My World Reborn

My mana practice consumed my life for the next seven days. At no point in time did I stop to drink any water or eat and of the food I had packed. Ironically, I was a water mage that hadn't consumed any water since becoming a water mage. My practice wasn't for naught though. I went from being able to hold a ball of water around myself for a couple of seconds to about seventeen minutes if I wasn't being actively distracted. If my concentration was split or I wasn't focused on the orb, then it would last about five minutes. I was extremely proud of these advancements and I was beginning to feel proud about how quickly my mana control was growing in strength.

After cancelling the water orb spell, I opened my eyes and stretched my arm looking around me.

Reflecting on my actions I had been a little rash. It would have probably been smarter to get something to eat and drink at some point and taken a break to digest what I had just discovered about mana and stabilize my own mana control. Reaching underneath my seat I grabbed some jerky and the mana capsule full of water to sate my killer thirst and hunger. First, I drank some water then I tore off a bit of jerky to eat. After consuming about a fifth of my store meat and about a third of the water I had packed I closed my eyes and thought about something I had noticed the other day but was too consumed to really understood.

Reaching out my hand I summoned an orb of water. Then I cancelled the orb, not by cutting of the connection to my mana like normal, but by actively pulling back my mana from the orb of water. As expected, the orb didn't collapse right away it instead kept floating above my hand, with water dropping down from sides of the orb almost like the orb itself was crying. It honestly was a creepy sight.

Through my experiment I found that it was possible to "cancel" a spell and recover a portion of my mana, and I believe that the amount of mana recovered would increase with concentration and overall skill in mana control.

I also noticed that the wild mana found outside my consciousness seemed to have a mind of its own, almost like an incomplete consciousness. That's what made it possible for the orb to hold its form after I "cancelled" it. Another way to look at it would be like a kid doing chores. They would obediently do their chores when watched, but if left to their own accord they would do whatever they wanted, just like wild mana. But what if the child's guardian left in the middle of chores, the child would obediently do their chores until they realized their guardian had left then they would go back to being chaotic. Wild mana operated in almost the exact same way, it would be obedient when closely watched, and then remaining obedient until noticing there was no supervision. In this analogy, pulling back your mana would be the equivalent of sneaking out the backdoor, on the other hand suddenly cutting off the connection to your mana would be like the guardian announcing that they were leaving then slamming the front door shut. It would mean the child aka the wild mana would immediately scatter and do lord knows what.

This discovery led me into yet another discovery. Wild mana gathered would assimilate together, meaning that this faint consciousness that was present within spells would only increase in clarity the more mana was present. This led me down to paths, the scarier of the two was the lingering question. If wild mana had a consciousness when a mage became powerful enough to control wild mana was that they became powerful enough to control wild mana or did they allow it to dominate their consciousness. In other words, did these mages die and their bodies became controlled by the wild mana? It was a scary thought to process, and I decided to think about it later as the current me didn't have enough information to guess reliably either which way.

On the other hand, this discovery did lead me down a better path, the understand of how to create familiars. Familiars were staple part of my old life; mages would create them (at the time I didn't know how) they would either use them or sell them off. There were many kinds of golems and there were different levels to them. These levels didn't have anything to do with how powerful (in a literal sense) these familiars were. Instead, they measured how much intelligence was present within them, in most cases. On the bottom rung was golems, which were controlled by a command token. They could only understand basic commands with redemptory steps. For example, if you told them to run exactly one hundred meters and then turn left, they could. But if you told them to solve a math equation, they would simply just ignore the command. On the top were transcendent. I had never met one, but my father had once told me that you wouldn't be able to tell a transcendent apart from a normal human if they tried to blend in. As such there was no command token, and transcendent only listened to those who they respected or were willing to follow like a normal human. But most of my knowledge on transcendents was hearsay as I don't believe anyone who had told me about them had even met one before. Normal familiars, outside of the initial cost of creation, would take no mana upkeep as they would operate almost like mages, drawing in wild mana and converting it to their own energy.

There was another kind of familiar, a growth type familiar. Growth type familiars were bound to their caster if the caster died so did the familiar. The intelligence when initially summoned was always very low, but once they grew the intelligence would grow with them. Now it is said they have low intelligence, but this is an oversimplification. A simple more accurate way of putting it would be that growth type familiars began with a newborn puppy like intelligence, it would grow with time and their capacity for intelligence (aka their brains) could be subjected to accelerated growth by injecting mana into them, this wouldn't instantly make them smarter, just like children they needed to learn. The biggest downside to this was just like puppies, if you weren't nice to them, they wouldn't like you much. And just like puppies they might decide to ignore the caster. The trick here was to respect them and treat them nicely. Now as the growth familiar's existence was linked to their casters, so they wouldn't initially have a negative opinion of them, it was still possible for the familiar's growth to be crippled due to the malice.

I was tired of being crippled. It was a funny thing to say, and many people would never get this chance. As such I was grateful and not less then a little excited, but I knew that my status as a cripple needed to change and I needed to regain the ability to walk if I was going to survive in this Renaissance hellscape. My plan to move was simple! I just needed two growth type familiars and then I would become set. I could link them to my mind, and they could be controlled like I was just operating my complete body. Now this would take time, practice, patience, and a fair amount of willingness with the familiar's part, but I believe I could work with them productively. Pets always loved me, and I figured this was very similar. Growth familiars had the innate ability to shapeshift, but they were always summoned in their preferred form.

To create these growth type familiars required me to send out my mana, and then wrapping them in layers of wild mana before the consciousness would form and link with mine and a growth familiar would form. This was a more exhaustive form of mana, as it had a piece of my consciousness included within.

Closing my eyes, I pushed my hand out and started to send out some mana, now I wasn't sure how much of my consciousness I should include within this mana, so I injected as much as I felt this piece of mana could hold, and then I started layering on more and more wild mana. Soon, feeling that my familiar was complete I stopped controlling the wild mana. Pop, Pop, Pop, Pop, soon I could hear things hitting the bottom of the boat. Confused I looked down to see that the bottom of the boat was now filled with little slimes. They didn't have eyes or any distinguishing features, but I could sense through our link that they were a single slime that had split apart, and they were looking at me waiting. I just smiled and patted next to me and stated, "Come here Limus!" Limus seemed to smile at me expressionlessly and rolled into itself, combining together to form a much larger slime that half laid next to me in the seat and half drooped off the side of it back onto the floor of the boat, unable to completely fit on the seat. It was immeasurably cute and it frankly more then a little adorable. I patted it for a second, feeling its soft and cold feel, it didn't stick to me and they seemed to enjoy the attention. After a while I felt I had recovered enough to try and summon another familiar. Once again reaching my hand up, I repeated the previous steps, once again forming mana within my consciousness, then wrapping it with wild mana, this time I had injected even more of my consciousness within this mana construct. My eyes closed shut, I can feel the process end, but instead of hearing something hitting the floor I can feel something coiling around my hand. Quickly opening my eyes I could see a snake wrapped around my entire arm staring right back into my eyes!