?? days after the explosion - ????

Elena found herself trapped in an unknown villa for a couple of days now. She was constantly followed by either a maid, guard or doctor, so she was almost never alone. Well, even if she wanted to escape, she wasn't strong enough to do it right now

After the stabbing, she was in a coma for a while(they refuse to tell her how long) and when she finally woke up, She had to go trough a number of check ups since she may have suffered permanent damage.

After some doctors checked on her to make sure she was ok, they told her that she wasn't at 100% right now, but with some rehabilitation and the help from her inner mana, she should make a full recovery

If she had to be honest with herself, she didn't like to use her inner mana. In this day society, it was considered barbaric for a woman to use inner mana, especially among nobles. Besides, since the men usually wanted to be the strongest one, thanks to a stupid misconception that a woman would need to be weak so she can be protected, it was hard for a woman to marry if she openly uses her inner mana.

On the other hand, outer mana was ok for a woman to use since usually mages were always considered weak, and needed a strong warrior to protect them. that's why the standard adventures party have a man as the shield and a woman as the firepower. It's not like there were a lot of parties with the man as the fire power and the woman as the shield, and what was consider the best party was a tank, warrior, mage, and healer, and it usually was a mix of both male and female

Still, most men dreamed of becoming adventures and have a mage to protect, and most girls dreamed of having a strong knight to protect them from any harm, so the idea was for the men to be the warrior and the woman to be the mage.

But it wasn't only because she worried about most people opinion, it was because she didn't want to brag in front of the prince. She knew the prince suffer a lot because he didn't have talent in magic, or almost every other subject, unlike his brothers. So showing off that her fiance was stronger than him would probably depress him even more since it would hurt his man pride.She knew he would probably don't care enough, or at least act like he doesn't care, but she wasn't THAT interested in her inner mana so she didn't want to pointlessly hurt the prince(beating the crap out of him when he did something stupid wasn't pointless to her)

She did practice a little when she was alone, since it would be a waste if she at least didn't know how to use it, and she was thankful to have it since it would have been impossible to become his fiancé otherwise since the minimum requirement to marry royalty was to be able to use mana in some way. Besides, she probably would have died and it would have been impossible to have a full recovery if she didn't have it

And right now, she was using it to the fullest. It seems that when the guard stabbed her, her inner mana helped restore her body and kept helping her during the coma. Right now there wasn't anything else to restore, but since she had some problems reconnecting her nerves with her brain and her muscle were a little weaker, after waking up she needed her inner mana to restore her stamina when working out

There were a lot of things the inner mana was useful for. For starters, it improved the power of regeneration in one's the body. Unless you were a monster, it was impossible to regrow an arm, but even a beginner could close a small wound with it and the better you were, the more damage you could recover.

It also makes you stronger, faster, tougher, improved your reflex, improved your stamina and extended your life expectancy. In ideal conditions, an inner mana user could live to around 300 years old if they trained enough, so even if you were a woman and even if you don't openly show it, they always trained it to some extent.

Since she could recover her stamina faster, she could keep doing her physiotherapy longer, and since she could use her inner mana to make her muscle stronger, she could move easier than otherwise. Thanks to this, she was making a fast recovery and it wouldn't take long for her to be even better than ever, since she never practices 12hs of inner mana every day before. Besides, it looked like her father wouldn't let her out for a while, so practicing was the best way to kill time for her

Still, she was far from an expert, and even if she kept training every day, she wouldn't reach the level of an expert warrior. A true warrior practice at least 6 hours every day since they were young, and the more mana you use, the more you have later in your body and the faster it regenerates. That is why training near a mana vein, and the better the mana vein, the stronger you become, since the mana in your body regenerates faster, allowing you to spend more mana faster, and increasing your mana and mana regeneration even faster.

Well, there were other things to consider like maximum capacity, talent in how to use your own mana, the effort you put in increasing your mana and efficiency in increasing it.

The maximum capacity was the limit of how much mana one can store in the body, and increasing that amount was incredible hard. The limit was almost the same for everyone, with some rare exceptions, and then you had to train 10 harder to increase the same amount than before reaching your limit. And after a while, it becomes 11 times harder, and then 12 etc. Most give up at their limit and then just do little training to keep in shape.Well, in case of Elena, she didn't even reach her maximum capacity, but that was the case for most nobles, woman or non-adventures

The talent depended on what you were good at. Some were extremely good at healing their body, others at increasing their strength and others at hardening their body. All could improve every aspect of their body to some extent, but it only increased the power they already have, and even if they have the same amount of power without the mana, how they use their mana changed the level of power. For example, if a normal person used mana to increase their strength, they would have the same strength of a trained soldier without mana, but if the soldier use it, he would have the strength of 5 soldier or 10 soldiers, depending on his talent in increasing his strength. In Elena's cases, she would barely reach the power of a weakly trained soldier if she used her mana, but she had a better regeneration power than most mana users

As for effort and efficiency, the amount of mana a person had would be the same if he or she trained 1 hours every day instead of 2, but at the same time, even if 2 persons trained 1 hour every day, one would have more mana than the other, simply because his rate of training was higher. And in Elena's case, since she barely trained 1 hour a day before, her mana shouldn't amount to much, and since she didn't compare with others, she had no idea of efficiently she learned.

Still, since she was under house arrest, all she could do was read, train and think, and it depressed her every time she thought about something, so she mostly read and train.

And that was because every time she let her mind wander, she would think about the prince, and then she would get worried since she knew he was in constant danger and there was nothing she could do. She already had nightmares for the stabbing, and she doubted that would be the last dangerous situation he would be involved with, or she wouldn't be put under house arrest by his father

Well, she would also worried and get depressed about his romantic affairs. The last time she saw him, every day he was with a new beautiful girl, and now that they were no longer engaged, there was nothing she could do about it. She knew that she would easily get jealous every time he was talking with a beautiful girl, but she could help it. And besides that, she knew that she constantly nagged him about everything he did, but it was really frustrating how he always did whatever he wanted and had no ambition what so ever.

And because she knew that she was constantly jealous and nagging, she wouldn't find it strange that the prince would jump at the first beautiful girl who treat him nice and do whatever he wanted, and she had no one else to blame than herself. All she could do was wait there with nothing to do but read, train or get depressed in her own thought

Well, at least that how it went for a while until a maid she was close to went to talk to her with a pale expression

"Elena, your father found out something today and he wasn't sure he should tell you but I think you must know"(maid)

"What is it Margaret"(Elena)asked while getting anxious since it didn't look like they were good news

"Prince Julian is dead"(maid)

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