By playing around with the soft, but somehow tough energy, I managed to ascertain that my lowest, freely available energy was significantly less than the total amount I possessed. The unavailable energy was actually forming the basis of my skeleton.

This way, my most basic physical shape was made of condensed Qi, actually allowing me to exist in corporeal form!

It also implied, that it was energy turning into matter and vice versa! E=mc^2 in plain view!

I got so giddy while thinking about the possibilities, that I stood up and started pacing around the room.

As I moved towards the platform that I had previously flipped over, I crossed the spot it used to occupy. With a crack, a tile disintegrated into dust and I fell straight down the hole that opened up under my feet.

---

"Duh, a secret hole hidden below some altar in the library? Crazy shit, isn't it?", I whispered to myself as I looked around while trying to ensure the integrity of my appendages - "Well, seems that a straight drop from the height of a four-storey building is not enough to damage me. Yeppee, cheers to the magic wonderland."

I was at the dead end of a narrow passage, with walls and both floor and ceiling made of smoothly hewn blocks of greyish-green stone, put together without any mortar.

The passage led further away before making a sudden turn after a dozen or so meters.

Interestingly, local inhabitants, if there were any, were not following the Great Code of Mysterious and Unexplored Hidden Dungeons. That is, according to the dominating tendencies in RPGs and MMOs, even the most dusty, useless and forgotten coal cellar must have sufficient illumination in the form of candles/torches/luminescent fungi/magic crystals, so that random adventurers and other trespassers would not have to bang their heroically unprotected heads against the possible ceiling protrusions.

It seems that I was cheating though - I did not have the eyeballs in the first place. So, as far as I could tell, I observed my surroundings not by having reflected photons stimulate rods and cones in the retina but by some sort of magic mojo.

---

Willing to spend more time uncovering the mysteries of my new body and feeling the need to familiarize with the workings of the magic, I sat down with my back towards the dead end and began my experiments.

I was not dumb enough to rush forwards, risking to encounter powerful hostile beings or traps without any knowledge about my capabilities. Such rash actions are meant for fiction, where characters have the plot armor, luck stat over9000 and other gimmicks.

Rushing forward would only get me end up dead, or, erm, deader than a skeleton could be.

I had played enough games to firmly believe, that an ominous ruin with a library, altars and deceased magicians is bound to have some dangers.

Therefore, first of all, I tried to ensure that I am actually aware of what I could do to actually protect myself.

---

After a while, I could conclude that I was able to sense my surroundings by the method of some form of a complex reflection-radiation scan of the surrounding magic energy, or how I was calling it, “Qi”. Actually, I liked the word “mana” more, but I blamed Frederik the kung-fu maniac and his second-hand paperback from Taiwan about acupuncture for sticking to “Qi”,

Subconsciously I interpreted the information about my surroundings in the way I was most used to. But with some effort, I actually managed to swap “filters”, achieving thermal scan and light frequencies outside of visible spectrum, such as UV and infrared.

As for my inner energy, after some trial and error and even an accidental discharge of power that almost led to second collapse, I found out that I could actually project it out of the “limits” of the body, forming a temporary crude spike of about 50cm length.

It looked like an icicle, and was fairly uneven and unstable due to the lack of control I had over the energy. I also had very little available energy, as creating even that form of weapon weakened me by taking the energy that usually formed my basic skeletal structure.

Although the weakening effect was fairly small, I still felt that it made me more brittle, and therefore, more vulnerable. But I placed my hopes on increasing energy pool and improving Qi control in the future.

---

Now, the problem was to increase my energy level.

It seemed that acting like in Chinese myths, and meditating and absorbing “Essences of Heaven and Earth” did not get me any extra power.

Following the meridians with the Qi just helped to guide it and improved my manipulation and control skills over it.

Just in case, I recited the Heart Sutra I had once read when studying about Indian history and culture.

I hoped that the connections between meridians and chakras would also work for whatever mystical practices are shared in (and between) the world(s): “Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā om!”

After reciting (and being thankful for the lack of tongue to bite) the lines several times, I could conclude that the original Sanskrit version of Prajñāpāramitā did not give me any results.

After some pondering, I decided to try a version in Japanese. Admittedly, I had heard it from an old, TV-run anime about some onmyouji, who were supposed to be old Japanese esoteric practitioners of Yin-Yang and five element theory with a healthy dose of Buddhism, Taoism and Shintoism thrown in, but the basic idea should be valid.

Well, at least there was nobody around to call me crazy.

“Gyatei gyatei haragyatei harasōgyatei boji sowaka!”, unsurprisingly, chanting the same idea in another language did not change anything either.

Pity, I would have really liked to sit in a secure place and just increase my strength until I felt secure enough to head out into unknown “outside”.

A year or two, or a decade. Even a century would not be an issue - who has ever heard about skeletons dying of old age? If anything, the older the undead, the stronger it is supposed to be.

Though, I was still not sure if I actually qualified as one. Damn mage that pulled me here, he could have left at least a local edition of “How it Works” handbook series.