“Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.”

-George Washington Carver

With most of the night still ahead of me, I focused on controlling the mana. So far I had no luck, but since I now had the improved Directed Mana Absorption I was hoping for a better result. I had previously improved my skill in a somewhat backwards manner. Now I was hoping to take advantage of the ability to improve in new directions and see if my control could be used in a different way. At the moment I was draining mana from my entire aura, with a single exception.

I was trying to make one area not move at all. The mana was more resistant to moving in the stone, so I figured that was a good place to start. Hopefully I would get to the point I could stop the mana trying to flow out of me, though I was starting elsewhere so I could more easily track my progress. At first I didn’t notice any progress, but by morning the mana flowing naturally through the area I was concentrating on was moving a tiny bit slower. As a captive I had nothing but time, so any improvement I could make without a change to my captivity was a win for me. My dungeon half would insist on action every now and then, but that was not really a possibility now. So I would just try to clear it away and get back to work.

The next morning Tam returned again. This time, however, I was surprised to see a change in routine. He was carrying a cage of what looked like bronze, and it had something alive in it. I honestly wasn’t sure what it was. It had a black exoskeleton which reflected the light in prismatic colors, but in form it was closer to a mouse.

Tam held it out near me and I focused my senses on it. I attempted to drain mana from around it too, but felt nothing remarkable. It might have been emitting mana, it might not; Tam’s billowing clouds of mana obscured any fine details. And my senses did not penetrate inside the thing either. Not surprising, I knew living things could block my senses. Tam nodded to himself, but I had no idea why.

Tam proceeded to cast some spells. These ones were different from any I had seen before. They hovered in numerous locations throughout the room. Then Tam cast another spell at me, but this one had more mana in it that usual, the muted glows of the spell looked more like molten glass. It penetrated into me and stayed in place.

Aw shit. Did he notice that I expanded my aura? If he is going to be monitoring me more closely all the time it is going to make things so much harder. It might actually make escape impossible.

I was still trying not to panic when Tam picked the cage up again. He held it near me. I ignored it and continued to try to study the more powerful spell cast on me. Tam frowned and shook the cage a little. Did he want me to focus on the cage again? I obliged and focused my attention and mana absorption on the cage. Tam smiled. Was I supposed to learn something about this? Honestly, I was interested in it because I had never seen anything like it, but alien life form or no, I had…

With a tiny gesture of his opposite hand and a word Tam sent a red ray of light into the cage and the creature was vaporized.

Holy Shit!

A warm feeling flooded into me. Mana. The creature’s death released a burst of raw mana that was greater than anything I had ever felt before. With a quick look I could see that I had five mana now. Attack. I shook off my other half and almost started to expand my aura under the floor like I had been doing, but stopped abruptly. Tam had deliberately given me mana. He knew I had it. He was expecting me to do something with it. What would he have done if he had seen my mana go down with nothing apparently happening. I felt cold. I almost exposed myself. He was expecting me to use it, so I would show him I was.

I expanded my aura out in a sphere from my core. My tiny sphere expanded out as swiftly as I could make it. If I had mana I was not going to waste it by letting the mana drain get to it.

My world expanded, my self expanding with my aura. By the time I spent all the mana I was connected to parts of the ceiling, most of the floor, and the lower middle of all the walls.

I could feel everything. I already felt the stone that I had extended into, but despite the minute fractures and pressures, it had felt fairly uniform. I had seen this room for days on end, but now I could feel it. The smooth grain of the wooden chair that Tam had spent so many days sitting in. The roughness of the floor, unpolished and gritty. I could feel the faint heat in the air from the lights.

I wasn’t touching everything. I could not feel them the exact same way, but it was more than what I had been feeling, which was practically nothing.

God, I had needed this!

I would have cried if I had eyes. The sheer feeling was overwhelming and I needed it so badly. I lost myself into the bliss, simply feeling.

Tam seemed to be happy too. He stared off into space as he proceeded to dismiss each spell in turn. Honestly, I barely noticed the first few, and might have missed the rest if my other half hadn’t inserted a strong instinct of hunger. Even as I realized the spells were being dismissed, I deliberately did not focus on them. Some mana poured into me naturally from the spells, but nothing like what would have happened if I had focused on absorbing them. The spell directly attached to me had not been dismissed and I had to assume it was monitoring my mana levels even now. For the moment I simply waited and focused as much as possible on draining the spot that the spell occupied.

