Next Chapter 10

  I woke up in bed again. I was really confused because I couldn’t remember what it was like to go through the portal. It was like everything immediately went blank the second my head passed through.

  I got out of bed and found I was still wearing the same clothes I had on before I went through the portal back to Earth. -Starting to love linen.

  As soon as I was done cooking something for breakfast and cleaning up, I was back in the study, continuing my deep dive into the books. There were a couple of key things I needed to figure out.

  The first was: now that I could semi-direct the mana into my cores, what exactly was I supposed to do with it? I knew there were a lot of things you were supposed to be able to do—the books had given me plenty of examples—but none of them explained how.

  As it turns out, the very next book I picked up gave me my first real hint.

  It focused on cultivation methodology rather than magician techniques. The first task it gave was to concentrate on creating a ball of mana in the palm of my hand. Once I could form a condensed sphere of roughly one type of mana—easier said than done—I was supposed to begin learning how to compress it further, into a smaller, more refined version.

  Let me tell you, it was like a toddler learning to color inside the lines for the first time. I had a strong suspicion that most kids in this world started learning this stuff around five years old. But hey, we all start somewhere. After spending the better part of two and a half days figuring it out without letting other mana types mix in, I could finally manage the task in just over thirty seconds.

  I expected I’d have to keep practicing this a lot more, but I wanted at least a basic understanding of what I was doing. That was when the book told me to let the mana dissipate after I’d compressed it as much as I could. Under no circumstances was I supposed to use it yet.

  It was very clear about this. The phrase “bad things” was underlined. And then, naturally, Javier had added his own handwritten note: BAD THINGS!!! With his own set of bold underlines and multiple exclamation points.

  Of course he did.

  Reading further, and this was honestly the first semi-regular-sized book that had more than twenty pages, it advised me to practice with different types of mana—specifically those that were scarce in the environment I was in.

  By the next day—my reading chair getting the workout of its life—I had managed to pull specific mana types into my hand and compress them from the size of a beach ball to a marble in about fifteen seconds. Not bad for just four days of work. Honestly, it didn’t even feel like four days. The concentration was so addictive that hours would go by and feel like minutes. I’d forget to eat lunch, only realizing it was past midnight when my stomach started complaining.

  My appetite was still nuts, but it wasn’t nearly as intense as it had been on Earth. The local mana was definitely helping sustain the developing cores. I only figured that out after finishing the next book.

  Turns out, cores need time to “solidify” during the first year. Until then, you can strengthen them by feeding them as much mana—and as many types of mana—as possible until they reach a saturation point and crack (for lack of a better word). After that, the rest of the core hardens, becoming almost impenetrable.

  That’s also when I learned magic users are incredibly vulnerable during that first year. Usually, kids are kept hidden away and practically force-fed mana to help accelerate the process.

  Taking that little gem of knowledge to heart, I resolved to be very, very careful—and not let anyone know how recently I’d started learning magic.

  Continuing my study, the next thing I had to learn was how to imbue mana into an object. This was supposed to be remarkably easy—on the condition that you didn’t put mana into an incompatible material.

  I had to figure that part out for a bit.

  Turns out, water and fire do not go together. Not unless you're dealing with pure elemental mana types, and even then, you wouldn’t put water mana into a fire-aspected item—or fire mana into a water-aspected one—unless you’d learned a specific trick that, of course, was going to be taught later in the books. Yada yada, manual.

  I wasn’t about to dig too deeply just yet. I was pretty sure if I did, I’d just complicate things and end up exploding a chair or something. All I knew was that I needed to be very careful not to, say, put wood mana into metal—or metal mana into wood—and so on. There was a lot of “so on.”

  It was pretty hit or miss, honestly. There was a whole section—no, four entire books—dedicated solely to which mana types shouldn’t mix with what materials. I had zero hope of memorizing more than a couple of the super-basic combinations.

  And here’s the kicker: at the end of the very first book, it straight-up said that once you advanced far enough, none of it would apply anymore.

  Yeah. That made me want to throw the book across the room.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  After calming myself down from that little revelation, I decided there had to be a point to this and started practicing for half the day.

  I started with nature mana—or wood mana, or whatever you want to call it—and tried to imbue it into a stick. At first, it didn’t want to go in. I kept trying to force it, and that went nowhere. Frustrated, I pulled another book from the pile and got my answer.

  Turns out, you couldn’t just push the mana in.

  There was a technique, something kind of like rubbing oil into skin or gently pouring water into a sponge. It seemed like a contradiction, but I gave it a shot. And—of course—it worked.

  Which frustrated me even more, because that meant there were a bunch of different techniques just for getting things to interact properly.

  To put it simply, it was like trying to get water from an ice cube into a cloth. You couldn’t bang the cube into the cloth. You could crush the ice into smaller bits, let them melt, and then the water would soak into the fabric. But forcing the cube in? Nope. Not happening.

