Chapter 30: My Eye Wasn’t for Reacting, It Was for Stealing
We came out in front of a giant forest.
A mass of trees so old and so tall they swallowed the daylight, stretching out of sight on either side of the road. Elsa stopped at the edge and turned to me.
"This is the forest of Larpaze." She nodded toward it. "We know for a fact it’s the territory of two kings. An orc king and a goblin king, locked in an endless fight over who rules the place."
I nodded, and asked:
"I have to kill them both? Them and their followers?"
"Yes. But you’re going to have to do a good deal more than that. Don’t think of it as just leveling up — you’ve done that well enough already." She let a pause fall. "Maybe even a little too well."
I didn’t follow.
"Too well, how? Isn’t it a good thing that I’m getting stronger?"
"It is. The problem is that I’ve watched you skip past two things this whole time. What should have been your fundamentals, you let slide in favor of banking levels."
I stayed surprised, not really seeing what she meant. She noticed, and went on of her own accord.
"Your skill, the Eye of Infinity. It lets you see the movement behind an attack, and the way mana is used — whether in the world or in a living being."
"Yes, that’s right. But I already use all that."
"Not fully. You only use it to react, not to learn." She crossed her arms. "If I brought you here, it’s so you can train your control of mana inside your own body. And once you know how to do that, you’ll be able to copy the skills of all these humanoid races your Eye analyzes."
I stood there for a moment, speechless.
"It was so obvious. Why didn’t I do it before?"
I suddenly felt stupid for not having drawn more from it. Me, the webnovel writer, I’d stayed fixed on my system, my windows, my stats — instead of looking beyond them.
"That’s not it," said Elsa. "I steered you toward building your foundations, up to now. The endurance, the basics of swordsmanship, the stat growth. I forged you. Now it’s time for you to fully use your skill to stack up more of them, more and more. And here, you’ll learn to do it while you clear out the forest."
A new goal clear in my head, resolved, I was already turning to go — when she caught me by the collar.
"Here. Take this, at least."
She held out a book.
"What is it?"
"A book I wrote. A few pointers for controlling your mana."
That was Elsa for you. A woman with a hard, blunt, cold surface — and yet the best teacher I could have found in this world. She always looked after us as well as she could, thinking about what would truly serve us in the moment.
"Thank you, Elsa. Really."
"Go on. Don’t waste time, get moving."
And with that, I pushed into the forest.
As I walked, I opened the book and started reading what was written in it, carrying it out as I went.
I had to circulate mana from my heart to wherever I wanted it, to reinforce or amplify a part of my body. The so-called martial path.
I activated my Eye, and I looked at my own body — something I’d never really done in any depth until now.
What I saw stunned me. A network. Hundreds of golden threads running beneath my skin, starting from the heart, tracing the path of the blood, feeding every muscle, every limb. All this mana in me that I’d only ever spent outward, without ever watching it live inside.
I followed the book’s instructions. Focus on the flow. Don’t force it, go with it.
At first, nothing. The mana kept on its course, indifferent, deaf to my will. I tried again, eyes half-closed, reaching for that feeling the book described — not to push, but to invite. Once more. Then again.
And on the third try, something gave.
A thread of mana left the vein of my hand, slowly, reluctantly, and spilled into my palm. Barely a flutter. But I’d felt it move where I wanted it to go.
[ New skill acquired ]
[ Mana Control — Lv. 1 ]
Wow.
It was like discovering a whole world. With the skill, I could move my mana a little more freely through my body, and I felt it grow stronger wherever I poured it in. But I felt it too: the place I drew it from grew weaker by just as much. After all, my mana stat wasn’t changing — so the amount inside me wasn’t either. What I gave to one place, I took from another.
But it could be very useful, if I learned to move it fast enough to adapt to any situation.
I kept walking, my mind half turned inward, playing at sliding my mana from one hand to the other, one leg to the other, as I made my way between the trunks. The trees drew closer together, the light grew scarce, and the air smelled of damp moss and earth.
Then a sharp crack rang out, somewhere to my right.
I froze.
I slipped between the trunks, without a sound, and I saw it.
A goblin. Small, green, gnarled, scaling a sheer rock face with unsettling ease. I opened my Eye and watched.
And I saw it. The mana gathering instinctively in its hands, at every hold. It wasn’t gripping the rock at random: it clutched precisely the spots where the world’s mana seemed thickest, densest, and followed those points like an invisible ladder.
It was as if...
Its skill. It had to have a skill. So that was it, damn it.
I finally understood, fully, what Elsa had been trying to explain to me. What I was truly missing, on top of the system.
Mana, and the way of using it. The movement, the knowledge. All of it gave rise to a skill in the system. And the more you used it, the more you understood it; the more the mana in the body learned to follow the path to perform it on instinct, the more it evolved.
That was what a skill was.
