New World Day 15

  I staggered back to the bathroom from the workshop and collapsed in the shower. I slept in the shower for half a day without stirring a single time. When I finally woke up, I found I was sitting in a small pool of dried blood. I chose to sleep in the shower because I feared that my wounds would open back up and ruin the bed if I tossed and turned while I slept. That idea proved to be correct considering all of the congealed blood around me. I pushed myself to my feet and tumbled forward out of the shower as a terrible pain shot through my right side. I grabbed the back of the nearby toilet to keep myself from falling all the way back to the ground. I leaned on the back of the toilet and used it to pull myself back to my feet. I used the sink and then the entertainment center in the bedroom to hold myself upright as I made my way to the workshop wincing in pain all the way.

  When I reached the workshop, I drank some water and ate all of my remaining granola bars and peanut butter crackers. I would have to switch to canned goods, a couple of bags of chips, and whatever I could hunt outside for food after today. I pulled myself outside and used the crude toilet I had made after I finished with my breakfast. I was nervous about going outside in such a weakened state, but aside from my physical needs, I wanted to see if there were any tracks outside. There weren’t any signs of anything snooping around this side of the house for the first time in awhile. I used the trees and rock wall to hold myself upright as I walked back inside once I was satisfied that everything was okay for the moment.

  I wasn’t going to be able to do much exploring in the immediate future with such a critical injury. That meant I would have to spend some time training inside again before I could resume my search for a path to Falmouth. There was one thing that I wanted to think over before I did anything else. There was something about the creature’s smile as it fled on the back of that forest coyote that worried me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was something about that final interaction that filled me with dread. Perhaps it would be better to make an attempt to get to the meadows sooner rather than later. I felt a bit like a coward running away from a fight, but it wasn’t like I thought the creature would fight fair next time we met. I barely survived a one on one fight with it, and I doubted that I would be so lucky as to encounter the creature alone again in the future.

  I kept postponing the attempt to reach the meadows and then the road until I had grown stronger, but that nameless dread pushed me to make the attempt as soon as my body finished healing. Since I decided to make yet another foolish and reckless choice, I better use the time that I had as best I could. I started out by updating my journals and then on figuring out how to learn a true mana enhancement skill. I suspected that the reason why I hadn’t learned the skill yet is that I didn’t have a proper image in my head while the mana filled my body. If I could align the image with my body and my mana then I thought that I would be able to control how my body was enhanced by the mana. I sat down against the wall in the garage where my scraps of wood laid scattered on the ground and tried to put that thought into practice, but it proved to be far more difficult than I had expected. I spent hours of fruitless practice without making any noticeable progress.

  Frustrated by my failures, I turned to practicing my rune carving while I waited for my mana to regenerate. The carving calmed my mind and after an hour of straight carving, I started to alternate between carving and practicing mana enhancement. I only stopped when the sun set and the light began to dim. At that time, I picked up the scraps of wood that couldn’t be used to practice my rune carving any longer and used them as kindling for a fire. I knew that it wasn’t good to use pressure treated wood for a cooking fire, but I didn’t have the strength to gather any wood today. If I was feeling better tomorrow, I would go grab some of the logs from the pile by the old fire pit. I used the pressure treated wood to make a fire for now and heated up two cans of soup for dinner.

  I took a lantern from the bedroom after dinner and continued my practice until a little after midnight. I laid down in my bed at that point and fell asleep. Whether it was the previous night or this night, there weren’t anymore nightmares or depressing thoughts plaguing my sleep. Things were looking up in that direction.

  New World Day 16

  I woke up the next morning, crept over to the old fire pit, and made three quick trips back and forth from there to the garage. The trips allowed me to bring over a half a dozen logs and three times that amount of branches for kindling. I could see the tracks of the python all around the old fire pit, but it didn’t come out to bother me. Once I had the firewood, I set a lantern outside to charge, updated my journals, and resumed my training. Alternating between carving and practicing my mana enhancement worked well the previous day so I continued in that manner but still failed to make any breakthroughs.

