. As he did so another System message flickered at the edge of his vision.
Congratulations on creating a Mana Exclusion Rune (Journeyman Quality).
Your achievement has been recorded.
Walk your Path. Reach your Goal. Become One with Mana.
Nate smiled with pleasure at the acknowledgement. But that wasn’t why he’d done it. Holding the mana gem against the barrier rune, Nate focused on the two Mana Exclusion runes. It took some effort to split his focus between the two but eventually he got the trick of it and mentally pulled the mana away from them, effectively turning off the Mana Exclusion runes. Two things happened in quick succession.
Mana blasted out of the gem into his Barrier rune, and then, a moment later, his hand and the gem was pushed away from the rune on the wood. That broke his focus and the mana stopped leaking out of the mana gem. Nate leaned over the piece of wood which now looked like it was hovering a thumbs length off the stone floor. Poking it gently with his finger he was stopped the same thumbs length above the wood by an invisible barrier. Exploring it with his hand, he found it to be a perfect invisible sphere around the wood. Closing his hand around it, he picked it up, holding onto the barrier as the wood stayed in the centre. It seemed if the barrier was moved so was the object inside. To Nate that seemed like something worth remembering. I wonder how tough this barrier is?
He turned and threw the barrier sphere gently at the wall. Tracking the piece of wood, Nate watched it almost hit the wall then fall back to the floor, bouncing once before settling, still hovering with the barrier intact. Nate tried again, picking it up and throwing it as hard as he could at the wall. Again, it rebounded off the wall without any sign of damage, bouncing a few more times on the floor this time. The third throw was enough to break the barrier and Nate found there was no release of mana that he could feel. He smiled though. There had been a few answers to a couple of his questions.
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Firstly, it looked like the barrier was absorbing some of the force when impacted. It hadn’t bounced nearly as much as Nate had expected it to. It certainly wasn’t like throwing a tennis ball at a wall. Secondly, the impacts had depleted the mana, somehow expending it. The wood was still intact as were the runes.
The problem had been the Barrier rune he had created used the All-Directions sigil. Nate was guessing, but he thought that such sigils could be used to guide the shape of the barrier created. The All-Directions sigil was four arrows pointing outwards evenly distributed with two lines connecting them and intersecting. With a little experimenting, Nate found that if he did a single arrow he seemed to be able to recognize the meaning. A left arrow meant Left Direction . A right arrow for Right Direction . Seemed straightforward to him. Time to get to work.
Nate found another piece of wood and began creating the Barrier and Mana Exclusion rune again, this time with the Barrier rune shaped sporting a Left Direction sigil. Losing track of time, he was covered in sweat by the time he had finished his second attempt. The lack of a System message was notable to Nate and he figured the direction sigils weren’t the important part of a Barrier rune and he was just making minor modifications to its shape which the System didn’t consider significant.
Activating the new rune with his mana gem Nate felt the mana get absorbed into the rune. Testing it with his hand, he found there was a barrier projecting out of the left side of the wood. Running his hand over it he found it was a half sphere in shape, as though the barrier directly projected from the left of the Barrier rune like a hose spraying outwards.
Holding his mana gem against the rune and increasing the amount of mana injected into it, he could feel the barrier grow in size until it was bigger than his head. As he did so, he felt the wood begin to grow hotter in his hand and, in a panic, threw it into the hallway and ducked behind the statue. A moment later he heard the sound of another explosion. Rubbing his ringing ears, Nate walked out and looked down at the small indent in the dirt floor in the corridor where the wood had exploded. Small fragments of the piece of vine were all over the corridor. That explained the explosion earlier.
It also gave him an idea. It was time to see about getting some food. Nate put on his hoodie and grabbed the mana gem and his pocketknife. He noted the mana gem’s brightness hadn’t decreased by much before tucking them both into his pockets and setting off down the corridor towards the valley. Pausing at the exit of the temple, he took in the area again. It truly was beautiful, he thought. Picturesque is how he would have described it to someone. Taking a moment to scan the valley, Nate couldn’t spot any disturbances in the lake, though he did spot a few of the boars on the other side of the valley, away from the forest below him.
