Chapter 16

…

[Floor 2 – Day 10]

[Total Days in Trial: 51]

It happened suddenly.

If I hadn't been in the state of mind to notice, I would have completely missed as the menu notifications flew past without so much as a "ping" to signal me.

[Status]

Name: John

Attributes

Class: Disciple – Skills: 3/7

Titles:

Perks:

Strength:

15

-

Lesser Analysis

Dexterity:

12

Archery 6

Constitution:

18

Resist Poison 11

Intelligence:

10

-

Wisdom:

11 [+2]

Meditation 1

Wise man of the Mountains

Charisma:

10 [+5]

-

Ambitious [ACTIVE]

With the Skill, my breathing stabilized. No longer did I feel a need to consciously control the practiced motions. Instead, I felt as if I could rely on auto-pilot. My body knew what to do, and it could maintain the breathing patterns without my constant focus on keeping within what I'd been taught.

In fact, though I still felt it as a minor discomfort in holding in air until my lungs felt like they were burning and only releasing it slowly, despite the growing urge to exhale everything and suck in all the air I could: it didn't tax my body nearly as much as it did before. When I'd started, I could barely repeat the pattern more than a few times in a row, hardly making it a single hour before feeling entirely exhausted and needing to take breaks where I breathed normally. But with the Meditation Skill, I found it was natural to fall into the pattern.

Sitting in the garden, lying down to sleep at night. Even walking slowly, while hunting with the bow. I felt an ease in continuing it, and following along with my progress, the Priest seemed to take pride in my sudden improvements, although he never vocalized such a sentiment. Instead, he offered additional instruction.

“Focus beyond your body. Look towards the life around you, towards the soil and the air. The life that sprouts up, that crawls along. The stone is but a reservoir of power, solidified. The insects that move along the ground are but tiny specks, but specks all the same. The grass is slow and patient, but very true in its efforts.”

His words were those of a person who could only explain around the concept, but not break down how it worked. Yet, the more he spoke, the more I realized he was leading me to find the answers myself, rather than try to do the impossible. Because this wasn't something a person could truly know, and define. It was more like growing a new sense.

How could someone fully explain how sight worked, to someone blind?

Of course, you could try. You could explain with words, but it would never be exactly right. The same for sounds and speech, to someone who had been born deaf. In essence, that seemed to be close to the truth of what he was trying to teach me, in that I had to understand it on my own.

And at the core of everything, was "Mana."

It was the reason for the breathing patterns. It was the reason the Priest could use his Miracle, and the reason he could see his way around the building and the garden, with relative ease. While his eyes no longer held vision in the traditional sense, it seemed he could perceive a different type of sight. One that came hand in hand with taking in Mana, day after day.

Mana was difficult to sense. Even after earning the Meditation Skill, that didn't change, but now that I was able to truly rely on the Skill to help me maintain the breathing patterns, I could spend my mental focus on more than my own body. And looking outward, I was finally beginning to believe I might be on the verge of feeling its presence. Certainly, I could feel something in my body was changing. As if something was moving along with my blood, bringing with it a strange sense of calm. It seemed especially clear to me, each time I was Healed.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only way I noticed my body was changing.

As the days continued to pass, I continued to lose weight. Whatever reserves of fat I’d once had, were now dwindling, and my muscles were growing weaker. While the Strength Attribute seemed to be keeping me functional, the Priest seemed to be pushing for my progress to continue a little less gently. Urging me to meditate for longer, while instructing me more often.

He did so for my sake, no doubt, but I was pushing for progress too. I knew exactly how dangerous the situation was becoming. Whatever careful equilibrium my body was somehow maintaining, could come crashing down. Just because the Miracle was holding problems at bay, didn't mean that it could do so forever.

My progress may have been decent, but I was entering risky territory. Before long, I would be nothing short of a skeleton, and the sense of hunger had become a constant companion. The urge to gorge on whatever I might find to eat, was being held off only by the rational acknowledgement that there would be no point, along with the persistence of the odd meditative breathing I was continuously cycling through. The focus on keeping my thoughts towards something productive, was becoming a life-line, and it was rare I stopped using the Skill, outside of meals and sleeping.

There were a few interruptions, though.

