NOVEL NEXT Chapter 217: Weaving
+ Reid +
Reid turned to find Nyx smiling with her circular, black mouth. Her eyes twinkled on her noseless face, and a few of the tentacles on the back of her head writhed in anticipation. She had her fingers tented together, black and silver nails scraped against one another.
He smiled, and gave Nyx the setup she was waiting for. He'd missed this.
"Weaving? What are we doing, making baskets?"
She let her fingers fall between each other and cross, then tilted her hands in a way that made her fingers look like a basket weave.
"I've seen your ability to physically weave things together, Reid. Remember that 'jerky rollup container' from back on Earth? Yeah, it wasn't bad for first attempts, but that level of quality isn't going to fly here. No, what we're doing is going to be much more interesting, and just a bit more complex."
"Complex how?"
She ignored Reid's question. "Tell me what you know so far about environmental mana."
He thought back to her prior lessons. "Well, you said there's energy and mana, and energy is this sort of pure or unowned thing that we got from the beacon and the system when I level up. And mana is more owned or associated with something. There's bits of it associated with, or owned by stuff around us, like snow and ice, or magma - anything, really. And, I guess, there's little bits of it in animals and beasts, too. In the meat and the plants I eat. Oh, and I think in the water I drink."
"Your head is going in the right direction. Now, how have you and the things you eat and drink changed over time?"
Reid raised an eyebrow. "That's an easy one. The higher level I get, the more lower leveled stuff I need to eat and drink to feel full or hydrated. Or, if I have higher leveled stuff, it takes less to keep me full. It's different nutrient density, and like the water itself is more..."
He paused as he picked up on her lead. She nodded for him to continue.
"There's mana in that stuff, too, but if there's not enough mana, my body doesn't have as much to absorb and use, so part of the reason why I need to eat and drink so much isn't just about hydration, it would also be about making sure I have enough mana in me. And, maybe, it's also a warning that I need to be more resource conscious with my mana use when there aren't high leveled beasts and things to fight around."
"Alright, you're not too far off what I was hoping for. You're correct about consumption including the needs of your metaphysical and supplying yourself mana. You also naturally convert and produce mana on your own, but that's a slower process. Being conservative with your resources is, in general, a wise move - and that goes double when you're stuck surrounded by things weaker than you are. No point in wasting your own resources fighting things that you can easily do away with without that resource use."
"So, ah, I should've avoided powered up throws for lower leveled spiders and cult village idiots?"
"Probably, but not the focus here. Level and density isn't just about what you eat and drink, it's about what you breathe. The world around you. Low-grade water does less to quench your thirst, low-grade snow does less to freeze you. Higher grade food fills you up faster. Higher grade heat would burn you more easily than low grade heat. Part physics, part 'magic'. You have skills already that try to let you stay comfortable in those kinds of uncomfortable conditions, but they do nothing to make sure you're able to keep in fighting shape within those environments. Honestly, since Humans - and Vuxarinans - don't have cutaneous respiration, this concept might be a bit foreign to you."
Reid perked up. "That's breathing through skin, right?"
"Correct - but the beings that do it don't get all their oxygen from that process. They still have lungs."
Nyx's explanation tickled something in his brain. "Hang on, I want to try and figure this out."
She nodded and moved herself back as Reid turned the information. She had started the conversation saying what they were doing wasn't a physical process, so she wasn't just talking about getting more oxygen by making his skin breathe. And she wasn't trying to completely replace a process if she was mentioning that breathable skin still required lungs. So, if they were talking about environmental mana - it meant she wanted him to understand the existing process he had for getting that mana, digestion through consumption, wasn't the only way.
Reid had spent a long while cataloging his metaphysical muscles, and understanding how his mana, his power, ran through different channels within his body. But those two pieces weren't the entirety of his metaphysical self. He had other things going on. Constructs, and himself, his eyes, and his skin. He followed the logic.
If his physical body interacted with the world around him, the same should be true for the metaphysical, too.
"Getting mana to my metaphysical body doesn't just happen from eating, it happens whenever I'm around other mana. And if skin breathing is a bad example, it's like my metaphysical fingers are pruning in a bathtub because they're absorbing water."
"Your conclusion is correct - but the idea behind your analogy is wrong. Fingers prune in water because blood vessels restrict. It's a way for smooth-skinned surface dwelling creatures to increase their grip in wet conditions, and has nothing to do with absorbing water. This is the camel thing all over again, Reid - I know you know this. Anyway, yes, your metaphysical self interacts with the world around you more than you consciously realize. That does involve a minor amount of mana absorption from the air and environment around you, and it also means you're technically a bit more susceptible to that mana than you might think. Like walking outside in the winter without a jacket on."
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
Reid nodded. "So what someone needs to do, then, is like what I did with the threadspace resistances. Find a way to block things out when they're bad, but let it through when they're good?"
"Bad and good are oversimplifications. Water isn't bad - it's good. Drinking too much can still kill you. Mana is the same. Find yourself in an environment that's far beyond you, and the mana around you can overwhelm your system, even if it's just in the air. So, you want to protect yourself from negative aspects of metaphysical exposure. And on the flip side, you go into an area too sparse with mana, you can't just going to sit around and wait for the good stuff to come through. Where are we right now?"
