Mana Conversion
Mana Conversion.
According to Oren, mana was invisible as air, yet it filled this world to the brim. Gather it, send it flowing through your body again and again, and it would slowly accumulate inside you. A body steeped in mana that way would possess a strength that could stand against even a monster.
"That's why adventurers are always trying to store as much mana as they possibly can. I'm no exception."
"Mana, huh... First I've heard of it."
Listening to Oren, I felt it all over again — this really was another world.
I'd had a vague sense that something didn't add up. In a world crawling with powerful monsters and demonkin, how were adventurers supposed to fight them at all? An ordinary human could train until they dropped, but racial limits were still racial limits. Oren was a Bronze-rank adventurer, and he didn't even look particularly muscular. The way he'd moved when he wiped out those slimes, though, had been nothing short of superhuman. All of it was possible because of this thing called Mana Conversion. No amount of ordinary training would ever let you beat someone who had mana stored in their body.
Learning of Mana Conversion for the first time, Yunoa realized that all the training he had been slaving over until now had been largely meaningless, and a profound emptiness settled over him. There was a reason they said a slow mind makes the body suffer.
Then why didn't you tell me while I was out there working myself to death?
Goddamn Narration.
"Everyone can store mana in their body. But the amount you can accumulate varies from person to person. There are a few ways to raise your body's maximum capacity, but for the most part, it's something you're born with."
"So that means I can do Mana Conversion too?"
"Of course. Close your eyes and imagine your entire body as a great vessel for holding mana."
I closed my eyes as Oren told me to, and pictured my body as a vessel for mana.
I am a vessel... a great vessel, made to hold mana...
"Now, in that state, focus your mind and try to sense the mana drifting around you. It's difficult at first, but you'll slowly get a feel for it."
Mana drifting around me, huh...
Easy for him to say. I'd never even known mana existed, so I had no idea what I was supposed to be feeling. He'd told me to try, though, so I did...
And then, after a little while, I really did feel it — something warm, floating in the air around me. I couldn't tell at first if it was mana, but just as Oren had said, the sensation grew sharper, and I knew, instinctively, that this was it.
"I... I can feel it!"
I shouted before I could stop myself, eyes snapping open at a sensation I'd never experienced in my life. Oren smiled at the sight.
"You feel it, right? Now slowly draw it into your body and let it flow inward. Do that, and mana will start accumulating inside you. I've already done as much as I can, so it doesn't accumulate any further for me."
"How do you know you've filled yourself to the limit, though?"
Oren had said he was already at his cap. That meant he had no more room to grow as an adventurer — the way growth plates close. A sudden fear gripped me. If my body's mana capacity turned out to be pathetically low, that would be as good as a death sentence for an adventurer.
"Ahaha... You'll know naturally when the time comes. Well, I should be heading back — I need to report the request to the guild..."
Oren waved goodbye and headed back to Kubel.
Focus the mind. Draw in the mana drifting around you. Let it flow slowly through the body, and let it accumulate.
Having learned the principle of Mana Conversion from Oren, I spent every day after that trying to store mana in my body. Waiting around, falling asleep, the empty hours of the afternoon — whenever I had a spare moment, I focused my mind and gathered mana. I kept up my sword training, too, to see whether Mana Conversion actually improved my physical abilities.
Would it really work?
It did. The effect was far more dramatic than I had expected. I could swing a sword without ever tiring, and I never got sore. My blistered palms healed completely and never tore open again. By this world's standards I was still an utterly ordinary adventurer, but compared to the body I'd had before, I was superhuman.
Feeling my physical abilities change day after day, I started to grow confident. At this rate, couldn't I make Bronze Rank in no time? If I could take real requests and earn some actual money, I could learn proper swordsmanship too. Thanks to the body Mana Conversion had given me, the guild chores I did every morning just to scrape by were finished in no time. I found myself wondering why I'd only learned about this now, and I started to enjoy how different my body felt with every passing day.
I would find out later that plenty of people had so little mana capacity that Conversion barely meant anything for them. People like that couldn't become adventurers, of course; they lived ordinary lives in the city, doing ordinary work. Looking at it that way, I was on the lucky side. Unlike what I'd feared at the start, the mana was still accumulating without any trouble. I had no idea how large my capacity actually was, but it was clearly not so low that I'd have to give up on being an adventurer.
