Meditation (Lv 1) -- You are able to drift away from your surroundings and peer into your inner self. Allows for more complete self-reflection and control over your inner energies.

Hijla couldn't help but blink at the skill's description. It was nothing if not open-ended. Inner Energies? She had assumed that the skill would help with her resource regeneration as that was the general consensus in her knowledge, but that didn't seem to be the case. Curious about what it could actually mean she activated the skill.

Hijla's eyes saw nothing. It was as black as night. Her heartbeat quickened as a sort of existential fear began to grip at her. Then she saw it. The faintest trickle of light. It was red, like blood, and seemed to move slowly. It oozed in a pillar. As her eyes adjusted she began to see other pillars of light. One was green, another blue, and the last yellow. The green one was the thinnest, though it moved quickly. It ran up and down its pillar. The blue lights seemed to jump around their pillar, while the yellow ones didn't move at all.

As she looked around more and more lights began to appear. Great veins of lights sprouted from the pillars and reached into the darkness. Reaching out, she passed a hand through the red pillar.

Pain.

Pain was all she felt as a silent scream passed her lips. It felt as though something had just grabbed her heart and squeezed. Hijla awoke suddenly to worried faces all around her.

Her mother, with copper skin and brown eyes was shouting. Her father, the yellow haired bear of a man, loomed over her. His face was grim, as though he had already passed judgement on a man about to die. There was another man. One she didn't recognize. He also loomed over her with a cloth. It was completely white at some point, but now it was covered in bright red blood. That's when she tasted it. It was immediately overwhelming. Blood. The taste of it filled her mouth, coating it like paint. The wisp hovered over her. For once it stayed still, it's soft tinkling came out loud and harsh, as if it was afraid.

"Hijla, don't worry, you'll be fine." Her father's voice, deep and guttural, sounded like the roaring of a bear even as he whispered. Thick furs covered his shoulders and a plain iron circlet rested upon his brow. She knew it was supposed to be ancestral but hadn't yet figured out it's importance. She could see her older sisters peering in through the doorway, her mother failing to drive them off.

A blinking box appeared in the corner of her vision. It expanded as she focused on it.

*Warning*

Do not attempt to cut your lifeline again. It is the pool from which your Health is derived. Cutting it will result in your death.

You have taken 20 points of damage from inflicting harm on your lifeline. Your Health Regeneration has been negated until either your Health has regenerated fully or you receive services from a sufficiently powerful Healer. You are losing 1 point of Health per second due to your ruptured lifeline.

Other Entities can heal your lifeline. It will come at a cost.

She was dying. Fear gripped her body. It was then that her scrambled brain finally recognized what was being said.

"My Lord, your daughter is dying." The other man, a Healer she assumed, just said the most obvious thing in the world. Sweat beaded down his forehead. His hands were shaking completely.

"I know!" Her father roared. His voice shook her entire body. She could see thin streams of dust fall from the ceiling as he shouted. Her siblings immediately ran off, fearing their father's wrath. The Healer cowered. The hairs on his arms and neck stood straight up, like the quills on a porcupine. "You are here to help her." His voice was quiet, but all the more terrifying for it.

"I can't, My Lord. Her lifeline is ruptured. There is no one close enought that can do anything for her. All I am able to do, and all my apprentices are able to do is to continue healing her. But we won't be able to do that forever." Now the man's entire body was shaking. It looked like he could barely keep his arms up.

Hijla's eyes fell back to the wisp that stayeed in place. It's sounds had been getting louder and now they were all she could here. She had no idea what the spirit was trying to say. She had no idea what anyone was trying to say. The girl jumped back into herself. Unlike the first time the pillars showed themselves perfectly. And then she could see the damage. The red pillar, which she assumed was her lifeline, was cracked. How a pillar made of light could be cracked she didn't quite know, but cracked it was. A long jagged scar ran up and down the pillar, the thickest part being where her hand had passed through.

Damnit! How utterly stupid could she have been. She had no idea what these things were other than her "inner energies". Of course messing with these things could have killed her. Breaking her mana and conviction lines would have sucked but that would probably not have killed her. The stamina one would have left her unable to move, which would have still killed her, just slower.

Clouds of red light streamed out from the crack. They floated up filled the invisible ceiling of her inner self. That had to be what her missing Health was. Also there was far more than she thought there should have been.

Hijla paced around. Her mind was running at a hundred miles per second. She had to do something, and she had to do it fast. Meditation claimed that she should be able to control her inner energies, which should have included the red lights amassing above her. The issue? She had no idea how to do that. And if she messed up she could end up killing herself faster.

Another stream of lights caught her eye. These were blue, but they connected to her lifeline. This stream was new and far thicker than her lifeline. It stretched out into the void. It didn't bend or branch out. When she looked closer it felt almost wrong. Like it didn't belong inside her body. At first she was worried that it was some other entity harming her lifeline. That was until she noticed the little blue lights crashing into each other. As they did so they gradually turned red until they matched her lifeline. Seeing the process started giving her some ideas.

She ran off to her blue pillar, which she dubbed her manaline. It was across the space from her lifeline. Staring at the pillar she wasn't sure what she was supposed to do. And likely what she was about to do was not what she was supposed to do. Bracing herself she poked a hole in her manaline. Immediately she felt a sense of loss in her core.It didn't hurt, but it did feel like something was leeking out from inside her. She knew exactly what it was. The little blue lights immediately started to jump out of the thin hole.

Immediately starting to freak out again she covered the hole with her hands, careful not to push into the pillar.

