Mana Affinity

Lucelle tiredly walked up the steps leading to the front door, following the broad back of her husband. Her first day back with her teammates, and they had drained her of nearly all the mana she had. They had taken a mission to clear out a tier 4 dungeon, which had, unknown to them, evolved into a tier 5 dungeon during the time the mana signature was recorded and the mission was taken. They had only ever taken one other tier 5 dungeon before, and that time they just barely made it. As the only healer in the group, Lucelle had to really strain herself to meet the needs of her teammates. Now, all she wanted was to go home and hold her child to sleep.

Entering the open door, Lucelle wearily crept up the stairs with a drooping back. Her silver hair hung at her sides aimlessly, while her bright white eyes had dimmed. She didn't see Rianne working on dinner, which was weird, but she dismissed it as Rianne doing other, more important things. Such as playing with Nadios. Speaking of Nadios…

Lucelle opened the door to her bedroom, where she saw a tense and alert Rianne sitting on her bed while baby Nadios slept soundly in his crib. Seeing Rianne's figure, Lucelle frowned. "Rianne, what's wrong?"

Rianne jerked. She hadn't noticed the door to the bedroom swing open. "Mistress."

This caused Lucelle to frown harder. Rianne never called her mistress, unless in a problematic situation. "What's wrong?" Lucelle repeated. "Did something happen to Nadios? Is he hurt?"

Lucelle could see Nadios perfectly, but sometimes, when one's loved one was the topic of danger, common sense goes out the window. Rianne got up and walked towards Lucelle. Then, she gave the white haired lady a report of what happened. After Rianne finished, Lucelle approached Nadios.

"Soothe, heal." Lucelle muttered, before a mass of green light flew out of her fingers and covered Nadios fully.

This caused Nadios to open his eyes. He shut his eyes tightly, expecting that same searing pain to appear once again. When it didn't, though, he reopened them and gazed up at his mother.

Seeing Nadios open his eyes only to shut them again immediately, Lucelle deduced that he had been in some kind of pain. She knew, all too well, the faces of people in pain. She wrapped Nadios in her arms and picked him up. "It's alright, Naddy. Mommy's here now, ok? I've got you, and I'll never let you go."

Lucelle turned around and, gesturing to Rianne to follow her, left the room and met her husband in the living room. There, she began to explain to him what happened to their child. Nadios, although he was over his mom's shoulder, didn't hear any of what they were talking about. His mind was too preoccupied with the changes to his body.

He felt stronger, faster, his limbs more reactive, and even his mind worked faster. It was like the gradual changes to his body over the last few months, except all at once and quite overwhelming. He came to a hypothesis; in the book titled "Magic", it had mentioned a fast, explosive increase in stats. That was in the core formation chapter. Which means…

Nadios tried out mana sense. The book said that it could be used immediately after the formation of the core, and should be an instinctive action, like moving one's arms, legs, and breathing. After a minute or so, Nadios was able to feel a tiny string of mana wiggling around in his body. Using that string, Nadios was able to understand that his mana core had formed. A fully formed mana core, at only three months old!

Now he had to truly be careful. You never know if someone is hiding in the shadows, waiting for a chance to snitch on you as soon as they get the chance. While his parents and Rianne talked about his safety and mana sense rejection ability, Nadios set to clearing his mana veins; Except, they were in pristine condition! Sure, there were little bits of clogged space here and there, but most of his mana veins were clean of impurities. After reading the chapter on mana veins and getting the idea that mana veins were clogged pounded into his mind, Nadios forgot that babies have clear mana veins and that he was a baby.

It only took Nadios a few minutes to completely clean his mana veins, after which he checked his mana vessels. Like his veins, most were clear save for small bits that Nadios took care of in less than a minute. After the cleansing of his mana veins and vessels, the only thing Nadios could really do was temper his core and vessels. The only thing is, Nadios didn't know how to do this. The book briefly went over this topic, but the few sentences it talked about the actual tempering process were vague.