So I began to analyze, to understand exactly what it was doing. When it finished climbing, I approached the rock face in turn. And I did as it had — guiding my mana into my hands, exactly where it had, gripping the points where the rock’s mana was most concentrated, following the same path.
Then the window I’d been waiting for so badly appeared.
[ New skill acquired ]
[ Instinctive Climbing — Lv. 1 ]
That was really it.
I was awestruck, in raptures at the infinity of doors it opened for me. But I pulled myself together fast: for now, the most important thing was not to lose sight of my new teacher.
I followed it for a few more hours, silent, without learning anything else — but taking the chance to circulate my mana without letting up, over and over, and firm up my control of it little by little.
Then the goblin finally ran into a wolf.
The two of them went still, sized each other up. They began to circle one another, slowly, as if taking each other’s measure.
My gaze stayed fixed on the goblin. Not on the fight. On it. On its mana.
The wolf sprang first, jaws open, straight at the small green figure.
And I saw it — the same pattern as at the rock face, that surge of mana abandoning the rest of the body to rush into a single zone. The legs, this time. The goblin bent its knees at the last tenth of a second and dropped into a slide beneath the wolf’s belly, fangs snapping shut on empty air a hair from its skull.
It wasn’t particularly fast, though. So how did it manage to dodge so precisely? I fixed on its legs, and I thought I understood: it didn’t spend its mana everywhere at once. It held it back, waited, and released it exactly where it needed it, exactly at the right moment. The rest of the time, nothing. A perfect economy.
The wolf skidded, wheeled around. The goblin was already on its feet.
Its hand plunged toward the ground. Mana surged into its arm, multiplied its speed tenfold, and its palm slapped the loose earth — the mana pouring into the dust itself at the instant of contact, sending it up in a cloud far denser than a simple handful of dirt thrown by hand. A blinding fog, straight into the wolf’s eyes.
Wait. It ran it through the earth? That gesture wasn’t strength. A handful of dust thrown by hand would never have done that. It had charged the earth with its mana at the moment of touching it, and that was what had turned it into a weapon. I caught myself wondering what it would do if you did the same thing with water.
The animal recoiled, shaking its head, half-blind.
The goblin gave it no respite. The mana flowed back into its legs — and it launched itself. But not straight. A short trajectory, broken, unpredictable.
For half a second, everything in me swore it was going left. I’d seen it, that surge in its left leg, that plant loading up. I’d have staked my life on it. Then, at the last instant, it shifted everything to the right, that leg bit into the ground twice as hard, and it shot off the other way.
And there, a shiver ran through me. It hadn’t just feinted with its body. It had feinted with its mana. It had made me read a direction, the same as the wolf, by deliberately loading the wrong leg. Did it even know you could lie that deep?
My heart beat faster. I was drinking in every move.
A dagger flashed into its left hand. And there, it was different.
The mana didn’t drop into its limbs, this time. It rose. Into its eyes, into its skull, a sudden concentration behind the gaze, as if it were calculating something at high speed.
The wolf lunged at the dagger, jaws forward, focused on the left blade that threatened it.
And in the meantime, the goblin’s right hand went to work. A second dagger, brought up from below, at a precise angle — exactly where the wolf, its head turned toward the first blade, couldn’t see it. Its blind spot.
I stayed a moment without understanding how it had found that angle so fast. Then I thought back to the mana that had risen into its eyes, just before. It wasn’t luck. It had seen the wolf’s blind spot, calculated the opening, and struck right into it. A way of thinking faster than the eye. And I knew, in that instant, that I wanted to understand how it did it.
The blade sank into the wolf’s flank.
But it wasn’t enough.
The wolf took it, held on, and threw itself at the goblin in one last surge, closing its fangs around its throat. A wet crunch. I thought that was the end of the little creature.
Then I saw the mana move one last time.
Not a thread. Not a zone. Everything. All the mana in its body, torn at once from its limbs, its torso, its legs, gathered in a fraction of a second into one single part of it: its jaw.
I understood what I was watching, and it chilled me a little. It was a gamble. All or nothing. It was emptying everything it had into a single point, knowing there would be nothing left behind to protect it.
The goblin sank its teeth into the wolf’s throat.
And tore it out.
The animal collapsed in a heap, its throat open, dead before it even hit the ground.
The fight was over.
But the goblin wasn’t on its feet for it. It lay on the ground, wracked with spasms, suffocating, its own throat half-crushed by the bite it had taken to land its own. It had staked everything on that last blow. It had nothing left.
I stepped out of the shadow of the trees.
I approached, step by step, without a sound, until I stood over it. It rolled its yellow eyes up toward me, bulging, incapable of the slightest movement — just lucid enough, maybe, to understand what was coming.
A strange feeling gripped my chest. This creature had, without knowing it, taught me more in a single fight than many hours of training. The shifting of mana, the feint, the blind spot, the total gamble. All of it, handed to me by an enemy who’d never had any intention of teaching me anything.
I lowered one of my sabers into its throat.
"Thank you for everything, teacher."