He turned himself around to see the mana compressor, and the clarity of the idea smacked him in the face. Reid rubbed at his forehead as he turned back to her.
"Good. You've got it now. So, let's take the next step and teach you what the natural process actually feels like. Come up to the simulation room - the one you got from linking Perception and Dexterity."
Reid did as asked, and Nyx had him activate a sequence of controls once there that put his body on the viewing space, then seemed to suck the air out of the simulation. He'd leveraged this room to figure out how his wings manifested, so it stood to reason he should be able to see other phenomena as well.
"Alright. Whenever you're ready, play with the dial on the right, there. That will adjust the 'intensity' of the environment around your simulation. It'll give you a rough sense of how your body actually feels when experiencing different mana densities. It's really just a rough starting point - you're going to need to start by shifting between grades rapidly to detect anything, and that doesn't quite happen in the real world. Well... no, nevermind, it's nothing you'll run into anytime soon."
He spent the next few hours within himself, playing with the simulated mana density his metaphysical form was exposed to. Just as Nyx predicted, it took him a long while to pick up on the real changes taking place. They were so faint, he wondered if he ever would have noticed on his own.
The first feeling was as if Susan were hovering her hand over his metaphysical arm. He could sense the fact that something was there, even feel the faint brush against the hair on his arm as it moved from his hand up to his shoulder, then down into his chest. He let out an involuntary, whole-body shiver - and tried to make it happen again. Dropping the density to nearly nothing gave him the same sensation each time the 'mana' in the simulation ceased. Once he'd gotten to the point where Reid could consistently notice drops in density, he decided to seek out the opposite sensation.
Reid whipped the knob in the other direction, and for a good long while, felt nothing. Even after being pulled out of his work by an energetic Bubbles telling him they were flying past an island - which was followed by Reid seeking out confirmation that the plane was very much still doing alright on fuel, and would be for a while - he hadn't nailed it down. He took time to eat - mostly to ensure Bubbles did as well, then jumped back into his work. Hours later, he finally figured it out.
The sense from the increase was difficult because it started out feeling like nothing at all. Reid didn't actively feel his blood moving through his body, nor did he actively think about breathing. This was just another automated, unfelt function - but for his metaphysical body. As the mana density increased, his meta-self just absorbed it. Even going quickly, the increase felt like nothing because his body was trying to adjust to it. So, Reid searched for the signs of that adjustment rather than the increase itself.
He did have an inclination that, with a severe enough increase, or a sufficient level of density, he would notice the phenomenon directly. But his internal simulations were only capable of doing so much, and running tests on things grades above his own were not in the cards at the moment. Instead, he kept going until he was nearly as good at detecting increases as he was at detecting decreases. And that meant he had the basics to understand when he would want to shut mana out, and when he would want to take in more.
At that point, Reid could have stopped and waited for Nyx to guide him again, but he wanted to make some progress on his own. And that meant going deeper. Reid shifted the focus of the simulation from his entire metaphysical self to part of his arm. He witnessed the mana fade and the influx in that smaller section, and developed a theory.
His body, his metaphysical self, was reacting to the changes as though it were a single functional organ.
The sense of something moving up his arm wasn't just resources moving within him, then - it was a shift of density within his body done in reaction to the surroundings. And it was easy to detect in large swings not because his self was instantly starving for energy - but because it was his metaphysical body's natural reaction to shift resources close to their home. He still naturally absorbed some mana, but not enough to notice once the rest had shifted.
Similarly, then - the dense reactions were just from his body getting enough energy to 'fill' all reaches of his metaphysical self, and it happened everywhere at once, but allowed his internal energy to shift back to being equally dispersed throughout himself instead of collected in a smaller spot.
Maybe most important of all - Reid had an idea on how the interactions were taking place. And it felt right.
His body and the surrounding mana were in a constant state of interaction. When the mana around him was weaker, it was easier to 'absorb', like throwing a tennis ball through a basketball hoop. More than that, when his body pulled mana back into itself, it made a natural, faint suction that helped pull in more energy. When the mana around him was stronger, it was like throwing a basketball through a basketball hoop. Not always perfect or easy, but there were also thousands of basketballs bouncing around all the time. So, it was both easier to gain mana, and more apt that he would be affected by all the mana bouncing around.
When he continued that train of thought, mana density in higher grades would be like trying to put a medicine ball or a beach ball through a basketball hoop. Even if you were surrounded by the things, and they were everywhere, a beach ball wasn't fitting through a basketball hoop. You'd just feel the pressure of all the beach balls bouncing into you, and get no real benefit.
So, if Reid's body and his capacity to absorb and interact with external mana was like a basketball hoop, and the amount and 'size' of the energy varied with grade...
He turned towards a patiently waiting Nyx.
"The lattice isn't dual-purpose, it's tri-purpose."
She grinned. "What is the third purpose?"
"I don't just have to protect myself from high-mana environments - I need a way to separate higher-grade energy into the 'size' of mana my body can actually absorb."
"And?"
"And to do that, I need to combine vortexes, restrictions, and some kind of shredder or sieve in a way they can function in unison." He crossed his fingers and tilted his palms like Nyx had done. "Weave them together in harmony."
Her eyes flashed, and he felt a warm approval.
"Full marks."