Hajlmar was unable to do anything. Thoughts raced through his head as he watched his daughter's life bleed out from her. Red spots kept growing on her sheets. The infant was literally sweating blood. He remembered seeing this happen on the battlefield. The hags of the western woods could cast a spell that caused this. For most it merely did a lot of damage and hurt like a bitch, but for some. For some it was a death sentence. He didn't know why, exactly, but it had to do with how their lifeline was poorly protected compared to most. From what he was told, the spell wasn't even supposed to shred open a lifeline. It was a tool of torture. But when the hags learned what it could do to some men they never stopped casting it.

He couldn't stop seeing it as he looked upon his youngest daughter. The Healer was exhausted. He had already been here for hours. Thankfully his apprentices were on the way. Scilla, Hajlmar's wife, had already ordered the kitchen maids to prepare a hardy meal for the healer. Hajlmar had to look away. Memories of steel on steel crashed in his ears.

"My Lord!" The Healer cried in alarm. Hajlmar immediately twisted back to look at the man, his neck cracking as he did so. The man's eyes were wide, his mouth open. The fear had doubled. "Her manaline has been punctured." I immediately turned to little Hijla. This tiny babe. Sure enough, small blue lights flew out of her opened mouth and from the pores on her palms and soles.

Hajlmar had no idea what to make of his youngest child. She was silent, completely. Only making sound when she needed food or to be changed, but completely quiet all other times. It had worried both him and his wife. He had started to call her Hijla, which means silent, for this reason. He hadn't realized that the gods would recognize it as her name. Children weren't named until they passed their fifth winter in Norland due to the high chance of them dying. His wife had taken it as a sign that her gods were watching the child, but here she was, her life bleeding out.

The man could still remember what the Healer had said when he first examined the child, a week after her birth. Hajlmar had told no one of what the healer said. His daughter's health should have been assured. Most children had merely 10 points of health, his own having at most 30 points. That was until Hijla was born. She had 88 points. An amount that was unheard of for newborns. She should have been completely fine. But here she was.

Hijla was twisting her mana. It took her a while to figure out how to get it to move properly. She had to continually twist it around as she walked it to her lifeline. It was somehow exhausting working her mana. Not physically but mentally. Then she remembered something she had learned weeks ago. Glancing at the yellow pillar, the second largest of the four, she noticed that it had dimmed quite a bit. That was her Conviction. And the fact that it dimmed meant she only had so much time to get this mana vein to her lifeline.

She began moving faster and slowly the mana vein grew. After what felt like hours Hijla was finally at the red pillar. Here would be the hardest part. The larger mana vein that was attached to her lifeline relied on mere pressure to force the Mana to become Health. She, on the other hand, simply didn't have enough Mana to generate that pressure. So she needed something else. She had already realized why doing this spent her Conviction. It was a solid. Or at least the closest thing to a solid in here. It formed a thin membrane around her mana vein and kept the Mana inside. Her Health and Stamina didn't need a membrane as they acted like self-contained rivers.

Now she just needed to figure out how to get it to work. At first she tried to model it from actual blood veins where they had pumps, but her Conviction was static and wouldn't move like she wanted it to. So Hijla tried something else. She split the line in two. The larger vein continued straight until it expanded into a sphere. At the far end of the sphere she formed a membrane of conviction that would only let one light through at a time. The other vein, this one much skinnier, ran underneath the larger one until it got to the gate at the end of the sphere. She had already noticed that if two lights jumped into the exact same spot they would ignite instead of merge. So she split the little vein in two again and had both ends wrap to opposite sides of the vein after the main gate. Each end had a gate as well, but these ones were slightly smaller than the main one. A light will get stuck on each one until the pressure builds enough. Hijla watched as two lights shot out of their gates and jumped right where she wanted them to. They ignited, creating a low pressure zone right outside the main gate. This cause a low pressure area in the sphere which pulled more Mana from the vein and made it so that less pressure ended in the secondary vein, thus delaying when it'll cause another ignition. The low pressure zone immediatley started pulling Mana through the gate, but as it did the artificial pressure caused them to merge creating Health. This Health then travelled over to her lifeline.

Image of the mana veins

A bright white light spread through-out the entire space. It illuminated the ground that she was walking on and a pedestal like thing in the middle of the space. Above the pedestal hovered a little blue cube. Walking up to it the cube unfolded and the familiar blue box appeared again.

Congratulations!

You have successfully created a functional Mana Vein and Mana Organ! You have successfully manipulated Mana to achieve a specific goal.

You have earned:

Earned Feat - Mana Heart I; Skills - Mana Manipulation Lv 1, Health Manipulation Lv 1, Conviction Manipulation lv 1; +2 to Constitution, +1 to Intelligence, +1 to Willpower

My heart was beating faster. The white light washed over the construct I just made. It moved it around to outside the four pillars. I could still see it, but its lines were smoothed out. Little leaks were fixed and it was running exactly how I wanted it to. I could feel the sparks of warmth as it beat in time to my own heart.

There was another blue box.

Angard couldn't believed what he just witnessed. His mana sight could see everything that happened to the infants mana channels. It was astonishing. The girl's mana channels just grew and formed their own Mana Heart. An organ that most warriors wished to have and cost exorbitant amounts to have implanted or grown within. Most had to get implants fashioned from beasts that grew the organ naturally. But this child's body just grew it, and at a rate that he could watch it form.

Sweat dripped down his back. Another change racked through the girl's body. He watched as her Health grew. The very lifeline, though cracked as it was, bolstered. The child's Constitution just grew. He had thought she was completely unconcious. The System didn't reward you for things done unconciously. Which meant only one thing. Somehow the girl had directed her mana to form such an organ. It was enough to save her out right, but if she did survive then the girl could very well be some sort of prodigy.