From a combination of actively focusing on specific sections of the knowledge granted to me from the God of Reincarnation and talking to the adventurers (especially the ever talkative Liz) after my initial tests, I had learnt a lot about lifeforce and mana, and how they flowed. Liz even gave me an instruction on a basic form of meditation designed to enable and enhance one’s ability to sense and manipulate lifeforce and mana as they flowed through their respective channels. I told her I was curious to see how their basic method compared to mine, leaving out the fact I didn’t have a method.

How wide and strong your lifeforce channels are determines how much lifeforce your body can handle you reinforcing it with, sort of like water through a balloon with two openings: the larger the balloon pipe and the thicker the elastic, the more water you can pour through it without it bursting. If you use too much you can tear muscles or snap bones or even rip an entire limb off, as well as potentially causing severe internal damage, as though your balloon pipe popped. Increasing your total health increases the capacity of your lifeforce channels but also increases the amount of lifeforce you had as well so it just kinda balances out. However, if your body is in poor condition - low muscle density, weakened bones, major injuries, especially in the areas you are boosting - that lowers the limit of what you can handle. Similarly, if your control over your lifeforce was such that you could push more through than what your channels could handle… POP!

Mana and mana channels functioned in a nearly identical fashion, though overloading your channels with mana could cause more esoteric effects beyond just taking internal damage, such as spontaneously combusting, becoming a human popsicle, being struck with lightning, or straight-up disintegrating depending on how much mana you lost control of.

Mana flows through mana channels centred on the mana pool which is situated somewhere just below the navel, and lifeforce channels originate from and return to a pool overlying the heart similarly to blood vessels. Neither the pools nor channels were physically present, so even if you were stabbed through the heart it wouldn’t impair your ability to use lifeforce beyond the slight impact on concentration from, you know, being stabbed through the heart. Although if a part of the body like a hand was separated then the channels would be cut off as well, which was why regenerating lost limbs was significantly more difficult than other injuries. Besides losing limbs, there were apparently materials that could interact with the pools and channels, as would anything with mana or lifeforce actively moving through it like another person’s weapon or a monster’s claws and fangs.

I took a deep breath, and leant back in a crook between two thick branches splitting off from the trunk, closing my eyes and clearing my mind, focusing myself on entering the meditative state Liz had instructed me on.

My sense of my lifeforce and mana flows gradually grew clearer and clearer as I sat, just breathing steadily and calmly. After a short period of time, it stopped getting clearer. Supposedly this was the point at which I would have the greatest control over the twos’ flows, so I reached out mentally and exerted my will. Earlier today I had managed to increase the amount of both lifeforce and mana flowing through their channels and had boosted my muscles by pulling some lifeforce out of the channels into them. Now I wanted to see what my limits were.

But I wasn’t going to be reckless though. I much preferred not exploding. Gradually I sounded out how much lifeforce I could tolerate, slowly increasing its quantity and speed at all points around my body. I was surprised; despite my entire reservoir being moved into circulation, there was only a slight feeling of tightness, as though wearing clothes a bit too small. I then proceeded to do the exact same with mana, the slight tightness increasing a little.

I played around a bit with increasing and decreasing the intensities and speeds of the flows across different parts of my body for a short period of time.

Then I twitched slightly, gently knocking one elbow against a nearby branch. It exploded into a fine mist. Which caught fire.

“Oops.”

After the short-lived fireball, I released my control over my lifeforce and mana. Their flows instantly snapped back to normal as they exited their pools, the increased intensity and speed being stripped away as they passed through them, the excess energy remaining in the pools.

Instead I focused on individual factors of the flows, speeding them up and slowing them down, sending them down slightly different branches in my channels, diverting the flows out of the channels, through muscles and bones, and back to the channels. It turned out mana couldn’t interact with the lifeforce channels or the lifeforce itself, and vice versa. Slowly and steadily my control over the fine workings of the flows increased, and the complexity of what I was capable of steadily increased, up until I managed to direct a lifeforce flow in the wrong direction back up its channel, conflicting with the rest of the flow following its normal route.

I barely even noticed falling out of the tree, writhing in such unbelievably intense pain as I was. The lifeforce was fighting itself, violently ripping its way through my surrounding flesh, coiling and pulsing like a storm of knives inside. I released my control over my lifeforce in the hope it’d snap back to normal as it had earlier, but instead it just got worse. My teeth were clenched together, fingers raking through the dry leaves and loose soil, breath not coming in. My perception of the world dwindled, all becoming black.

“Focus on the toes,” the words of my old engineer-surgeon floated through my wind. “Why the fuck am I thinking about that now?” I complained internally, the sharp flash of annoyance bringing an instant of clarity that I struggled to retain. “Oh, right, a nigh-unbearable pain that will only end when a mental exercise is completed. Well then I should be fucking good at this.” I grit my teeth and focused.

The chaotic maelstrom of conflicting lifeforce had expanded to across half my body; slowly but surely I forced each swirling current back into line. My control slipped for an instant, the conflict retaking my left arm but I caught it before it could expand further.

It took what felt like years, but eventually all my lifeforce was flowing smoothly in the correct direction again. A victorious growl rumbled deep in my throat, becoming a breathless groan by the time it reached my lips.

I lay there, gasping, soaked in sweat across my entire body. There was a sudden lurch of disorientation as my aura exploded outward from me. I hadn’t even noticed when it had collapsed.

My attention flicked up to the top left hand corner of my vision, at the long line of debuff boxes detailing the quite impressive list of damaged organs, then to the top right hand. I had dropped about two hundred health or so, and it was still ticking down. Probably due to that internal damage.

“Fucking oww,” I groaned.

As the area was lit up by the golden sparkles of the Shiny Stone I relaxed and watched them pour into my lifeforce pool over my heart and then circulate around my lifeforce channels.

It was curious that I’d drawn a parallel between this incident and the maintenance of my exoskeleton. Especially that fucking phrase: ‘focus on the toes.’ Yeah, thanks doc, I’ll be sure to do that while all the nerves at the base of my spine are firing continually. There was even a dark joke passed around in the chats I frequented: “How can you tell who has paralysed legs? Stamp on their toes then tell them to focus on them. If they wince then complain, they don’t; if they complain then wince, they do.”

That brought a slight grin-grimace on my face. One of those chats had always been amusing in a rather dark way. I believe their motto was “Make light of the darkness and maybe it’ll be a little easier to see the end of the tunnel.”

The grimace faded, leaving only the grin.

Once the Shiny Stone had finished healing me completely, I hopped to my feet, then back to the top of the tree where I sat back in my spot. A flick of my wrist and a Terraprisma appeared in my hand. Dumping almost one-and-a-half times the mana normally required through it, I summoned a Terraprisma blade. Just in case I mess up again and some monster finds me while I’m vulnerable.

I returned to my meditative state, gently manipulating the flows of my lifeforce and mana throughout my body once again. My previous failure had given me a clue.