Jen used her mana inspection skill to watch while she circulated her mana through her newly-opened channel.”

Sam was also inspecting her mana system, and said, “Right before you broke open your mana channel, I noticed your mana was just an uncontrolled torrent of power smashing around your core. When you kept pulling mana in without releasing any, your core and your channel filled until your channel burst open like a sewage line being cleaned out. I think this happened because the channel was mostly open, and the clog was a very small one at the end of the channel. You basically used brute force to smash open a small clog that was keeping you from circulating mana through the entire channel.”

“Do you see my other two channels that were already open and working?” replied Jen.

“Yea, what about them?”

“See how the walls of the channels are not smooth, but have some sort of grime building up that is slowing the flow of mana.”

“Yea, I see it.”

“Well, I think the grime or corruption that was blown out of my new mana channel has spread throughout my mana system, impeding the flow of mana elsewhere.”

Sam thought for a second as he watched her mana coursing through her channels, and asked, “Maybe there is a way to clean out the grime, or maybe there is another way can you open channels without smashing them open?”

Jen replied, “The gambling quest gave me a year with a pretty high return on my bet, but I still had over a 70% chance of failure, so I can’t imagine that there is some easy way to open them. Also, I can see another channel coming out of my center, but it looks like it only extends out an inch from my core and is 95% blocked with grime. I can’t see any other channels at all. There is so much grime along the walls of my core, it’s like looking for hidden doorways to find where the channels start.”

“How many channels do you think we even have?” Sam asked.

Jen replied, “Lay down; I want to look at where your mana channel is, and compare it to where mine are located.”

Jen grabbed the enchanted mana rods and placed them around Sam and said, “I’m going to try to talk as relaxing as possible, like a hypnotist, just listen to the sound of my voice. I want you to start meditating, don’t try to break your mana channels open and don’t try to bloat yourself with mana. I want you to simply focus on bringing in pure mana and pushing out the unfiltered dirty mana.”

After about an hour, Jen could see that Sam’s mana was about as pure as it was going to get, and she said, “We need to focus on the mana entering our bodies and start self-filtering all the time. Your mana looks very clean and pure, but your channel has gunk or build-up in it. It’s like someone’s artery that slowly fills up with cholesterol. Every time your unfiltered dirty mana bumps into your channel, a fractional amount of corruption is building up and thickening the channel like cholesterol blockages. If you burst open a channel, and that “dirt” is not removed from your mana system, I believe it just flows throughout your mana system, clogging everything up. It makes me wonder about how much build-up people who have lived here all their lives have.”

Jen made some adjustments to the location of the rods around Sam’s body, then said, “Now just relax all your muscles again and focus purely on the mana flowing through your body. Look at your center, where most of your mana is, it looks like a tangled fishing line of mana. Work on that fishing line. Try to untangle it and turn it into a smooth coil of line that runs from your center and smoothly spools out into your channel, through your channel, and back into the spool. Also, imagine your purified mana flowing through and against the sidewalls of your mana channel picking up the dirt and pushing that dirt out of the pores in your body. Make sure the corruption is pushed completely out of your system, I don’t want any of it clogging up other areas in your mana system.”

After a few hours of focused effort by Sam, Jen said to him, “I think you have removed all the loose dirty corruption in your channel and in your core. All I can see left is the hardened build-up in certain areas on your channel walls.”

“But look at my mana center along the walls where mana channels should be!” replied Sam.

“Wow, now that you’ve cleaned the major grime out, I can see the grimy circular spots indicating the entrance to where more mana channels should be. Their everywhere. There must be hundreds of them!”

“I know, and some of them are much larger than others. It’s a network of channels that make the circulatory system look simple!” replied Sam.

==

System Message

==

Mana filtering skill - level 1 Novice.

Mana system cleaning skill - level 1 Novice.

==

“Nice skill messages! Come out of your meditation and tell me your thoughts.”

Sam opened his eyes, but he didn’t look very rested, and said, “You can see I’m almost out of mana. I would have run out long ago without these enchanted rods. The good thing about almost running out of mana is that I was able to make more improvements to the tangled mana in my core as the total amount of mana decreased. The mana system cleaning skill allowed me to identify all the corrupted and dirty mana sticking to my mana system and scrub at it with my pure mana. My open channel feels raw but mostly clean.”

Jen nodded, and replied, “I see that, but look again at your open mana channel. Some of the areas that look dirty are actually clogged smaller channels that branch off your open channel.”

“My god this is going to take a lot of work to open all these channels. Well, anyways there is still some grime on the walls that is going to take repeated scrubbing, but I think it will eventually come clean. The corrupted dirty mana is ‘sticky’, and as I would get it to break free, I had to focus on getting it out of my system before it had a chance to stick to other areas in my mana system. However, I think it would take years to simply scrub at a clogged mana channel to get it open.”

Jen nodded her head in agreement while waving her hand in front of her nose and said, “Man! You stink like 2-week-old sweaty underwear from all the grime and corruption you pushed out of your body. Go shower and rest. I need to lay down, purify my mana, and start scrubbing the corruption out of my system.”

Sam showered, but he didn’t go to sleep. He said to his empty room, “Kelly, I need to use those rods I was holding back for that other experiment to immediately make more of these mana purification rods, and then place them around our bodies while we sleep. I think after all that Jen has done today, there is no way she is going to be able to focus on mana purification while she is sleeping.”

It was almost morning when Sam finished the purification rods. He had heard Jen head to the showers about an hour earlier. Sam went to Jen’s room and found her passed out asleep, and he placed the rods around her body before heading to his room and placing some around his own body, and then going to sleep himself.

The rods were not really staying in place too well, but Sam planned on enchanting some gold bracelets and chains with a mana purification enchantment, to wrap around their wrists and necks until they could train themselves to naturally purify their mana all the time.

Gold was a great conductor of mana for enchantments. “Kelly, Jen’s going to go through the roof when I tell her how much we are going to need to spend!”

The system informed Sam his mana regen had increased by 4 points, and his mana pool increased by 2 points for partially untangling the pool in his center. He saw a system message Jen forwarded him where she had increased her mana regen another 3 points from cleaning up corruption and also increased her mana pool by 2 points. Sam thought, “Good, she is untangling the mana pool in her center as well.”