Matt slowly regained consciousness.

The last thing he remembered going through that portal because of his siblings going in before him.

His body felt beat up and sore. As if he just had made a hard landing.

“Auch, not doing that again”

Did he break anything? He made a quick checkup. No broken arms, legs felt good, chest okay, seemed fine for the moment, just some bruises.

His state of mind was still affected from resent event.

Where was he anyway? He looked around:

Pale blue and yellow shimmering ores dimly lit up wet karst cave formations. The ores looked fluid and part of the formations. A blue ore made its way down a stalacite and contiouned on the stalagmite beneath. Drips could be heard from droplets falling from the surfaces of the cave landing on stalagmites, floor, or on one of the ponds of water.

An expansive cave unfolded before him.

There was no sign of Martin or Mathilde.

Matt got up. Where were they?

So, the shard had told him to deliver it to “The queen”, and it had given him the clear knowledge that going through the portal would lead him to her.

Unless that queen preferred to live in caves, this was clearly not the case. It made him wonder, had the crystal just been a prank?

No, it had given him a clear felling of being genuine, and not in a way that felt fake, it came from having an insight into the mind of whoever made it. It was the reason he had trusted it so blindly in the first place.

Maybe that had been a mistake.

Now that he remembered it, the portal had shown many different scenes. Assuming he would end up near his siblings had obviously been naive, for all he knew they could had ended up on completely random and unrelated places.

A felling of foreboding and anxiety fell over him.

He quickly asserted what he had. Besides the was the clothes he was standing in there was his phone and the sword on his back. There was also the backpack with the health and mana potions. He had but the pocket book containing aura techniques and the knowledge shard in it too.

Matt realized he had forgotten to share the potions those with his siblings. He hoped they were okay. His own situation was, however, currently the only one he could adress.

Now he was stuck in a cave, separated from his siblings, and – his stomach growled – no food.

Getting out of the cave, and secure some food, had to be his first concern.

He began moving.

An hour later he still hadn’t gotten any closer to finding a way out.

Earlier he had the impression that the cave was large, but he hadn’t expected it to be of those unheard proportions it presented to be.

An endless amount of closely packed karst cave formations stretched as far as the eye could see, created by the equally endless amount of dripping. It gave off an eerie and surprisingly loud back-ground noise.

Granted, duo to how close the formation where, the line of sight was never very far, but no matter how many drapperies, coloums, and other things he passed by, there was always some more.

Another indicator of the size had showed itself when he tried to yell out his sibling’s names, just in case they had ended up nearby. The only feedback he got was an echoing that lasted well over a minute. Hearing their names being endlessly repeated form somewhere behind the formations creeped him out. He didn’t attempt to do it again.

The problem was however the complete lack of direction it gave. Dou to the nature of the formations it was impossible to, in the long run, hold a straight line. Matt truly realized this when he encountered a place he had been before, despite that he the moment before could had sworn that he had wandered in a straight line.

It was at this point he began reevaluating the situation.

He had to find a way of direction if he wanted to progress. He couldn’t think of any way to determine anything unless… his hand moved to his phone…A compass! Of course!

He activated the compass on the phone. It worked.

His finger then moved towards the folder of downloaded songs. Should he put on some earphones and listen to some songs?

Doing so would reduce the battery time left, which now was about 3.5 hours, but there was the prospect of helping him uphold his mental fortitude. Constantly hearing your own footsteps echo back as you walked wasn’t a pleasant thing at all.

Matt realized that, given the situation, it probably was better to priorities his mental state.

He pressed on a playlist and started moving again.

Like hell he was going to be done in by freaking cave.

Matt decided to drink something. The ponds of water were safe to drink, right? It tasted safe enough.

There was however still no food.

Food or not, rest was needed. With nothing else to do he had wanderet undtil he was so tired that he was sure he wouldn't waste time trying to sleep.

This was a somewhat dry place. Apart from the body of water of course.

He checked the charge of the phone: 16%. He sighted and took out the dual battery. With no electrical charger nearby to charge the electrical bit, he had to charge it with mana.

A few pictograms showed how to use it.

