Chp.21: Mana core

Haku remained expressionless as he stared at Mirta's charred corpse. After Kotaru and Tikka finished telling him what happened days ago, he was quite worried. "So, simply put, this fairy suddenly became very strong?"

Tikka nodded. "Exactly. The other fairy said something about drinking your blood. I don't know how that's possible, but I think that's what triggered this strange phenomenon"

Haku looked at his right front paw, where his wounds from three days ago were now gone and his scales had completely regrown. "Now I understand why she bit me. She didn't want to hurt me, she wanted to lick my wound to drink my blood. Very clever..." he murmured. "Are you sure she's really gotten stronger? Hasn't she just recovered her energy?"

"We're absolutely sure of that" Kotaru replied. "She withstood three of those incendiary ovoid objects. It's not something a normal level gold could do"

"Not to mention that the pressure emanating was overwhelming" Tikka shivered slightly. "I'm sure she was above the level gold"

Haku snorted. Indeed, from what his sisters had told him, that fairy must have been at least a level diamond. This was a bit strange, because ninjas usually didn't pass the level gold. Of course, there was always the possibility that she was an exception… but that was very unlikely. It was much easier to believe that his blood had somehow made her stronger, even if he had no idea about how. "So our blood can make fairies stronger... how is that possible?"

Kotaru shook her head. "I have no idea. You're the smart one here"

Haku tried to put the pieces together. If his blood had made the fairy stronger, then mana most likely had something to do with it. However, too many questions crowded his mind: where did that mana come from? Why was it always in his blood? Why had he had such an effect on the fairy? And where had the fairy found the energy to use that mana? "Wait..." A thought shot through his mind like an arrow. "The fairies had their invisibility rune carved directly into the heart, so the mana is likely to be found in the blood"

"What do you mean by that?" Darbi asked him.

Haku snorted. "According to the 'mana theory' that we have formulated, the body of living beings is able to absorb mana, but where does that mana go? Well, I think it is inside the blood. This would explain how warriors move it to fortify different parts of their body. Think of it as little bits of something moving around in the circulatory system"

"I understand" Darbi said while he reflected about that. "And I know what you want to said. You think that our blood is full of mana, right?"

"Why not? We aren't able to use it, but that doesn't mean that it isn't already in our bodies" Haku responded. After all, dragons were capable of using very powerful spells from the moment they gained their domain, so their bodies were unlikely to absorb all that mana in one single time. It was more plausible that they had accumulated it over their previous ten years of life.

It wasn't such a far-fetched idea. After all, dragons were the representation of power. Their every muscle, nerve, bone, or scale was engineered to be the best that could exist in the world. So why shouldn't their mana absorption method follow the same logic? Haku didn't know if the mana absorption was due to an organ or if his entire body performed it, but regardless of this, strictly speaking, this system should have been tens, perhaps hundreds of times more efficient than the ones of other creatures living creatures, and therefore absorb mana much more quickly.

That would have explained why his blood had leveled up Mirta just by drinking it; if it was so loaded with mana, then it would have added to the mana already in the fairy's body, allowing her to go from level gold to level diamond. However, this still presented a problem: "Even if this theory is correct, it lacks energy"

According to the 'mana theory', to use mana a living being needed energy. Even if Mirta had gone from level gold to level diamond, that would have been useless in the debilitated condition she was in. She must have found the energy to use the mana somewhere.

"Maybe she converted the mana into energy?" Kotaru proposed. "Is it possible?"

Haku shook his head. "Maybe yes, but that doesn't change anything. According to the 'mana theory', to use mana you have to use energy. Consequently, using mana to create energy would also require energy, at least in the initial stage"

The dragons looked at each other with extreme confusion in their eyes. None of them knew which way to turn. That situation was far too complicated. Even Haku, who up to that moment had managed to understand almost everything that he had encountered, was now completely lost.

But suddenly, Tikka's eyes widened and a smile spread across her muzzle. "Wait! What if mana spontaneously produces energy?"

