The Dao of Magic

03 - Mana

I feel an itch. An itch that could only be scratched by going somewhere new, somewhere fun and exciting. If there is one thing that I love about cultivation is that it is rather easy to find something interesting and entertaining. Arrived at a new village? Just spread yourself through the environment and make a mental map of all thing unknown. Then go look at the things you don't know. That's it. A new type of plant can be a research project of multiple years. Once your senses get sharp enough to see the workings of individual cells, studying something becomes a lot more hands on and interesting.

I have a wry smile on my face. Being bored and very emotional don't seem to go together very well, but I've been sitting in this cave for about ten hours and trying out my control of the energies around me. Wait, that's not correct, I decided to call these energies mana for now. I think that breaking qi apart gives you mana, and combining mana gives you qi. At least, I really hope so because else my last few hours of effort would have been in vain. I sigh and continue practising.

I flip a switch in my mind and rage boils through my body. Unbridled wrath fills my every cell, clouding my head and body. Faint dark green mana gathers as I hold out my hand. I force it into a ball just above my palm, trying to coalesce something. Matter has states; solid, liquid and gasseous, with plasma just off to the side of that triangle. Currently, I'm attempting to condensate the green gas into a liquid or deposit it directly into a solid. I keep up my anger for five minutes, feeling arteries pop up all over my head as a result of the required effort. The green gas ball is a bit more opaque now, but I don't think there is enough to condensate into anything.

With another deep sigh, I let the emotion go. The ball disperses immediately, not leaving a trace. All this emotional rollercoastering is leaving me mentally drained. I look outside the cave and the trees and grass seem a little less colourful, a little more drab. With tired eyes I give in to despair, a horrible knot forming in my stomach. I image a horrible future, a bleak prospect without a shred of love and warmth. As deep red wine coloured wisps gather above my hand and I give it a twist. Standard coalescing techniques don't work, let's try something different. As I spin the gas above my hand I focus on the centre. I keep a little sphere still above my hand, while I command everything around the one-centimeter sphere to spin and twist.

"Why do I bother, it isn't going to work anyway."

I mutter as I let myself sink a little further into this temporary depression while speeding up the small tornado forming before my eyes.

This method seems to work better than just gathering it in a passive manner. I don't dare think that aloud though, afraid to break my control, and being bleak-minded is easier than maintaining a roiling rage. As soon as a strand of red energy is rotating fast enough I pull it into the centre sphere. Pressure keeps building up but I imagine the ball unbreakable, never cracking and able to withstand immense pressure. Another minute later the strands don't go fast enough to penetrate through the pressure in the sphere, so I give the small cyclone another spin to speed it up. Focussing intensely while feeling like the biggest and most useless sack of shit ever a quarter of an hour passes by.

A small shake wakes me from my despairing half daze. The tornado above my palm is half a meter wide now, spinning faster and faster. I feel a headache coming on from the energies swirling around my body now, but I keep on spinning it even more vigorously. It gives another shake and collapses, the cyclone exploding inwards and outwards at the same time. I blink my eyes from the blast of red and look at my palm. A small bead of dark red is laying on my palm, the size of a pin's head. I feel a slight resonance with the little thing, an aura of despair and heat wafting towards me. A smile splits my face and I start to laugh. I hold my stomach as I feel my belly muscles cramping up. Feeling a lot better without the previous self-imposed state of clinical depression, I decide to love the world. A warm feeling followed by bright red colours surround me as I place the little bead beside me and I hold out my hand again, a small bright red tornado forming just above my palm.