After he went to do his things I returned some of his stuff back to its place while memorizing the room layout. It seems like my room disappears when I’m not actively thinking about it. And cameras can’t capture it in either state.

I also found some cursed items that were well maintained and would look nice if you were not actively using mana sight. Which is a passive for me thanks to being a dungeon core.

While I was examining one of the stronger cursed items the kid returned and said:

-”Why are you looking so much at that vase? It’s something I got from my grandma but it isn’t that special though” He was standing in the doorway in plain clothes.

-”The energy I use is tainted with the concept of being alive. To put it simply, I have a Nature Affinity it does not prevent me from using and casting spells with different schools that require other affinities. This vase is cursed, curses and blessings are very similar while blessing takes energy from surroundings and powers the user. Curse takes energy from the user and channels it in a predetermined way manifesting defined effect, If the effect isn’t specified it will put the energy back in the surroundings.

Some cursed items are useful for training purposes and blessed items are usually powerful but often a shitty limiting shortcut to power. This vase is the latter cursed item, because of that your affinity is probably darkness.

Darkness is often misunderstood as a force of evil. Generally it is used by assassins and warlocks or artificers. Depending on your skill level and amount of energy you can store in your body you could even heal with it, by the use of a death spell. This spell kills the target instantly but thanks to the mystical nature of the affinity you could kill diseases with it or cancer or whatever.

Here is a quick lesson about energy use in spell casting. to cast anything you need 3 things:

Knowledge

The more you know about the desired effect, the easier and more efficient it is to cast it. For example Nature affinity user in middle ages can reattach or regrow a limb but it would take him about 1000 energy units because he doesn’t know about cells or nervous system, The same user who will try the mechanism of a lizard regrowing its tail could do it for 500 units aside from the fact that the limb would be covered in scales it would be cheaper because he is copying a process the occurs in nature. For me who knows about cells and has modern knowledge can do it for 100 energy units. You need to know stuff and need to be able to apply it while imagining the effect. Energy capacity

Simply put you need to have a certain amount of energy to cast a simple spell otherwise the spell instead of energy will take the surrounding energy and will become unstable or will start consuming your life force which will eventually kill you. Energy manipulation

The more energy you can manipulate outside of your body the cheaper the spell gets. A novice can spend 100 energy units to light a candle while an expert would need like 2 energy units. That's because the energy is quite ‘energetic’ it moves in all directions trying to escape your grasp and before it reaches the area where the spell is happening some of it or most of it will escape.

Affinity as I said doesn’t matter if your affinity is darkness you could still use light based spells or earth based spells it’s just the matter of cost effectiveness. With an affinity it’s easier for you to manipulate energy that is tainted by the concept of your affinity which leads to faster progression and cheaper spells.” I monologue for a while while slowly pacing around the room. At the end I placed my hand on his shoulder and forcefully moved pure mana through him.

-”You aren’t hurt, it's just a body reaction to energy awakening, your natural affinity is temporal. Artificial ones are darkness and blood. Natural affinity is the affinity you are born with. The artificial one is the one you acquired by spending a lot of time around certain areas or items.

About the blood affinity, it’s similar to mine but it’s different. It will allow you to manipulate blood like making stuff out of it like swords’n shit. At first it’s a very shitty affinity because depriving yourself of blood is a great way to die quickly from blood loss, eventually without someone like me you can modify your body by yourself.

And making stuff out of the blood of others is harder than energy manipulation because you have to overpower the affinity the dead guy had and if he also was an energy user you also have to defeat all of his passive defences.

Temporal affinity is both good and shit. If you have a deep passion for being alive you need to first reach intermediate level in space and gravity school before even casting one spell from temporal school because time is quite volatile. Making it excedingly easy for you to kill yourself by accident.” As I was explaining I was boosting his body to adapt more quickly to its situation.

When he finally relaxed I extracted all of his waste material that accumulated in his body over the years and made it into a nice smooth black ball and handed it to him he was too exhausted to even notice it. Before he went to bed I asked him the address of this condo and for his card to pay for the pizza.

When the delivery guy arrived I really wanted to hypnotise him and absorb extra calories he might have. But at this stage I shouldn’t kill needlessly. I wonder what happened to my humanity. Heh, probably all those years alone really fucked me up…

Kid didn’t want to wake up for the meal so I ate 3 quarters of it and left the rest in the fridge and went to my hidden room. Most of the furniture was made out of plywood, even speakers were made out of it. Welp time to work on hatchery! I thought while grabbing every piece of furniture and absorbing it’s nutrients by using an advanced mana digestion system that was really just a copy of the termite stomach which allowed it to metabolize cellulose.

While the process drained a lot of mana the small crystals in my watch and bones were helping greatly with mana recovery. I used the word energy in all of my explanations simply because I don’t know anything about the world so it wouldn’t be strange if there were people that could use ki otherwise known as martial energy or psi aka psychic energy. Also mana sometimes is described as magical energy hence the generalization was born ‘Energy user’.

Thank god Christy knew some legends’n’stuff which allowed me to kinda bullshit my way through that dialogue. Of course Christy didn’t know anything about temporal affinity or space or gravity but it would be logical to know these before attempting casting temporal spells. According to my spotty modern knowledge you cannot manipulate time without manipulating space and gravity aka 1 second in the sphere of influence of the black hole can be 100 years outside of it.

While I was analyzing past events and contemplating if I’m still human or not I covered the floor with a thin carpet of flesh which will act as a calorie storage and eventually will work as a library when I make the brain for it.