A Broken Promise

I spent the next few hours meditating, getting a sense of the mana within me. I did so just by sitting still, putting my head on my knee like any old normal resting position. Only amateurs needed to cross their legs and put their hands together to meditate.

Top notch Fighters like myself could do it in almost any position, even while moving around.

Nobody could tell I was doing anything special just by watching me. And because I circulated mana within my body, nobody could sense it either.

The principles of mana flow were almost the exact same as Qi flow in my past life. I had a core, my heart, and through it, I circulated my mana through my body.

Doing this, I used a meditative technique called [Restoration] to heal my body. This involved directing mana to injured parts of my body and accelerating the healing process. Using this, I eased over any aches I felt from the electric shock.

I healed much faster than I would have with Qi. I estimated that had I suffered a more severe and lasting injury like, say, a deep cut, I could have stopped the bleeding in seconds and closed the wound in minutes.

On earth, even the best Fighters took hours to heal wounds like that.

This confirmed to me that mana was a superior energy resource.

But it was not good enough to save me.

I tried to use a technique called [Reinforcement], gathering mana in my fist to strengthen the muscles and bones there. It was a very basic technique, but unfortunately, as I expected, it was not enough to do anything useful for me.

As I mentioned before, Qi was a multiplier, not a flat boost, and mana seemed to act the same, at least when it was applied to the physical body. I had no idea how it changed when it was used for spells.

Multiplying my weak, untrained punch by two did nothing close to breaking me out. And until I trained and built my body back up, nothing would change.

However, I did not have that kind of time. I needed years to build my body back up to what it was, even with mana.

But all was not lost.

I could tap into the life force that Eyva had imparted in me. Closing my eyes, I looked into my heart, my core, entering into a state called [Reflection]. This involved entering my 'inner world' which was essentially just visualizing my core as a space I could interact with to aid in control.

My inner world, just like in my past life, was a pool of still water that I could stand upon like solid ground, my feet making ripples across the surface with every step.

I saw a green fire, as large as a big car, roaring in front of me, lighting the surface of the water in its bright, life-filled tint.

This was the life energy Eyva gave me.

I reached out to the flame, dipping my hand into it. She had given me a hundred extra years to live free from the Fell Curse.

I sensed the curse, too. It manifested in tendrils of amorphous darkness in the distance, drawing in closer and closer, stopping when it reached the light of Eyva's flame.

I willed the flame to snake around my mental body. I could control it. I could manipulate it as a resource and empower myself with it.

However, like Eyva said, it was highly unstable. Chaotic. Easily burn out.

If I used this in any way, the effects would only be temporary.

On top of that, it would take time for me to channel Eyva's flame of life within me, and I knew I would need absolute concentration as I was working with energy I never dealt with before. This was risky. I would have to take a meditative pose, and at any given moment, someone might barge in and interrupt me, potentially hurting me from the inside considering the unstable nature of the flame.

I opened my eyes, exiting my [Reflection].

I heard the wolf demi-humans talking about me. I could understand them, though I myself could not speak their language.

"Should we try to talk to him?" said one of them, a young girl.

"No. He is human. Leave him," snarled another, the oldest and biggest male boy them.

"But he is here just like us. Maybe he can help us."

"If he could help us, he would have helped himself first, don't you think?"

…

The demi-humans could not help me, most of them nursed severe bruises from suffering routine rounds of beatings, making them too weak to do anything even if they wanted to, but I listened to their words for hints.

They spoke about missing home, that they lived in the plains below these mountains, that they were scared, that they hoped their mother or father or brother or somebody would save them.

I ignored all of that. That was useless information.

Instead, I separated the wheat from the chaff and found more useful information.

"I wonder when Arban is coming back," said a girl. "Do you know, Batu?"

Batu, the oldest boy, replied from his cage. "No. He's in the black box for biting one of them during feeding time. The last time I was sent there, they locked me up for three days."

"What is the black box like?" asked an inquisitive, much younger boy.

"You don't want to go there. It is dark. You cannot hear anything. See anything. Talk to anyone. You are just alone. At first, it feels like peace, but soon, it breaks you. You start losing your sense of time and then every second feels like an eternity.

It breaks you. Don't ever go there."

The other demi-humans gulped, tucking their tails down in fear.

I smiled. I had what I needed to get free.

==

I waited until late at night.

A man, not Cuthred, but an underling, came into the cargo hold carrying a big pot of stew. In response to the smell of food, all the demi-human children's noses sniffed, their tails growing high in alert.

They rushed to the bars of their cages, eyes wide in pleading.

I could see how malnourished they were. Under their tattered clothes, I saw protruding ribs and skin so thin it looked like it would tear apart.

"Get back, you damned mutts! I'm not about to be bitten by your mangy teeth!" roared the underling, and the children cowered back. He grumbled something to himself before he started to go from cage to cage, using a large spoon to pour out some stew into dirt crusted bowls that had never been cleaned.

The children lapped the stew up greedily.

I, at the very end of the cargo hold, was last to receive my meal.