Trekking down into the trees carefully, he found what he was after fairly quickly. A fallen log, a few metres in length, in between a cluster of trees. Nate began painstakingly carving into the log, stripping back the bark till he had wood to work with before carving his Barrier rune into it. He contemplated including a Mana Exclusion rune but decided it didn’t matter that much if the log overloaded. He’d just run away if he felt the heat begin to rise. He was getting faster at his rune carving and after he was happy with the result he tested them, injecting just a little mana into the Barrier rune from his mana gem.
It worked perfectly, creating a small hand width barrier on the side of the log facing away from him. Nate nodded, pleased. His plan was simple enough. He was going to try and lure one of the boars to him, then overload the barrier rune and try to make the fallen log explode. He figured it should work. If the log didn’t explode he’d have the barrier between the boar and him. If it did work it should be enough to kill the boar, right? His stomach grumbled hopefully.
Nate settled in next to the log to wait. The last boar had been able to smell him. Hopefully the next would too. He knew that the noise of the explosion would either attract more animals, or, at least, potentially attract any other predators. But he figured he’d have time to grab the boar, stuff it in his spatial storage and flee the scene of the crime before that became an issue. He wasn’t sure how long he waited, but eventually he heard the snuffling sound of a boar approaching. Looking over the top of the log, he could see the creature enter the little copse of trees. Nate focused and began charging the Barrier rune. The heat coming off the wood happened quicker than expected and Nate freaked out, jumping up to run. The boar noticed and squealed loudly as it began to charge at him. Nate sprinted in the opposite direction towards one of the trees, ducking behind it at the last moment before the roar of the explosion almost deafened him and wood splinters flew everywhere.
Rubbing his ears for the third time since he’d woken up today, he peeked around the tree. The log was mostly demolished, and the boar was lying off to the side on the grass. Nate smiled, about to cheer, but then he heard a huff from the creature. It slowly climbed back to its feet as Nate stared in horror. The side of the boar was a mess of small cuts, and it looked like the splinters had taken out an eye, but the beast was still raring to go. It shook its head a few times before its remaining red eye focused on Nate.
Nate's already elevated heart rate spiked, and he immediately started trying to climb the tree. Pulling himself up to the lowest branch, he screamed as he almost fell off the branch when the whole tree rocked. Looking down, Nate saw the boar backing up for another charge and lunged for the trunk of the tree, hugging it for all he was worth as the tree shook again from the impact. Glancing down, Nate realised the tree had started to slant.
The boar was preparing to charge again, and Nate’s panicked mind tried to come up with a scenario where this didn’t end up with him as pig food. Pulling out the mana gem and his pocketknife in desperation, he scratched down the side of the gem over both runes as hard as he could with the blade, leaving a scratch through two of the sigils and messing up the geometric shapes of the runes in the process. Cracks began to form along the inside of the gem, and it instantly started to burn his hand. Nate held onto it only long enough to throw it at the boar.
Landing at its feet, the boar bent down to sniff the gem before it exploded with such force that Nate was lifted out of the tree and thrown backwards to the forest floor below. He landed on his back, rolling once before coming to a rest on the grass. Scared the boar was still coming, he quickly shot back to his feet only to look over and see a crater waist deep where the gem had been. Nate frantically searched for the boar and as he spotted it across the clearing from him, he felt mana rush into him in a large wave.
The pressure from the mana burrowing into him hurt almost as much as it had on the research station, but thankfully lasted only a few seconds before fading. Nate shook himself to clear his head from the pain and focused on the corpse of the boar, because it was definitely a corpse this time. The front half of the beast was almost completely gone with only the back end remaining relatively intact.
Flashing at the edge of his vision demanded Nate’s attention, but he couldn’t stay here. Rushing over to the remains of the boar he placed one of his hands on it. The hair was coarser than he expected, and this close, the smell of offal, burnt meat and the stench of the pig assaulted his nose. Quickly focusing on his silver ring, he pictured the remains of the creature in the dimensional storage. A moment later it vanished. With that Nate broke into an awkward run, his balance thrown off from the explosion, heading back to his nook and what he hoped was safety.