“If a man cannot buy his freedom, then all the world's wealth shall be as a grain of sand by the sea.”

-Istan Triant, after the great slave revolt of 1540 AC

I assessed my options. Admittedly, without any mana to work with they were more limited than I liked, except for the option to spend AP. There were a couple skills that I had seen in my research that I thought worth buying. There was a problem, however. I was fairly certain that my captor had some idea of my skills from analysis spells. There was no guarantee, but if I assumed wrong it could negatively alter my escape chances, so better safe than sorry. This would make everything harder, but I was going to approach my situation as intelligently as possible.

Since I had little in the way of options, that simplified what I was going to do. By instinct I was drawing in mana continuously, so I decided to stop that. After a few minutes I managed to stop, though there was a constant urge to resume. It reminded me of stopping in the middle while I was going pee. I had only been pulling in mana for a short time, but it already felt completely natural to do it continously.

The mage perked up after I managed to stop.

Okay, I need a name for this guy, wizard, mage… I don’t understand him and until I speak the language I won’t be able to ask. So what, that annoying mage, or Tam for short? Yeah, that works. Tam sounds like a name.

At the moment Tam was looking surprised and excited. He cast more spells and traced them into the air as he examined me even closer. Yes, yes. I know other half, he is too close.

I resolved to ignore them both as I practiced pulling mana in, stopping, and then starting up again. I don’t have a body at the moment, so I might as well do one of the only things I could actually do.

Eventually, after a couple hours of practice, I could stop and start up again with a thought. The discomfort of doing so had faded to no more than a tiny twinge as well.

Now that I could control it reliably, I wanted to see it I could control other aspects of my absorption and make it more efficient. The skills available for purchase had said it was possible to resist mana drain and harvest mana more efficiently. If I wanted to have any mana at all to work with, I was going to need one or both of those type of skills.

For now, I was going to practice harvesting mana as long as Tam was in the room. He released a rich cloud of mana, after all. And when he wasn’t here, I would practice resisting the mana drain.

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Not much had changed since I started practicing mana absorbsion. Tam had left and come back a few times. The lights of the ceiling would dim, for nighttime I assumed, and then they would brighten a few minutes before he came back in the morning. The most exciting thing that happened was Tam bringing a chair and a book with him. It was more accurate to call it a tome. It was thick, heavy, and handwritten with drawings that made no sense to me at all. Shortly after setting up to read each day, Tam would cast a spell, look off into space for a moment, and then turn to his book.

From then on, that was my day. I quickly grew used to the sound of stiff paper pages rustling as they turned in Tam’s fingers. His breath emerged in a soft in and out that filled the room with faint sound. The sound of Tam’s feet on stone rang from the hallway to announce his impending arrival and followed his exit. Even the sound of his clothes was noticeable to me as they swished softly and slid over his skin.

When Tam was not in the room I was subjected to silence. When I was human, I was never fully silent. I had the pulsing rush of the blood in my veins, the high pitched sound in my eardrums that filled a silent room. These were gone. I took no breathes, had no heart beating a constant thrumming beat, no gurgling stomach, or flexing muscles. In the absence of self produced sounds, I could hear the faintest whispering of air moving gently over stone. However, it was so faint that I would catch it for a moment, and then it would fade as I strained to listen for it. The silence grew maddening. So I turned away from the outside, and delved inward. I focused as much as possible on my practice.

When Tam was present I continued my efforts to pull from the mana he released. I wasn’t sure why he released mana all the time. Was he emitting mana because he was a caster? Did all living things release mana? I assumed all humans at least produced it, based on my own soul mana ability. Tam was the only living being around, so it was hard to know for sure.

Every time Tam cast a spell I could see the structure. They looked like layers of glowing glass, though where the pieces overlapped they became an indefinite translucent mess. Any bit of the spell that entered into my aura I could see more clearly, but otherwise I could only see from the perspective of my core. The spells wrapped little tendrils of power around and into my crystal. Even as I tried to pull them apart, I was always curiously trying to understand what the spells were doing. I could see the spells slowly leak mana and gradually turn more transparent with time. They dissolved into even more mana when Tam eventually dismissed them.

By the end of the first day I had improved my ability to focus my mana absorption. It wasn’t much, but I was able to exclude a tiny sliver of space from my mana drain. Obviously I still had a lot of room for improvement, but any improvement at all was a good sign for my plans.

