01 - Cursed Eyes?

'Can I teleport?' I mentally asked myself as I wavered between the pain my eyes were making me feel and the happiness of knowing that the world I lived in wasn't as boring as I imagined!

Of course, this is the sort of thing that would probably make most people think they could get rich, after all, with a power like teleportation you could get into places no one would ever imagine without leaving any traces to you.

Perhaps perverted people could use this ability to satisfy their fetishes, antisocial people could use this ability to interact as little as possible with other people. For a skill as useful as teleportation, probably everyone would have some creative idea about it and how to best use it in their own design.

I am also one of those people.

When I was younger I always thought the world was very boring, people could only do the simplest things, live boring lives where they had to study for 25 years and then work for another 35 years to be able to retire on a salary so low.

So watching cartoons or reading comics has always sparked my imagination for the amazing things I could do with such powers.

My favorite ability would be to get wings and pretend to be an angel sent by God and fly through churches around the world receiving worship from the faithful, a silly dream I know.

When I thought about teleportation, my wish was to be able to have lunch in a different country every day, to be able to experience everything in the world without spending a penny on an airplane, a simple dream, I know.

But who would have thought that this simple dream would come true?

It was more of an ordinary day, as my house is close to where I study, I was just coming back from my university at night and because of some videos I saw on Youtube where people walk through the streets of Tokyo while observing the surroundings and the people around them, I decided to try it in my hometown.

It was a very interesting experience, I've lost count of how many times I've seen drunk young people messing around on the street, and this was something I had never noticed while walking with my head down reading something on my cell phone.

Following this new routine, last night I played some indie music at a low volume on my headphones and walked around while taking in my surroundings.

As I was passing by the store where I work, I saw a man in a black overcoat walking into an alley.

As I work on this street, I know that that alley is only used for garbage disposal and that there is no exit on the other side, I couldn't understand why the person would go in there so to satisfy my curiosity I kept walking down the street and in front of the alley I watched out of the corner of my eye to see what that man was doing.

Initially I thought the man was doing drugs there, or maybe selling them to someone, but to my surprise, when I passed the front of the alley, I only saw the man for a split second before he disappeared in front of my eyes. !

Startled, I went to lift my hand to rub my eyes and see if I was hallucinating, but soon an agonizing pain shot through both my eyes.

"Aarrrrgghhh…" I grumbled under my breath, controlling myself not to scream in the middle of the street and attract unwanted attention, but the way this pain was building, I was already worried that I might need to scream louder for help.

As I rubbed my eyes with my hands, I felt a large volume of liquid leaking from my eyes, which I assumed were just tears.

The pain wasn't decreasing, but it wasn't increasing either.

In what seemed like hours to me, I finally started to feel the pain in my eyes lessening and some information popping into my mind.

[Skill: Teleportation.

Cost: 10 Mana Units per meter.

Effect: Teleports the user and objects in contact with the user to the desired area.]

'Teleport?!' I thought shocked. I have to admit, when I first thought about it, what came to my mind was that I was probably hallucinating again, but the information was so detailed that I no longer knew if it was true or not.

The pain in my eyes was almost gone, so I already managed to stop scratching them with my hands and took a look at the liquid I thought were tears which made me even more worried.

The liquid was too red to be tears, this was obviously blood!

Leaving the thought of teleportation aside, I started running home and got into the bathroom as quickly as possible. There was so much blood on my face that even my vision was turning slightly red, as if a mild red filter had been placed over my eyes.

The first thing I did was wash my face.

The amount of blood was substantial, no matter how hard I rubbed it, I was still feeling that the blood was blocking my vision.

But when I looked in the mirror, I finally understood why my sight was reddened. My eye was red!

It wasn't red like when you're tired, or when you do drugs, but it was my pupil that was red!

I had heard that vampires typically had red eyes, usually in books and comics, those who had contracted vampirism had a side effect of their pupils taking a scarlet hue.

"Have I become a vampire?" I wondered scared. The disadvantages of being a vampire were too great, I couldn't walk in the sun, I couldn't eat human food anymore and I would have to become a cannibal having to drink other people's blood.

In a modern society full of security cameras, being a vampire would definitely be very difficult.

Perturbed, I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a pack of grapes that I'd saved to eat while playing video games.

As I ran, I felt things were moving slower and images had become sharper, as if my worldview had shifted from a resolution of 720p and 30fps to a gob smacking 4k 144fps!

