I came to myself, lying on the floor, a definite feeling of déjà vu.

Slightly shifting my head around, I realized that I was still in the throne room, but in a different location. And, from the looks of it, I was where poor Elrond used to be. I could make out some silvery lines inserted into the floor around my body, forming a hexagram. At the tip of each of its points was a complicated-looking rune that gave the whole thing a bit more of a professional look than just an amateurish, run of the mill witch-craft circle to scare the average Joe.

Before I could figure out what the hell was going on, I heard the goblin chant in a somewhat high-pitched voice, and the lines of the runes started glowing brightly.

And suddenly I felt cold.

Not cold like outside in the winter, no, this cold was more profound. Much deeper. It was the coldness of desolation, the iciness of an absence of life. And the feeling was originating from my chest. It was as if my life energy was somehow sucked out of my body. Slowly at first, a small trickle. Hardly noticeable. But quickly, it started becoming faster, a torrent of warmth and vigor, leaving my body.

In sudden panic, I tried to move but couldn’t even lift my limbs. Nothing, not even one of my nine remaining fingers. The only thing I could move was my head.

And it reminded me of the last four years, being stuck in a wheelchair.

For a moment, I was unable to see as my thoughts were wiped away by a haze of panic and red, hot rage… I was never going back to that kind of life! I would never again allow myself to be that helpless, that needy, that… dependent – a burden for everyone around me!

And that rage gave me the strength to fight back. I was not going to be a pushover, not a wimp to be dominated and discarded like an empty husk. If that goblin wanted to suck me dry, I was going to try and spite it. Even if it cost my life.

Or better yet… I’d try and turn the table on it.

I activated mana vision with the little bit of silver mana I had recovered by then, trying to find some clues to what was going on and what, if anything, I could do. What I saw was both terrifying and astounding - a veritable vortex of energy swirled chaotically around my body, most of it green or red, but also tiny amounts of black, amber, and silver interspersed in the raging maelstrom. Wisps of energy branched out of the vortex and were drawn along my arms toward the multifaceted crystal on the pedestal.

So far, it was mostly the substantial amount of free mana that was drawn out of my body, but I could see that the strands of solidified mana that constituted part of my rotating core were also pulled into the direction of the vortex. The force was not enough yet to tear them apart, but it was going to happen sometime soon if I did not take countermeasures.

Scared what losing all that mana would do to me, I tried fighting the pull of the vortex, but it was like trying to prevent water from flowing down a creek with just your hands. Sure, I could redirect some of the mana, and could even slightly slow the flow of it, but there was no way that I could stop the whole shebang.

It was just too powerful and the mana too diffuse to really hold on to.

The old adage is that attack is the best defense. Not that I necessarily agree to that proverb, at least not in all situations – after all, a strong defensive position can provide significant tactical advantages. But if defense is not an option, attack is, by default, the only option left. Apart from running away, but, obviously, I couldn’t do that either.

So I had to try and go after the source of the pulling force, which was either the crystal itself or the goblin.

Ideally, I would just whack either one with a sword or ax, but, again, that was not part of my current set of options. Perhaps I could overload either one instead. Just like an EMP can fry electronics, maybe I could shortcircuit something with mana.

Worth a shot.

Instead of trying to stem the outflow of mana, I actively started pushing. Immediately, the trickle of mana floating toward the crystal changed to a roaring torrent of magical energy. I followed the energy along, mentally, using the connection to my mana to stretch my awareness, curious to see where it went and what happened with it.

When the energy reached the sphere, the different types of mana separated and began to spin in a complex cycle, drawing ever closer to the core of the gemstone. The mana condensed in the center into a bright knot of purple color, from which a ray shot out direction old goblin.

Instead of leading to any sort of instability within the matrix structure of the crystal or the cycling mana within, the extra mana from my attempt to overload just made the cycles turn into spinning whirlwinds of unbridled power, that fed into the purple core with that much more pressure and speed.

And the ray going out increased in width and… substance, by order of magnitude.

It was like a raging river feeding into the old goblin on the other side. And rather than triggering any pain or discomfort, it seemed as if it caused pure bliss instead. The goblin’s body was vibrating in pent up energy, and it started to laugh out loud in unmitigated joy.