I no longer needed to sleep. I could imagine any number of uses for this in my old life, but all night gaming sessions aside, it was also useful in my current situation. As far as I could tell I could no longer even get tired mentally. Physically, well, I was a lump of rock. It might be possible that some ability of mine would make me get tired at some point in the future, but for now it seemed impossible. So, no more dreams for me; truly a shame, I always had crazy dreams.

Working through the night proved simple enough. As I grew more familiar with my own mana absorption, the more it felt similar to the mana drain I was experiencing. It was just happening in reverse. I suspected that some of my problem stemmed from the fact that I had no idea what was actually happening. I had no conception of how my ability worked, and that could prove important. I tried to turn the mana drain on and off in the same way I had learned to master my own ability, but I detected no progress that first night. Of course, I knew this was probably going to take time.

I was right.

I spent days lost in the same routine. Tam would show up and I ignored him; he did not do anything particularly interesting anyway. In my boredom I did consider trying to contact Tam by turning my mana absorption on and off in sequence. I could do numbers, one, two, three, etc… However, I knew that was a bad idea. It was my boredom. I made me want to take a different way out. Even if I took that option, however, I didn’t speak the language. Even if Tam realized I was intelligent, we would not be able to communicate. He might eventually be able to teach me, but in the meantime I would be stuck in exactly the same situation. No thanks. And that was assuming that he didn’t decide I was too dangerous to be left alive. And if he kept me alive, he would probably grow more fascinated and take even more precautions.

I was forced to confront the fact that I was not in my old world. I was going to do my best to keep my morals intact, but even my old world accepted killing in self defense. I was also worried what might happen if I let myself kill someone. Those new instincts in my head were already more than I wanted to deal with. They had been a little quieter while I focused on my current plan, though I wasn’t sure if that was because I was doing something, or they simply had no interest in something as cerebral as training. If I killed someone, I worried that they would come to the fore. And even assuming I was able to get control of them again, they might do something very stupid in the heat of the moment.

No. For now I had a list of what I was going to do. First option, escape. If that didn’t work, my second option was to try to communicate. Another problem was that even if I managed to communicate to Tam that I was human, there was no guarantee that would be a solution to my problem. Plenty of societies had had slaves and considered owning other humans perfectly normal. And far too many societies, even if they hadn’t had slaves outright, had considered lower class citizens less than human. I also knew nothing about Tam. He could just be a horrible person who would think nothing of capturing and torturing a human, regardless of his society. It was risky. That left my third option. I would kill him if I absolutely needed to. I didn’t want to, but if it proved necessary I was prepared to do it.

In the meantime, I mastered my boredom with the thought that if I didn’t it might result in the death of me or someone else. Naturally, the thoughts of death drove my other half into more homicidal impulses. Ignoring it, I did my best to dive back into my training.

After several days I finally improved my mana absorption ability to the point I could exclude a third of my aura while still drawing from the rest. Shortly after I got to that level of proficiency I received a new message.

Your skill Mana Absorption I has changed and improved through your efforts. It has become:

Directed Mana Absorption I

Raw mana within your aura can be drawn into your core to increase your available mana. You can direct where to focus your absorption to increase your efficiency.

You have been awarded a new title!

Skill Evolution

You have altered a skill's capabilities beyond normal through concerted effort. Use it to acquire your dreams, or just richer mana.

+100 Ability Points

+5% easier to acquire merged or upgraded skills

Huh. I was not actually expecting that result. I thought I would simply level up in my Mana Absorption skill. That meant that there was some other way to level it. Actually, now that I thought about it… it was probably just a matter of speed. I had tried to be more efficient in where I got the mana from, but drawing in mana faster would probably have worked just as well. A part of me was frustrated and wanted to scream, but I also acknowledged that I probably wouldn’t even have discovered this ability if I had done it another way. Oh well. In the balance my ignorance probably worked out in my favor.

Now that I had my new skill, I was going to try using it again, but I wanted to wait until Tam took a break. For now I decided to keep my focus as it was and try absorbing faster.

I started trying to draw mana in faster and succeeded immediately. I could go quite a bit faster. Apparently, I had not been using my maximum speed this entire time. It was possible the new skill was responsible, but since it only improved once I focused on it, I doubted it. And, of course, Tam noticed.

I swear I only screamed a little.