  All the mana types had their own version of this weird logic depending on the material. And one of the reasons you were warned not to combine opposing mana types was because—just like in real life—opposites attract.

  But here, when opposites attract? Mana slams in so fast it overloads the object before it can absorb it—and it causes an explosion.

  Most of the time, these were just tiny pops or ruined materials. Annoying, but manageable.

  Other times—like the examples listed in book six—there were at least twenty combinations that were flat-out “do not try this unless you’re trying to decorate your walls with shrapnel.”

  The author put it succinctly:

  “Causes super big boom.”

  That was literally the entire explanation. Honestly? It said all I needed to hear.

  For the next two days, I got familiar with the different effects of putting mana into specific things. Wood became nearly indestructible. Metal became stronger—depending on what kind of metal mana you used—or even springy if you were going for a different effect with a lighter metal-type mana.

  I experimented with everything from eggs to paper to different vegetables, cloth, and water. And I got some pretty cool results.

  One of my favorite results was what happened when you put water mana into water. Depending on how you did it, you’d get one of two effects.

  The first result was ice. Like, instantaneous ice. And not just regular ice either—it was super-condensed, hard-as-steel ice that melted slowly. I made a bucket full of it and left it out in direct sunlight. By the end of the day, just before sunset, there was still about 50% of the ice left in the bucket.

  The other result? I called it super hydration. Every sip felt like the kind of refreshing drink you'd dream about after a five-mile jog. It cooled you off, gave you a boost of energy, and made you feel like you could take on the world.

  After getting what I felt was a good understanding of condensing and imbuing mana into objects, I moved on to the next technique I needed to learn:

  Distillation.

  When I read the word, I was thinking alcohol or something like it—but it turned out to be more similar to condensation. After compressing mana into as tight a form as possible, you had to make this... mental shift. That’s the only way I can describe it. The book went into a whole “blah blah blah mental state alignment blah blah intention” explanation, but the truth was simpler: it just clicked.

  It caused the mana to shift into a physical form—like wood, water, plant matter, stone, or even materials I couldn’t fully identify. Some of them were just these strange uniform substances I had never seen before. And no, you didn’t misread that—I couldn’t put into words how the shift worked. It was just something that happened when you pushed your mind the right way.

  It’s equivalent to walking. You don’t think about how your legs move; they just do. You don’t know how you know, you just know—and it works.

  I got a decent handle on the technique, but it was mana-intensive, which meant it wore me out fast. After five days of practicing on every material I could think of with every kind of mana I could find, I had a literal pile—three feet high—of different mixed materials on the kitchen table. Following the motto of waste not, want not, I threw it all into my personal storage.

  That’s when I made a surprising discovery.

  I could instinctively feel that every material I had placed in storage could now be retrieved as mana. If I wanted them to come out as their original material, I could. If I wanted them to come out as raw mana, they would. Somehow, I had created what I could only describe as the equivalent of a mana battery—which was distinctly different from a mana crystal.

  After practicing calling mana from my storage like that, I moved on to the next technique, which was even more daunting:

  A regeneration technique.

  Unfortunately, the way to learn this involved—yet again—mana crystals.

  But of course, you'd say, “Jake, don’t worry about it. You’ve done this before. It’s gotta be different from the first time.”

  It was not.

  If anything, I figured out why you had to do it that way. This time, when I popped the crystal in my mouth and bit down on the leather strap, I waited the thirty seconds and focused very deliberately on how my body started absorbing mana.

  You see, this time was different. I wasn’t bombarding my body with mana for the first time, trying to shock it into an accepting state. This time, I was just flooding my body and the area around me with an insane amount of mana from the crystal. That might not sound super different—but when you feel like you’re being electrocuted and your head’s exploding versus just feeling absolutely crushed, you start to understand the difference.

  Both were extremely painful.

  And the worst part? I didn’t pass out this time.

  Through the pain, which was gradually lessening, I could feel the pressure on my skin, in my cores, and inside my mouth. I could feel how my body reacted differently to the increased mana in the air. I focused on that shift.

  Again, this was one of those times where your body just does something. You don’t know why it works—you just know it does.

  The closest example I can give is changing your posture. You go from being hunched over to standing tall, shoulders back, arms loose, legs shoulder-width apart. It wasn’t a perfect simile, but mentally, I could feel the difference.

  I’d still absorb mana either way—but when I was internally postured correctly, the mana flowed like a river.

  And not just like a river. It was the difference between a small stream or brook and Niagara Falls.

  Because there was enough mana to create that pressure, my cores started sucking it up greedily. This wasn’t like the first time where they just activated and kept drinking it in—it was the difference between a newborn baby guzzling from a bottle and the legendary Oktoberfest drinking contest.

  After learning this method of absorption and regeneration, I finally understood why they referred to those crystals as “low capacity.”

  Which was insane.

  Moving on to the next building block of becoming a mana-wielding badass, I came across my first real difficulty.