The journey from another perspective

POV: Will

It is hard. I am alone in my spherical crystal of a body. It is hard on the mind, the psyche is made to react to the world, responding to stimulus. Solitary isolation is hard on the mind because you keep nearly all stimuli away from you, but you still have those of your body.

In my case, I am in solitary isolement while also being in a sensory deprivation state. The only stimulus available to me are those I get when sensing my mana-knot and threads. I do get something out of absorbing mana too, but I can’t absorb any right now because of the douchebags and their shitty enchanted rocks to screw me over.

At least I can explore myself in the meantime, and it is all I can really do to pass time. If I don’t do anything I will just lose myself, so I just keep trying to move the mana-threads around. I am met with little success, but little means I achieved at least something.

While I was searching for the fullest thread I could find, I found 2 particular ones. Those threads are so alike to the others I passed over it without sensing how they were particular. They are completely empty, it is not the amount of mana inside of them that took my attention on them, but are a part of my mana-knot.

It is the only thing telling them apart from the other threads, those two are a continuation of it, as if one was the start, then it got entangled on itself, and the end is the other thread. They have a different feeling to each other, so they should not be the same thread. What makes them interesting is that they are the only ones built like that. All the other threads are attached to my knot, burrowing inside of it to then make a root-like structure inside and anchor themselves.

I tried moving them a bit, and to my surprise I got a response this time. They did not move like I wanted them to, but they twitched. It was nearly nothing, they barely shifted position, but they did move, and I took it as a good sign.

But I dropped my antics when I felt mana entering me, it seems the jerks decided to let me take energy in once more. And it is good news, I lost myself when I increased the density of my knot, I used all the mana I had accumulated, so it is really good news for me.

But again they are doing something weird, I felt an absurd amount of mana entering me suddenly. But it is not natural mana, it feels close, a mana type similar to natural mana. But the feeling I get from it is broader, I don’t know how to describe it.

It is even more evident when I feel the mana filling a new thread. I have no vision in this body, but it does nothing to prevent me from seeing stars. I feel pain of a kind I never felt before, the thread is filling quickly and the more it fills, the pain I feel. I try to expel the mana from me, but the sheer quantity of mana entering me, as well as the pain, prevents me from doing so.

It stops an unknown amount of time later, the thread is filled at one tenth of its capacity. The mana inside of it is slowly spreading itself inside the thread, I feel it throb painfully. It is still hurting pretty bad, but it is easier to endure, when it is not filling up.

I sense something strange then, like a voice with no words trying to talk to me. I can feel what it wants without hearing its words. It is telling me to take mana in me, as much as I can. I am not sure where it is coming from. Is it someone outside trying to tell me something, or am I losing my mind, hearing voices?

I don’t get much time to think about it, I feel mana entering me again, the natural one this time. I did not notice when it stopped entering me, and as a repeat of earlier, I felt the thread filling up, the pain coming with it taking all of my attention. And when it stops, I feel the natural mana stop entering me as well. The silent voice repeats itself, wanting me to absorb as much mana as I can.

I feel myself getting dull, my thoughts feeling sluggish, slow and hard to form. I feel mana entering me again, and not intent on being subjected to this torture of a treatment again, I breath in as hard as I can. I know there is more mana coming in than I could take before, but my mind is taken off that fact with the next wave of pain, each one seems more intense than the previous.

Since I woke up in this body, I felt no fatigue, no need for rest or tiredness. But now, I feel my mind getting more and more tired, my consciousness fading. Soon, all I feel is the pain propagating from the overinflated thread’s end towards its other end located inside my knot.

The speed at which the new mana seeps in me slows down, instead of entering in bursts, it now comes in a smooth flow. The pain eases a little, the mana is using the thread to go to my knot. If before it was akin to the feeling of your intestines bursting from pressure, now it feels like the pressure is at the brink of causing damage. It is still immensely painful, but less so than before.

The time passes, I can’t keep track of it, my mind too numbed by the pain for me to be able to process anything else. Until the pain spikes, if I had to describe the feeling, it would be akin to being inside an exploding rocket fuel tank. It feels like I am exploding, and then I feel something rush in me.

After that I black out, I don’t know for how long, again. But my brain, or rather the thing that makes me able to think, got overloaded with pain. I should already have lost consciousness if I were human, or die even, the heart can support a limited amount of torture after all.

And now, for the first time since I am in this world, I feel myself resting. It is strange, I think that the thing I am now is not supposed to rest at all. I think that because I know I am knocked out, or what corresponds to it for me at least. But even so, I still have a modicum of consciousness to me, able to see myself.