Fuck.

So much for trying to pop the gob by cramming magic into it...

Since that did not work, stemming the drain was ineffectual, and I could not move… then the only thing left was to fight back aggressively. If I could not prevent the goblin from taking my mana, then I just had to take it back.

Focusing on the purple mana, I could still feel a resonance, some familiarity, a connection that clearly indicated that this was mine. Part of my arcane self that had been ripped from the very core of my being. I latched on to this feeling resonance, trying to merge my consciousness with the mana somehow.

What was mana? Was it a force? Energy? A wave or particles? Something altogether different?

I had no answers to any of those questions. But as I focused all my attention, all my willpower, fear, and desire on the mana, I was able to make out its intricate, mind-bogglingly complex structure. I tried to understand what I was seeing but felt hopelessly outclassed.

But suddenly, it was as if I had taken a step back, and the structure crystalized as snaking tunnels of bright light that I could dive through, submerging my awareness into the brightly glowing world of magical energy.

Subconsciously, I could feel how I, or a projection of mine, a mental avatar, was moving at lightning speed toward the old goblin, racing through a complex set of runes around the hexagram surrounding it, before entering its core.

For a moment, I was stunned by the view.

The old goblin’s cycling mana looked nothing like mine.

First of all, and not particularly surprising, it was all purple mana. But the structure of its mana cycle was as different from my simple figure-eight gentle flow of mana, as a work of art was from the drawing of a toddler. It wasn’t as if the goblin’s cycle was overly complex, but it had depth, it had cohesion, and it had structure. The exact difference was hard to put into words, but it made me realize how primitive my mana cycle looked in comparison.

Pretty or not, sophisticated or primitive, it did not matter. I was going to take back what was mine, and while I was at it, take the goblin’s mana as well. And only part of that was my desperate will for survival. I also wanted to teach the old geezer a lesson that it should not have fucked with me. I was not the strongest being out there, but I was tenacious, and I was resourceful, and anyone going after me would have to watch out.

I slammed my will into the goblin’s core and began to shred the cycling mana. I was on a mission to damage, rent the structure apart, and then pick up the pieces. And things went great for a little while, with the mana cycle of the goblin stuttering and strings of purple mana fraying from the tight structure.

Within moments, the old goblin stopped laughing and began to growl in a guttural voice. And then a force slammed into my mental projection like a bulldozer. The goblin, and I was sure it was the old geezer, started pommeling my mind viciously. Instead of trying to defend myself or hit back, I focused on tearing the mana cycle apart, ready to take punishment to dole out my own. The mana cycle budged, and twisted, resisting my pull like a bucking stallion. But slowly, I managed to draw a few wisps out of the mana cycle and pull them in my direction.

And the goblin began to panic.

Rather than continue to beat up my mental avatar, it began to frantically push back the mana into its cycle. But as much as the old geezer had me beat in mana based attacks, it proved no match to me when it came to manipulating the raw essence of mana.

I brushed away its feeble attempts at mitigating the damage and methodically ripped apart its remaining mana structure. By then, I had already noticed that the pull on my mana had decreased to almost nothing, which took away the worry that I simply would be too late with my counterattack.

And it was time to reverse the flow, get back what was rightfully mine.

And then some.

I was still tethered to my own body through the thin stream of mana, which by now was moving at a much more sedate, even gentle pace. Rather than cut off the mana flow, which I felt would be much more successful now that I had forced the goblin to defend itself, I gently coaxed the mana already en route to reverse direction.

The reason was simple. I was not entirely sure if I could regain mana from the goblin’s body, and every single bit of mana that was still in transition would be valuable in case I could not.

I had the feeling that I had lost, potentially permanently, a tremendous amount of mana to this ritual, and I had to really scrape for every single bit. Just the thought of losing the precious bit of silver mana and the life-saving amber mana made me raving mad.

Frustrated and angry, I yanked at the mana cycle of the goblin, trying to somehow connect it to the thin stream of my mana that was hovering just outside of its body. And, against my expectation, I was actually able to nudge the mana. Not much, but enough to dent the mana cycle sufficiently to redirect the flow just a tiny bit. And this was different from tearing apart the goblin’s cycle, for which brute force sufficed. No, this was so much more difficult.

