Chapter 31  

After meditating, running to the sea and completing his daily exercises, Kai tested his new Inspect skill. Strolling back home, he had an easier time estimating people’s race grade and profession.

Once in his room, he tested it on a dragonroot he brought from the estate. It was a material he had used and studied extensively, so he was curious about what the skill would give him. The results were beyond his expectations.

His eyes and Mana Sense dug deep into the root. Simple patterns and shades he would have disregarded before, now came together to tell a story. An understanding on a deeper level of the dragonroot, its revitalizing effects and how it could mix with other herbs. A flood of new possibilities entered his mind.

I can’t believe this. I absolutely made the right choice.

Without wasting any time, Kai excitedly took out all the mana-rich ingredients he possessed. Both those Dora put in his portable alchemy toolbox and those he bought at the market. He ordered them in neat rows on his bed. Multiple rows of roots, mushrooms, leaves and flowers laid in front of him.

With an excited smile, he began to analyze each of them with Inspect.

The results soon brought him back to reality. When something looks too good to be true, usually there is a reason. He did gain a new understanding of each material, but only a couple were comparable to the dragonroot.

Inspect seemed to build on his familiarity and knowledge. When he took a plant he bought from the market and never studied closely, he didn’t gain an innate understanding, only a few hints of its properties and potential uses. Nothing like the inspiration he felt with the dragonroot.

Going through a few more herbs, he understood how his new skill worked. Inspect didn’t do miracles, but it did improve his comprehension abilities. Taking half as much to gain double the results.

Inspect was able to build upon his experience and knowledge about the dragonroot. All the pieces of the puzzle were already laying around in his mind, the skill helped him put them together in record time. It provided a surge of understanding that felt almost magical but was based on his past hard work.

Kai was satisfied with his brand-new skill. After analyzing less than half of the ingredients laying on his bed, he had already gained a level in Herbology.

What would happen if he were back to the estate? His small pile of herbs was insignificant compared to the hundreds of rare plants there. He could only imagine what he would gain. Herbology would shoot through the levels, it might be the first skill to reach lv100 and evolve to Orange.

Kai stopped his racing thoughts. He was getting ahead of himself. Taking out his notebook to write his new observations down, he got to work. Herbology helped him remember facts about plants and fungi, but it couldn’t provide inspiration to put them together in an alchemic recipe.

One by one, Kai moved through each row of materials on his bed. There was a reason he handled them so easily and without precaution. Dora only gave him safe hardy plants that would remain useful for a long time even without complicated preservation.

Most of them could only be considered pseudo-mana plants, but were still worth a small fortune by his standards. Maybe almost a silver mesar altogether.

He didn’t spend more than a couple minutes per plant. He wanted to use Inspect to reap the easy benefits of his past experiences and knowledge. His mind made connections that had eluded him till now while his hand scribbled furiously on a notebook. Thankfully Dora gave him two.

After the first half an hour, he noticed a slight headache forming behind his eyes. Just a slight annoyance at first, barely there. Kai ignored it and continued analyzing materials.

Ten minutes later, the headache wasn’t so easy to ignore any longer. He gritted his teeth and carried on. It was weird, he had never suffered from headaches since he overused Mana Sense, but that hadn’t happened in months.

At any other time, Kai would have stopped to analyze the situation, but in his frenzy and euphoria, he did not.

The headache suddenly passed some hidden threshold and turned into a brain-splitting migraine. It didn’t take a genius to find the culprit. Just to stop to think for a second.

Shit. It seems there truly is no free meal in life. Using Inspect takes its toll.

He could only lay on the ground, waiting for it to subside. His bed was already taken by the ingredients, and while not dangerous, he preferred to avoid rolling over them. For both of their sakes.

The backlash of Inspect overuse didn’t last too long. At least it didn’t feel like somebody was stabbing an incandescent knife through his brain any longer. It was reduced to a throbbing headache, not pleasant but survivable.

Slowly rising to his feet, Kai waited for the dizziness to pass. Purely as a scientific curiosity—and not because he was a masochist—he briefly reactivated Inspect. An immediate stabbing pain in his head told him it was a very bad idea. His migraine slightly subsiding didn’t mean he was ready for another round.

On the plus side, his mad rush had provided him with two more levels in Herbology and one in Inspect. A pretty good haul for less than an hour's work.

