Day 30, 2:45 PM

  Mana is alive. I don’t know where that intuitive knowledge comes from, but I can feel it. The way it dances, mana isn’t leaves floating in a mighty river, it is an entity, a creature with its own will, or at least an instinctive knowledge of where to go.

  I stand above a gushing stream of golden-colored mana, yet I remain a hazy green silhouette, giving off the same mana as the forest, drawing it to make up for what I have lost. The yellow mana slips past me, like oil spilled into a river, flowing atop, yet not mixing with the rest even a little bit.

  There is an important truth hiding in plain sight. My keen mind pushes me towards it, yet I don’t know what that truth is. I wish to speak, to ask Edna, but breaking this moment of realization, of heightened sensation might come at a cost. If I stop, I might never again enter this state of mind.

  So, I observe. The mist is not a mist, the golden torrent is not a torrent. It gushes up, yet avoids my body. It goes through my clothes, yet doesn’t disturb them. How do I know it’s not going through my body?

  My attention shifts up, above my head, and sure enough, a pocket of green vapor swirls like an islet surrounded by a furious, grand river of gold. I raise my arm, and another patch of green springs to life, I place my arms together, and the patch grows. I grab my sleeve and stretch it, but the yellow current passes through it.

  Yes, it passes through the clothes, not through me.

  That’s important. I know it is. Because… a blank. I feel like I’m relying on raw power to plow through a field which requires finesse. I’m pushing snow by going forward, but it’s building up. It’s possible to make progress, but the more I push, the greater the mound of unresolved questions tripping me up, the harder it is to make the next step because of all the deductions I should have made but didn’t, instead relying on instinct and raw brainpower.

  I’m missing something.

  Whatever it is, it’s vital. Whatever it is, it requires knowledge I don’t possess, nor know where to acquire it.

  The raging current of yellow mana dwindles, then subsides. My trance ends, and I focus once more on Edna. She is still an explosion of colors contained in human shape, among others, yellow splashes swirl in the multicolored mannequin.

  “Edna, why do I only have green mana in me, while you have a bunch of other colors.”

  “Green mana is that of life, the forest is also green because this whole area is saturated with life mana. The abomination you killed mainly relied on yellow mana. The mana of cowards, tricksters, and deceivers.”

  “And why do you seemingly have all colors? Why does green break down into yellow and blue?”

  “I have absorbed mana of all types and learned to mold it into whatever suits me. As for green mana, I’m surprised you noticed it. Life mana is a mix of yellow and blue, of chaos and order, of cowardice and bravery.”

  Sounds like nonsense to me, but she seems to believe her own words.

  “So, you can only heal with green mana?”

  “No, not exactly.” There goes all her certainty, wiped away by a single simple question. “You can heal with red mana too, or yellow, or blue. It’s just that green is the most efficient. The body obeys it the most.”

  I consider the statement before asking the logical question.

  “That means you can do anything with any kind of mana, but there exists a specific color with extra affinity for the task at hand?”

  I open my eyes and mana sense disappears, letting the world revert into normal, much duller colors. Edna is looking up, her lips moving slightly.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Basically, yes,” she says eventually.

  “All right, what are the exceptions?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Never heard of one.”

  Then why didn’t you just say ‘yes’? Are you being contrarian on purpose or—

  I stop the useless line of thought. Bickering leads nowhere.

  “All right.” I calm down and change the subject. “I have another question, mana constantly evaporates from me, and I guess I draw it into myself passively.”

  She nods.

  “Why didn’t the yellow mana enter my body? In fact, it seemed like it was struggling to avoid me.”

  “You are still not drawing mana, the amount that enters and leaves your body is the same, and the density of mana inside your body is more or less the same as the surroundings you are in. It’s a bit denser in the dungeon and in the corrupted lands, it’s thinner in the castles—”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Do you know why mana is thicker or thinner in places?”

  Edna looks at me as if I asked her why it was raining. “I don’t know. That’s the way it always was. Mana around human settlements is sparser, while it’s abundant in the wilds. I can tell you there’s more of it in the dungeons because dungeons are a magical construct, and some of their magic seeps out. The deeper you go, the denser the mana.”

  A part, a small, meticulous part of me wants to shout at her. How could she not know? Why didn’t she or her predecessors run experiments and try to figure out how magic worked? And yet, I have already lived a life, and I haven’t done the rational thing of cataloging BSD classes, level up conditions, and optimal paths of advancement.

  So, I decide to be constructive. “Edna, how much time are you willing to invest in me, and are you interested in uncovering the secrets of magic?”

  “I have decades left, if that’s what you’re asking. What’s your plan?”

  A crazy idea strikes me.

  “I just had the most brilliant flash of inspiration in the history of Everrain.” I pause, since that dramatic introduction needs buildup. “What do you think about the following - I become a mage, like you, we map out the path, skills, everything we need to know, you teach me magic needed to shape and heal and everything you know, then you switch your class to something like a hunter.”

  She chokes, staring at me as if I’m mad, but I continue with my spiel.

  “Then, you once more become an apprentice mage, you lose your skills, including losing a tier of mnemonics. That would allow you to forget a bunch of things your brain doesn’t need, and that would help extend your life, right? You won’t go insane, you write down everything important, everything else you let disappear, and then your mind will have room for another century or two of memories—”

  “You’re insane.” She says, and while I can’t argue against her statement, what I’m saying is both perfectly logical and rational.

  “And why is that?” I ask calmly.

  “Because!” she stutters. “You don’t stop being a mage! Nobody stops being a mage!”

  “And why is that? Do you lose the ability to use magic if you stop being a mage?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Shh.” I place a finger on my lips. “There are minor abominations prowling around, and you’re shouting while sitting in a pile of crystal moth.”

  She covers her mouth, looking around, apparently so shocked she momentarily forgot where she was.

  Some mnemonics… Blunt almost said it, but I caught it at the last moment.

  “If you don’t know, we’ll find out. I’ll become a mage, we level you up, then I drop the class and try to do magic. If it works, all is great and good, we can see what happens when I re-enter all the mage classes, and how skills behave. If it doesn’t work, all is great and good, we can see what happens when I re-enter all the mage classes, and how skills behave, with the caveat that I can’t use magic until I’m a mage again. Big deal.”

  “You are insane.” Her eyes are wide as she shakes her head, trying to chuck out the idea I’ve planted in her brain.

  “You already said that, and while technically true, there’s nothing insane about my idea, and you know it. Had your people known about this, some of your ancestors would have used it to transcend life and death, and you would have thought it a common custom now.”

  I spread my arms, looking like the mad messiah that I am.

  “If we time things right, we could have undying bodies, undecaying minds, and live as long as the world exists. All we have to do is redo our mage classes every couple hundred years to filter out irrelevant memories.”

  Why isn’t Manny here? Why is my goddess cold and dead on Arborea while I’m here, on an alien world, on the cusp of achieving immortality. Can magic bring her back? Can it somehow summon her into this world and grant her a young body?

  Then that disgusting, rational part of my mind speaks again. Even if it were possible, would she want something like that? Would she hate me? Would she consider her existence a curse?

  So many unknowns, but one step at a time, I’ll figure things out.

  But, the voice of reason says, making me shudder, is there a difference between a life eternal and an endless redo loop?