That spell was dismissed last, and as much as I hated the waste of the others, it was still a feast. Tam had invested much more energy into this spell than usual, and when he dismissed it, that extra mana was mine to take. By the time I was done I had seven mana, more than I had ever had before. I used it immediately, expanding into the walls, ceiling, and floor. I avoided entering any open space I didn’t own already. I also decided to do all my future expansion in the direction away from the hallway. I had no idea what other rooms might be here, but I knew at least one direction to avoid.

Expanding my aura made me think more about my aura. I had never felt anything like it when I was still human. The amount of information it gave me kept growing. I couldn’t feel the microscopic world, though I had no idea if that would always be true. I could, however, feel things from the stone of the walls. The small amount I had before had not told me much. Now, with stone in my aura above, below, and to the sides of the room I could feel the stresses in the stone. I could feel how additional weight was borne by the dome of stone that formed the ceiling and channeled to the sides of the room. I could feel the literal tons of weight bearing down. Some part of my other half seemed to find this soothing. Personally, it made me feel vaguely claustrophobic, even though I knew, from the stone, that it was in no danger of collapse. I could also feel the imperfections in the stone. The grain of the stone for an entire section had sheered under pressure, or formed improperly. Where two different types of stone met, there was a disconnect in how they intermingled at the border. And I could feel the faint buckling as each type of stone bent differently under the pressure.

I let myself get lost in the joy of sensation. I traced the subtle temperature gradients formed between the air and the stone. Warm air was constantly entering from the hallway and cycling out cold air from the room. Somewhere Tam had heating. Somewhere in all of the sensation I realized this was another proof that I was not human any longer. Not the strange feelings, though those were proof on their own, but the amount of information that I was feeling and processing simultaneously. No human could feel this much and understand it. I knew from learning about the brain that it was already cheating. We did not see as much as we thought we did. The edges of our vision were place holders with details added from memory. We had a blind spot in our vision where the optic nerve met the back of the retina. We heard what we thought we should hear when our hearing was insufficient.

‘We’… funny that I can think in one thought that I am not human and then think ‘we’ when I generalize about humans. I guess I am both. I am human, because I was born as one, and I have carried that part with me. My soul, or mind, or emotions. What have you.

My emotions stabilized. I think increasing the amount of stimulus might have actually unbalanced my emotions temporarily. Something to watch out for in the future. Tam had wandered off somewhere during my distraction. I had a vague feeling I had known that from the pressure of his footfalls on the floor vibrating through my aura. Calmer, I focused on keeping mana still in an area.

It was only a few moments before Tam returned. I was surprised when he cast another spell that hovered partially inside my aura at the doorway. Then Tam went back to his endless examination of his tome.

Wonder what that spell is for? Well it is at the border of my aura, so probably checking for that. I would have smiled at Tam if I could. Don’t worry Tam, I won’t be expanding my aura there.

I waited until the spell that monitored me was canceled and drained it away. I used this to send a rod of aura in the opposite direction from the doorway. As Tam continued to monitor me and then cancel the spells I sent the rod farther and farther. Eventually, as I widened it to reduce feeling strained, I discovered that as long as I kept the diameter at least three feet I felt no strain at all.

I was enjoying the irony of using the spells meant to keep me in check to further my own growth. It had become obvious to me that Tam could not see like I did. Not just through walls and so on. He couldn’t see the mana that I grabbed from his spells. And his spells were beautiful, but they were also messy. I couldn’t tell at first, but watching the same spell get cast at me day after day, multiple times a day, I learned to tell. He was using the same spell, but it was never the same. The core structures were the same, but little drips and drabs of mana went askew each time.

If Tam was capable of seeing the spells, I expected that he would have fixed that. I could be wrong. I doubted he had to worry about the mana. However, once upon a time, he probably did need to worry about the mana, if he had leveled up like me. And even if he didn’t need to worry about mana, it showed a lack of control that felt foreign to my perception of this man who was so careful with his precautions. I did not deceive myself. I knew the only reason that I had a good chance of escaping from Tam eventually was because he didn’t know I existed. He assumed I was just a set of instincts. And if I had been, his current precautions would have been more than sufficient. It was hardly Tam’s fault that I represented an outside context problem.