  New World Day 17

  I added in some training with my two footwork skills on the third day of my convalescence. I couldn't yet hold the axe or the gun at the same time I practiced. I also had to be careful how much I twisted my upper body, but I had recovered enough strength to add it to my practice routine. I started by working on my footwork, then when I was physically exhausted I sat down and attempted to learn a true mana enhancement skill, and when my mana was exhausted, I shifted to carving runes. I alternated between rune carving and mana enhancement until my body recovered enough to train my footwork again at which point I started everything all over again.

  New World Day 18

  I was able to hold my axe or one of the guns while I was working on my footwork by the third day. I made some progress on my rune carving yet continued to fail when it came to the mana enhancement skill.

  New World Day 19

  The fourth day didn’t add anything to my practice routine, but I noticed that the size of the wound had decreased to the point that an ugly yellowish brown scab covered it.

  New World Day 20

  The fifth day proved to be a watershed moment for me. I had kept pushing and pushing and my persistence paid off. I succeeded in controlling how my mana enhanced my body, and the System registered it as a skill when I succeeded just as I suspected. It remained at the point where I had to enhance my entire body at the same time, but I envisioned a day in the future where I could supercharge the enhancement for a specific body part. That was my goal for the future at least. The difference between an active controlled enhancement and a passive enhancement via just filling my body with mana was enormous. My physical abilities increased by one and a half times using the passive method, but my abilities doubled when I controlled the enhancement. The key to the whole skill laid in the image I held in my mind as the mana sank into my body. It just took some time to both find the right image and learn how to hold it in my mind while still having enough leftover concentration to circulate my mana. The next step was to keep up the enhancement while practicing my footwork.

  I combined the footwork practice and mana enhancement practice at this point. Circulating the mana, activating the mana enhancement and dancing around while minding my footwork pushed my mind to its limits. The time I spent rune carving became the time where my mind was able to relax and recover from the intense pressure of my training.

  New World Day 21

  The scab decreased in size by half by the sixth day, but despite my improved health and the successes of the previous day, I started to feel restless. The monotonous training was rewarding, but I needed something new to work on. Something to break up the day for me. I thought over what to do, and I decided to see if I could learn how to see mana. My failures in that direction had been pretty spectacular, but I had given it some thought over these past few days while I was resting. I thought that the reason I screwed up before was that I just pumped a bunch of mana into my eyes and hoped that it worked. Now I sent a much smaller amount of into my eyes and combined it with the image of a contact lens. I intended to use the mana to both enhance the strength of my eyes and form a lens over the front of my eyes that would tint the world in such a manner that I could see the mana that naturally flowed through the New World. The mana vision training proved quite difficult much like the mana enhancement training. The curve and thickness had to be custom tailored to the individual’s eyes in order for eyeglasses to reach their full effectiveness. I was sure the image was correct, but I needed to work on finding the curve and thickness for the lens that would let me see mana. That was the idea at least.

  New World Day 22

  My footwork, enhancement, and rune carving practice continued to improve, but I wasn’t able to find the right form for my mana lens at first. My dedication to my training ended up working out in the end though. I succeeded not only in learning a rudimentary mana vision skill, but I gained the Agility stat. I couldn’t use the mana vision skill at the same time as the mana enhancement skill, but it was more progress than I expected to make in such a short amount of time. Eight days of training resulted in my wound healing, two new skills, a new stat, an increase in the level of numerous skills, and a big increase in my stats. I didn’t think for a second that I had grown strong enough to take on the python, frog, or hawk, but I thought I had a chance of escaping from them now which meant that I was ready to undertake the journey to reach the meadows. The fact that the creature, which I had come to call a hobgoblin, and its minions hadn’t been snooping around this entire time I was cooped up training worried me, but I was now confident that I would be gone before whatever they were planning came to fruition.

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