Chương 43: Mana Well

The mana well was another stone circle. Jonny stopped and gaped when they emerged into the clearing where it was located. It was not identical to the one by the orphanage, but it was clearly done in the same style. It had the same circular stone table in the center, and an assortment of broken pillars surrounding it. These ones were actually more damaged than the ones in the woods, but Jonny assumed that's because this mana well was stronger, and therefore the magic beasts that fought over it were also stronger.

While he stopped and stared, Igrette limped past him, still clutching her side.

"Does every mana well have one of these stone circles?" he asked, running after her. Igrette didn't respond. She just limped on until she reached the stone table, practically collapsing onto it. Jonny rushed to her side right as she groaned and pulled herself all the way on and rolled over, flopping onto her back.

"Igrette?" asked Jonny.

"We should be safe… for a little while…" She took a long, dragging breath.

"I'm going to sleep. Practice your mana."

"O– okay." She closed her eyes, and began breathing rhythmically, doing what seemed to be a weaker version of what Tommy did to form his core layer. He could sense the mana flowing into her as she lay there, and even after a few minutes passed, it did not stop. Jonny wondered if she was actually asleep, or just meditating or something, but he wasn't foolish enough to ask at this moment. If she was asleep, though, he would have to ask her how to do that later. If there is a later…

The thought came unbidden to his head, and he quickly waved it away. Igrette was in bad shape, but they had taken over a mana well. She could heal herself properly. She would be doing better when she woke up, and if they stuck around longer, she'd just keep getting better. His biggest worry was that if they stayed in one place too long, they'd become sitting ducks for their pursuers, but they had been moving so slowly lately that if they hadn't been caught already, they had probably successfully gotten away.

Not that they could safely return to civilization, but they could afford to take a break here for a little while. He didn't want to let Igrette out of his sight, in case something happened to her, or some other kind of magic beast showed up, so he picked a spot between two of the ancient stone pillars and sat down to start doing his breathing. In the time that he had been in the mountains, before Igrette's health had gotten worse, they had developed a kind of training regimen for him.

Or at least a checklist of things for him to do. He had three major goals at the moment. The first was to strengthen his body to the point that he could handle the full force of his mana. He hadn't even been able to do that back before he reached this pseudo-first layer state, and now he couldn't even handle his inert mana.

The silver lining was that his denser mana seemed to affect his body much more strongly than it used to, so simply doing the breathing technique where he let the mana expand into his body was more than enough for his purposes. He had already gotten to the point of being able to use just under half his mana during normal strengthening. Still a long way to go before he could safely use his full mana, let alone the more condensed kind, but at this rate, it would only be a couple more months.

He'd be able to do it by the time spring rolled around. The second goal was mastering the ability to deliver mana to specific body parts. He needed to be able to enhance every bone, muscle, tendon, ligament, and organ individually. Only once he could reliably do that could he start training in proper internal mana techniques.

He was the most excited for this goal, because even just meditating sitting still, he could already feel the potential in mastering this ability, just when passively enhancing individual muscles. He couldn't wait to start chaining it together. That would be a while, though, because while his progress wasn't slow, this was easily the most tedious and boring thing to train.

Going from his toes to the top of his head and taking the time to enhance each body part individually one at a time was an enormous pain in the ass. And even worse, he couldn't even let his mind wander like he could when he was doing his breathing. He needed complete and utter focus, which was something he usually couldn't maintain for long. He had yet to make it through his entire body in one sitting.

He would usually get a quarter of the way or so before getting bored and deciding to pick up where he left off later. The third goal was, of course, internal gravity magic. It was the most frustrating of the three, since he hadn't made an ounce of progress, and he had no idea how to make progress. Igrette had said it was like pressing a dull needle into fabric. At some point, if he pushed far enough, it would just suddenly go through, and he would get it. He just wished that moment would come sooner.

Sitting on the ground beside Igrette, he quickly passed through the first two pieces of training. While he did the first, he also focused on processing the mana he had stolen from the deer. He hoped to find some insight into converting it into his own more quickly, but it was all gone before he could figure something out. When it came time to work on gravity magic, he tried a variety of different methods, starting with just concentrating like Igrette taught him to.

He then moved on to raising his arms, and letting them fall, trying to feel the gravity better, and use that to visualize that. That didn't work either, so he started dropping things and watching them plop into the snow. He then got distracted for a little while, trying to drop sticks into certain ways to make patterns in the snow. In the end, he somehow found himself climbing up the stone pillars and jumping down, trying to will himself to fall faster as he did.

This didn't help at all, but it was kind of fun, especially when he gave up on gravity magic entirely and just started jumping from pillar to pillar. Periodically, he would head over to check on Igrette, making sure she was still breathing properly and didn't look like she was getting sick or anything. She always looked the same, calmly absorbing mana as he slept, which was a relief. He couldn't deny that the idea of her not waking up again had crossed his mind, but at the moment, she seemed to be doing well.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. Hours passed, and soon it was time to stop "training" and be more productive. Jonny leapt from one side of the stone circle to the other, from one pillar to another, but he overshot his target, and ended up tumbling through the snow behind it.

