Sam continued to increase the mana charge in his arm. “Each time my arm burns like hell, but I don’t want to heal my arm, and risk the rune scars disappearing. I am pretty sure that my arm is being strengthened or tempered by the constant burning as well. We’ll just have to keep experimenting Kelly” Sam said as he was analyzing his arm for the tenth time.

“I am nowhere close to filling the mana reservoir in my arm, and my next charge will need to be released outside of town, or I might knock down a wall. Finally, we’ll be jumping to the Second Deck soon Kelly!” Since Jen was busy and couldn’t go outside of the city until tomorrow, he decided to carve the enchantment into his other arm, and practice with that arm until both forearms were evenly powered and tempered.

Just before he started to carve the rune in his arm, a light bulb went off in his head, “I should change the enchantment so that it doesn’t completely drain all the mana out of my arm. Everything has some trace ambient mana in it, but I’m draining every ounce of the mana out of my arm with my enchantment. This is probably causing damage to my muscle tissue, and the cause for most of the pain.” Sam adjusted the enchantment to leave a trace amount of mana in his arm if fully activated.

The enchantment burned Sam just as much when the mana drained out of his arm, but he didn’t feel the aching muscle damage that he did in his original arm. “This sucks!” Sam thought to himself as he healed his original arm completely and prepared to put the modified enchantment on it as well.