*** Kiara ***

  She was grasping for straws, and she knew it. By now, the once bright star in her room was down to a bright light bulb and nowhere near its once celestial beauty. The tree leaves were barely shimmering purple, if she had her eyes open, and even with her eyes closed, the situation was not much better.

  The only plans she had come up with were stupid.

  First option: Accept the situation, like the adult she was telling herself she was, and wait seven years to regain her Mana sense.

  Unacceptable outcome. Totally not an option! Or at least the option of last resort. Given that she had to do nothing to achieve it, a fitting backup plan.

  Second option: Jump-starting her dwindling Mana sense by introducing more foreign Mana into her system.

  Problem: Where to get foreign Mana from?

  Possible solutions: The plant leaves or the nothingness orb. Both shone bright enough to identify them as possible solutions for her problem.

  Problem: How to internalize or consume the Mana?

  Solution: Eat the leaves. Sia told her they were not poisonous. Wait! She told her people got sick from overdosing on Mana. No problem, she was already overdosed on Mana as it is.

  Yeah, nothing bad ever happened from adding to an existing problem and making it worse. It felt like the house was on fire, and she was trying to build another floor on top of it to keep it from burning down.

  Outcome: It might not work. She might make her existing Mana poisoning, or at least what felt like it, worse. If it worked, it was unclear if it proved to be a long-term fix or only a temporary patch for her problem. Overall, not a desirable option, with some time pressure if she wanted to proceed.

  Third option: Get a crystal and become initiated.

  Problems: Where to get a crystal from?

  Possible solutions: Ask her grandmother. Destroy the nothingness orb without breaking the crystal inside and integrate with it.

  Problems: She did not trust her grandmother, and it was apparently a capital crime to supply a child with a crystal before it had reached their 12th birthday. She had no way of opening the orb, except for shattering it on the floor and hoping for the best, and even if the crystal remained whole, she did not know whether it was a good one or would accept her.

  Outcome: Unlikely success overall and a risk of negatively impacting her long-term future. It was a gamble, and she did not like it, and there was no time pressure.

  “Okay, here goes nothing!” she thought to herself. The leaves disappeared in her mouth. Given what she had learned with Sia she chewed them thoroughly to release the Mana stored inside them as fast as possible. They tasted horrible. Kind of bitter, like she would imagine grass to taste. One last moment of hesitation before swallowing them down, full of determination.

  A decision she regretted nearly instantly. All the symptoms she had experienced when taking the Mana potion came back, only more aggressive and violent. She heaved, but kept the leaves down. Mana levels inside her were rising. Her head was throbbing and felt like it was stuck in a slowly tightening vice.

  The foreign Mana inside her barely budged, but it did move somewhat. It reminded her of a dog that has no motivation on its own to move, but is dragged along by its leash.

  It was working. Her Mana sense was slowly improving, but it was not yet enough. Spurred on by her early success, she took another few leaves in her mouth and chewed.

  Her eyes started throbbing. The pressure inside her head made them want to jump out of her head. She groaned. The pain was getting worse. Her field of vision was narrowing as if she was about to black out.

  Nothing to worry about yet. Nothing, she could not handle as long as she avoided sudden movements.

  Her mind felt sluggish, but she had the feeling it was finally growing used to sensing the Mana around her. It just needed another push.

  She grasped for more leaves, but found none on the little tree.

  “When did that happen?” she wondered, her head dizzy.

  “I need more Mana…” the thought.

  Her attention was drawn to the little star in her room. It looked so bright. So shiny. Maybe it wanted to play with her. It just needed to come closer, and so she pulled. The Mana answered her call and came to her, flowed into her. She breathed it in, absorbed it through her skin, into her very soul.

  Everything hurt. Just a little more. Her head was killing her. She closed her eyes as the black fog took ever more of her field of view. Her skin started to sweat blood, but she was too far gone to notice.

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  She didn’t relent. More and more Mana rushed into her. Her soul screamed and etched under the pressure. Somewhere far away, she heard someone shout. Something broke inside her, something was forced to adapt.

  Suddenly, she was thrown back into her mind, into the calm water representing her Mana, but she was no longer floating above. She was drowning. Something was pulling her under, and she had to fight just to keep her head above water, and then she felt an angry dragon tearing into her.

  *** Magdalena ***

  She was too old to run around like a headless chicken. What was her granddaughter doing? What was she thinking? The orb had cut out and no longer received any signal. Her house was on the other side of the city.

  She was running as fast as her old bones could carry her. The image of Kiara would not vanish from her mind. Her eyes had been bloodshot. There was vomit on her shirt. She was sweating heavily. All signs of a severe Mana poisoning.

  What had she done? How had she even done it? Why was her orb no longer working?

  A low-pressure air blast pushed the other citizen out of her way. Some were thrown into the dirt and loud, angry shouts erupted all around her.

  She summoned several force barriers to use as an improvised set of stairs, allowing her to jump over a wall into a garden and taking the same measure to leave it behind her. Time was of the essence, and she wasted none.