The man looked at me with more kindness. He put the stew in a bowl much bigger than what the demi-human children got.

"Sorry about this, kid," said the man. "I've got a boy around your age somewhere, his ma won't me see him anymore cause of what I do. But it ain't right treating a human kid like you like the mutts. Tell you what, you be good now, and I tell the boss to let you out the cage. In shackles, of course, but you'll get to move around, get to know us a little.

How's that sound, huh?"

He opened a sliding panel from my cage and passed the bowl through it.

I took the bowl of steaming stew, one that all the demi-human children looked at with envy because of how much more food there was, and threw it in the man's face.

"Argh! Damn it all!" The man yelled as he pawed at his face, the hot liquid scorching him. "You goddamn brat! I'll-I'll fucking kill you!"

He squinted open his eyes and withdrew from his back what looked like a single-barreled rifle made of brass and wood. The barrel was long, almost unwieldly so, with a bright red crystal floating in front of it.

A small circle of bright red letters appeared around the crystal, rotating rapidly around, whirring and building energy.

The demi-human children all whimpered and squealed in reactive fear, recognizing this weapon as a great threat.

I stared at the man, knowing I was safe. They needed to keep me alive for a ransom.

"You-you!" The man roared in frustration as he pointed the rifle away from me, realizing that he could not hurt me. He instead fired into the roof.

A bolt of crimson energy shot out at extreme speeds, punching a small hole through the ceiling.

Almost immediately, Cuthred, as well as several other men, barged in.

"What in the name of Hel is going on here!?" shouted Cuthred.

"The little demonspawn burned me!" The man pointed at me.

Cuthred saw me, and then the empty bowl by my feet, and put two and two together.

"You gods damned fool, you let a child do this to you!? Out of my sight!" Cuthred then rubbed the bridge of his nose, annoyed, before whirling around at me, enraged. "You're a lot more trouble than I thought, boy."

He withdrew his wand again, but I just stared back at him without emotion.

He saw that and chuckled. "It looks like pain won't break you so easily. But maybe this will. Take him to the black box!"

==

After a few beatings, I was shoved into the black box. It was, as the name suggested, a black box about as big as the largest cage in the cargo hold. The top opened up, and I was tossed with my hands and legs bound by rope that ate into my skin.

"Take time to think about what you've done." Cuthred glared at me. "In here, nobody will hear your pleading or screaming. Go ahead and cry yourself hoarse if you want. Nobody will help you. Not your highblooded mother, your father, nobody."

With that, Cuthred slammed the ceiling shut with a metallic clang.

Silence settled over me. I could hear nothing from outside. It was so quiet I thought I could even hear my own heart beating. It was dark enough that I could see nothing. This was solitary confinement.

Torture.

But to me, it was peace.

My master of old tossed me into a cave and sealed the exit shut to force me to meditate. This was much the same.

It was not just my peace. It was my salvation.

Things had gone exactly according to my plan. I had made a massive ruckus and sent myself to the black box where it seemed these slavers shoved their unruliest quarry into. Nobody would check on me here.

And that was good.

It gave me time to meditate.

I entered into [Reflection] again, visualizing my inner world. I stepped up to the green flame.

Eyva's flame.

I reached out and put my arm into it and took in a deep breath, feeling burning hot heat rage across my arm.

"I'm sorry, Eyva," I said. "I know you wanted me to live a long life. A happy life. I know I promised. But I don't know if I can keep that promise."

I focused hard, willing the fire under my control. It was hard, like trying to wrestle with a giant snake, but I was a master of controlling energy flow, and I would not submit so easily.

It took hours and hours, exactly how long, I did not know. But at the end, panting like a dog, I held a sizable ball of green fire in my hand.

Eyva's flame had shrunk noticeably, its warm, life-giving light dimming. The dark tendrils of the Fell Curse drew ever closer in the distance, but there was still enough of Eyva's flame to ward it away.

I had taken twenty years from the one hundred Eyva gave me. I stared at the orb of fire in my hand.

It flickered and flashed and rippled, and I felt that if I lost my concentration for one second, the orb would just explode, dealing me horrible harm.

This fiery energy, the art of synchronicity, was an extremely difficult thing to master. It was not like Qi or mana that flowed like water, cool and calm. It raged and struggled and burned.

The fact that Eyva could do it to such fine-tuned degree spoke volumes about her own experience in energy control.

I hesitated for a moment. If I used this ball of fire, this orb of life now, it would be gone forever. Whatever strength it granted me would only be temporary. It would, like all flames, burn out.

Was I really willing to spend twenty years of the life Eyva gave me? To come a step closer to snuffing out the light that protected me from the Fell Curse? To come a step closer to breaking the promise I made with Eyva?

I closed my eyes.

I had to survive. There was no other way.

In a perfect world, perhaps some kind old man would have found me and taken care of me. Like the kind old man I had killed in my past life.

But this was not that world.

I slammed the orb of flame into my heart, envisioning myself at the peak of my power, as I was in my past, when I was undeniably the Strongest.

Burning, raging heat coursed through my veins, breaking me out of my [Reflection].

=