My consciousness comes back to me little by little, and at some point I get the idea of looking at my threads to see what happened to the pain inducing one. And I am surprised to see it has changed, not much, but still significantly. Before, it was like a thread with tree roots in my mana-knot, but now it is a continuity of it, just like the other two I had before.

The thread still hurts a bit, it now feels like a bruised member. You don’t feel anything for a moment, and then a muscle or heartbeat makes it move and you feel it again. Compared to what I just felt, it is nothing at all.

I do feel something happening inside of it though, it feels to me as if it was expanding, but I don’t see any change to it. I focus a bit more, as much as I am able to currently. And then I feel it, the mana inside the thread, before whatever happened, the thread was empty of mana, the spreading of mana inside of it was oh so painful, but now…

I feel mana passing through the thread, heading towards my knot, and all along the thread, the mana is gradually changed. It is nearly nothing, it can pass through nearly all its length and keep its feeling of broadness to it. But when it is nearing the knot, it feels like the mana is evaporating, losing its feel, and then condenses back as my mana.

It is an interesting sensation, and I feel at it, wanting to feel more of it, all my attention is on it. It takes me a long time before I gather enough of my consciousness back for me to think of using all this mana to increase my knot’s density. This time I don’t use everything, I keep what I already have and use about 90% of the mana that is entering me to increase the knot’s density.

For a time, nothing changes, but at some point I feel pain coming not from one thread, but two. It is not as intense as it was before, the mana directly comes as a flow, instead of a sudden burst. It is also a slower flow than what I got for the first thread. But it is still hard to take as there are two sources of pain this time.

As the mana goes deeper inside me, going along the threads, my pain increases gradually. From an overheat sensation to a searing feeling, to the incapacitating feeling of your insides being stretched to the sensation of bursting open.

I once again black out, even before one of the threads begins its change. I feel myself slip in the minimal amount of awareness I can have. It is weird, feeling yourself, your pain, feelings, but not having any want or capacity to react. I feel like I am just here, and that is all, there is nothing else to be done, I am here because I am here, with the only purpose of being here.

It is so hard to think when I am like that, I can’t form thoughts by myself, I can only think about what is happening to me. I feel the change happen to one of my threads, it is horrendously painful, but all I think is ‘Ouch, that hurts. I hope I won’t be stuck like that.’ I know there is something wrong, but again, I can’t really think about it.

Soon after one of the two threads changed to fuse with my knot, the second fused too, sending ‘it hurts’ everywhere in my mind. It is then that I felt the others, there are 3 other threads that are filling up too. Two of them are about ⅔ full, while the third is not even at 10% full.

The threads are filling up slower than the first one, or even the second and third. And it feels way less painful than them when they fill up slowly. I am glad for that, but I had only just recovered a part of my consciousness when the 2 new threads began to change. It sent me back to the no thought zone. By the time it finished and I got back the consciousness I just lost, the sixth and last thread I could feel filling up, was nearing the 10% fullness. And the only pain coming from it is at the level of a sunburn.

I am quite happy at the fact that all the threads did not fill up at the same time and as quickly as the first one, I don’t know if it would have been more painful for me, or if it would have made everything easier as I would have only suffered one assault. I don’t want to know anyway.

When I can focus enough, I inspect each thread that is newly fused with my knot, and feel at the mana inside. There is a flow in each one of them, sending an absurd amount of mana to me. I use most of it to condense my knot without thinking, then I recover and see that I used everything I had, again.

I then proceed to use 90% of the mana coming from each thread to continue condensing my knot, the rest I keep, I don’t know what is happening, I don’t have enough of my mind to think about it efficiently, but I know for sure that I could need do something if I have enough mana, so I keep mana.

A long time passes, I feel some threads stop giving mana, others keep on giving. Then those that stopped resume their mana flow, those that kept giving stops, to resume some hours later I think. By that time I had recovered almost fully, I raged a bit at all the pain I was subjected to, flinging bird names left and right.

But from what I could guess, the people that captured me are giving me mana for whatever reason. I don’t know if they knew what kind of pain I would be feeling, but now that I recovered, the threads are not painful anymore. Only the one still filling up, it is between 38% and 39% full, the pain increases slowly enough to be hard to perceive, so it is not that much of an issue, it is just uncomfortable as it is.

What I would like to know though, is for how long will I have to wait in this state before I can gain back at least some of my freedom. I feel like a prisoner, unfairly captured, chained and tortured. It is plain to say that if those kidnappers purposefully did all of this to me, at the first opportunity, I will do all I can to exact my revenge!