Fill your core, circulate your mana, compress it, then push it outwards. Now, that was nice and all, but that just begged the question: how? Nadios was just about to give his first attempt when he felt his mom move. Lucelle carried Nadios to his crib, where she set him down and got ready for bed with Vortick. Not long after, the room was completely dark and soft snores from Lucelle and Vortick could be heard.

The next few days passed by in a blur for Nadios. His parents kept him close to themselves in a state of vigilance. They only had to take a couple missions every week, as the ones they did take gave lucrative amounts of money, so they were able to stay home and watch their son. After finishing the book and finding no other information about the process of core tempering, he experimented with all kinds of circulation, compression, and release, but nothing seemed to work. Small, tiny changes happened to his core, but they were so pitifully unimpactful that Nadios' body didn't change at all.

Then, one day, Nadios was laid to sleep next to Rianne. He felt this strange, but didn't give it much thought as the day after he was back to sleeping with his parents. It was only eight days after his core formation did Nadios get anywhere with his core tempering experiments. He had tried circulating his mana in all sorts of ways, from a simple circular motion, to a square shaped motion, to a figure eight one, and many more. He even tried different directions of rotation, like counterclockwise turning, clockwise rotation, and even both. Today, he tried a burger shape; something he quite missed. Although Nadios liked to think it was a burger, in reality it was just a thick circle with two thinner ones above and under it.

After finishing his burger circulation, Nadios felt the mana change somehow. It had become rough, wild, and untamed. He could barely control it, but he could also feel that the quality was way higher than previously. Nadios next forcibly pushed the mana together, compressing it into a ball not even half its original size. Something was quite wrong, however, as Nadios felt the mana quality drop by nearly 75%.

Frowning, Nadios continued and released it in one big action. The mana dispersed and Nadios felt his mana core improve. This improvement was much larger than all the other miniscule changes to his mana core in the past few days. However, Nadios didn't feel that this increase matched the quality and quantity of the mana after circulation. Nadio sighed. He could already tell his immediate future was going to be wrought with blood, sweat, and tears. Wasn't a person's childhood supposed to be filled with joy and happiness? From the way things seemed to be progressing, if Nadios wanted the power to suppress his enemies and protect his family, he needed to work his ass off.

'It seems like fate and karma really do exist.' Nadios thought.

*

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*

Nadios sat on a soft leather couch in the living room, eyes closed and in deep concentration. For five months, he had been trying different ways of compression to maximize the mana quality while retaining quantity. So far, the best he could do was get a nearly 100% increase in quality with a 50% reduction in quantity. If he tried to compress harder, the quantity would, naturally, decrease, while the quality would only get infinitesimally better. If he compressed it less, the quality would decrease tremendously while the bigger quantity wouldn't be able to justify the reduction in quality.

He had, at first, tried single digit fractional changes but no size seemed to be a lot better than another. Then, he had the thought of trying out different ways of compression. So far, he had only changed and experimented with the power with which he used to compress, but didn't change the way he compressed. So, after that thought, Nadios compressed half of his mana first, and then the other half after.

He made it half the size of what it was, which caused the quality to drop a ton. Even more than if he would do it all at once. However, this experiment provided him with evidence that different ways of compression gave different results. If changing the way he compressed could change the quality so drastically in a negative way, what's to say it couldn't change in a positive one?

So, Nadios attempted many, many different compression styles. Slower compression, faster compression, compression of certain parts of his mana before other parts. Whenever he reached a style that gave him higher quality mana, he would take whatever he did and build on that. So if he compressed the top bun first, then the bottom, then the patty, he would do the same thing next time but change something like, say, the intervals of compression. Like this he continued, changing whatever he could think of, until he either reached a dead end or he finally reached whatever he was aiming for. At this point, Nadios felt like he had changed his meditation technique thousands, if not tens of thousands, of times.