Everyone looked at her with wide eyes, including Haku: "What are you saying?" he asked.

Tikka cleared her throat: "Listen to me, something came to my mind. Some time ago, when we were still training to use the runes, I did some experiments on my own. And one day, while I was trying some runes containing magic of the earth, I noticed a puddle and for fun I closed it again using a very thick type of earth, through which water couldn't pass". Tikka looked a little embarrassed as she recounted her childish behavior. "I expected the earth to crack from the pressure of the water, but it resisted. So I said to myself 'let's see how long it can resist!' and I used other runes to compress the water more and more. In the end the earth gave way and cracked, but the water that came out wasn't as cool as the water that there was in the puddle, instead it was so hot that some of it transformed into vapor as soon as it has been exposed to the air. Do you understand? Heat! Energy!"

Haku was amazed by that discovery. "So, the more you compress something, the more energy this something produces? How is that possible?"

"I have no idea, but it doesn't matter at the moment. Now, try to imagine the same thing but with mana instead of water" Tikka lifted one of her paws and closed it, as if she was gripping something tightly. "Let's imagine the body of the fairy as a container. Normally, there is a certain amount of mana inside of it. But then, the fairy drinks Haku's blood, which is full of mana. Suddenly there is too much mana in the body and there isn't enough space anymore, and so the mana compresses in an effort to not explode. In doing so it releases energy, energy that the body collects and feeds on"

Haku felt his heart pound at those words. It could work! If what Tikka was saying was correct, and the more something was compressed the more energy it released, then that hypothesis was plausible. However, what still clashed with that theory was that a fairy's body was too large to set off such a chain reaction. Even limiting the mana's area of ​​effect to blood alone, the space was still too much. Unless... "Stop! Maybe we were wrong! Mana isn't in the blood at all. There's only a small part of it in the blood, let's say some sort of residue. Actually... maybe the true seat of mana is the heart!"

His siblings looked at him surprised. "The heart?"

"Yes! Or maybe something inside the heart. A sort of 'mana core', we can say" Haku replied. "If Tikka's theory is correct, then a very small space will be needed to hold the mana. The invisibility rune of the fairies was engraved on their heart. Also, blood flows from the heart. It is possible that this 'mana core' is located inside it and is constantly bathed in blood, which like water carries part of it with itself along the circulatory system, but the actual seat of all the mana is that organ"

"We've never found it when we ate the hearts of animals..." Keita objected. "But it must also be said that we all eat their hearts whole. If this mana core is really so small, we probably just didn't notice it"

But Haku was hardly listening anymore. His brain had now kicked into high gear. "Let's try to imagine how this mana core could work. Its job would be to absorb mana and store it. We know that it is possible to increase someone's strength level through training, like all the other muscles; so this 'mana core' too should improve as someone train it. The more mana it would keep, the more this mana core would grow. Obviously, this growth would be different from individual to individual, given that in some this organ would be more efficient, others would be more adept at mana manipulation..."

"That's why Ethan was talking about talent!" Kialandì exclaimed, remembering what the human had said some time ago. "All people are more or less likely than the others to grow their mana core, just as some animals are weaker or stronger than others even if they are the same species! Maybe that's what he meant by talent!"

"Exactly! So, in simple terms, this 'mana core' grows over time, very slowly and respecting the biological rhythms of the body" Haku said. "But now let's imagine that an immense amount of mana is introduced into the body..."

"Like drinking a dragon's blood" Tikka said, realizing where Haku was headed.

"Right. Suddenly, the mana core could no longer grow by natural processes. It would be filled with extremely compressed mana" Haku continued. "This compressed mana would release energy, energy that would be captured by the body. The body would then use that energy to rapidly expand the 'mana core' until it was large enough to hold all that mana without excessive effort. But that process is however slow (we have seen that it took Mirta almost a day to do it), and in the meantime the mana inside continues to emit energy. This energy then flows into the body..."

