The poll went clearly in favor of chocolate with yes a close second. I will take until tomorrow to decide how it will go.

Luke noticed that channeling Mana to the tree while maintaining the Expand Conscience skill slightly strained him. It was nowhere near his limit, but he estimated that he could increase the rate of consumption to 300 Mana/Second at least. He should test the limit in the near future as it was an important piece of information to have and it could be dangerous to find his upper limit in a fight.

Luke soon discovered that doing nothing could get boring pretty fast. So he decided to explore what he could do with Mana. He theorized that he should be able to get some degree of control over the elements through this energy. After all, there should exist spells that utilize fire, wind, water and earth as the base. He suspected that he was the strange one, using neutral spells with no affinities all the time.

He had read enough novels to know that there were different ‘basic elements’ depending on culture, religion or an author's imagination. He decided to go with one of the best known configurations: fire, water, wind and earth. He just wanted to expand the skills available to him in a short time, so he discarded the elements that he believed were going to take too much time like time and space. He also desired to learn light and darkness, or even lightning, but thought it better to understand the original four first.

Fire, water, wind and earth… he didn’t want to start with fire as any mistake could harm him or the forest around. Water was easier, but there wasn’t a big body of water nearby to study so it wouldn’t be that simple (yes, he was made mostly of water and there was water in gas state in the air, but he wanted something easier to began with). Air wasn’t hard to notice though it appeared too changeable to understand. That left only earth. Earth had the added advantage of being an element which almost always specialized in defense and crowd control, just what Luke needed most.

He started by closing his eyes and breathing deeply as if he was meditating (he didn’t believe the crap about meditation making you closer to yourself, but he accepted that it was an useful way of relaxing the mind and improve focus). Then he plunged some of his Mana as tendrils into the soil beneath him. He discover anything that he could use. There was no ley line or Earth Mana or anything like that. He tried other popular approaches without success. At this point, he realized that if there wasn’t something special in the ground, maybe he shouldn’t search for a different type of Mana, but how to utilize the energy he already had to make the element do what he wanted. This new idea was proved right immediately when he grabbed a pebble from the ground with one of the Mana tendrils. The rock resisted at first until some connection was established and he could move it without need of the tendril.

He played moving it from one side to the other in the air to get more comfortable at manipulating this new ability. After a while, he wondered what would happen if he could set a similar kind of link with the ground. He formed the tendrils again, inserting them into the earth. He almost collapsed with the connection made. He felt the whole planet for an instant, every rock, boulder and mountain passed through his mind. The amount of images and information was staggering, he could barely remain conscious. Suddenly, the instant had passed and he was back in his body, shivering.

DING

You began walking the path of the Earth. You established a tiny link with the world you reside in and the mysteries of the Earth Element are now closer to you. This path requires more than a full life to mastering, so you might not see the end, but just walking it makes you stronger.

Rewards:

Earth Affinity: 5%

Earth Manipulation Beginner lvl 1

It took some time for Luke to become calm enough to analyze his gains. The sensation of being something so immense and powerful was exhilarating and addictive. He had to fight with the unconscious need of losing himself on the Earth. He knew that if he did he would become insane if he was lucky, or his spirit may be severed from his body leaving an empty shell behind.

The skill was what he wanted, but he would need to train extensively before it was truly useful. It didn’t have any part that scaled with his Intelligence which was disappointing, though it allowed him to control the ground in a ten meter radius. He suspected that leveling the ability would increase this range. He did numerous testings until he got proficient in three pseudo skills (it was still Earth Manipulation, but used in a single way repeatedly until it could be considered a skill on its own): earth spike, earth wall and quagmire. The former two are self explaining, the first one creates up to three spikes from the ground. They take a second to form and are sharp enough to impale any creature that didn’t focus on defense. The second one was even more obvious, it formed a two meters tall and three meters wide wall of stone. Luke guessed that the durability of the wall may vary depending of the composition of the soil from where it sprout, but he couldn’t test it at the moment. The last one wasn’t actually a quagmire, he called it that way because it was close enough. This skill dug and filled a circular hole half a meter deep and with a radius of one meter. The objective was to trap a being in the earth at least for a while. Although it was enough for small and physically weak creatures, It probably wouldn’t work with big or strong ones.

After his experience with earth, he became afraid of trying out the other elements, but he rationalized that he needed the flexibility they would bring. He put his limit on fire, However. He couldn’t know what would happen when he connected to fire, but he was certain he won’t desire to know for awhile. Of the two remaining, he felt closer to wind for no real reason. It probably had something to do with the fact that he imagined the air as being free of any shackle and limitation. Besides, who could honestly say that he didn’t dream of flying?

The connection wasn’t established as fast or easily as he thought it would. It was quite hard to catch the wind. Finally, he realized that Air wasn’t about grabbing or controlling, but about flowing with it. The sensation was also different: if with the earth he felt immense and powerful, in the wind he felt ethereal and scattered. Nonetheless, the consequences of losing himself in these feeling was the same: death or insanity.

DING

You began walking the path of the Air. You established a tiny link with the atmosphere of the world you reside in and the mysteries of the Air Element are now closer to you. This path requires more than a full life to mastering, so you might not see the end, but just walking it makes you stronger.

Rewards:

Air Affinity: 5%

Air Manipulation Beginner lvl 1

The new skill was pretty similar to the previous one: it gave control over the wind in a ten meter radius. He wanted to create a few pseudo skills with this element too, but he suddenly sensed that the Mana Tree had stopped accepting his Mana. It looked like it had finished maturing.