He placed his fingers and began circulation his mana into it. Some runes began converting it to electricity. It took a while for the battery to be fueled and converting, but was good in survival situations. Matt was aware this was one.

It had already been 6 hours, and he had been hungry from the start. Humans had shown to last over 60 days without food so it hadn’t begun to worry him too much. The hunger, combined with the thereby inevitable effekt on his mind, had however begun to show on his mood.

As such he figured he had too endure that until he found some food.

One thing that was important was to keep occupied, or was it? He wasn’t quite sure. Couldn’t be a bad thing. A thought crossed his mind; the handbook!

He began reading it, it was indeed very light read:

Aura techniques refers to the use of mana without it’s consumption. While this is may seem to break some laws of Arcane physics, this is not true. In most cases it will either merely work as a mediator or catalyst, otherwise it will cause a counter effekt. The user should always beware of these costs and thereby affiliated risks. Any use is at the own risk.

The typical “we aren’t responsible if you somehow manage to fuck things up”. Matt already know how aura techniques worked. His [Force] was partvise using ki, and [Hardening] used some sort of distribution principal. Extending the aura had the same spiritual basis as all mana manipulating, which was honestly still a very unexplored area of science.

He kept on reading:

These are simple aura techniques you learn and praktise, with experience you can expand upon them yourself:

[Hardening]

[Heat allocation]

[Force]

[Sharpening]

[Arcane protection]

He noted that he already knew [Hardening] and multiple variants of [Force]. Just to make sure, he read up on the techniques, but they really only taught the very basic principle of the skills. Made sense, he had seen brick-thick books on just one of them.

He didn’t find interest in the [Heat allocation]. [Sharpening] was certainly something he wanted to learn, for obvious reasons.

He didn’t start reading it however. There was something else that had caught his attention. He scrolled through the pages until he landed on the section covering the [Arcane protection] technique.

Hadn’t he used something like that back when he fought that orc? When he annuled the intake of the curse and used [Boost]? Now that he was reminded of it, it really had been a strange occurrence. Puzzled he began reading.

The basic idea was that you had to put as many of the mana types you had, as you could, out to the very edge in a thin dense layer, much like a wall, and that was essentially it.

Doing so efficiently would prevent mana types with the same “frequency” as your own from entering. One mana type could cover several of those.

It gave more questions than it answered.

There was countless differences to what Matt had done earlier.

First of all: He wasn’t even using his mana, “Flipping the switch” certainly gave him an impression of pushing “something” too the edge of his aura, but the only reason he knew that impression wasn’t just a figment of his imagination was because of the very real effect off blocking all incoming mana. . .

. . . And most outcoming mana, which shouldn’t be a problem if it was his own mana since it would just conform to his wishes and make way.

There was also the problem of focus. Just keeping it together was something beginners had to fully focus on. His protektion just stayed there.

What was more: While most people’s mana type covered a large portion of the general used spectrum of mana types, having a mana type of the same frequency you tried to block didn’t necessarily mean you would be successful in blocking that spell. There was so many more factors to consider.

Yet he blocked it all without even knowing how, there hadn’t even been a budge.

Matts head was hurting, well not literally, that would be extreme, but nevertheless it was a mystery he couldn’t solve, especially not when he was as tired as he was now.

Still waiting for the battery to finish charging up he used some of his techniques on his other hand, sometimes moving it around with those white, blue and green flames covering it.

Having no mana regeneration had a surprisingly significant boost to his aura techniques in itself.

Speaking of [Boost], using that technique turned out too actually require “Flipping the switch”, it had something to do with the way it had to be forced out. Not that it was a problem.

Matt noticed that he had charged the battery. He put it back in the phone. The indicator now said 96%. Good enough.

He decied to not think to much about it

His mind was kind of hazy from being tired.

He quickly found a horizontal spot, and made sure it actually was dry. He placed the sword at his side and decided to use his backpack as a make-do pillow. The hard karst-stone had to do for a mattress.

“guess I’m skipping dinner for now” he mumbled for himself before drifting into sleep.

Just before he fell asleep, he thought that he probably had to find a proper name for “flipping the switch”, it was to advanced just to call it [Arcane protektion]