Alex focuses, searching quickly with her thermal vision. She sees a colder spot and moves toward it, her heart pounding in her chest. Her eyes open briefly; the room is in total darkness. She feels a faint rush of air, then the torches along the walls light up, casting a warm glow that seems almost welcoming after the inferno she just left. Getting up, she feels the air, noting no movement.
Looking around the room, Alex heads to the fountain for a drink. The water is cool and refreshing, quenching her thirst instantly. Next, she goes to the kitchen and places her hands as she did the day before, focusing. It takes her several minutes to find that inner strength, but then it starts. Within moments, another bowl of oatmeal sits on the counter, and she feels less lightheaded as she starts to eat, glancing around the space.
Alex finishes the food, the plate dissolving into nothing just like the day before. She heads over to the statue and notices something odd on the floor next to it several faint lines as though it had slid back an inch or so. Alex tries to push the statue but fails after several long minutes. Her muscles strain with the effort, but the statue remains stubbornly in place. She goes to her things and gets her halligan, attempting to apply leverage. The statue moves the barest amount before rebounding, causing her to stumble and nearly fall.
Alex sits down with her halligan, breathing deeply and staring at the statue. Her mind races as she starts contemplating how she could shift it, sinking back into her thoughts. Eventually, she gets up and paces, hardly noticing the halligan swinging in her hand as she walks. She turns when she feels air moving again, only to see the statue sliding back with a faint click.
Alex looks over and sees the statue sitting to the side before slowly walking over to stand before it, gazing at a set of burnt black stone stairs descending into darkness. Yep, this is going to suck. Alex walks over to the bed, gets her bunker clothes, and pulls them on before heading down the burnt stairs with her flashlight clipped to her chest but not turned on yet.
She stops a few steps in, examining the wall. Her glove comes away with soot on it. What the fuck is this place? she wonders, continuing down the stairs into the darkness below. As she reaches the landing, she looks down and sees plain white stone. A notification appears in her vision:
Trial of the First Flame Smoke
The room is small, with a single pedestal standing in the middle, featuring a handprint melted into the stone. Alex moves closer, examining the handprint and seeing individual ridges of a fingerprint in the melted stone, marks like claws at the ends of the fingers. Looking beyond it to the wall, she sees a small tube of glass.
Alex looks around the room more, trying to find answers but finding nothing else. This has to be like making dinner? Just dump mana in? Alex moves to the pedestal, places her hand on the mark, and pushes mana. A bright flash causes her to shield her eyes, followed by an explosion of glass. Fragments pelt Alex before she starts lowering her arm.
"What the fuck!" Alex yells taking in the scene, she sees glass fragments scattered over the floor and a new glass tube forming in the same place. She puts her hand on the handprint again and pushes mana, only to get sprayed by glass once more.
She continues this pattern until her head starts to hurt. The HUD comes into sharper focus as she realizes she is almost out of mana. Looking around the room, she sees a spray of glass shards and a new glass tube on the wall. Crunching her way across the room, she trudges up the stairs, collapses on the bed, and stares at the ceiling.
This is stupid. I just spent who knows how long blowing up glass tubes; that can't be the right way to figure this out. Alex lets her head flop to the side, seeing the rows of books. "Nooooo," she whines aloud, staring at the rows of books. I probably need to read all these.
Alex moves over, pulling her old nemesis back out and starting to read the book Formula of Mana by A.R. Hipkin. She reads for a while before finding what looks like a pencil and some paper in one of the desk drawers and starts taking notes.
After several hours, Alex closes the book, reading over her notes. Most of what she learned was about mana being a source of energy, but the part that stood out to her was control. The book described a lack of control as an 'explosive waste of potential.' Based on everything she read, the closest comparison she could come up with was when a new recruit started training on the hose and they would lose their grip or start being thrown around by the hose. They had the power to put out a fire or at least help contain it, but without controlling the hose, they couldn't effectively do anything.
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If she understood it correctly, she was that new recruit spraying the whole unit with water; or more accurately, herself with glass. Walking back down the stairs, her boots crunch as she reaches the pedestal and places her hand on the handprint again, trying to focus on her mana and control the flow out.
The glass explodes again. She groans but tries again, feeling the slight shift as her mana starts flowing out before being sprayed by glass once more. Closing her eyes and focusing on the feeling, she tries to slow it down. To her surprise, there isn't an explosion. She looks up, seeing the tube glowing softly, with another tube forming next to it.
