Chương 111: 110 - Shells

The heavy, wet fabric of her robes clung to her shoulders, cold and dragging with every step. Alexandra didn't pull her hood up. She let the light rain drench her hair, the cool droplets hitting her face alongside the sharp, salt-heavy sting of the sea wind. Apart from the rhythmic, thunderous crash of the waves hitting the gray shoreline, the beach was entirely silent. It wasn't the best conditions for an experiment. Not by a long shot. But it would have to do.

Alexandra stopped, her boots sinking slightly into the wet sand. She closed her eyes and turned her attention inward. Deep within her empty mana core, the Bronze effect of her bloodline remained active. A small, thin trickle of solar energy was pulling from the overcast sky, flowing through her skin and down into the Solar Core. The total absence of mana made the internal landscape clearer than it had ever been. There was no ambient static.

Just the cold, vast emptiness of her core, and that single, steady current of solar warmth. She focused on that warmth. Willed it to move. To shift to her fingertips. Nothing happened. Alexandra opened her eyes. Of course nothing happened. Without mana to act as a tether, she had no indirect leverage to bend the solar energy to her will. Even with mana, she had only started dipping her feet into this new energy.

She had known that before she even walked down to the shore, but a small, stubborn part of her had needed to try anyway. The alternative solution was going to be complicated. She wasn't looking forward to it. Alexandra exhaled a long breath that turned to mist in the damp air. She knelt, her knee soaking through her trousers as it pressed into the wet sand. Her fingers brushed past a tangle of rotting kelp, locking onto the smooth, ridged curve of a cockle shell.

She tossed it into the small leather pouch at her belt and took three steps forward. The books in the library had been useless, but she hadn't given up. Since she wouldn't be able to use mana for a few weeks, she found solar energy to be a worthwhile use of her time. She spotted a pale spiral shell half-buried near a tide pool. She dug it out with her thumb, shaking off the grit. If she couldn't use mana to pull the solar energy out, could she do something else with it? The energy fed her body naturally.

It kept her alive. That meant the energy was already converting into physical stamina. She bent down again, her fingers tracking a smooth, dark scallop shell. Mana worked in threads. Solar energy evidently didn't. The only other type of energy she could draw comparison from was lifeforce. Alexandra paused, a large, pristine whelk shell clutched in her hand. The rain was coming down harder now, blurring the line between the gray sea and the gray sky.

She hadn't cast enough lifeforce spells to really understand how it worked. She slipped the shell into her pouch and kept walking. Testing a completely foreign energy structure by burning away her own vitality was a quick way to end up in a grave. The cost was too high, the margin for error too thin. Unless she gathered the courage to cast Drain Life on some poor Bronze human. She was ready to do it if she had to fight for her life, but counting on it felt like a line she shouldn't cross.

She stood, her wet robes clinging to her skin, and looked down the long expanse of the shoreline. A few paces ahead, a shard of white caught her eye. She walked over, bending from the waist to pluck a heavy oyster shell from the tide line. She wiped a smear of black silt from its rough surface. If lifeforce was out, and mana was temporarily gone, she had to look at what remained. The Solar Core sat in the center of her emptiness, radiating that thin, steady pulse of heat. It was a physical sensation.

Her muscles didn't ache from the damp cold the way they should have. The heat was actively combating the chill of the rain. Photosynthesis alone hadn't done this. It was an automated process. The system handled the conversion from solar energy to heat and stamina. If the system was doing it through her bloodline, it meant that it was possible. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. She moved toward a shallow tide pool, her boots splashing softly through the pooling water.

A small, unbroken snail shell rested at the bottom, shifting slightly with the current. She reached in, her hand submerging past the wrist. The water was warmer than the rain. She pulled the shell out.