Kai tidied up his bed. He had gone through all the ingredients he was interested in. The only remaining were a few plants he bought at the market.

Looking at his inventory, Kai took a couple leaves of azulea and frigid orchid petals to prepare a tea that would help with his headache.

He had forgotten to clean his cauldron the last time he used it, so he walked into the kitchen. A normal stove and kettle would do just fine to boil the water for tea.

He made sure he was home alone. The preparation process was easy, but he wanted no distractions. Luckily his headache didn’t worsen by using Mana Sense, so he prepared it the proper way. It wasn’t a true alchemic recipe, but almost any concoction could be improved by paying attention to its mana during the creation process.

Kea was out with Alana to observe different jobs, they would not be back for a few hours. It was his turn to cook lunch after all. He had finally convinced Alana it wasn’t necessary for her to hurry back and forth. He could take care of lunch.

He also wanted to flex his culinary skill on Kea a little. He was no great chef, but he picked up a couple tricks from Dora.

With everything ready, Kai put the kettle on and went to prepare the ingredients. An easy and sure way to strengthen the potency of any pseudo-mana herb was to push your own mana through the plant. Ideally, he should delicately fill the mana veins of the ingredients. Otherwise, you risked the rapid decay of the ingredients’ properties.

He didn’t really need to worry about that. He wasn’t practicing a long and delicate alchemy recipe, he only cared about squeezing out all the useful qualities of the herbs into the tea. Nothing fancy.

Kai started with the azulea leaves. He began pushing his own mana with all the finesse he could manage through the main mana channels of the herb. He could see the internal mana structure of the plant start to collapse, but it didn’t matter. He tossed them into the boiling water.

I should probably practice more Mana Manipulation. Even I can see how garbage I am at it.

In the last month at the estate, Kai had been forced to practice that skill till just the thought gave him shivers. He now realized he had been unconsciously avoiding it since he came home.

Moving the kettle away from the flame, Kai waited for it to cool a little. The frigid orchid petals were better added to a temperature of around 60 degrees Celsius.

The temperature metric Dora utilized was about the same as he was used to, even if with a different name. It wasn’t that surprising really, dividing the temperature between freezing and boiling water into a hundred degrees was only reasonable.

Anyway, temperature control was fundamental in alchemy and Dora had given him a small heat gauge, but right now he didn’t bother to use it. His head was still throbbing and Kai wanted to drink this damn tea already.

He repeated the process of inserting his mana into the frigid orchid petals, with an even worse result. Eyeballing the temperature, Kai chucked them into the kettle too.

I promise I’ll do my Mana Manipulation exercises as soon as this headache is gone.

Kai helped the two ingredients into the tea mesh together. It wasn’t strictly necessary: the properties of the two herbs were too weak to clash and create significant problems. It was better than waiting for the water to cool down.

The process turned out to be more complicated than he thought, making him realize why using a proper cauldron was important. Moving his mana through the kettle added another layer of difficulty that the metal of his cauldron didn’t cause.

He was glad Dora would never see this poorly prepared tea.

Taking out a clay mug, Kai poured himself an abundant amount. The tea was a pale green with a pleasant herbal smell. He took a sip. The taste wasn’t bad, a bit too bitter for his taste, with a minty undertone. It could have used a little honey or sugar, but no such luxuries were present in Greenside.

The only thing Kai cared about was for his headache to be gone. After emptying the kettle, he could already feel the pressure in his head getting better.

Damn, now I’ll need to practice Mana Manipulation.

Postponing it after lunch, Kai spent a couple hours fixing his messy notes. He couldn’t wait to try a few new ideas and do a little pseudo-alchemy. It couldn’t be called true alchemy due to the mana level of his ingredients, glorified apothecary at most.

Kai wanted to have the Inspect skill at his disposal to help with his experiments. He had to test how long this skill overuse lasted. Most likely he would wait for the next day.

After cooking a simple meal for a lying Kea, who still refused to admit his cooking abilities had left hers in the dust, he opened Dora’s textbook on mana exercises.

Till now he only focused on the Mana Sense section. It was time to open the dreaded Mana Manipulation chapter.

Kai sat cross-legged on his bed and began with the absolute basics - feeling the mana within himself. Thanks to his mastery of Mana Sense, he could see around thirty meters away if he focused, but he could also do the opposite. He restricted his vision to his own body to enhance details and avoid distractions.

