Absolutely

Sea travel was always awkward if you had a guy who kept hurling whenever a torrent hit the boat.

If I remembered correctly, these very same people were fine the first time but these days some of them were going crazy with the amount of nausea they were carrying.

"Is he okay?" I said, trying to make sense of the red I was seeing every now and then in the water.

"He's fine," one sailor said. "Just having a bad day."

"Uh-huh."

Wasn't just him though, everyone was having bad days. They weren't throwing up but they were definitely not looking great.

Even Alustur was looking a tad pale.

"Was it something we ate?" I said.

"Probably. But more likely it's the sea," he said. "This region is too mana dense."

 We'd barely crossed into the open seas and past the horrendous currents. There were still underwater currents but those were much deeper now and they couldn't do anything to us, or so I thought but the ship swayed and that only made things worse. So much damn worse.

This region had dense mana in the air which poisoned us. Similar to what happens when one chews on manafish bones.

I was fine though.

Way more than usual. I hardly ever had sea sickness but given the current situation it wouldn't have been a stretch to be sick, yet I felt fine. Almost like… almost like something had changed in me. Something that wasn't there before the journey started. Or maybe the mana density didn't affect me since I didn't have much to begin with?

Could this have something to do with that voice… "Hey Alustur," I said. "I think I might have heard a voice while I was passing out in the vortex."

"What'd it say?"

"I can't remember but I remember hearing a voice. It couldn't have been the mermaids since I was already too far."

"Was there anyone around you?"

"Not that I remember. Just high-pressure waves."

"Could have been your imagination."

"I suppose."

"Or it could have been the spirit of the ocean!" One of the sailors, the captain said.

I doubted it. But I didn't discount the possibility. Anything was possible. One moment you were having fun with friends the other moment you were swimming mermaid toi… okay even I was starting to feel a little shit. Probably best to not think about weird stuff.

Still, this is going to be a long journey, huh?

***

Not much was different from the first time. The sea calmed considerably by the fourth day and we were back on our regular schedule of doing absolutely nothing.

Or so I thought but Alustur was keen on making me practice swings even on this small ass boat. There was barely enough space to fit five or maybe six of us on the deck at any given time, let alone space to be practicing. Yet here we were.

"Your physique has improved," he remarked.

"What do you mean?"

"You look stronger."

"Look stronger, but probably am not. Don't I look thinner?"

"You do," he said. "And you are stronger."

"Sure, sure."

"Did you," he paused, taking a look at my hand and the scales… "Never mind."

"Finish your thoughts please. You'll give me anxiety."

"I don't mean to make you anxious but I think I will hold on to my thoughts for now. You will find out once we get off."

A groan leaked out. "Seriously… finish your thoughts dude…" I mumbled.

I did some practice drills. Mostly swinging and footwork stuff. I also did some thrusts and then read some stuff we found on the forbidden continent. Alustur and Shia had been kind enough to stea- borrow some books for my reading pleasure.

 Mostly just stories but a couple were interesting. One in particular- Chakra and Energy. I'd heard of the word before and it was sort of related to monks, right? But that's about what I remembered from the games.

I flicked it open and expected mostly bogus or stuff I couldn't do anything with or about. Yet some of the things made sense to me. "Put out your hand in a waving motion to disrupt the mana particles in the air, and collect them to strengthen spells…" sounded great in theory but probably wasn't going to be effective in practice. I'd already tried it a lot of times but it'd never worked. Then again, you never tried it consciously with just the idea of strengthening a spell. I'd tried to create a spell, I suppose there was a big difference. Besides, isn't this a mana dense region?

So, I borrowed some mana from the bracelet and formed a ball of water like usual but instead of taking more mana from the bracelet, I let the air do its thing. I first disrupted the mana, trying to separate it from the air, and then consolidated it, similar to how I'd formed the ball of water. I expected nothing to happen.

And nothing happened.

For the first five seconds but then it increased in size. A marginal difference but even a 1.1X boost was a big difference when the scales were massive.

"What are you doing?" Alustur said, taking a seat beside me.

"Trying to see if I can boost spells," I said. "This book's amazing." And it was just one of the damn techniques. There were like hundreds more.

"It better be; the priests were frothing when we took it."

I laughed awkwardly. "It's not nice to just take things you know."

"I know but don't you appreciate it that we did?"

"Absolutely."

He half smiled but mostly just sat there without saying much else.

Yeah, it was definitely wrong to just take things. But did I appreciate this book?

Absolutely.

I kept practicing to see if I could improve the boost. But so far about 12% was all I could manage. Some of the other techniques were a bit more convoluted and involved certain steps and preconditions so I couldn't just try it out right away but I figured I'd be able to figure it out eventually. We still had months. For now, I was going to focus on the spells that could benefit from the high density of mana in the air which was already decreasing by the hour.

"Isn't that a ship?" One of the sailors yelled.

I borrowed the ship scope to get a better view. I saw a ship, and I also saw a flag with a skull.

"Pirates," I said.

"Good," Alustur said. "We needed a bigger ship anyway."

"Fair enough."