[SECONDARY QUEST]

[DEFEND THE CITIES: PROGRESS 0/5] [QUEST FAILED]

[REWARD REDUCED] [NEW SECONDARY QUEST ISSUED] [DEFEND THE CITIES: PROGRESS 0/4]

After waking that morning, the menu made its annoucement, with a loud "Ping" as the messages blurred past. It seemed that events were continuing along as predicted.

The first city had fallen.

I had been hoping that maybe, just maybe, the Secondary Quests had been related to participation. That the Cities would be just fine on their own, and whatever was happening on this floor was more like a stage I could play a role on, than an actual need for me to intervene as some sort of hero.

Clearly, I'd been wrong.

A city that I had been expected to try and defend was now gone. Whatever rewards would have come from saving it, were now also gone. For each day I spent sitting in a garden, breathing slowly, I was ignoring the fact that I'd stepped away from the reason this Floor existed, and was dangerously ignorant of what I was actually up against. All I knew was that danger was likely approaching.

In truth, this was something that I had been thinking about even before the notifications.

I didn’t know how the Floors worked, exactly. The [Trial] had spirited me away as one of the [Selected] but I wasn't entirely sure what that meant, other than some rough concepts. The first Floor had obviously been constructed as a test, specifically to push me to my limits, and yet the second Floor seemed quite different from that.

It felt much more like I was in a real world.

Not Earth, clearly, considering the demons, Miracles, and the lack of familiar technology- but the Priest seemed as real as I did. They were a person of flesh and blood. Of thoughts and emotion. Just from their efforts to teach me, I couldn't think of them as anything less than human. Which had me wondering: For every city which fell, how many lives were being extinguished?

I felt frustrated.

This Floor was likely created to test me, just as the first Floor was, so was I at fault for not helping? Obviously I should be helping those cities, fighting whatever was out there- but I could barely help myself. Here in this small church, I was barely clinging to life, ritualizing my days simply to stay alive.

Not for the first time in my life, I cursed my limitations.

I cursed how difficult ordinary existence was. How I could not simply take for granted being able to stay alive. How I could not eat, how I could not simply exist, without something dragging me back to the painful reality of my body’s shortcomings. That hatred and frustration spun around in my mind...

But, then I drew in a breath.

And I drew in air, I felt the air sink into my blood, and I let my heart beat that blood throughout my body. Up through my chest, my limbs, my neck...

The power I could feel within it was weak. Barely the faintest sense that it was even there, and yet it was.

It was present.

As my heart slowed and my breathing grew still: I could see it. The Mana waiting there, just out of reach. The Mana all around me, flowing freely through life and inanimate. Through sand, through stone, through roots.

Through the Priest.

“How gifted you are, my disciple.”

I felt a smile come to my lips at the sudden praise.

“I shall now enact the Miracle. Watch, witness, and learn, child.”

At once, a hand fell to my chest, and Mana surged.

The patterns were like static. Complicated beyond what I could understand, they flowed through as my blood made way, setting themselves in place while continuing forward from their origin. I could see each and every point, but from a distance there was simply too much to focus on. Instead, I simply chose a single place, settling on the patterns I found in my chest.

The logic, I realized, was not something I needed to know.

This was not about logic. This was not about total understanding.

This was not a spell, and I was not a Caster. The power here was borrowed, not known. I simply needed to remember the foundation to channel it. While I thought that perhaps, one day in the distant future, I could try to decipher the finer details, as I was currently, I simply needed to guide this power. I did not need to assemble it entirely in order to bring it into existence.

As the Mana rolled through my body, circling with the flow of my blood: I felt it.

Then, I grasped at it.

As the Miracle ended, and the waves of its power faded, I grappled with what was left. I pushed for it to stay, to linger: repeating one more heart beat, than another. I kept it alive, before it was lost in its entirety.

Slowly, painfully, I continued it. Pressing it to repeat, as it cycled through my flesh.

It took everything I had.

My lungs burned, then screamed. But I knew if I were to release the air in my chest, I would lose what I was on the cusp of finally obtaining.

I needed to contain it. To focus it. To learn from it-

Then, like a bolt of lightning, the message appeared.

Skill Earned: Miracle: [Lesser Heal 1]

Finally.

I exhaled, laughing away the pain as tears rolled down my face.

Finally.