My World Protected Part Two

What exactly was mana? This was honestly a difficult question to answer for multitudes of different reasons. For starters, how it exactly worked was a complete mystery. Unlike divinity which required a seed mana seemed to just naturally form in people's consciousness. Your consciousness impact on the world was limited to what you would act upon, in other words your thoughts only effected the world through your actions. Mana existed in a similar way but acted differently, it existed inside your consciousness but unlike your thoughts, it could directly impact the world around you. It further differed from divinity in the fact that while divinity seemed to command the world to act in a certain way mana seemed to politely act. In other words, if I were to create a ball of water with divinity new water would just appear in the world, it would be water that was created by my divinity (one of the many reasons divinity was considered holy and a gift from god).

On the other hand, if I tried something similar with mana, instead of simply creating the water out of nothing I would need to control the mana to gather the water in the air together to create the ball. As such mana was more difficult to use, as not only would you need a large pool of mana, you would also need high control over that mana. Mana came in elements, with the three mains being water, lightning, and wind. By combining and altering the elements controlled by the mana you were able to generate different elements. By slowing down the movement of the mana in the water you were able to create ice, by passing lighting through a medium you could generate flames, and by combining different elements with wind you were able to give them certain buffs, for example lightning with wind would increase the speed of the lightning strikes.

Now all this information wasn't something known to the public, instead it was given to me by The Voice, who transferred a great deal of knowledge directly to me. Just as before with my memories it was an extremely painful procedure that left me with a bunch of seemingly foreign knowledge forcibly jammed in my brain. But the information gained was truly a godsend, through it I figured out how to circulate mana from the atmosphere and into my consciousness. The mana outside in the world was unruly and difficult to control. It wasn't impossible to control and once you were able to manipulate mana outside your consciousness you would become a complete and utter powerhouse, as not only would you have insane control over mana you would have near limitless amount of mana. At that point there would be no need to manifest mana in your consciousness, you could just use the mana in the world!

It is currently three days after subduing the monk. With some words of encouragement from The Voice I managed to drag the monk into the boat with me and tied him up with the rope that was initially tying me down. According to The Voice I wouldn't need to worry about him croaking on me since this was some form of daemonic ritual that basically perfectly preserved the soul and through that the flesh that remained could also be saved. When I first heard about this, I suddenly had a thought. Realistically speaking there should no way that I could have survived the poison that basically rotted away over three quarters of my body. Something tells me that this voice was more invested in my life then they let on.

I am currently carving a space in my consciousness to allow for the formation of mana within my mind space. This was done through careful meditation, maybe because I already had a separate space in my consciousness (where The Voice in my head lived) maybe because of this I was able to imagine carving a space in my consciousness more easily. Soon I felt almost a brain freeze as I felt cold energy seep into my mind and take up home within. Just like mana had elements so did mages. If mana was a light then mages were the prism, further shaping and coloring the light. If the prism and the light matched in color, then the light would intensify and the same was true between mana and mages. Take me for example, I was a mage who apparently had a very strong affinity for the water element. I could still eventually cast lightning magic, but it would take much more mana and finer mana control to be able to cast it compared to a mage who specialized in lightning. Think of it like talent, some people were more talented with water some more with lightning, with practice one could overcome this, but innate talent is innate talent and shouldn't be ignored.

Because your mana pool became less and less relevant the higher mana control you had, I decided to create only a small pool in my consciousness. It was enough mana to cast a spell to gather fresh water in the air into ball form to float in front of me. Opening my eyes, I could see a small ball of water floating on eye level with me distorting the images behind it. Smiling, I then proceeded to maintain the spell, manipulating the ball to float around me in circles. This was very difficult, and it took everything I had to maintain control over the spell before I lost concentration and the ball lost its form and the water fell into the boat.

When a mage casts a spell, they usually take some mana from within their consciousness and form a connection with the mana in the world, then they would be able to manipulate the world, like forming a ball of water like I just did. Now once this connection was made no more mana was needed to continue this connection, but if the connection was broken for any reason, then spell would lose all its steam, failing and more mana would be needed to reestablish the spell. Now, once one had enough control over mana to directly manipulate the mana in the world, then the need to establish the connection with your own mana wasn't needed anymore.

This, of course was what I was gunning for. As soon as I lost concentration and the spell failed, I would then start to meditate to refill the chalice of mana in my head, then cast the form water ball spell, holding it for as long as I could, eventually failing and then starting over from step one. This was what my mana practice entailed and it was hell but time still flew by.