She starts to push a bit more as the second tube forms, but they both explode, and the first reforms. "FUCKING!" Alex yells before stomping up the stairs and heading to the mana kitchen, pushing most of her mana pool into the system to get food. She sits down at the top of the stairs, glaring down at the glass scattered across the floor.
Alex mechanically eats before moving down the stairs to try again. Over the next several hours, she forms a headache but manages to make it to a fourth tube on the wall before it explodes. As it does, a screen appears:
New Skill
Fine Mana Control Rank 1
Alex takes a deep breath and tries again. She finds it startlingly easier to control her mana flowing into the tubes on the wall as they form almost instinctively. After long minutes of filling tubes, she looks around the room, seeing over a dozen tubes formed around the room, flickering with the orange-red glow of fire. Another, a final tube, forms right behind the pedestal.
She pushes another thread of mana, watching as the tube flickers but then nothing. She keeps pushing more and more into that thread. The soft tink of glass as one of the tubes cracks from too much mana.
Alex feels her back prickle and a cold bead of sweat trickling down her back. She keeps focusing, closing her eyes again and focusing inward on those threads of mana, forcing just the one to increase in size. She hears a ding, and the pedestal heats.
She opens her eyes, seeing all the tubes starting to sink into the stone and a message waiting for her:
Trial of Smoke complete
Continue your Studies.
New Skill added
Mana surge Rank 1
Congradulations
Fine Mana Control has reached Rank 5
Trudging up the stairs, she barely notices as the statue slides back into place. She curls up in bed, her head throbbing as she falls deeply asleep.
Waking up some time later, Alex isn't sure if it's morning or night, but she gets up, and the torches come to life around the room as she walks over to the fountain for a drink. As she goes to make her breakfast, a new menu appears as she pushes mana in:
Options:
Mana Breakfast
Mana Lunch
Mana Dinner
She can feel the threads of mana connected to each option and pushes a surge of mana into breakfast, only to have the same plate get made that she has been having. Alex moves over to the desk, sitting down with her oats and grabbing a book from the nearby shelves.
She glances over the cover: History of the Flame part I. Starting to read as she eats, she quickly decides this is some sort of cult when the opening inscription reads, 'I was before the word for sky.' Alex rolls her eyes but keeps reading, finding the book to be somewhere between a religious text and a historical account.
Opening part II, she finds it similar but starts focusing on the perspective of a single person named Elric. Alex finds it interesting but hard to follow as it describes places and people with little context. Eventually, she puts the books back and pulls out Weight of the Sun: Sword Forms of Solar Gravity, finding it similar to HEMA manuals.
She starts following the stances in it and, within a few hours, finds an easy rhythm with the movements. Using her halligan in place of a sword for weight, she works up a sweat, her muscles burning from the effort but feeling stronger with each repetition.
She fell into a routine over the next few days. Practicing the sword forms, reading, and making mana food became her daily cycle. She tried all three meals, finding lunch to be a simple sandwich and dinner to be pasta. Dinner had left her on the ground clutching her head from the sheer volume of mana it consumed.
Each day, she spent hours pulling books down and reading. She learned a good deal about what was apparently the disciples of the first flame. The statue, it turned out, was of their founder, a man named Elric. The dungeon below it was formed by the first flame, though Alex wasn't really clear if it was a deity, Elric, or some sort of magical phenomenon.
From what she could tell, the disciples died out about a hundred and fifty years after they were formed. The final book described a fissure in the disciples that formed, leading to infighting and the eventual demise of most members. The book fairly abruptly cut off after recounting something the author had called the "burn out."
She read about various monsters and one book she initially thought was pure fantasy when it described disciples closing wounds with a touch and surviving hours of standing in fire with no special gear. The more she read, the more she realized that what seemed impossible might just be a matter of understanding and control.
Some of the books were more interesting and grounded for her though one described plants that were edible and medicinal she found she recognized some of them. Others talked about meditation or things that she found useful but boring. Each day brought new insights but the routine kept her grounded and focused on her goals.
She moved over to the statue and focusing on meditating heard it slide back with the rush of warm air. Ahead of her Alex could see the same stone stairs this time it looked like they ran deeper underground and she could hear scratching and chattering echoing up.
Alex took a deep breath, her heart pounding in her chest. The sound echoing up from the darkness was both daunting and intriguing. She clipped her flashlight to her chest and started down the steps, her boots crunching on the soot-covered stones. The air grew cooler as she descended, and the scratching sounds became more distinct.
This is going to be interesting, Alex thought, her mind racing with possibilities. She took another deep breath, steeling herself for whatever lay ahead.