Since Tam already knew that something was happening I went for broke and tried to focus my ability more. The difference in my new ability was amazing. I had been teaching myself. I was simply fumbling about trying to master the skill on my own. Now directing my focus was so much simpler. A combination of techniques and what felt like muscle memory had slipped into my mind without me noticing a thing until I tried to use them. I didn’t have perfect control, but I could focus the drain onto a sphere about a foot wide.

Tam smiled in excitement as he put the book on the ground and stood up. His eyes fixated on me as he cast more spells. This time as I focused my skill on the spell something different happened. Everything seemed perfectly normal up until Tam dismissed the spell. The spell dissolved and a good portion of the loose mana rushed into me. I could feel something warm in my core. I called up my status and stared in shock. I had two mana.

I’m going to summon a monster. No, stop that. I haven’t even purchased any monsters to summon. The only thing I could do was create aura, but I needed to keep Tam from noticing. I tried expanding my aura downward, keeping it as narrow as possible.

My aura responded, growing effortlessly down to cover the entire stand. I almost stopped as I tapped into another skill that felt imprinted into my brain, uh, mind. I had that same feeling of muscle memory, of something happening that I was not consciously aware of and was simply done without thinking. It was the same way I didn’t need to think about each individual muscle as I walked. I just did it effortlessly. The minimum width I could make my aura proved about half a foot, but I hoped it was enough.

My aura reached the floor after covering the entire stand and I could feel the difference. I could expand my aura through it almost as easily as the air, but the mana within felt thick. If the mana in the air was water, the mana in the stone was molasses, sluggish and slow. I ignored it for the moment, and kept expanding my aura in a narrow corridor toward the back wall opposite the hallway. I was actually getting quite a bit more aura than I had expected for how little mana I possessed. With a little thought I realized it made perfect sense. I expected a dungeon would be quite large. Or at least I assumed so based on my, admittedly little, knowledge sourced from another universe. I continued expanding my aura into the back wall, keeping a safe distance from the surface. I knew I risked entering some other room, but I could only do so much. In the end my aura expanded into an area behind the wall about three feet across, almost as large as my original aura.

As far as I could tell, Tam had not noticed my aura expansion at all. I felt slightly different, however. I was getting more mana. Even when I focused my absorption I could feel I was getting a little trickle more. I did a little testing. Unless I turned my absorption off completely I seemed to get a small passive flow from all my aura. Not sure if that was a permanent feature, or because my Directed Mana Absorption was only level one. Only time would tell.

Tam simply continued his routine, so I added expanding my aura to my own. Every time one of his periodic spells ended I would channel it into creating more aura. I had debated trying to store up mana, but ultimately decided it was a bad idea for two reasons: My mana was being drained, and I was reasonably certain that Tam’s spells were keeping track of that. I really did not want him to notice I suddenly had some mana. So, I was doing my best to examine the spells that Tam was casting and then frantically sucking in the remnant mana when they dissolved. By the end of the day I had managed a reasonable coverage behind the back wall. I had actually started to have some trouble though. It had started to get harder to expand my aura farther upward. Since it was directional, I thought I might be getting too far from my core or I needed to make my connection wider. So tomorrow I was going to expand under the floor instead. Tam left and went off to bed, the lights doing the usual and fading down to a dull glow.

At this point it had been several days. I had been attempting to stop the mana from flowing out of me, and unlike my mana absorption, I had noticed no change. It was possible that what I was trying to do was simply much harder, but it was equally likely that I was trying to do it wrong.

So it was time to acquire information and just watch. I could see the entire stand and the outside of the white crystal below me, though it was still opaque to my sight. Well my ability did tell me that concentrated mana could block my perception, so no great surprise. I took the time to study the runes on the stand. They were still gibberish to me, but I could see my mana flowing through the metal down toward the crystal. No, actually I could see my mana flowing around something inside the metal. It was like an invisible pipe was guiding the mana down and away from me.

I couldn’t see whatever was doing this, but I did think I could learn more. There was already mana flowing passively toward me through my aura from the my aura below and behind me. I tried to condense my mana into a narrower channel to flow around the stand. It worked, though it only condensed a little. I could suddenly see gaps. The mana was swirling like fog moving around glass. I could not see anything in great detail, but the hollow shapes in the mana were gradually coming into focus as I concentrated.

I traced the invisible shapes upward until it reached the top of my stand. There I could see that they actually extended up into my core and pulled mana right from where it was stored. My other half was really unhappy about this, but I think the fact there was no good target moderated it a bit. I was not sure how this knowledge would help me, but as least I had a place to start.