He was strong and durable enough at this point that this did not hurt at all, but when he came to a stop, he stayed sitting in the snow for a few seconds, looking up at the sky in thought. The sun was starting to set, and now that he thought about it, he was actually pretty hungry. With a sigh, he pushed himself to his feet, and started looking around for fallen branches and logs to use as firewood. When sunset rolled around, he had a fire going near the stone table, and a few deer steaks roasting on sticks.

Igrette was still asleep, but that was fine by him. Before the sunset changed the colors of the world, she seemed to be regaining a bit of color in her cheeks, and he wasn't sure if he was just imagining it, but her breathing seemed to be stronger too. He continued his breathing technique practice as he stared into the fire, and soon spaced out so much that he didn't notice when Igrette woke up.

"Careful," she said.

"You'll burn them." Jonny flinched, and looked up to see her sitting on the edge of the stone table, sliding down to the ground by the fire. Jonny gave her a relieved smile before reaching out to turn the deer steaks. They had indeed gotten a little crispy on the side facing the fire, but they weren't past saving.

"Are you feeling better?" asked Jonny.

"Yes and no," said Igrette.

"I feel better now that I have mana, but I haven't healed any."

"Oh."

"I'll be able to do that tonight, though," she continued.

"When you sleep, I'll stay up and focus on healing."

"Are you sure?"

"I got plenty of sleep just now. And we definitely need to be keeping watch while we're here." She reached out to grab one of the wooden skewers and tore a bite of steak off with her teeth. The meat was definitely not ready yet, but she didn't seem to care, chewing through the raw meat while letting out a satisfied sigh. Jonny watched her, then reached out for the other skewer, but she stopped him.

"Don't. You'll get sick. You shouldn't eat wild game raw."

"But–""I can do it because my digestive system is strong enough to handle it. You have to be patient." A few minutes of silence passed as Igrette ate her meat, and Jonny moved his closer to the fire so it would cook faster. Right around when Igrette finished hers, his was finally ready, and it was Igrette's turn to watch him eat.

"I actually almost died eating bad meat once," she said as he took his first bite. I guess it's story time, thought Jonny.

"This was during that time I spent in the mountains after my teacher abandoned me," she continued. Those mountains were nowhere near as dangerous as these ones. Looking back, they were more of hills, really. And they were much closer to real human civilization, so there wasn't anything particularly powerful there. I doubt there was anything stronger than second layer in that entire region. But at the time, it felt like I had been tossed right into hell.

"He left me with about a week's worth of rations, and nothing else but a sword that probably wasn't much bigger than that knife I gave you. He said if I wanted to eat anything else, I would have to kill it myself.

"And I did. I adapted surprisingly quickly. I guess that's the reason he even considered leaving me out there alone like that. If I wasn't the type, I probably would have died. Even then, I almost died, but not for the reason you might be thinking.

"I was a bit of a feral child, which is why my parents gave me to my teacher. I was a troublemaker that they wanted to get rid of, and I had already hunted my fair share of small animals. Now that I think about it, they might have been right to be worried about me. My teacher called me a natural killer, but I don't think that's something that any five year old should be.

"Anyway, shortly after he disappeared, I found my prey. It was a deer, similar to the ones we just killed, but weaker, and it was alone. At the time, alone meant easy prey to me, so I didn't think twice about killing it for food. I hid in a tree and dropped down from above, using gravity magic to strengthen my sword and cut its head off in one go.

"I cut it up, took some meat, cooked it over the fire, and took it off too early. It was still raw in the middle, but I didn't care. I had never properly learned why eating raw meat was bad, and I was hungry.

"I learned that night that there was a reason that deer was alone. It was probably diseased, and I had eaten the meat raw. That was the closest I ever came to death, and it left me weak afterward. I barely made it out of the mountains and back to my teacher, and it took me two weeks to fully recover afterward." Jonny nodded along as she spoke, trying to picture the story. He couldn't picture a young Igrette.

To him, she was a scarred old lady with a sword, and trying to make her younger and not scarred just turned her into a generic child. When she called herself "feral" his mental image of her turned into something cartoonish, with dirt on her face and holes in her clothes, and when she talked about killing small animals, it turned into something more like a horror film, with a creepy, blank-faced child cutting small animals up.

He was pretty sure neither image was quite correct, but it was kind of funny to think about. Igrette leaned back further, sighing as she looked up into the starry sky.

"My teacher was an asshole. Back then, as soon as I was old enough, I ran away and never looked back. But ever since we got into these mountains, my mind keeps going back to him…" She didn't say anything else after that, and after a few minutes, she got back up onto the stone table and started doing what Jonny assumed was healing. He finished his own dinner while thinking about what she said. The story was somewhat interesting, but what caught his attention more was the fact that she had told it at all.

She was never the storytelling type back at the orphanage, but she was growing more talkative now that it was just the two of them. Part of Jonny was worried. His grandma had gotten the same way near the end, always telling stories from her childhood whenever he would listen. She would talk about her parents, or her middle school friends, or how she met her first and second husbands, and how Jonny's mom had been as a kid.

The fact that Igrette was doing the same filled him with a sense of dread that he couldn't quite shake. She'll be fine, he told himself. Look, she's healing. Igrette was now sitting cross-legged, drawing in more mana, and he could vaguely sense her concentrating it around her side and arm. She was doing her best to survive, and she didn't seem like she had lost hope. She was definitely much better than last night, at least. She'll be fine, he repeated, as he lay back on the snow, staring up at the stars.

We'll be fine…