Homesteading in a fantasy world

chapter 92



Last night had been interesting, we discussed many things and made many plans but most importantly we need to start gathering more lumber. It’s a perfect opportunity to train the wolves more and to teach my apprentices a new skill. But I didn’t want Francis to miss this, and I knew that if he found out he would be pretty disappointed.

So currently we were all working inside the barn to make a cold room against one of the barn doors. This way when we open one side of it the cold will not get into the entire barn just inside this small room. It would be big enough for Francis so we could get him in and out.

It was a bit more time-consuming than I first thought because we need to make it not just one board thick but make it a bit more insulated from the cold.

We got everything done in about 6 hours, but we didn’t go into the forest today because I wanted to start teaching them a bit more about energy control and trying to get them the energy storage stat.

After that, it was time for them to learn how to train their bodies. Today I just teach them the basics and how to keep training themselves without me. Mostly we focused on running as I wanted them to get the running skill and eventually homesteaders mile.

The day went by quite fast, and I was pleasantly surprised to get another level in my mentoring skill. It felt to me that I had too many skills and abilities and I wondered how people deal with it all. Let’s hope that someday soon I would get to be able to talk openly to someone about skills and abilities or perhaps a book if I could learn how to read this language.

By the end of today, they all got fitness enhancement and running skills which, I was quite happy about although I don’t think that they were that happy about half a day of exercise.

The next day we started by doing a run then we prepared everything so we could go logging. Francis was quite happy to finally be able to stretch his legs and then he figured out that he will get to do some pulling making him extremely pleased.

Freya was apprehensive about going back over to the bridge, but her children were quite excited about exploring a new environment. I had even modified one of my backpacks so that Goose could be in it so he could also come with us.

The bond between us was a bit stretched because of my long absence but I now worked on strengthening it. Through it, we could understand each other better and I hope that eventually, we could even communicate this way without ever having to talk. He had quite a lot of fully developed feathers now and I believe that he would be ready to fly soon, and I couldn't wait until I can experience it through our bond.

Logging itself started out quite slowly as I needed to teach them everything, but they were fast learners and I believed I had at least a little bit to do with that. Arthur was able to cut faster than his sibling's thanks to his abilities and his better control over them.

His siblings didn’t have a combat ability which I explained was quite a missed opportunity for them. It didn't take a lot of convincing when they could see how useful a combat ability like this could be for everyday use and not just for combat.

Even though I teach them most of the day I was still the one that cut down the most trees. The only thing to slow me down when I was done teaching all the time was someone having to unload what Francis was pulling to the edge of the forest.

He could have done it all by himself if he had hands to unhook the chains, so I also needed to use my movement ability to rush between cutting down trees and unloading. Even then I still needed to use a lot of my other energy abilities so that I wouldn’t waste my regeneration.

I wondered where this energy was coming from. Was it myself that was generating it or did it come from someplace else? My inner energy was getting stronger as I got more stat points not just the amount of it.

It was a slight change but thanks to my monitoring it for a big part of my gains I was able to pick up on the change. This made me wonder how strong people were that made it to the top of the power hierarchy in this world.

Was there even a max level here or could you just keep going endlessly and perhaps become a God, who knows? Speaking of God this is one thing that has surprised me the most about this world. Religion didn't seem to be an everyday part of regular life.

There wasn’t even a church in the village, and I was never taught about the gods by my parents but I’m still quite certain that some sort of religion exists. I have a vague memory of it in a story my grandfather told me.

This is just another factor that requires further exploration similar to mana and magic. I’m quite certain that mana and magic are the pain of energy sort of like a rock, paper, scissors effect. This is a weakness that I would not like to have especially because I don’t have mana of my own to counteract it. But somehow energy and mana can live together I have seen it multiple times.

For this reason, after we were done with everything we wanted to do today and had eaten our dinner I was in my room staring at the mana orb that I got from the goblins.

I started by using my energy sight so I could see mana even though the only way I get to view it was by seeing the absence of energy. When I used my energy sight all the colours seemed more vibrant, and it changed the world that I looked at. I wonder what mana would look like if I had a similar ability. Would it be similar or are they completely different? I hope one day I will get to know.

I prepared my hand by slowing down energy movement as much as possible and trying to get as much of it out of my hand as possible. Even then I still probably had 100 plus stats worth of energy when I picked up the mana orb.

Instantly I could see the emptiness trying to burrow its way into me and at the same time consuming my energy. Consuming was the wrong word here, it was more like battling it and dissipating it. Mana won that battle quite easily, and I had to endure agonizing pain as I kept viewing how it started to move into my hand.

As I hold the mana orb with my entire hand every part that was connected to it the mana tried to pierce into my body and at the same time into my energy body. My energy was fighting it trying to push it out and it did it without my command.

Still, my energy was not weak, and I could already see the mana orb had spent up a small part of its reserves trying to penetrate me. So, I concentrated on trying to eliminate as much energy as I can so the mana could get deeper inside.

I had a theory on how people become mages and hoped that it was true so that way everyone had the possibility of becoming a mage. As time passed and I worked hard even sweating a bit from the pain and exhaustion of trying to eliminate energy from a part of my body I could see it getting deeper inside and indeed starting to form a mana network similar to what I have seen inside other people.

The mana network in other people looked like the meridian system from Chinese medicine or a cultivation network from xianxia novels.

When the network had reached halfway to my elbow, I understood why everyone can't be a mage. The beauty and correctness of the mana lines started to break apart leaving a muddled part as it kept trying to reach deeper inside.

At first, I thought that it was something that I could fix, that I needed to help correct when I got mana control. Help it out a bit to fix the pathway but as it kept going further towards my elbow it went back to normal for only a little bit before it got messed up again.

After a bit more of agonizing pain and time, I came to an understanding that not everyone’s mana network was strong enough or it just had too many defects for it to work.

The first plan was a failure as I dropped the mana orb and release my control over energy and watched it quickly rush in and eliminate the built mana network quickly. It still cost me quite a lot of stored energy.

If I can’t join with it, then I need to find a way where my energy cannot be so easily beaten by it. I spent multiple hours trying to see if I could eliminate manas advantage, but I only found a single way that just made my energy a bit more resilient to it when first contacting mana, but after that no matter what I did it simply didn't matter mana was just too efficient at eliminating energy.

This made me think about why mana wasn’t dominant in the world, but the answer was quite simple. Not everything was energy and mana, there was quite a lot of regular space in between that acted like insulation. Also, there seemed to be a lot more energy in the world compared to mana.

Energy itself is quite porous on the surface so the only thing that slowed down the mana was making the surface smoother, so it didn't have the openings it needed to start burrowing inside.

My control simply wasn't good enough to make it so smooth that mana couldn’t find a way inside. But this was still a way to counteract or at least protect my energy from mana intrusion. For this experiment, I got the level of energy manipulation. Let’s hope that I can learn to control energy fine enough so I can actually complete this idea.


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