It was a strange feeling, it wasn't like I was slower, I could feel that my body was moving at normal speed but it was like I had more time to analyze everything that was happening.

'Doesn't that seem like the eyes of that ninja family?' I thought surprised.

With the grapes in hand and with little patience, I simply took the bunch and brought it to my mouth, biting into as many grapes as I could and I realized that my body didn't have any adverse reaction to it, which was a relief!

Even my hunger was somewhat sated by the grapes, which goes to show that my body can still digest human food, meaning I'm not a vampire.

With the vampire hypothesis being ruled out, the analysis I did as I ran to the kitchen comes back to my mind.

In an anime I watched when I was younger there was a family "cursed" because of their eyes that had similar effects, members of that family could see things much more clearly and they described it as if the world was in slow motion.

That was exactly the feeling I was getting with this.

Thinking about the eyes of this Anime family, I remembered that their eyes could copy other people's skills, or rather, they saw everything so slowly that they could memorize opponents' hand movements and learn to perform the action themselves.

Thinking that I managed to copy the skill [Teleportation] of that man in the black overcoat, the skill of that family also matches my eyes very well.

'Maybe I have U family blood in me?' I wondered confused.

Returning to the mirror I shook my head and forgot about this idea, my eyes were not the S eyes of that family, but only the iris of my eye turned red, no Tomoe appeared around my eyes, ruling out the possibility that I had the S eyes. from that family.

'Apparently my ability is unique, maybe some differences may exist…' I thought while analyzing myself.

After a few minutes of looking in the mirror I noticed that my body was getting weaker. Reminding myself of the S eyes that were the only reference I had for my current situation, I remembered that it consumed a lot of the user's energy.

'Maybe I have something similar to the spiritual energy?' I thought, but then I remembered some information about the Teleport skill. 'The skill said that teleportation consumed 10 Mana Units per meter teleported, that is, I probably have mana!'

Knowing that I had mana in my body, I started to analyze myself in the mirror, unfortunately I couldn't see anything, but when I took off my shirt and looked down, I could see that there were thousands of faint blue lines circling my body.

Looking again in the mirror, I couldn't see these lines, looking back at my bare chest, I could see these lines.

'Apparently I can only see it in person…' I thought a little confused.

Looking at my body I saw that by these blue lines it was possible to see that something was going up my chest to my head, but as I couldn't see anything in the mirror I couldn't see it for sure, but I could guess that this could be the mana that was being consumed by my eyes.

'This ability to see mana lines resembles the B eyes abilities of the H family from that same Anime…' I thought pleasantly surprised.

Calmer, I sat on the couch and started controlling my mind to stop supplying mana to my eyes.

I believe that if I were to try to do this blindly without practice it would be practically impossible, but I wasn't doing it without any foundation, in fact I practically had a guide ready.

The teleport skill was not something I just had to press a button and I would be teleported, in fact this skill taught me how to control the mana in my body and with a specific move I could teleport myself.

If I were to try to do this without any guides, I would probably be no different from an ordinary person trying to transform into a Super Saya from another Anime. I would just try mentally but nothing would happen to me physically.

But with the skill guide I already had a direction in which I wanted to go and a feeling of how I could control it more easily.

Initially I didn't feel any change, but little by little I noticed that the feeling of fatigue that had not stopped increasing was now stabilizing.

Opening my eyes again, I realized that I could no longer see as clearly as I had before, and looking down at my chest, I could no longer see the blue lines across my body.

Returning to the bathroom, I saw that the irises in my eyes had reverted to their original black color.

To test again I mentally commanded my mana to go back to my eyes and the feeling of being able to see everything in Ultra HD 4K came back to me, everything became sharper again, my irises turned red once more and I could see the mana lines moving through my body.

'Fortunately I can turn it on and off…' I thought relieved, after all, walking around with red eyes would attract a lot of attention. Maybe I could just look like some young man who likes to wear contact lenses, but it's better not to have to deal with it all the time.

Looking at my body I couldn't feel how much mana I still had, after all I didn't have any basis for comparison for how much I had in total, but from the fatigue I was feeling, I at least knew that I had less than 50% of my total mana remaining.

'I think I have a way to find out what my total mana is!' I thought excitedly.

As my teleport skill consumed a fixed amount of 10 Mana Units per meter teleported, I can calculate the total amount of mana I have from this skill.

If I teleport 2 meters and the total amount of mana I have goes down by 50%, it means I only have 40 Mana Units in total.