"Stupid quest." She sighed, knowing there were still a lot of shells to collect. It was also time to test her idea: Life Curse. Alexandra paused, her hand hovering over her pouch. The idea was stupid. She had just cleansed the sicknesses from her body, scraping her core clean of mana in the process. To willingly introduce a curse now felt like taking a deliberate step backward. How would it even work? The theory was simple enough on paper. Life Curse translated a direct lifeforce cost into a curse.

If she could manipulate that curse energy, she might be able to use it as a substitute tether to bend the solar energy to her will. She shook her head, the wet strands of her hair slapping against her cheeks. It was highly unlikely to do anything at all. She didn't understand how Life Curse worked. She took a slow breath, tasting the salt on her lips. She needed to understand it. Her boots sank deeper into the sand as she moved toward the edge of the sea.

A jagged piece of driftwood lay half-buried in the sand, stripped white by the sea. She stared at it, her internal focus shifting back to the vast, empty space inside her core. The thin trickle of solar energy remained steady. She could wait until her mana came back. It was only a few weeks. As long as she continued her streak, it didn't matter. But she was curious. Just a try. One try and I'll stop. But first, she had to understand how Life Curse worked.

She focused inward as she prepared a Dark Bolt on her fingertip, the weakest she could manage. She felt lifeforce gather on her finger. She held it there for a few seconds. It was nothing like mana. She felt the micro-drain on her vitality, a faint, phantom ache in her chest that traveled down the length of her arm to feed the gathering dark. How did the conversion actually happen? She pushed her awareness right to the skin line of her fingertip, where her own living energy ceased to be itself and became a spell.

It wasn't clean. The transition consumed her lifeforce to spark a spell. If she activated Life Curse now, that consumption would twist. The skill would step in, intercepting the vitality cost and rewriting it into a curse. She did. Life Curse. The reaction was immediate. The lifeforce gathering at her fingertip curled. The drain on her vitality disappeared and, instead, nothing. Dark Bolt dissipated into the wind. She frowned and slapped her forehead as she realized where it had gone wrong.

"I'm a fucking idiot." Curses were made of mana. There was no mana in her core. She knew all that. How did she not think about it sooner? Alexandra rolled her eyes. To think she'd gotten so serious about it. She really thought she had something. She walked on and bent down, picking up a knife-edged razor shell. It was a dud. Lifeforce was out of the picture for good this time. She turned her attention back to the gray expanse of the sand.

Her fingers were becoming increasingly itchy from the sand and the salt water. The skin on her knuckles was puckered and pale. She adjusted the strap of her leather pouch, feeling the heavy, wet thud of the gathered shells against her thigh. Five more shells. It didn't take long. A few yards ahead, the surf rolled over a cluster of broken shale, leaving behind a small pocket of debris. Alexandra walked over and knelt. She reached into the pile of gravel, her fingers closing around a smooth, chalky white fragment.

A broken clam shell. Right beside it lay a small, perfectly preserved periwinkle. She took it. She stood up, rolling her shoulders to break the tension building in her upper back. The library had been a dead end, her idea to use lifeforce too. She smiled. She was starting from nothing, trying to devise a brand new way to use her energy. Expecting to succeed in a day was a fool's errand. Alexandra wiped her wet hair away from her eyes, her gaze tracking a thin line of white foam further down the beach.

She needed to finish this. The sooner the pouch was full, the sooner she could get back inside. Alexandra walked another ten paces, her eyes scanning the shales. A flash of dull orange caught her eye. It was wedged between two jagged pieces of black shale, half-submerged in foam. She walked over and waited for the water to recede. As the wave pulled back, she reached down and pried it loose. The last one. She dropped it into the pouch, then summoned her journal.

Collect twenty different types of seashells (20/20) -> Quest Completed: +10 exp, +1 PER. Daily Quest Streak: 69 -> 70 No skill quest. She shrugged. She'd half-expected a seashell version of Basic Herbology, but it wasn't like she had a use for it. Speaking of which, she was already outside and drenched. She might as well work on Basic Herbology's Training Quest. She looked at the dunes, then at the woods beyond, and shook her head. Not today.