It all amounted to today. Nadios started with what he usually would; He filled his mana core, which was sporting a nice red spot not even half a percent of the total size of the mana core, to the brim and manipulated his mana into three parts. A top circle, a middle, slightly bigger circle, and a bottom circle the same size as the top. The top bun he spun clockwise slowly, the bottom bun he spun clockwise slowly for a bit before switching to a fast counterclockwise rotation for the rest of the time. The patty Nadios turned clockwise, then reversed it, then switched it once again, increasing the speed, decreasing the speed, and making many more minute changes.

After 20 minutes, when the mana was at its highest quality, Nadios took control of the top bun and fiercely smushed it together in one big motion, as hard as he could. After that, he waited for roughly 45 seconds before seizing half of the bottom bun and slowly pushing it all together until it was half the size it was. Then he immediately crushed the other half of the bottom bun, like with the top bun, and mixed the two bottom bun parts together. After it mixed completely, Nadios once again compressed the bottom bun, but only slightly this time. Then he moved onto the patty at once.

The patty was the most complicated part, and the one which he spent the longest trying to perfect. It started with a small squeeze, then a separation of the patty into four different parts of different sizes. Nadios compressed the parts differently as well, one part a 17% compression, another part a 52% compression, the third part a 68% compression, and the last part only a 1% compression. Nadios then combined the 17% part with the 52% part, the 68% part with the 1% part, until he was left with two parts, both compressed to 69% of their original size. Now came what Nadios considered to be his smartest idea yet.

He circulated the patty. He moved the right patty part in a clockwise rotation and the left patty part in a counterclockwise rotation. After five minutes of rotation, when Nadios felt the mana quality improve tremendously, he stuck all the parts of his mana together and gave them a light squeeze. He once again circulated his mana, which, after five minutes, started to give off a bright light.

Mana, outside of the body, is transparent and invisible. However, people with special abilities that allow them to see mana describe it as an impossible bright thing that floated around pretty much everywhere, with small dots of color to differentiate between the mana types. For example, red mana was a white blob with a red so light it was nearly pink. So, if someone were to take a look into Nadios' mana core and had the ability to see mana, all they would see was a white expanse even brighter than the surface of a star.

They would most definitely get permanently blinded by it, unless they were, perhaps, at the peak of what mana allowed their species to be at. Nadios, feeling the mana increasing in quality exponentially, continued to circulate until it slowed down. He immediately stopped the clockwise circulation and what he was left with was a bright mass of mana that glowed and was clean of any impurities that it might have gained while traveling from his mana veins to his mana core from the outside world.

Nadios felt ecstatic. For five months, he had been relentlessly experimenting with the compression part of mana meditation, and he had finally succeeded in moving closer to his goal of the perfect meditation technique. The front door opened, causing Nadios to break out of his state of joy and ,after a minute of confusion, shoot up off of the couch and run to the front door, where he greeted his father. Lucelle, who had been sleeping next to Nadios, was woken up by the sound of heavy footsteps approaching her. Her half-closed eyes focused on the figure of her husband getting bigger.

Vortick hugged his wife with one arm while carrying Nadios with his other. As soon as had he walked through the door, Nadios ran into his arms. Vortick had gladly welcomed Nadios into his arms, smiling as he did so. After enough time cuddling his son though, Vortick thought that he might as well give his wife some attention, lest she get mad.

"Hey, beautiful," Vortick said. "How's he doing?"

Lucelle smiled before looking down at her bulging stomach. "He's doing fine. He doesn't kick as much as little Naddy did, but he shows me he's there from time to time."

Vortick crouched and placed his ear next to Lucelle's stomach. "I can hear him. I still can't believe it. We were blessed with two beautiful boys back to back, after all our years of trying."

Nadios too couldn't believe it. A little brother one year younger than him, with a name close to Kye. If this wasn't fate, then fate does not exist in the universe.

Anyways, Nadios thought. He closed his eyes and set his sights on figuring out a way of releasing that suited him.

*

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*

Three months later, Nadios was meditating in his crib when suddenly he heard a commotion occurring just outside the door to his parent's room. Not too long after, that commotion spread through the open door and into the room. Opening his eyes, Nadios saw Rianne standing over a naked Lucelle with a blanket in her arms. Vortick was there as well, looking at his wife with worry evident on his features. Lucelle's face was coated in pain, her mouth open and releasing a constant stream of cries. Vortick left his wife's side and approached Nadios' crib, where he picked him up and carried him down to the living room.

