"I don't understand you." Alvir sighed, interrupting my reading with sothing other than random knowledge. "It would've been smart to at least cripple him after his first attempt, but I wasn't about to begrudge you your morals. To go out of your way to save him after his second? Do you have any understanding what kind of world we live in?"
I looked longingly at the speculations of old mages before turning to my bitch ass ntor.
He was blurry, but my vision was mostly back now.
"I take so offence at that. Considering whose mouth it's coming from."
"I act the way I do because I have to. Witches don't get the luxury of showing rcy. Just the nature of having no one but yourself to rely on. There are no laws in our circle except that of the strong, the fact you can't accept that astonishes ."
I let out a sigh. "Can we have this conversation when my body isn't filled with dead shit? Discussing philosophy with you is a whole torture of its own."
"Fine, but answer this first. Would you have let him live if he had done the sa to Xae?"
My face darkened. "What's the point of that stupid ass question? Would I seek revenge if he almost killed one of my friends? You should already know the answer to that, Rat King."
"So why don't you kill him then?" Alvir raised a brow.
"Because I'm not you," I said. "I've still got so sense of right and wrong, and killing a child for failing to kill is firmly in the 'wrong' category."
"There are so many flaws with that way of thinking it's absurd. Just look at yourself girl! He obviously left the city of good sense long ago. Killing the boy would be a favour to everyone that has to suffer his presence."
"Then go ahead and do it yourself."
He glared. "You know I can't."
"Oh?" I gave a slight grin. "Care to share what's holding you back, mister law of the strong? Is it the big scary mind witch or the grave keeper?"
"Don't act like it's a vice to be smart. I can't harm that child, but that doesn't an that you can't. Our situations are entirely different in the eyes of the coven."
"Then stop bitching about my choice to let him live." I shrugged.
He rolled his eyes but did indeed stop his bitching, returning to his enchantnts as I continued the book on my table. He'd been using less and less mana lately, trying to be more subtle to train my mana sense. It was kind of working?
Considering I was reading, I didn't pay enough attention most of the ti to pick it out, but it was pretty simple to find when I took a break.
Apparently I'd gotten to the point where sensing any offensive spells was a given, and we only continued because it didn't hamper much of anything in my studies or training. The training to get strength had paused. Obviously.
I could barely lift this book for heavens sake. To be fair, it was a heavy book. Entirely because it was just a bunch of journals from old mages compiled together into a disjointed ss. Each 'chapter' was at least fifty pages long, and there were enough that it was more of a brick than a book.
The words were super small too, which sucked for my yet-to-recover vision.
More interesting than dry theory though, and surprisingly helpful.
I assud any actionable discoveries were redacted from the public book. Considering how strangely it cut off at points; but there was still plenty to stoke a few theories if you knew what to look for.
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The problem was choosing one to explore while taking into account how full my training would be once I was healed. Resonance? Sounded fancy. Didn't look like it could be applied to combat. Mana genesis was interesting, but I never had an issue with the quantity of mana in my spirit considering how little I could actually use.
Mana infused ritual casting looked cool as fuck. I just needed an understanding of how rituals actually worked, and even then the research to put mana in the equation seed too long and arduous.
Bunch of other shit, in the end there were three I was considering testing while incapacitated.
Pathway rging, simple casting, and mana poisoning.
The first was entirely because of the droplets. It didn't look like a good idea in the long term, but I could always learn how to make more later. Right now the need to acclimate every pathway to the erratic behaviors of my droplets would be a detrintal bottleneck once I could actually control one.
Which would be soon.
Almost managed to push it to do whatever my mana interpreted my desires for the dead shit in my body was. Almost.
The last step was frustrating to say the least.
Simple casting was pretty much just cantrips, taking a bunch of words and forming a pseudo spell that wasn't really a spell. Apparently it was different than the way I used Awake and nd in conjunction, and looked like one of those things that was a pain in the ass to figure out, but pretty simple to implent once you did.
Mana poisoning was very interesting though.
It varied from mana sickness. By a lot. Where mana stressed the body from it's taphysical properties to create mana sickness, mana poisoning seed to be when you managed to make mana physical before fusing it with your body.
How to do that? No idea.
According the snippets that weren't redacted it seed to do a number of things. Mutations if you were stupid about it for one, but what I was interested in was how it hinted at making the body more resistant to mana over ti.
Like foreign spells were less effective.
Not useful right this second, considering my need for a Healer, but if I ever had to deal with mages or enchantnts? Well, I wasn't planning on fighting soone that strong or rich, but I wouldn't say no to an edge either.
Only problem was it sounded very similar to my ridian theory. In that I was only trying to make it half-physical, half-spiritual. I had no plans on exploding any of myself in my current state.
I'd dabble in each while or when I could, mainly focused on simple casting as that seed to be the easiest.
Just had to do it when Ken wasn't around. The ass was very against letting do magic practice while I was healing. For good reason, but still.
Droplets were...hmmm.
How to describe them? Droplet wasn't entirely correct, it didn't act in any way like a liquid. Just a more concentrated eddy of mana whose travel through my pathways were unnecessarily half-hazard. Had about fifteen in my system right now. Dangerously close to when a pair last overlapped at twenty.
It'd been a bit though and having more in my system would an that everything would get stronger quicker.
I doubted I'd enjoy another instance of that blinding pain, but the quality of it made it hurt less than the feeling of my flesh constantly dying! Almost wouldn't have to deal with that. Ken said I had nearly recovered enough for him to start putting strong enough stabilization spells while healing that the ups and downs would turn into just ups.
Wouldn't be long after that that I'd finally be rid of the toxin.
For now my focus was the droplets, moving around my pathways to leave behind relatively small cracks. Cycling over and over, switching which path they travelled on a pattern I couldn't hope to decipher.
Grabbing one was easy now. Just a matter of finding it and imposing my will. Moving it wasn't so hard either. While taking it out of my pathways ant progress was sluggish, I was still able to maintain my grasp. All that was left was the execution.
Normal mana acted a lot like an arm. I didn't have to think consciously about using it, I just did. The droplets forced to figure out how the mana potential turned into a tangible action...and I was disappointing.
I expected sothing fantastical. Not to witness mana burn like a gas fueling my desires.
Not an exact taphor. Nothing was when comparing the mystical with the physical. After finding out what was 'burning' the mana (also my desire), I could stoke it to the point where it would burn a droplet.
Simple in theory. Difficult in practice.
Desire wasn't like will. It couldn't technically be trained. I coined it as 'desire' because it was literally how much I wanted sothing to happen. Normal mana needed so little that I'd never considered it possible to be a part of the casting system, which made droplets more...unappealing.
In a sense. The minutiae wasn't sothing I cared to regale right now. Suffice to say that my desire to get rid of the dead tissues in my body was barely enough to finally use the damned things.
I could tell imdiately when potential had turned to action.
I watched with wide eyes as one of the blotches on my arm shrunk by a few milliters, converting the dead tissue into sothing living. I thought I was hallucinating, but nd suddenly recognizing the recovered portion as part of my body left no room for doubt.
Huh.
Didn't even feel any burden on my tolerance.
I grinned. Well then. Better get to work. I had fourteen droplets in my system, and plenty more I could make!
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