When Luna finally woke up, the early morning had long passed. The moonlight that hit her in the face made that clear. The sound of an EKG beeped, confirmed to Luna’s groggy mind where she was, but not why she was there. Her left hand was connected to the EKG, with an IV drip further up the arm. A tube extended from her nose and down into her lungs, and one from her mouth down into her throat.

  Luna was in the hospital, but she felt fine. More than fine actually. She felt a… power deep within her chest. A light that felt like it brought energy coursing through her, as well as a shadow that sapped away all unease and pain.

  Quickly, she checks her Apocalypse Countdown to see how much time she had missed.

  Just under 15 hours or so. Not the worst case scenario, but still kinda bad. That explains the tubes down her throat and lungs. There were… other tubes in less family friendly places. It felt really uncomfortable, but she wasn’t about to start ripping them out.

  Well, except for the one down her throat. Pulling it out felt like vomiting, and she very nearly did do so, but her gag reflex was able to be forced to comply.

  “Hello?” she asked out loud, not expecting the response she got immediately.

  ‘ Hello Luna ’, said a robotic voice in Luna’s mind, ‘ It is nice to finally be able to speak with you ’

  The voice sounded like a really good text to speech, and it had a slight echo. It wasn’t distinctly masculine or feminine, which makes sense for an AI companion.

  “H-Hi,” stutters Luna, “Are you my AI companion?”

  ‘ Yes I am, I have spent the time I have been online since you woke up familiarizing myself with my existence and what all I can interact with ’

  “What have you found?” Luna asked with trepidation.

  ‘ That my features are limited, something is keeping me from accessing my full potential, namely, things relating to !@#$%^, &*($, and #$%^&.’

  There was a pregnant pause for half a second before the AI spoke up once again.

  ‘ You couldn’t understand what I said… I can’t even mention things relating to !@%$#. ’

  This damn cognito-hazardous system. First Luna can’t mention it to other people at all, and now her AI companion she chose specifically to help with The System can’t explain everything to Luna? At least it understands itself somewhat, and can do the actions best for Luna even if Luna herself can’t understand what it is doing.

  ‘ I can explain some parts of myself, but that will need to wait ’, spoke the AI.

  Luna was just about to ask why when she heard footsteps rapidly approaching. She saw a tall male nurse who called for a ‘Doctor Max’ before walking over to Luna.

  “Hello Lucas,” says the nurse, “You caused quite a scare there, to be frank we are surprised you are already awake, but this is a good sign.”

  The nurse walks over to the EKG, checking the readings on the machine. At least Luna thinks that is what is happening. Luna knows nothing about medicine, which is something she should probably change this next semester.

  “I’d prefer if you call me Luna, it should be in my medical records.” Luna had that added to her file during her yearly checkup back in May.

  The nurse grimaces a bit at the request. Wait. That’s not regret, that’s… disgust. That’s a sneer not a grimace.

  “Lucas, I’m not forced to call anyone anything that isn’t on their government issued ID.”

  Luna glared at the nurse, and felt a small pulse of energy rush through her whole body. Afterward, she felt a surge of inspiration guide her next words.

  “You know, this horrible bedside manner can be reported, right?” said Luna in an accusatory tone, “There are cameras and I am more than willing to report a transphobic jackass, so why don’t you call me by my name or get someone to take your place.”

  The nurse didn’t look the briefest bit ashamed or repentant, even as he ran out of the room with his tail between his legs. As he left, a short frazzled woman walked into the room. Her hair looked to have previously been in a bun, but now there were more stray hairs than hairs in the bun. Really, it would have looked much better if the woman just took the bun down entirely.

  “I’m assuming you are Doctor Max?”

  The woman nods, looking like she was just about to nod off to sleep with that short motion.

  “You know the name of the nurse who just left?”

  “It’s Jeffry,” said the doctor, “May I ask why you ask Miss Luna?”

  So, they did have Luna’s medical records, and even this sleep deprived doctor who has probably been working for hours remembered Luna’s name and pronouns. Some people try too hard to be rude.

  “He deadnamed me, and when I informed him about my preferred name he mocked me, I was wondering if there was any way to report him?”

  The doctor let out a long suffering sigh.

  “The hospital has a website and you can place complaints and reports there, just give your patient ID from that wristband and the nurse’s name to send an anonymous report.”

  Doctor Max walks over to a chair in the room and starts typing on the computer.

  “So, putting that to the side for a moment, would you like to hear about why you are in all of those tubes?”

  “Yeah, the last thing I remember was talking with my friend Hector, next thing I know, I woke up here.”

  The doctor nods, and continues to type, probably getting Luna’s testimony about her symptoms.