And the only reason I was able to do so, was because I felt a tiny bit of resonance, a smidgen of familiarity with the mana of the goblin. As if it was, or had been… a part of me. A small, almost insubstantial part, but nonetheless something that my mind recognized and that was aligned with me, for lack of better words. Clearly, those were traces of mana that had previously been part of my own mana cycle.

And now that was going to cost it dearly.

Gleefully, I pulled the goblin’s mana cycle ever closer, trying to solidify the connection and increase the mana flow from a paltry trickle to a more substantial flow.

I had to fight the old goblin for every inch, but it almost felt as if it was flailing around in the dark. I could feel its desperate strikes and resistance, but more often than not, it was targeted at the wrong place. Which, at first, I found quite confusing. I mean, yeah, my willpower was pretty good and all that… but this goblin had mad skills at fucking with other people’s minds. And that skill should translate to some degree to its own mind, I would have thought.

Unless… the goblin was using a spell to create those illusions and the pressure and had no idea how things actually worked… perhaps it did not have the equivalent of my Mana Vision spell…

The more I thought about it, the surer I was.

And it gave me an opening. An opportunity that I was going to use, without mercy or regret. Not that it wasn’t hard work anyway, but at least I only had to contend with the occasional mental attack, instead of a constant barrage.

The goblin attempted to break out of its hexagon circle as well, but just as I was constrained, apparently, it was as well.

Relieved to learn that I had some time, I focused on dragging more and more mana into the tether until I realized that the mana flowed out of the goblin’s body, into the crystal… but never reached me.

Suddenly nervous, I allowed my consciousness to flow back toward the crystal.

Mana was accumulating at a rapid pace in the center of the crystal, but it was all purple, and it did not go anywhere, just sitting there and rotating at an ever-increasing velocity and potency.

Carefully, I analyzed the internal structure of the crystal, trying to understand where the mana was flowing and how I could possibly change it back into the colors I wanted. After all, if it went from any color to purple, the reverse should be possible as well.

Hopefully.

Not allowing myself to dwell on the thought that I was, just perhaps, going to be stuck with an overwhelming amount of useless purple mana, I tried to understand how this mana transfer and transformation worked.

Based on what I had seen previously, it was quite apparent that the mana coming in was routed through the various sub-portions of the crystal that were dedicated to that type of mana - ten different facets, ten kinds of mana, excluding gold and silver mana.

Then the mana flowed toward the core of the sphere, only to be caught by some runes inserted in a purple crystal shard and then… my mind blanked for a moment as I tried to understand what was going on. It was as if the mana was there, but not there for a moment. Or perhaps at two separate places simultaneously, kind of like watching a three-dimensional movie without having the appropriate glasses that fooled the brain into thinking that the image had depth.

A parallel dimension? A fourth physical dimension? Some weird magical shit messing with my brain? Or just a strange reflection or filtering of light through a purple prism?

Whatever it was, it felt as if the mana disappeared, was there, yet not there, and then it came out transformed into purple mana. So if I had to hazard a guess, the crystal with the runes determined the type of mana that would come out of that transformation. The question was how I could change it to something I wanted.

So how about…

I pulled black mana toward the crystal, trying to insert it into the crystal shard instead of pushing it through, and, suddenly, it changed color, from a deep purple to swirling darkness. I then pushed on the mana in the core, forcing it to leave the sphere toward my prone body.

Jackpot!

After a moment, the purple mana I drew from the still resisting goblin was turned to black, and the ray of dancing and twisting shadow energy arching toward my body quickly filled my black mana reserve to the rim and beyond.

Despite the almost orgasmic feeling this inflow of energy created, I barely paid any attention because as I watched the core transform from purple to black, I had noticed a glint of silver and gold. I squinted closer, trying to find what I had glimpsed briefly. At first, the swirling dark shadows covered everything, making me believe that it had been a trick of light, a mirage of shadows and purple.

But then I noticed it again.

Gold.

There was bloody divine mana in there!

Shit, I wanted it. Badly.