"Pahpah… mommah?" Nadios asked, looking up at his father.

"She's going to be fine, Nadios. Before long, you're going to be having a younger brother to look after." Vortick said, clenching onto Nadios tight but not tight enough for him to feel pain. "From what Rianne saw, your younger brother is going to be a little weaker than people his age will be. So, he might get bullied. Make sure to protect him, alright?"

Nadios nodded cutely.

The minutes passed by in agony for the father and son pair. Just sitting in silence was hard enough, but when Lucelle's screams were added the silence became almost unbearable. After hours of sitting like this, Lucelle's screaming gradually died down. Vortick's heart clenched as he prepared for the worst. Soft footsteps coming down the stairs caused Vortick to get up, still holding Nadios tightly.

Riane appeared round the bend in the staircase, silently gesturing to Nadios and Vortick that they could come upstairs. Vortick started up the stairs, a multitude of questions on the tip of his tongue that he refrained from asking, for fear of the answer. Questions such as 'Did the pregnancy go well?', 'Why do I hear no crying?', among others.

Vortick slowly opened the door to his room. Once the door was out of the way and no longer blocking his vision, what he saw was a beautiful, white haired lady caressing the face of a newborn. Vortick's ashen face bloomed into one of pure joy as he saw his healthy wife holding a healthy newborn. His healthy newborn.

Vortick rushed to the bedside, where he was able to get a better view of Nadios' younger brother, Kyrillos. His fears were dashed as he saw that the reason Kyrillos was not crying was because he was in a state of slumber. Nadios looked over his father's shoulder, examining his new younger brother. The first thing he noticed was Kyrillos' abnormally pale skin. It was paler than even their mom's hair, which caused Nadios to begin to worry.

"Kye… fine?" Nadios asked.

Lucelle was shocked that Nadios was able to connect his brother's name with the child in her arms, before dismissing it and smiling. "Yes, he's fine, Naddy."

Nadios was about to ask another question when suddenly, Kyrillos opened his eyes. They were a vibrant red, like blood. That was when both Nadios and Vortick learned the fact that Kyrillos, their son and brother, was an albino.

*

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*

Three more months passed since the day Kyrillos was born. Nadios was now fourteen months old, and had finally figured out a method of meditation that gave him the most amount of improvement to his mana core and veins. It started with the circulation of mana in a burger formation, then a complicated compression process, before ending with a release so violent, sudden, and precise that it took a whole two months to master even after Nadios found out the perfect method.

Nadios finished his meditation session and got out of his bed. He had started sleeping by himself one day when he just got up and left his crib, walking down the hall to his room and getting in his clean and undisturbed bed. No matter what his mom and dad said, he never went back into their room and slept with them. Except for some days when he missed their warmth so he sneakily entered their room in the middle of the night to demand cuddles.

Nadios entered his parent's room, gave a quick hello to a sleeping Kyrillos via a quick peck on the forehead, and grabbed a book off the bookshelf. He remembered most of everything he read, but he wanted to double check and make sure he didn't make a mistake in what he was about to do, as this is the most important part of a magician's start.

"Let's see… chapter 6, mana affinities." Nadios muttered, flipping to page 58. "Cycle your mana through your veins and vessels until it takes on an element."

Nadios couldn't help but think this was too easy. Just cycle his mana through his veins? That sounded like heaven compared to what he had to do to perfect his meditation technique. Nadios read over the passage on checking for your mana affinity once more, just to make sure. The only other thing it mentioned, other than the cycle your mana part, was that it could take anywhere from 30 seconds to an hour, depending on how high your affinity with that particular element is, with the average being about 15 minutes.

This was also the process needed to make mana that was actually usable in spells, unless you wanted to use the weak elemental-less mana that was a result of compression and circulation. Nadios, figuring that he had enough knowledge on this subject, immediately got to work. He firstly filled his mana core to the brim before starting his meditation technique. Just filling your mana core with mana and cycling it through your veins didn't work. You had to meditate and make that mana yours, else the mana might have some traces of natural elemental mana.