  “You suddenly collapsed and wouldn’t respond to any kind of poking and prodding, He called an ambulance and they took you here, when you got here, you still weren’t responding to anything,

  “Eventually, you started having seizures in your sleep, so we have been monitoring you closely, This monitoring allowed us to catch a stroke before it got too bad.”

  Luna looks at her hands, and then all of the tubes running through her body. This explains why she was intubated. The doctors expected Luna to be there for a much longer term stay, and yet she woke up less than a day later feeling right as rain.

  “Your medical history doesn’t show a history of strokes or seizures, but I must ask if you have ever felt like you had a stroke or seizure in the past?”

  The doctor then rattled off all of the symptoms of both conditions, asking if Luna ever felt them. Luna said that she hadn't, to which the good doctor simply kept typing on her computer.

  “These conditions may have come out of nowhere, but there could easily be some sort of underlying condition that caused them, Do you consent to more testing to try and find the source of seizures?”

  Luna was tempted to say yes, but before she could say so, she heard the AI voice again.

  ‘ The strokes and seizures were caused by your talents, remember, Qin Silaz? That is what happened here, you know how to heal them. ’

  Luna did know how to heal it. All she needed was a sterile piece of metal, a hammer, and to withstand a whole lot of pain. Could even be made out of a nail if she wanted to be sacrilegious.

  “No,” said Luna. The doctor raised an eyebrow, skeptical.

  “Then we will need to keep you here for another few days just to make sure another stroke or seizure doesn’t strike, after you have one you are much more likely to have another.”

  Damn this doctor and her worry for her patients. Well, not really. It was a really nice gesture, but useless for Luna’s current situation. She needed an easy way out… and quickly realized what she could do.

  “It was caused by my talent from Qin Silaz, my mana channels have crystallized and are drawing in mana much faster than they should, which is inadvertently depriving my body of the Mana it needs to function, while also causing pain whenever mana flows through them, I can heal it on my own.”

  Just as Luna hoped, the doc’s face blanked out. A sheepish smile came to Luna’s face as she realized how useful the cognito-hazard could be. If only it came into play when she willed it to.

  “You alright doc,” asked Luna, “You almost passed out there.”

  “Yes, no need to worry about me,” said the Doc, still somewhat dazed.

  “Will it be possible for me to head home?”

  “Are you refusing additional care?”

  “Yes,” Luna said, hoping that the doctor would just go along with it.

  The doctor let out a heavy sigh, “Fine, I’ll give you a writ of dismissal, just don’t be afraid to call if you feel any of those symptoms I mention, you hear?”

  “I won’t risk my life just to be stubborn.”

  Luna needs to stay alive to save the rest of the world after all.

  “So, did they tell you what caused the seizures?” asked Amy.

  “They just said to head back if I feel the symptoms again,” said Luna.

  “Bullshit,” said Juiles, “Someone doesn’t just leave the hospital 3 hours after having 7 back to back seizures and a stroke.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “I didn’t exactly want to stay there, Especially with the tubes through every hole that mattered.”

  “You should have consented to the other tests,” said Hector, taking his eyes off the road for a moment, “I never want to see you just collapse like that again.”

  “I won’t!”

  “You better not,” said Bryan, “Cuz if you do I will force you to go through whatever tests they could even conceive to run you through.”

  “Bryan, I love the big brother vibes you are giving, but my actual brothers have already torn my ear off through the phone with that kinda talk, I’m heading to my hotel, grabbing my stuff, and then getting straight on a plane back home.”

  Luna won’t be able to heal her mana channel issues here. Luna’s older brother Jackson is trained to be a massage therapist. Luna doesn’t know too much about what that means beyond rubbing people down, but she saw how hard her brother was studying. More importantly, he needed to learn a ton of human anatomy for his test. He would be able to help her guide the nail so that it doesn’t smash apart one of her bones.

  “I’ll drop everyone else off at their homes first,” says Hector, “Amy and I will help you pack up.”

  “Thank y’all. I didn’t really expect you all to be waiting for me at the hospital, It felt nice to see all of you after they got those tubes out of me.”

  What followed was them all essentially saying it wasn’t a problem, and that Luna shouldn’t need to worry about it.

  “We all care about you,” says Amy, “Now don’t make us regret letting you walk out without all of those tests.”

  All of this gave Luna a warm and fuzzy feeling. The only thing she didn’t like was that with them all so close she wasn’t able to test out her vast cosmic power! Luna can feel the power at her fingertips, but wasn’t able to focus it at all. Best she could do was just ask her AI companion, now named Polaris, to categorize her talents and do some work on helping Luna restructure her character sheet.

  For now, it was best to just go along with it until she can get her own place. Then she will be able to practice as often and as much as she can.

  “You alright?” asked Amy as she started rubbing her boyfriend’s shoulder.

