Chapter 8 A Mind at Work

To practice my training, I was required to hold one manna a minute on the yls spell the entire way to the work out center. Walking there, my body felt lighter. It was like I had lost ten pounds of weight and was in better shape than I had been in a long time. As I was doing pushups, I noticed that they were just a little easier than they were this morning prior. With my body functioning much better life was a little easier. The problem was when it started to get to the last push up and I was getting tired again, I accidently released a second manna. It temporarily made me stronger but now I was one manna down and couldn't get it back unless I stopped using my ability.

While the push up was easier Lilly spoke to me, "Be careful not to over expend your manna. If you do I will have you start the workout routine over. If you quit putting out one manna a minute you will also have to start over."

The work out proceeded as such. At least until I started to get exhausted on the 1 km jog. The extra stat boost helped with my running considerably. My whole body felt lighter and my cardio system was working better than before, however I was still incredibly out of shape and there was nothing that could be done about that yet. I was pushing myself a little harder than I had this morning and accidently let three manna slip. I still had a quarter mile left to go and could afford no more mistakes. One minor slip and my manna would deplete.

Lilly mentioned there were multiple problems with manna completely depleting. Any spell you had to hold your manna out for would come to an end. In my case I would have one last minute and then my extra strength would run out. The problem however is that even though I was getting a 3 percent boost, the exhaustion from over using manna would be far more debilitating than the benefits of the extra 3 percent. I had to be careful.

Thankfully I managed to make it with one manna to spare to the end of my exercise. I was told to stretch and then head back to my dorm for a shower and then for more study about training the soul to grow stronger. All the way back and through my shower I was to hold the spell. As I was showering I began to feel weird.

It was like an intense feeling of depression out of nowhere one I couldn't stop. It took my breath away. I dropped the spell and fell to my knees in the shower. Lilly's voice appeared in my head and explained, "while you didn't expend your manna completely which was a great job by the way, you still were using manna for a long period of time. Just like the muscles in your body, your soul can only use so much manna for so long. The more manna you use the quicker your soul will get tired. As you can see even though you had manna left over, your soul was unable to keep outputting power and you collapsed. We will need to work on strengthening the soul as well. For now when you get out of the shower and have let your soul recovered, we will learn about how to tell when your soul is beginning to tire and what you can do to combat that.

You may be pissed that I didn't warn you but I find experience is a far better teacher. Make sure you remember this feeling because if you are ever in a prolonged intense fight, then you will have to watch how much of your soul you use or you will collapse.

About five minutes after collapsing on the shower floor, the water began to turn cold and my body was feeling better. My manna was all the way full again and it stopped hurting as bad. I could still feel a depression and my chest still felt like there was a weight pushing down on it, but it was manageable now.

The trick to learning how to tell the state of your soul was similar to meditation. You had to get rid of all the other distractions and focus only on what your soul was feeling. The reason I didn't even notice was because the endorphins from exercising was blocking out the pain my soul was trying to give my body. While I was only practicing monitoring the state of my soul now, I would need to get skilled enough at this in order to always know the state of my soul without having to even try.

Finally training was over and it was time for dinner. I ate my fill at the cafeteria keeping away from soda and fried foods. If I was going to put this much work into my body, I didn't want to waste any effort with my bad eating habits. Lilly approved.

I worried though. It was hard enough today, but I didn't know if I would have the strength to continue this regiment. Exercise was hard enough but I was weak when it came to controlling my food. I began to wonder if I was able to control my gluttony if it would even help my soul progress towards an evolution. I know for a fact that it would help my soul change for the better in the long run but I was excited to see how it would change. It made it worth the pain, at least for today.

Lilly gave me free time in my training schedule until the end of the night before bed. I used that time to read from the bookshelf provided in the main lobby for the dorms. I figured it would be a good idea to check up on some of the literature about the cult I was staying in. Moreso than ever I had learned that knowledge is the key to keeping safe and gaining power.

Finally I prepared for bed and practiced my soul monitoring again. I could just barely feel it. It felt tired and almost left me struggling to breathe. It was thankfully resting up. Lilly said that when I slept the soul would almost fully heal. Unlike the muscles in the body, the soul could almost always heal from anything over a good nights sleep and bounce back stronger than ever. The only times it could not do that was when the soul was repeatedly damaged from scarring. Intensely traumatic events or repeated abuse from others or the self would eventually wear on the soul. Even now, my scar was just beginning to heal a little. The scar would always be there, but the stronger my soul got, the less likely I would ever become a monster like that again.