After the 45 minutes it took to finish the circulation and compression phase, Nadios was left with a ball of bright mana, pure of elemental affinity. Unlike his meditation sessions, Nadios didn't release the mana to be absorbed into his core, instead, he took control of it and led it on a journey through his mana veins. Contrary to what Nadios expected, it wasn't that easy at all. If even a sliver of mana touched the sides of his mana veins, the mana vein would absorb it, like the mana core and vessels.

This was surprising news to Nadios and caused him to lose a lot of his total mana. He had never tried to send tamed mana from his core to vessels through his mana veins; His only instances of mana touching his mana veins were when he used them to suck natural mana from the atmosphere and move it to his core and using natural mana to cleanse his veins. Ten minutes after Nadios started cycling his mana, he was left with not even 10% of what he started with.

Calm as a saint, Nadios released his mana and started to fill his core again. After the tens of thousands of attempts he needed to perfect his burger meditation technique, how could just one failure dispirit him? No, Nadios would try again and again and again. His second attempt turned out to be not easier than the first. The mana veins were not straight, linear paths. Instead, they curved, spiraled, and made confusing patterns. This caused the hard process to be even harder. Nadios needed to control a large mass of mana with precision and skill through chaotic channels. He sighed. He just wanted to learn magic. Was that really such a tall task?

*

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*

Another month passed in the blink of an eye for Nadios. After all his hard work, Nadios suspected that he would finally be able to learn his mana affinities. Like his first attempt, Nadios circulated and compressed his mana before taking it out of his mana core through a mana vein. His sweat shed over the past few weeks were not in vain, as he masterfully controlled his mana, letting it come as close as a fraction of a millimeter to his mana veins but not touching them.

Nadios slowly crept his mana through his veins, taking his time and being careful. After what felt like hours of excruciating pressure and stress, but was probably only a minute or two in reality, Nadios felt his mana change slightly. Smiling to himself, Nadios continued cycling his mana. Not too long from now, he will finally be able to ascertain his mana affinity, or affinities if he was lucky.

A few minutes later, Nadios saw his mana change color. At first, it started with the tip of his mana train. The tip started to darken in color, slowly changing into a vibrant violet. The violet was constantly shifting and changing, twisting and turning continuously. Nadios knew this element. He had an affinity for space, and anything of the spatial element. Considering the time it took for his mana to take this spatial element, he had quite a high affinity for it too. Nadios was quite happy with this result. Spatial affinity was considered one of the most versatile mana affinities. It could be used for swift movement, strong defense, or deadly offensive.

While Nadios was checking out his mana, something suddenly happened to his mana blob. Like with earlier, the tip of his now-violet mana darkened once again, before stopping at a pitch black darkness that resembled an endless void. The black quickly spread to the end, before the entirety of Nadios' mana was pitch black. Nadios frowned. His mana now felt destructive, toxic, and dangerous. Just feeling it in his mana veins reminded Nadios of that moment when he was laying in the desert, after being betrayed by the squad leader. That moment, seconds before he saw the lady with red hair who gave him new life, a chilling feeling had gone down his spine. His eardrums had burst from a loud boom in the distance, and his skin was flattened by a shockwave that could flatten even Mount Everest.

From the distance, a loud mushroom cloud rose into the air. It was dozens, no, hundreds of kilometers tall, seemingly wanting to touch the heavens. With sand in his mouth and nose, with blood trickling down from his ears, with what seemed like the end of the world before his eyes, with the descent of a red-haired angel, a strange feeling had washed over Nadios. That feeling was perhaps the strongest feeling Nadios had ever felt, stronger than the bliss he had felt after losing his virginity, stronger than the regret he had built up in prison, stronger than the hope he had when he was given a chance of redemption by the U.S. President. That feeling that day, and the feeling he was getting from his pitch black mana was, without a doubt… death.