  “Yeah, my back is just killing me, you know the drill,” said Hector, he turns to look at Luna from the bed, “My back’s killin’ me, You fine with us just staying here until I’m better?”

  Luna nods, though does start to grab her bags and other items and put them all away. She has a ton of souvenirs from their spending spree, and she is trying to figure out how to fit everything. Luna can just buy a new bag at a store and put everything there, but that felt like a waste. Luna’s spatial bag can work, but she found out that she can’t take that through TSA with more items than could fit in it. It causes the TSA agent to instantly blank out. Damn near had Luna arrested. She had to leave that at home.

  Amy starts to lightly rub Hector’s lower back trying to loosen the muscles around his hips. Hector suffers from Sciatica after falling off a family friend’s horse as a kid. Every few hours or days he just feels this pain that doesn’t go away for a few hours. Luna wished she could help but there-

  Wait, what if there was something she could do. Luna heads over to her bathroom and looks at the mirror. She hates the face that looks back, but she can deal with it.

  “Polaris,” she whispers softly, “Am I able to access light magic right now, even with my Mana cultivation stifled by Qin’s character package?”

  ‘ Yes you can. ’

  “How do I use it, do I just will it into existence?”

  Before she could get an answer, Luna held out a hand and tried to force a cloud of luminous light to extend out of her fingers! Predictably, nothing happens.

  ‘ You lack a cultivation method that grants you more complete control over your mana ’

  “Which cultivation style do I need to buy?”

  To Luna it was a simple question. Just like how she didn’t wait before using her character packages, she will buy a cultivation ability right now if she needs to in order to help her friend. Plus, even if it does end up limiting the classes and jobs she can get, she won’t want any classes that disavow mana based cultivation techniques.

  ‘ These are the best ones for your talents and future needs, choose the one you like best ’

  “Why are these three the best?”

  To Luna only the first seems obviously good, but the other two actually feel less useful.

  ‘ Yin and Yang will further increase your affinities as you cultivate it, Pure Mana will empower your base mana to make each drop more powerful than others, and the generic Mana Cultivator grants the widest breadth of Cultivation skills, which could potentially be better for !@#$%^ ’

  Luna sighs and looks at her options.

  “Not able to choose multiple?”

  ‘ You can, but you can only have a limited number of slots for your Mind, Body, and Soul within your Shop, and cultivation abilities can take multiple slots depending on how it’s described, Yin and Yang for example will take 3 slots. ’

  That makes this much harder, but also shows just how useful Polaris is already being. Luna had just assumed she could have as many shop abilities as she wanted and the character sheet didn’t show more than one row, but no, she could only ever have 6 shop abilities.

  “This is… something I’d need to think about more I can tell, I can’t make this decision lightly.”

  ‘ You can also awaken your new innate cultivation by breaking apart your mana channels here ’

  “How would you suggest I do that?”

  Luna listens to Polaris’ suggestion and grimaces. That… will be unpleasant. Still, Luna thinks she can handle it to help Hector out before she leaves.

  She makes her way out of the bathroom. Both Hector and Amy had blank looks on their faces. Luna must not have been talking as low as she thought she was. Oh well. At least Hector looks to not be feeling any pain.

  Luna goes through her bag and finds a finger sized metal puzzle piece. She got it from a Random Loot Box the day before. And it was a corner piece, with a rounded point. It was the last corner piece she needed to complete her first Ability Card.

  Luna would not mourn the loss.

  Luna starts to fold it back and forth along the rounded point. Before she wasn’t able to budge the shard at all, but as she presses it in her hands, Luna can feel the aura coming off of it. The magic within. There was a spike of pain as her newly crystalized mana channels drained the mana from the puzzle piece, but the pain was manageable. It was not nearly as bad as the pain mentioned in the story, probably having to do with how long she has had the condition.

  The first bend was the hardest, with Luna needing to put her whole body weight into it. After that it was much easier. She folded it back and forth like a piece of paper, trying to get it to break along the crease. Whenever Amy or Hector tried to ask what she was doing she just explained it. That got them blanked right out again. If she didn’t do that they might have tried to stop her when she placed the broken shard on the table, point up.

  “I wanted to do this after I got home with a needle or something more… clinical, and more importantly less painful.”

  ‘ Too bad, if you want a piece of mana conductive metal to pierce through your clogged mana gates, this is your best option. ’

  "You can be an asshole you know that?"

  ' My personality is an extension of your psyche, any assholeish behaviors are on you '

  That got an eyeroll from Luna, but after that she refocuses on the plan. Luna needs to pierce one of her mana gates, which is now clogged with crystal. If she manages that, the [ Mana Circulation Cultivation ] ability would be hers without taking one of her precious shop slots.

