Chapter 6: Mana
Sleep didn’t happen so much as get postponed indefinitely.
I lay there running the same four facts until they wore smooth and stopped meaning anything new each pass through. Not my body. A different century.
A sister two continents and one dead language away from ever hearing me again.
A contract that came with a pain clause for breach of service, and I’d already tested that clause once and had no plans to test it twice.
I considered, briefly and with the kind of seriousness usually reserved for tax forms, taking whatever this house was worth and disappearing. Find a town nobody important visited. Let the plot happen to somebody else.
Then I remembered the lock. Forty-five seconds, every muscle at once, had been considerably longer than that from the inside.
So. Not that.
What I actually had was a deadline I didn’t really understand the shape of, an heiress who told me politely, like it was already decided that she’d be three hundred miles away in two weeks, and a body that kept losing fights with staircases.
I called for Luna out of habit more than expectation.
The air didn’t fold. No feather. Just the panel, blinking on by itself, the way a phone screen lights up with nobody behind it.
[Lady Luna is unavailable. The System is here to assist with any queries she cannot answer.]
"Lady Luna, Twelve years old and somehow she still outranks customer support."
[Query noted. Irrelevant to function.]
"Is there a quest for physical training? Conditioning, stat grinding, anything?"
[No.]
"Why not?"
[Running. Lifting. Conditioning. These are expected actions.] [Expected actions do not generate engagement.]
I’d sat through a whole quarter of meetings about exactly this metric, just dressed up in nicer language, daily activities, retention curves. Nobody had ever said it to me that plainly.
"So you’re a live-service team," I said. "You reward novelty. Not effort."
[Affirmative.]
"And insulting you..."
[Warning: Insulting the System may result in a penalty.]
"...was a bad idea I’m withdrawing entirely," I said, fast enough that I half expected applause for the recovery.
[Tone noted. No penalty issued.]
I lay back and stared at a ceiling I hadn’t earned and didn’t fully trust not to be listening.
***
A knock came a few minutes later.
"Come in."
The door opened, and the hinge didn’t make the sound.
"Your bath is ready, Young Master."
Sebastian, again. Coat pressed sharp enough to leave a line if you ran a hand down it. He didn’t move like staff.
I got up, and he fell in half a step behind.
The hallway alone could’ve hosted a wedding with room left for the guests who didn’t make the cut. Marble underfoot. Ceiling tall enough to need its own weather.
The bath was stone and gold and faint floral steam I couldn’t name. I waited for the door to shut before I looked down.
Couldn’t see my feet. The body ended the view early and didn’t apologize for it.
"Interesting plot," I said, to nobody, and got in anyway.
[Ink +1.]
Apparently making fun of my own arc counted as content now. Good to know.
Sebastian was right where I’d left him when I came out. Breakfast was already laid out pale and delicate. I wasn’t interested in it
Yesterday was still sitting behind my ribs. Food wasn’t winning that argument yet.
"Not hungry," I said.
He didn’t blink. "As you wish, Young Master."
Near the stairwell on the way out, a low voice said: "He hasn’t shouted once all morning." Someone else’s answer.
***
Back in my room, the panel was already up, like it had been waiting a while and wanted credit for the wait.
[Ink +1.]
[Reason: Host treated own circumstances as narrative rather than tragedy. Novel input registered.]
[New Feature Unlocked: Shop.]
So that was the pattern. A joke at my own expense in a bathtub, apparently, cleared a bar ten years of swordwork hadn’t.
I opened the Shop out of the same instinct that used to make me click through other studios’ monetization screens, just to see how broken the friction was.
Tabs stacked deeper than made sense for a system that introduced itself with forty-five seconds of full-body agony.
Monthly Spin sat near the top, lit up like it wanted to go first.
I clicked it before deciding to.
Luna’s voice showed up before she did, off to my left, already singing—actually singing, like this was a children’s program and I was the studio audience.
The wheel ate most of the room. More prizes than I had time to read before the spin blurred the labels into nothing.
It stopped.
"Infinity Mana Breathing," she said, with the enthusiasm of someone who’d done this bit a hundred times and still hadn’t gotten bored of it. "Passive absorption. Congratulations, I suppose."
"How do I use it?"
She gave me a look, the kind that comes right before something hurts, and it isn’t going to be their fault. "You don’t have a mana heart. Or a circle. Nothing to run it through. It’s a key for a door that isn’t there."
"Then I’ll build the door."
Her mouth opened and nothing came out right away. From Luna, that apparently passed for being caught off guard.
***
Building a door that isn’t there turns out to be exactly as straightforward as it sounds, which is not at all.
I sat on the floor, crossed my legs, closed my eyes, and reached for whatever Luna had said wasn’t there.
Whatever I was reaching with came back empty. I went again, same motion, nothing.
My legs went numb after the hour mark. All I had to show for it was a headache sitting right behind my eyes.
"You’re doing it wrong," Luna said, from near the window, without bothering to look over.
"Helpful."
"I didn’t say I’d tell you the right way."
I kept going anyway. Quitting felt like it would cost more than my knees currently were.
The mana itself wasn’t the problem. The problem was whatever Itsuki’s body used to take hold of things with.
It wasn’t built for this. Every time I thought I had a grip, it slipped through, the way water slips through a fist that keeps forgetting fists don’t work on water.
I lost count of how many tries that made before I stopped trying to force it and started doing the thing I actually knew how to do, which was take the process apart instead of pushing harder at it.
The body had aether. Plenty of it, before the title cut it to a fifth the wiki entry had implied as much, back when it was still a wiki entry and not a stat block I was wearing.
What it lacked was attention. In seventeen years, nobody had sat this kid down and told him to stop performing and just notice the room he was sitting in. Every lesson aimed at output. Every tutor measuring results.
The feeling of mana actually sitting in the air had never once made it onto anyone’s curriculum.
So I stopped grabbing and started just noticing. Temperature of it. Texture, faint and a little embarrassed, like static you’d tune out completely if you weren’t already listening for it on purpose.
The light through the window went from grey to the gold that means a day’s decided to end whether you’re finished with it or not.
Then, with my knees long past being any use for anything else, something in my chest answered. Quiet enough that I’d have missed it if I hadn’t already been staring straight at the spot where it happened.
I didn’t grab this time. I let it sit there instead.
[Mana Heart successfully constructed.]
[Grade: Bronze.]
Luna had stopped smiling by the time I opened my eyes, which told me more than the notification did.
"That took you the better part of a day," she said, like she was revising something she’d assumed earlier. "Most who manage it at all take a week. Some never do."
Bronze. Bottom rung. But a duke’s only son, raised by a man people called the Tenth Swordmaster, had gone seventeen years without doing what I’d just spent an afternoon clawing toward on a cold floor.
Laziness didn’t explain that. Whatever did, I wasn’t ready to put a name to it yet.
Name: Itsuki Amagi
Title: The Wasted Heir
Mana Heart: Bronze Grade
Active Abilities: None
Passive Abilities: Infinity Mana Breathing
Title Effect: [Wasted Heir → Aether circulation reduced by eighty percent.]
Comments