  As she arrived at Maya’s and Sarok’s home, she touched a glyph engraved onto her belt. A green flare shot into the air, summoning a healer to her position, something meant only for city-wide emergencies, but she did not care. She left the front door open as she rushed into the house. No one else was home. Kiara was supposed to be with Sia, and only a hunch had led her to check the sensing orb to see if she could maybe get an evening lesson in after all.

  She would teach the foolish child a lesson once this was all over. How could she be so irresponsible?

  Her heart missed a beat.

  “Kiara, stop!” she shouted desperately.

  Her granddaughter was engulfed in a storm of Mana, with her at the very center. She pulled all this unrefined Mana into herself. Poisoning, no, killing herself.

  “What was she even attempting to do?” She cursed.

  Blood was leaking from her every pore. Tears of blood were streaming down her cheeks. The area around her eyes was swollen and red.

  With [Mana mastery] she exerted control over her surroundings and cut through the storm. Commanding the Mana to disperse and leave her granddaughter alone.

  She picked Kiara up and pressed her close to her. Vomit and blood were getting on her elegant, fine clothing.

  Kiara was burning up. The remaining Mana inside her was still ravaging her body. This was the worst case of Mana poisoning she had ever personally seen, and she had seen people die from it.

  Mana inside another person was trickier to manipulate. The soul would not allow an intruder easy access, but she was not an inexperienced novice. She was one of the most accomplished weavers of the kingdom.

  She extended her senses into Kiara, her body so small and vulnerable in her arms. If she had been conscious, she might have fought her off, but as it was, there was only limited resistance.

  Shock froze her for a second.

  “Well, this day simply keeps on giving you, little monster!”

  Inside her granddaughter, she could feel a core, not a powerful one. It felt oddly smooth and round, not at all like the usual crystal, but it was unmistakably a core. At least it was unattuned to any element or concept.

  “You just couldn’t wait anymore,” she mumbled while assessing the situation. It was bad. It was really bad. There was a breach in her dormant Mana source, leading to her internalized Mana and foreign Mana to mix. Foreign Mana was always poisonous in one form or another if not treated correctly. More often than not, it was in the form of alchemical procedures.

  She needed a way for the Mana to leave the body. Then she needed to plug the breach in the Mana source, and by then, the healer was hopefully here to fix the damage the rampage Mana had already done.

  “This is going to suck!” Ritual magic was never her strong suit. An old mentor once told her she was too headstrong and stubborn to work well with others, and maybe he was right. Nevertheless, she knew the basics. And included in said basics was how one linked one's own Mana source to another.

  Overcoming Kiara’s soul resistance once more, and feeling the forming headache as a reward, she linked the two of them together. Mana instantly gushed over to her side of the bond. She started to circle it as fast as she could to internalize and eject as much as possible. Impurities would taint her Mana for weeks if not months to come, but she paid it no mind.

  The pressure on Kiara lessened.

  A thin strand of Mana pierced her astral form, gently so as to cause as little damage as possible, wormed itself forward until it found the breach in her source. What foreign Mana had gotten into it, she would have to take care of it on her own, but what she could do for her was to stitch it up and plug it up until the damage healed on its own.

  She concentrated as much Mana as she could into the beginning of the strand. It would fade over time. There was nothing she could anchor it to. The more Mana in it, the longer it would take before her stitches would tear.

  Gently, she stitched the tear together and placed a thin sheet of concentrated Mana on the inside of her granddaughter’s source. No Mana usage of any kind for at least a month. Maybe she should give her a spanking as well, just to drive home the lesson. But she did not like her very much as it is, so probably not the best idea. If she survived the blood loss and had no major internal injuries she had missed in her scan, she would pull through.

  “Mrs. Thornwing, I do not care what your standing in our city used to be. You are not allowed to use emergency equipment in the case of personal emergencies. Not to speak of the ruckus you caused. Lucky for you, I have brought Healer Norman, so what’s the emergen… Oh, by the gods, is she even still alive? What happened?” spoke an old city guard as he entered the room, a man in healer robes right behind her. He rushed over to Kiara and started to cast his Magic.

  His eyes widened, and he looked up at Magdalena. She just shook her head slightly.

  “We will talk later,” she whispered.

  Minutes passed in tense silence.

  “It looks like a severe case of Mana poison, from eating leaves of a Mana-rich tree,” Norman said. At that moment, she noticed the bare tree for the first time.

  “You have the situation under control?” the guard asked.

  “I think she will pull through, yes, but only because we arrived as early as we did.”

  “Then I will take my leave,” visibly uncomfortable with the situation.

  After the guard had left, Norman spoke again, “What really happened?”

  “The truth, I don’t know. We will have to ask her once she wakes up.”

  “Have you noticed…?”

  “Of course, I have! Who do you take me for? Thank you for not spilling her secret.”

  “I only ever saw one other case of a naturally formed core, and that one was way smaller, and you could feel the impurities within, well, at least at first. Fascinating, isn’t it? If she ever wants to learn the art of healing, send her my way.” Norman spoke. “And now let’s talk money,” he added with a greedy smile.