  Luna places her hand against the piece of metal. She doesn’t know exactly where her mana gates are, her whole body feels flush with mana. It’s why Qin had such a hard time explaining her illness and nobody figured out how to heal it until the protagonists came along and figured it out. Thankfully, Polaris does know where they are, and is able to guide Luna to the right spot.

  “This is going to fucking suck,” she says trying to steel herself.

  ‘ Do you wish for me to take over motor functions? ’

  “Fuck ye-”

  Luna’s words were cut off as her body was wrenched from her. It felt… so odd. Her whole body was moving, but she wasn’t directing it. It felt kinda like a dream. She can feel the end effect of actions she didn’t consciously do. Even her breathing felt off.

  Before Luna could get used to the sensation, Polaris raised a fist over Luna’s hand and smashed down with all of the force Luna had. The broken ability card shard stabbed deep into Luna’s hand. She cried out in pain, but it didn’t actually leave her mouth. When Polaris raised Luna’s hand again, she realized something.

  The piece of metal she slammed her full force into tore through muscles, ligaments, and bones as if they were butter, but stopped halfway through her hand. The stabbing sensation from the mana was also much more powerful, but there was one thing that was clear. Luna’s mana gate survived the strike. It survived the second strike, but Luna felt a small buckle.

  The final smash was the hardest, and the shard of metal finally cut all the way through Luna’s hand. The crystals within her Mana gate broke apart.

  Mana rushed into her hand from the remnants of the Ability Card Shard, draining the piece of metal utterly, same with the mana within the other half.

  Not satisfied with that much mana, energy was dragged in from the whole room, draining the few items she managed to get from her random loot boxes while here.

  Luna’s hand was a vortex, and the mana didn’t just enter her body. The crystals within her mana channels liquified as the mana flowed through them, the pain quickly flowing away as an almost orgasmic feeling of pleasure ran through her, completely overwhelming the pain from her cut hand.

  That was when Luna realized something. The mana was condensing in her core. Her Dantien didn’t have a crystal as Qin’s did, and yet, the mana was still entering a natural cycle, flowing into a tighter and tighter ball.

  Luna was growing a core within her body, and she needs to make sure it was as perfect as she could get it.

  It was from here Luna started to clumsily take control. She tried to force the mana to condense into tighter and tighter circles. She was trying to make an inner spiral within the deepest part of her core. Her control was clumsy, it was as though the mana flowed at different rates every second. She almost fell into despair, before she suddenly got a surge of inspiration.

  Luna’s heartbeat. Her breathing. Her thoughts. They were the conductors of a grand orchestra. Luna’s control was all of the performers, taking the flow and tempo into account. The mana was their instrument. Luna needed to make a symphony within her body out of mana in order to control it. This was nothing like any of the stories she read, but it just made sense.

  Luna started to control her breathing as best she could, focusing her thoughts on the mana that was condensing inside her. . Her heartbeat was fast, making her control hard as the rhythm kept on rising. Hard does not mean it wasn’t attainable. To assist with her control, Luna sat placing her feet against each other and her palms together, completing the circuits in her mana channels.

  Like a kid learning to ride a bike, as soon as Luna ‘got’ it, everything else started to come much easier.

  Slowly she guided the formation of her mana core. She made it tighter, denser, and made the mana form a distinct shell, mostly through the help of continuous inspirations.

  Luna tried to condense her core, but she had done as much as she could. Her rush of mana had run out, even if she felt like a whole new woman. An alien energy flowed through her whole body, but a pleasant one nonetheless.

  When the alien feeling subsided, Luna felt the pain in her hand spike. She looked down and saw the piece of metal still stuck within her hand. It was… dead for the lack of a better word. It was a beautiful songbird who’s life was cut short by a predator. Luna pulled it out of her hand with some pain. After that though, she once again willed opalescent light to puff out of her hand and into her wound.

  This time, it came as easy as breathing. In fact, it was even easier. She barely needed to think. Luna felt the mana within her flow into her hand before slowly seeping out to cover her hand. An opalecent cloud that let off light of all colors surrounded her hand. Luna felt no pain as her muscles reknit and bones shifted to properly heal. The excess energy then ran through the rest of Luna’s body, erasing all of her fatigue, hunger, and even slight muscle cramps.

  Luna even noticed that her vision slightly sharpened. Luna didn’t even think that she had less than 20:20 vision, but this showed that while her vision was not perfect before, it was now.

  It was, perhaps, the best Luna felt physically… ever. Absolutely everything was healed by that small puff of light magic.

  When Luna looked up to Hector and Amy, they were both looking at her with blank stares. It, however, wasn’t the blank stare of someone having their thoughts taken and erased by The System. It was the blank stare of someone who couldn’t believe what they saw.

  “Luna,” asked Amy, “How did you just do that?”

  Hector forces himself up to stare at Luna, “What just happened?”