The network of his mana channel lightened in his vision. All those twists and turns felt familiar, and yet he found out something new each time he looked at them. The dazzling movements of mana never ceased to amaze him.

Stop stalling and let's get going.

Dora once told him a true master magician could control even the mana that didn’t belong to him. Maybe one day he would be able to do that too. For now, he could only control the mana attuned to his own body. And even that wasn’t easy.

Whenever he tried to separate part of his mana network, there was always a slight resistance. His mana wanted to keep flowing on its own terms. That had been the biggest obstacle to unlocking Mana Manipulation.

A slight flex managed to separate a few filaments of energy. He carefully molded the thread to be as uniform as he could make it, before shaping it according to the exercise instructions.

Internal control of your own mana was the easiest. His body was a stable and secure environment, while the ambient mana was kept outside, unable to disrupt his control.

It was easier if you compared the same exercise inside and outside your body.

Kai's brows furrowed in concentration and effort as he tried to imitate the complicated pattern from the book Dora gave him. The thread moved up and down forming an intricate braid of knots and loops. The challenge didn’t only lay in the complicated design, but also in maintaining the completed parts as the structure grew larger.

Kai clenched his teeth and held his breath, sweat formed on his forehead as he tried to keep the design together.

A small thread escaped his control. As he separated a small amount of his focus to fix it, two more appeared. Before he knew it, a series of cascading effects caused the inevitable downfall. The braids fell apart and the mana returned to his channels.

Kai sighed. He had not missed this. Pushing his annoyance down he tried again, spending a few hours on the various designs Dora selected for him. The book contained twenty of them, divided into four levels of increasing difficulty. He didn’t manage to complete one of the five easiest ones despite trying them all multiple times. Not that he expected anything different.

Like Mana Sense, Mana Manipulation was a slow grind. Dora warned him they were both considered amongst the hardest orange skills to improve.

Done with his internal exercises, Kai passed to external mana manipulation. There was a reason he trained them in this order. If you lost control of your mana inside your body, it would return to your channels. On the outside, it would disperse into the environment, and his reserves of mana were very limited.

There were methods to absorb ambient mana and refine it in the speedier time, but Kai didn’t know any yet. His only option was to let his body naturally regenerate it. Away from the artificially increased mana of the estate, the process was even slower.

After taking a small break to stretch his stiff body, Kai got down to it.

If internal manipulation was about careful control and finesse, the fundamentals for outside manipulation were an iron will and decisiveness. The moment he expelled a filament of mana from his hand, it was immediately assaulted by the free-flowing ambient mana. Trying to wash away his imprint and opposing his control.

Minuscule motes of his mana started to disperse under the assault, the thread losing its proper form. Kai decisively clamped down with his will, forcing the mana to remain stable.

The first exercise he ever learned was to simply extend the filament as far from his body as he could and maintain it for as long as possible. He had graduated from that, gaining enough mastery to add shaping exercises to the mix.

Dora prepared a different set of shaping exercises for external manipulation that also considered how far from his body he pushed his mana and through which materials.

While he could practice endlessly inside his body—or at least till his mind got exhausted—outside it he had a limited number of tries. Each mistake would make him lose mana. The more he drew from his limited reserve, the harder his mana channels would oppose him. His body needed mana to survive or at least to function correctly.

Extracting till 50% was fine if you were in good health, lower than that problems started to arise. Dizziness, nausea, loss of fine motor control at first. More serious and permanent consequences if you went lower, till you risked cardiac arrest below 20%. To stay on the safe side, and keep an emergency reserve, Kai preferred to remain above 60%.

Browsing through Dora’s book, he tried different exercises. Half of them were related to Alchemy and required him to move his mana through different materials. He used common weeds he found outside in place of precious herbs. It wasn’t the same thing since mana-rich plants behaved differently, but it was the best he could afford.

His practice continued for around an hour before his mana levels dropped too low. With his small, underdeveloped body, he had maybe a third of the mana an adult would possess.

I’m finally done.

Checking his skills, he noticed he had gained a level in Mana Manipulation, greatly improving his mood. Even though his body was technically fine, consuming mana made him feel weak and sluggish the more he used.

Kai looked outside. It was late afternoon, there was still a little light outside, but he was exhausted.

Nap time!