Episode 22 – To take a single step (1/2)

Kiel sat down cross-legged and concentrated on feeling their soul He could no longer feel his own soul, it had blended like a ball of clay into Elaru’s, and now, that giant blob belonged to both of them He couldn’t tell which part was his and which part was hers Their control over it wasn’t separated into regions All of it belonged to them both

He could tell that the mana pool within the soul was filled to the brim with mana, but he couldn’t tell howwith thefull, but to kno nified one would need to test it out

It was just like the story, full, almost full, or even so full you would burst if you ate ht of the food inside your stomach

Kiel exhaled slowly, before starting to draw mana from the soul into his body It flowed down the countless tendrils into his flesh, continuing to travel through it until it exited to form the aura

Mana flow speed, as defined by the association of Magic, was a standardized e could pull into his aura in a single second It could be used to calculate e spells and even detere could cast in a certain period of time

Mana flow speed greatly depended on the amount and quality of the soul tendrils, the availability of mana in his mana pool, and was also influenced by the composition of the cells in the body, as half of the trip was from the body to the aura

Mana was energy In a way, it was similar to electricity What happens when an object is hit by lightning depends on the properties of the object If it hit a block of ice, the composition of the ice would be destroyed, and the ice would melt into water or even directly disperse into stea hit a copper coin, it would pass right through, not i it at all

There were two properties that described how a material behaved towards mana: mana tolerance and mana resistance

Everythrough it If the ah it was above its mana tolerance, the material would start to collapse and eventually be destroyed Too y

To prevent itself fro easily destroyed, h e ofthe ae of o over the mana tolerance It was a simple self-preservation mechanism that achieved balance

If the her mana resistance would mean a narrower pipe It would lih it at the same time Mana tolerance, on the other hand, would be the material of the pipe If it was flawless steel, it could handle a violent water current, but if it ooden, the fast current would soon cause it to start leaking The holes would expand until it is completely destroyed

If Kiel wanted to increase his mana flow speed, he would need to decrease his mana resistance and increase his mana tolerance If his mana resistance decreased, it would h his body and thus it would be faster And if his mana tolerance increased, he would be able to h his body at the same time without fear of injury It would also ic

Both his mana resistance and tolerance would impact his mana flow speed

As ized, his cells were agitated This sudden increase in the density of Kiel’s aura startled Elaru out of the strange mood she was in She stopped her work and observed Kiel instead

He started pulling thethat this speed wasn’t his limit, he would make it flow faster

Some time and a lot of mana later, the mana pool still wasn’t fazed by the loss of e was it?!

Faster Still faster

Soon,into his flesh felt like a tsunae If he had to give it a score, he estimated it would probably be 17/25 Yet, he could already feel sore all over his body

No h his soul tendrils, his mana flow speed wouldn’t increase if the bottleneck was his body It would be like attaching a wide pipe into a narrow pipe, it would either block the floater coh the narrow pipe to become extremely fast If his body couldn’t tolerate the speed of the streaed

If his eneration would be wasted on him Since he would never be able to e would be limited by how much mana he could transfer from the soul for use

Kiel gritted his teeth and continued He kept pulling more andtraveling through his body Yet the tingles of power couldn’t overshadow the stinging pain spreading through his body His clothes were already drenched with cold sweat

He wasn’t surprised at his approaching e There was never h his body so his body wasn’t used to it He was extremely fit, which increased his e, it could only reach the average mana tolerance He speculated that the only reason why his current es to his body caused by Aetherneal bond

Kiel’s hands clenched into fists tightly He had thought that he had finally escaped froht that he had transformed from a caterpillar into a butterfly That he had shed his old skin Yet, at every corner, he kept being ree

He had hoped that he would be able to shock the entire world by having a perfect score on Muni entrance exaht too highly of himself He was full of hopes and drea up at the clouds instead of facing reality

The sourness, the bitterness, the disappointed that clenched his heart, must have spread onto his aura, because Elaru honed in on his worries like an arrow

“Are you ai for the perfect Muni exam score? Do you want to be the first? To shock everyone? To raise froenius in one swell swoop?”

Kiel’s knuckles turned white fro his fists

His silence gave Elaru all the answers she needed, or perhaps her questions were rhetorical from the start

“If the only thing standing in your way to reaching a perfect score is inadequate mana flow speed, all you have to do is raise it”