Of course, I didn't intend to teleport 2 meters, after all, if I only have 20 mana and I end up using up all my mana, I had no way of knowing whether or not I would end up killing myself, that would have to be discovered in the future.

I wasn't at full mana currently, so there would be no way for me to truly know how much total mana I had, in which case I would have to wait for my mana to fully recharge so I could find out accurately.

As I didn't know how long it would take to recharge my mana, I decided to just teleport as a test and try to guess how many mana points I have.

'Considering that I started feeling tired a few minutes ago and that I only started feeling tired with 50% less mana, I can guess from the mana color change that I can see that maybe I still have 30-40% of mana left.' I started mentally calculating.

'With 30-40% mana remaining, ideally I teleport just 10 centimeters and find out how much that will affect my total mana.'

With that in mind, I started to think about the knowledge I gained from the teleportation skill.

Unlike the Anime I saw where people from the U family used S eyes to copy hand movements, my eyes showed me the mana movement I had to do in my body to activate the teleport ability.

The control of the mana threads in each of these thousands of lines has to be very precise so that I can teleport to the desired location.

If I have a small margin of error in mana control, that means I can have a small margin of error in the teleported location, if I completely miss, maybe I can teleport to a completely different place, or maybe go to a different place, a place so far that my mana possible couldn't tolerate.

In other words, this is a dangerous skill.

My advantage is that by copying the skill, I also copied the feeling of controlling mana through my body. Not only does this help me control the mana to disable my eyes, it also instinctively tells me what I have to do to properly move the mana for the Teleport skill.

If I say my heart is calm, I would definitely be lying. My heart was racing so fast I was feeling like it was going to jump out of my mouth.

There was so much new knowledge in my head that I was very excited, but it also scared me. Knowing that if I made a mistake now, it could result in my death was something I never had to deal with in my 21 years of life.

But at the same time, it was also overloading me with adrenaline.

It is said that the sensation of your body being doped by adrenaline is something spectacular, and many people even become addicted to this sensation.

This is how I was feeling, my body was so excited I never felt like this before!

Not even when I spent the night with some girls was I as excited as I am today. Maybe just the first time I've done this sort of thing made me as nervous and excited as I am now.

With bloodshot eyes, I looked down at my chest and at the lines that stretched all over my body.

Mentally I started to control these lines to follow a certain flow.

Initially it was difficult, but soon I adapted and let my instincts guide me, making full use of the experience the skill gave me.

Suddenly, after about 40 seconds of controlling mana, my vision saw that my surroundings changed a bit.

It didn't completely change, but it was like I leaned forward a little.

Seeing that my vision changed, my heart got even faster.

'I achieved!' I mentally screamed completely excited.

Without thinking twice, I looked back at my chest and saw that my current mana had decreased by 5%!

Teleporting myself by 10 centimeters took 1 Mana Unit, the blue lines were 5% weaker than they were before, meaning I was currently at 20 Mana Units, or rather 19 Mana Units!

If with my current mana I assumed it was only 30 to 40% of my total mana, then that means that maybe I have 50 to 70 Units of mana in total…

'With this total mana I can teleport more than I thought , a wall is on average 10 centimeters thick, if I teleport 20 centimeters every time, I could teleport at least 30 times with my total mana!' I was amazed to hear this.

Unfortunately, for now I didn't know how much total mana I had, nor how long it would take for my mana to fully recover, so I couldn't jump to conclusions about that, but for now it was very good news.

My body was already drenched in sweat. Even though I wasn't doing any physical activity, controlling the mana through my body not only consumed mental energy, but I felt that even my muscles were a little tired.

'It would be nice if using mana could make my body more defined.' I thought with a smile as I looked at my belly.

As much as I wasn't fat, my body wasn't muscular and I had a little beer belly, if controlling the mana through my body could help me stay in shape it would be a lot more practical than going to the gym to work out.

But remembering how mages were always portrayed as having weak physiques, I soon put that idea aside and started considering going to the gym to train. Before I didn't need to have such a fit body as I just needed a good job and my life would go on normally, but now that I know about magic, I believe my life can change a lot.

Having an athletic body can definitely help me a lot more in dangerous situations than if I have a sedentary body.

With a change of mind, I took a shower to wipe off the sweat and lay down to sleep.

My head was too excited to be able to sleep, always thinking about what changes this power would bring to my future and I couldn't help but get more excited.

So, to solve this problem I teleported myself a few times across the bed and consumed even more of my mana.

Fatigue soon hit me and I fell asleep within seconds as I thought. 'This is a great sleeping pill.'

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