Don't tell me I'm... a genius?
Yunoa had only just stumbled onto Mana Conversion — common knowledge among any other adventurer — and was already swelling with confidence. He was still a Novice-rank adventurer. He might have looked impressive next to an ordinary person, but among adventurers, Yunoa was nothing more than a late starter who had gotten off the line behind everyone else.
Just as I was getting carried away with how far Mana Conversion might take me, the Narration dumped a bucket of cold water over my head.
Yeah, yeah. I got it. Don't get cocky just because I'd figured out a way to get a little stronger. Still — I'd been staring at a wall with no way through, and I'd finally found a crack in it. Was I not allowed to be a little happy about that? Completely tone-deaf, this thing.
A bluish, squishy, translucent lump of jelly sat in front of me. It was a Blue Slime — the same kind I'd run into while gathering herbs with Meruru.
With a bit of real strength in my body thanks to Mana Conversion, I'd pushed deeper into the forest to hunt them down. The King Blue Slime that had been something like their leader was already gone, taken out by Oren, but Blue Slimes were still easy enough to find in these woods.
This wasn't a guild request, of course. Even if the target was a slime, monster subjugation quests weren't handed out to Novice-rank adventurers. I just wanted to test my strength. I had a sharp sword now, and enough power behind the swing. A slime, at least, I ought to be able to beat.
Squelch. Squelch.
The Blue Slime facing me inched closer with a nauseating, wobbling crawl. The memory of being surrounded by a swarm of them, of nearly going under that day, still made my blood run a little hot.
"Hah—!"
I hoisted the sword high over my head, lunged forward, and put everything I had into a cut straight through the Blue Slime's center. With a bright, clean sound, the blade split the translucent body neatly in two. Just as it had when Oren cut one down, the slime lost its viscosity and collapsed into a puddle of water right where it stood.
"To think I struggled against these things..."
They were so easy it was almost insulting. If it felt like this, I had the sense I could massacre a whole pack of slimes the way Oren had.
"How did he even do that, though..."
I turned over the technique Oren had used to sweep a swarm of them aside in a single stroke. Swinging a sword wasn't going to produce Sword Qi on its own. I'd probably need to learn real swordsmanship first...
Afraid of picking up bad habits, I hadn't been swinging the sword freely until now. But that technique of Oren's had been too cool not to try imitating, even once. What was the worst that could happen from giving it a shot? Sometimes you had to indulge yourself a little, or you'd lose the will to keep going.
"How did he stand, again?"
I dredged up the memory and clumsily copied Oren's ready stance.
"Sort of a half-crouch like this... draw the sword all the way back..."
What had the technique been called? Oren-style something-or-other Hundred-Man Slash, I think.
Yunoa, who had never properly learned swordsmanship, was clumsily trying to imitate someone else's technique. He didn't even understand the principle behind launching Sword Qi; swinging a sword like that was never going to produce any. He was trying to copy another man's move, and he couldn't even remember the name. It was pathetic.
Can it. I'm just messing around.
Yunoa knew how to accumulate mana in his body through Mana Conversion, but he had no idea how to actually release Sword Qi. Mana Conversion did more than store mana — it was the starting point of every technique that used it. Altering mana's nature and giving it form was magic. Channeling mana through a sword and releasing it with the cut was Sword Qi. That Yunoa didn't know even this, and possessed such catastrophic inability to apply what he had learned, was proof of just how dim he was.
The Narration wouldn't let up, pouring venom into my ear.
Channel mana... through the sword?
Still holding the blade drawn back, I closed my eyes the way I did for Mana Conversion and let mana gather in my body. Then I pictured that gathered mana slowly traveling into the hand that held the sword. From the center of my body to my arm. From my arm to the hand on the hilt. From the hand, along the grip, all the way to the blade.
"That... whatever-it's-called! Hundred-Man Slash!"
I shouted a technique name I couldn't even remember, making it up as I went, and swung the sword I'd been holding back.
Fssshk—!
A sharp sound tore from the path of the blade, and a shockwave of Sword Qi went flying. It carved through empty air, shot dozens of paces away, and only vanished after neatly felling a tree.
"Huh..."
What? Why did that actually work?