Chapter 2: The Faintest Current

The mana slipped out of his core for the fourteenth time, and every muscle in Felix's back screamed in agreement.

Pulling mana had been like scooping water from a river. Here it was like trying to drink dew off a blade of grass. He guided the thread up through his forearm, into his chest, and held it against the hollow space where a core should form. Compression meant density, and density meant retention. He tightened his focus, imagining the thread folding in on itself. Fifteen. He drew in another thread, slower this time. The ambient mana in the apartment was so sparse that each draw required thirty seconds of patient coaxing before anything responded. In the post-Integration world, the air had been saturated.

The compression approach wasn't working. Not with this body. Felix recognized the problem: the method he'd been attempting was something he'd learned six months into the apocalypse from a woman who'd been cycling mana since Integration day. Her technique relied on pathways that already existed, channels worn into the body by weeks of ambient mana exposure. Felix's body had no pathways. He was trying to push water through pipes that hadn't been built yet.

It was something deeper, a strain in whatever faculty he was using to grip the mana. The same ability that had been second nature in his old body was now raw and untrained, like a muscle he was discovering for the first time. By the time the clock in the bedroom read 9:47, he'd pushed his hold time to eight seconds on a good cycle and his head felt like someone had driven a nail into the space behind his left eye. The headache wasn't from tension or a pressure buildup in his skull.

He forced himself to fifteen, then collapsed flat against the hardwood, cheek pressed to the cool surface, breathing hard. Pathetic. In his previous life, after months of running and fighting, he'd been able to do sets of fifty without pause. This body had the endurance of a piece of furniture. Felix cleared the center of the floor and started with push-ups. His arms trembled on the twelfth rep.

The water hit him like a slap across every nerve in his body. He gasped, and his diaphragm locked. For a terrible half-second he was back in the ruins of the Kellerman overpass, rain pouring through the shattered concrete, his left side torn open and the cold settling into the wound like fingers.

The refrigerator held half a carton of eggs, a block of synthetic cheese, two containers of pre-made rice, and a protein shake he'd apparently bought three days ago. Felix ate all of it. The eggs went into a pan with the cheese, six of them, scrambled, cooked fast. He ate standing up, shoveling forkfuls into his mouth between bites of cold rice. His stomach protested at the volume. He ignored it.

A drone would bring it to the port.

Not dramatically. Not in any way that would have impressed anyone who'd survived Integration. But Felix could feel the difference. The threads came slightly easier now, as if the pathways he'd been forcing open that morning had retained some faint memory of the mana's passage. He drew in a strand, guided it to his chest, and held it. Eight seconds. Nine. The mana thinned and slipped away at ten.

Each attempt cost him. The headache from the morning had faded during his exercise and shower, but it returned now with compound interest. A thick, pulsing pressure behind both eyes that worsened with every cycle. His muscles ached in a way that had nothing to do with the push-ups, a deep interior soreness, as if the muscles themselves were rejecting what he was pushing through them.

Elder Mireth, starting village NPC, can trigger dialogue before accepting the first questline. He typed the first entry.

A hidden dungeon that appeared near all the starting regions and despawned after two days. The rewards had been exceptional for early game. Felix remembered the location with reasonable confidence, northeast of the starting village, past a ridgeline, but the exact trigger condition was fuzzy. Something about time of day. Midnight, maybe. Or dawn.

Corporate-funded, professionally managed. The kind of guild that turned money into territory. In his first life, Hale had built it into the dominant force on their shard within two months. Felix couldn't match those resources. What he could do wasn't competing directly. It was being in the places Hale didn't know to look, claiming the opportunities that money couldn't buy and only knowledge could unlock.

Felix's typing slowed as he thought about them.

His hold time crept upward in agonizing increments. Fourteen seconds after a mid-afternoon session. Eighteen after the next. Each second was a battle fought in the space behind his sternum, his focus straining to keep the mana from thinning, his body protesting with headaches and deep muscle soreness that no amount of stretching could touch. By evening his hands trembled even when he wasn't cycling, a fine persistent vibration that made eating with chopsticks an exercise in frustration.

It felt faintly dense, and he held it with everything he had. Ten seconds. Fifteen. His body shook. Sweat beaded along his hairline and ran down his temples. Twenty seconds. The mana thinned at the edges, trying to leak, and he tightened his grip, pulling his focus into a single concentrated point. Twenty-five. His teeth clenched. The wire of pain behind his eyes flared white-hot. One second. Two. Three. The mana sat in his core, warm and firm for four hours, and he let his arm drop.

He dragged himself to the bedroom. The mattress caught him more than he lay down on it, a controlled fall sideways that ended with his face half-buried in the pillow. He reached for the nightstand, set the alarm.