A week passed going through a routine like this. Over that period of time my soul had strengthened a lot more than it was before. I now had 7 manna points instead of the 5 I started out with. Further, thanks to the yls spell, my body was progressing at a rate faster than I even expected. I had lost ten pound in a week and my muscles were better than ever. Lilly put it in stats for me. She made it easy to visualize the change a week of hard work could do.

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Strength = 1--> 2/20

Stamina = 1--> 2/20

Coordination = 1/100

Manna = 5 -->7/20

Manna Regeneration Per Minute (MRM) = 1 --> 2/?

Soul Strength = 1

Soul Stamina = 1 --> 3

1st circle spells = 0 --> 1 (Light ball)

2nd circle spells = 0 --> 1 (Body mod)

Synergy = N/A

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Lilly explained what each of the stats she put up meant. Strength was how strong my muscles were. Basically the amount of force I could use. A human without magic could get their strength up to a total of 20

Stamina was basically the cardio system. How long I could use my strength and move around. Coordination was how well I could combine different muscle movement. Basically how clumsy I was. As of now I was still a walking brick that tripped over my feet, but with time I hoped to increase this skill as well. Stamina could only go up to 20 in most humans but coordination had the capability of 100 in incredibly skilled humans. Though the average was about 20 for an adult and 35 for an athlete, martial artists of the past had made it up to the 80's and 90's with potential for growth if they had mastery of the soul as we did today.

Manna Regeneration per minute was exactly what it sounded like. Lilly didn't know the upper limitation of this as manna hadn't been used with humans for very long. However, the average was about 5 manna a minute. This averaged out to 1 mana ever 12 seconds. I now was recieving one manna every 30 seconds which was an incredible boost from where I started.

Soul strength is how strong the soul is. This would increase with evolutions as well as practice. It was how powerful you could make the spells and how much manna you could spend at once. While I was able to spend all my manna at once I still wasn't able to use my soul to boost the power of my spells. Although, this wasn't a huge issue as most humans hadn't figure out how to do that yet either. It was part of the training I was doing with Lilly that no one else would have.

Soul stamina was basically how long I could continuously cast magical spells. I had gotten to a point where the continuous manna use from exercising no longer wiped me out. I was still tired in my soul, but since the first day, I had not collapsed. I had gotten better at regulating how much manna I spent as well which definitely helped.

The different spells I had learned this week were the light ball as well as the body modification spell. There were two separate categories for spells to make it easier to organize what I knew. Spells that could be used by a first circle/ first level soul went into the first level category. These spells tended to be simplistic and didn't require a lot of manna. Spells in the 2nd circle/level category were a bit more complex and could only be used by a soul who had evolved to the second level. Further these spells could also only be used by a soul who had evolved to be able to use it.

This was interesting because besides the Judges, the Apostles, and the Prophet, I was one of the only people with a second level spell in the Sanctuary city. Even those who gained a soul evolution to level 3 rarely learned how to best work with their personal soul magic and instead worked on strengthening the various level one abilities.

Lilly had mentioned that the Sanctuary City we would be traveling to in the coming month would have much higher spell users. When I tried to ask her more about these people she told me she would tell me when it was time and there were other things I needed to focus on.

Finally the Synergy was something I hadn't worked with yet. It was how well I could apply my knowledge of spells and combine multiple spells together at the same time. I hadn't even begun to experiment with this yet. It was hard enough managing one spell. Very few in this world even knew how to properly combine spells as well.

While I was still incredibly weak. Compared to where I started I had more than doubled my ability. I know that wasn't an incredible amount but the more I trained, the faster I would get more powerful. Once I finally got my regeneration to a point of 2 manna per minute which was still low for most people, I was able to start using a more powerful version of body modification which gave me a 6 percent bonus to my physical body instead of 3. While this tired out my soul faster, it was also good training for my soul and partially why my soul stamina increased so fast as well.

Finally it was time to start week 2 of class. Octavius kicked off the class with an announcement. We would be learning two level one spells this week. At the end of the week we would duel to see who had the best mastery of each spell.

I began to get excited, I would have a chance to prove myself! That was until he mentioned the next part.

"Due to an influx of new members joining, we cannot afford to continue taking care of all of you." Octavius continued, "those of you who lose these duels will be either killed by the victor, or if they were too weak, they would be exiled outside of safety where they will most likely die a worst fate than being put down."

Octavius looked at me and smirked. He thought I would be one of the ones to die and lose. He had made himself clear. You either won or you died. Not only that but he made it the humane choice to kill your opponent. His goal was to teach us to murder and I was worried how this would affect my soul.

Chapter Title from the song "Schuyler Sisters" off the Broadway musical Hamilton