And then I noticed that I had continued to transform mana to black, overshooting things a bit. Quickly, I switched to silver mana, and amber mana, in turn, trying to keep things level from then on out.

Such an amazing feeling - a mana high, coupled with the realization that I had dodged the reaper yet again. Once more, I had danced on a knife’s edge and triumphed against the odds.

Fucking addictive.

But then the energy slowed to a trickle before stopping altogether.

This was it?

The goblin was still alive and feebly kicking, utterly different from the deflated Elrond earlier. Perhaps draining the lifeforce was different from draining mana… in which case, I had no idea how to do that. But, frankly, draining life force also seemed, I don’t know, weird, and disgusting. As if I was eating the goblin.

Which felt a bit too close to cannibalism, so I was not terribly upset about it not working out.

But I did want to have that gold mana in the crystal.

I focused my mind once more on the sphere on the pedestal, delving deep into its core to find once more those traces of gold mana. At first, I did not see anything. In fact, the crystal was utterly depleted of mana and more like a lifeless piece of glass than the fascinating microcosm of mana from earlier.

As I dug deeper, I noticed a glimpse, a memory of gold, in the very center of the core, not more than a tiny mote of golden light, dancing chaotically through the crystalline structure. And it looked as if… yes, as the golden light moved around, other mana appeared. An infinitely small amount, but it basically was mana arising out of nothing.

This was big.

Greedily, I stretched my mind to the gold mana and pulled. At first, nothing happened. But as I increased the force, I could feel the gold mana slowly drift toward the tether connecting my mana cycle to the crystal.

I was beginning to feel giddy in anticipation of obtaining golden mana. The mana of creation, it seemed. Hence aptly called the divine mana. And once I had access to the tiny mote, I would send it into the transformer crystal and create more of it!

Maybe I could not use it, because I did not have a golden core, but that was a bridge I would cross later.

Distracted as I was with my dreams of grandeur, I failed to notice the cracks until it was almost too late. As I was forcing the golden mote toward the energy-tether, hairline cracks appeared in the crystal to my left and right, spreading out like branches at the speed of lightning.

I could feel the splintering gem cut into my mental avatar. Each hairline crack was cutting into my spirit until I could barely form a cohesive thought. With a last, desperate push, I managed to merge my battered and bruised mind with my body.

Fearing the worst, I looked up at the crystal, only to see it briefly light up with a plethora of colors, before a massive explosion sent thousands of shards slicing through the throne room. Sharp, needle-like pieces of crystal pierced my eyes and cut my flesh into hundreds of ribbons.

Briefly, I heard a wet, gurgling noise from the goblin, and a thumping of something hitting the floor, briefly thrashing around, and then there was silence, only disrupted by my own moans.

And then, out of nowhere, I could hear a clear chime that reverberated through the mana inside of me as well as the air around me. A single note that seemed to stretch on forever but must have lasted only a second or two. It was a timeless sound. Ethereal and eternal.

And then it was gone.

Not that I cared about a fucking chime at that moment.

I could feel how my blood gushing out on the cold, wet floor with each of my heartbeats. Feeling coldness and apathy settling over me with each passing second.

And the pain was excruciating. But perhaps that is what saved me. Rather than give in to the apathy, I frantically pulled forth amber mana and flooded the worst of my injuries with the soothing energy, desperately trying to decrease the pain.

And yet, despite the screaming pain, I needed to be efficient like never before. I knew that there was just too much broken and destroyed in my body, too many wounds, and almost inevitable death due to nervous shock and plummeting blood pressure.

With all my willpower, I forced myself to calm down and focus on an image of pink, healthy skin, moist and supple to replace the bloody, flayed mess of skin that was hanging in loose ribbons off my arms, back, and head.

But I could feel that in many places, the damage went deeper. So I also imagined the mana to build a new layer of fibrous connective tissue underneath the epidermis, with sweat glands, blood vessels, and nerves. Which was a lot more crucial for avoiding a nervous shock and plummeting blood pressure.

It was a close call there for a while. Another close brush with death, barely dodging the reaper’s sickle. But slowly, I could feel the worst wounds close, increasing my chance for survival drastically.

But for all my effort, I had done barely enough to stabilize.