When Tam left for the evening I had made good progress on expanding a long cylinder of my aura deep into the back wall. Well, deep was relative. Maybe thirty to forty feet deep.

In addition to that expansion, I had been focusing the entire day on holding mana still within a small section of stone. It had gradually gotten more and more sluggish. I continued through the night and by morning I had managed to get mana to stop moving entirely. So I had naturally switched to something more difficult and tried the same thing in the air. The mana in the air barely slowed down at all. Oh well, progress is progress.

Not much had changed again by the time Tam arrived. When he entered he cast his usual analytic spell my way. After he got the results he simply stared at me as he leaned forward in his chair. Um, why are you staring at me like that? I checked my status really fast, no change. If I could have sweat it would have been dripping down the stand and forming a puddle underneath me. Did he discover that I had expanded my aura far more than he thought possible? Did he know this whole time and had just been humoring me?

After an endless silence Tam started to mutter to himself. His tone was shifting back and forth. It sounded like he is arguing with himself. Don’t worry Tam, I am harmless. No need to think about destroying me at all. God, why was there no language skills available for purchase in the AP store? Watching Tam argue with himself my mind was just getting more and more frantic. Without being able to understand my mind was coming up with worse and worse scenarios. After a few minutes Tam nodded to himself and left the room.

Please don’t come back with a hammer…

When Tam came back he was carrying the same chalk he had used to fuse me with the dungeon core. This time I could sense the incredibly dense mana packed into the chalk. Tam didn’t walk towards me, he went to one of the walls and started to draw in an area my aura didn’t cover.

A diamond shape appeared, followed by a circle inside it. The circle and the diamond did not touch. Tam then used precise strokes to draw out runes. It took him only a brief minute He carefully inspected each rune, and nodded when he finished. With a word and a gesture the chalk flared with light and burned half an inch into the stone. I could still see the mana left behind in the traces. He pulled out a hunk of silvery metal, it looked like the same metal that he had used as a powder when he made me like this.

I tried to imagine what it was for. Unfortunately my thoughts kept focusing on the idea of a larger and more powerful mana drain. Something that would suck all mana out of me the moment I got any. I was barely managing anything as it was, and if he did that…

Tam spoke and gestured. Mana flowed out from him in a stream and formed spellwork that constantly shifted. It drew metal off of the hunk and coated the indentations left in the wall. He followed this by gathering mana together as he put the metal away into a pocket. The mana brightened from a will-o-wisp, to sunlight, to dazzlingly bright. It looked like hundreds of times more mana than I had ever seen Tam use to cast a spell. The mana was fed into the metal, and the metal began to glow. With a flash the runes lit up and then faded from blinding down to a faint glimmer.

Tam headed out of the room after casting a few spells at the runes on the wall.

As far as I could tell, all that mana had simply disappeared. I was fairly sure, however, that like the runes covering the stand I sat upon, it had simply become invisible. I could feel mana moving gently toward the rune structure on the wall, but it was barely noticeable. It certainly was not enough to cause me any problems, and it was not coming directly from me at all. I figured the rune was simply maintaining itself. I didn’t know what it was actually for, but at least it wasn’t a new and improved mana drain, I think.

I concentrated mana to cover me. Nothing seemed to be touching me. Wait. There. I felt a flicker of something, but it was gone immediately. Then it happened again. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Threads, maybe? Little strands of magic drifted through the room. I feared the worse and checked all of my aura. No, it was not monitoring everything, it seemed confined to this room and just a little into the walls.

Okay, now I really had no idea what it was for. It didn’t seem to be measuring me, or my aura, my mana, or anything else I could detect. It just constantly passed over the room.

Tam returned with a cage. This time there were three of the strange creatures inside. What do I even call those things? Mouse-bugs, mice-bugs would be the proper plural. Yeah, guess I will go with that. I wonder if he is going to sacrifice those to me too?

Wait. If he does that I will get a little more than five mana each. I checked my status to by sure. Yep, holy shit, there it was. If I got fifteen mana, I could level up!