"That's why the fever and the convulsions!" Teramon said, as the pieces kept popping up in her mind as Haku spoke.

"Yeah. There would be so much energy that the body would have to dissipate some of it through heat or uncontrolled movement. But eventually, when the mana core would reach its proper size, the body would be filled with energy with which the fairy could use that mana to her liking" Haku concluded. "What do you think?"

His siblings looked at each other in fascination. "It could actually work!" Rhaegal said, and his words were shared by all. If that mana core really existed, then that would have explained everything! They vowed to look into the heart of the next animal they killed to test that hypothesis.

Haku was beaming. If his theory turned out to be right, then many questions he had been asking for some time would have been answered. For example, that would have explained why dragons only gained a new domain every four hundred years: their mana core slowly grew over time, absorbing more and more mana, until it reached the size necessary for a second domain to exist. Since dragons, for some reason, couldn't use spells other than their domain, and also they didn't have to fight seriously very often since they lived in isolated places and rarely found opponents to match them, they probably didn't notice that change until they didn't get a new domain. Furthermore, the 'mana core theory' also explained why many newcomers, especially children, couldn't use mana: since the mana core was a muscle or an organ, it had to be trained. The children were too young and those people who didn't train it (for example, in ogre society, the women and the weak) would have been unable to use it well, and probably the mana core would remain in a very primitive form. In contrast, soldiers, who trained their mana core from a young age, could use mana effectively.

Yes, there were indeed many questions that were being answered. Haku smiled as new information took shape in his mind. He wished Tikka had told him sooner about the phenomenon that the more you compress something, the more it releases energy. If she had, perhaps he would have guessed the existence of the mana core sooner. And maybe even something more... because the more he thought about it, the more he realized that that hypothesis of compressing mana to release energy could also explain how runes work!

The runes had remained a mystery to Haku up to that point, since they seemed to violate the rules of 'mana theory' since there didn't seem to be anything that supplied them with energy; but if the mana core theory was correct, then perhaps runes could have had a very similar process!

In the case of the mana core, if there was an excessive amount of mana inside it, it expanded, and so the mana became stable and didn't release further energy. But the runes couldn't expanded: they were drawings and carvings, they couldn't get any more space. As a result, even when loaded with too much mana, they stayed the same size. The mana would then have began to generate energy due to the compressed state it was in, and at this point, perhaps, a deadly balance could emerge: the mana would release large amounts of energy, most of which would have frozen inside the rune, but some of it was used to continue to absorb more mana from outside, which continued to enter the rune and kept the cycle stable. And so, the rune remained charged with supercompressed energy and mana, ready to expel both of these forces as soon as it was activated, even years after it had been charged with mana.

It was all so logical! Of course, it still remained the question about where the rune gets the initial energy to absorb the first amount of mana and thus initiate that delicate balancing act. Maybe it got it from other sources of energy, like the sun, or from the movement of the water from the spring it was immersed in when Haku charged it with mana. But in any case, the biggest question, which is how he manages to contain the mana and use it even after a long time, seemed to be solved!

Speaking of runes...

Haku had a flash of genius. Very quickly he reached out one of his paws and began to engrave the rune of invisibility he had seen engraved on Mirta's heart. His siblings noticed this. "What are you doing?" they asked.

"I check an hypothesis!" Haku answered. "Mirta said that fairies carve the invisibility rune into their hearts to get as much mana as possible. However, given what has happened, it is clear that just a few drops of our blood contain more mana than a fairy's heart or mana core. So, according to this logic..."

Haku bit his finger lightly and a few drops of blood color from it; he picked them up and smeared them on the rune. The rune remained inanimate for a moment, and then began to glow a little. "I want to disappear!" Haku thought with all his might.

From his point of view, nothing changed. But his siblings jumped back. "Haku... where did you go?" they asked, even though he was directly in front of them.

Haku's heart was doing somersaults. He had just achieved the ultimate form of stealth: invisibility!