With my amber mana spent, all my focus was on breathing.

That was pretty much all I could do, and even that, I wasn’t sure how long I could handle.

I wasn’t in a good spot.

For a moment, I seriously wasn’t sure whether I just wanted to die. To just let it all go, to stop struggling.

I felt so tired.

The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that given time I could heal most, if not all, of the wounds over time.

If I survived that long, that was.

To speed up the mana recovery, I decided to get back into meditation. I focused on relaxing my muscles, blending out the screaming pain, the headache, the piercing pain from my eyes, and allowed my mind to sink deeper and deeper into a detached state.

It was far from easy.

But finally, I mentally detached from my body and took a sort of third-person perspective. With a slight shift in focus, I was able to see the mana coursing through my body, the silver mana, entwined with black and amber.

What had happened to the golden mana?

It seemed like there was nothing there, causing me to curse myself for the greed that had driven me to go after that tiny amount of divine mana… but how should I have known that it would blow up the artifact?

Just when I was about to further berate myself for my foolish choices, I noticed a faint golden shimmer around my mana cycle, barely perceptible but still there, like a golden halo.

Maybe I… no, first, I had to focus on recovery. The gold mana could wait until later.

What I really needed was amber mana now. Was there any way that I could speed up the mana recovery? This was the perfect time to find out.

I carefully observed the tiny amount of amber mana cycling through my body and saw it ever so slowly increase in potency. Where was the recharging mana coming from? Spreading out my awareness, I was gradually able to discern a trickle of diffuse amber mana drifting from my lungs to the cycling amber mana and slowly replenishing it.

It stood to reason then that the mana somehow came through the air I was breathing. Some of the ambient mana I had made use of when using Mana Vision to navigate the caves, I assumed. And if just breathing replenished my mana, I could perhaps increase the rate at which that happened.

Meditation was the first step for that. But why would meditation do anything? Was it the mental state I put myself in? Or perhaps it was the lack of movement… after all, if I moved, I’d burn the oxygen that I had just taken in, and maybe that prevented the mana from fully seeping into my body.

So, staying still likely was a component of increased effectiveness. And deep and even breaths.

To test that part of my, admittedly, ad-hoc theory, I focused on fully inflating my lungs and keeping the air there for a moment before exhaling as thoroughly as I could. And I soon noticed a slight uptick in the amount of mana entering my body.

Which also allowed me to observe more clearly how and where exactly this happened.

There were tiny spots, for lack of a better word, that looked almost sponge-like and apparently served to attract and bind minuscule amounts of mana from the air. Some of these spots were slightly amber, others were black or silver. Corresponding to the types of mana I had in my mana-cycle.

Could I somehow enlarge the amber spots? I tried various approaches, and what ended up working was simply using some of the amber mana that was filtered out of the air in my lungs, and bind it to the sponge-like spots, rather than allow it to drift into the rest of my body. It did not increase the size of the spots by much, but after adding mana for a few minutes, I could sense a noticeable uptick in the mana regeneration speed.

The only problem was that the moment I stopped focusing on keeping the extra mana in those spots, it started to dissolve slowly and drift into my body towards the cycling mana.

But as long as I meditated, focused on even and deep breaths, and kept the mana attached to the sponges it sped up the mana replenishing by one order of magnitude.

So that is what I did.

Whenever I had recharged my amber mana, I healed another part of my body, until the mana was exhausted again. After a few hours, I felt that I had dealt with the worst damage to my skin and muscle tissue, a least enough to be minimally mobile and not in immediate danger of dying any longer.

Time to turn my attention to my eyes.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a clear idea of how the human eye is built. As such, I could not give my mana specific ‘instructions’ and had to rely on a more generic healing approach – just flood the eyes with amber mana and hope for the best. I did visualize the end result of me having vision again, hoping that it would suffice to regenerate my eyes.

And it worked, however inefficiently.

It was a slow process, certainly much more time-consuming than dealing with a similar-sized amount of skin. But after a few minutes, I could feel vision slowly returning.

First, I noticed colors and general shapes. Then slowly, things started to come more into focus, albeit still quite blurry. And just when I ran out of amber mana again, I finally felt that my eyes were fully back to normal.