Chapter 319: Unorthodox Cultivation
“Look! What’s that?” Lyriel grabbed Coop’s shoulder and pointed to the shallows they were leaving behind, eagerness communicated through both her voice and grip.
This was a query she had already repeated hundreds of times as they crossed the continent on a shared hike through the American South. She seemed intent on keeping it up, even as they sailed away from the mainland. Her fingers gently squeezed, as she silently insisted he answer.
Coop checked her latest find, taking a second to rub his eyes with his knuckles as she dragged her perfectly manicured finger across the water, tracking the creatures that she wanted him to see with her opposite hand. It took a moment before he recognized what they were looking at, but he squinted through his watery eyes to avoid missing them. It didn’t help that the water was deceptively turbulent, despite its glassy appearance at the surface, with underwater currents battling against inevitable tides and constant waves, all tinged with agitated mana.
At first, it looked like three polka dot kites with long tails drifting through the water, but Coop recognized the creatures soon enough to answer. “Three spotted eagle rays...” Coop finally responded, raising his eyebrows at the sight, but failing to match his usual genuine enthusiasm. The animals were swimming in formation, cruising along the sandy bottom, unbothered by the churn, leaving a trio of sediment trails across the seafloor before they were lost in the murk.
“And that? Over there?” Lyriel swept her pointed finger to a different spot, shifting her focus to a break in the water where a thousand tiny ripples danced together like pin drops on the smooth surface. It was almost as if an isolated sun shower specifically targeted a barrel-sized area with invisible droplets.
“Hmm.” Coop blinked, fighting with his double mana vision. “School of minnows.” He eventually concluded, recognizing the slight shimmer of tiny scales as they surged in unpredictable directions near the top of the water.
Though it had been nearly a week since he finished the fight with the Omega Construct Region Boss, his damaged vision lingered. He was slowly getting used to the sensations, though it was still frustrating, especially when his eyes involuntarily fought to focus, watering as they strained. It felt less like he was seeing double or that lines which should have been stationary were vibrating, and more like he had a bunch of extra floaters in his eyes that just happened to line up with the edges of solid objects. At least they lined up most of the time. They were something that his mind would eventually be able to sift through with enough practice, according to Lyriel.
He was thankful for that, because he had already had enough of feeling like he was on the verge of a headache, tripping over things he should have noticed, and missing the small details in his surroundings without applying Presence of Mind. At the same time, he was occasionally distracted by random flashes and random noise in the air, like he was spotting ghosts out of the corner of his eyes, causing him to flinch out of the way when nothing was really there other than tiny eddies of air turbulence. Overall it was an annoying, but relatively minor nuisance, like he needed a new prescription on a pair of scratched up glasses.
If he hadn’t been traveling with someone as powerful and protective as Lyriel, he probably would have struggled in at least a few more situations. Of course the benefits of having a goddess as a companion were at least partially offset by his inability to mistjump and cut the travel times way down. Being in unfamiliar territory while partially hindered made the issues that much more irritating. He would survive, but it only added to an underlying anxiety that was slowly building in his chest.
To him, it seemed pretty clear that this was not a new ability granted by the system, but rather something he had to develop independently, whether through brain damage or mana exposure. He had to give the system some credit, considering it was able to grant all sorts of other skills without the painful learning curve of channeling, manipulating, and adapting to the use of mana. For some reason, this mana sight was more of a cultivated talent, one that only came with a particular familiarity with specific affinities under precise circumstances. In his case, extended use of Vaporform to walk among the mists while exhausting his spectral mana on phantasms seemed to have been the trigger. He was mostly joking with himself about contributions of brain damage, but who really knew?
The whole situation had him reconsidering the explorations of mana that the Ghost Reef residents had been undertaking. With the knowledge that the Eradication Protocol would attempt to sever them from the system, more and more of his companions had been testing the limits of their skills, learning to draw on the pathways taught by the system without its guidance. Testing affinities and experimenting with internal and external mana concentrations were all a part of the process. Even Coop had previously come to the conclusion that the system was simply providing training wheels with its skills. He frequently applied what he considered to be muscle memory to access abilities without consciously activating them, essentially bypassing the system.
The whole experience with his eyes had him thinking about mana in general and made him increasingly curious about Lyriel’s relationship with mana in particular. She seemed devoted to the system, holding it up as the ultimate authority, but had been forced to survive completely outside of it. She heavily utilized mana while detesting its very existence, blaming it for excising her from the community and wiping out her species. At the same time, she described mana as an unthinking, emotionless force of nature. Coop knew better than to challenge such personal and tragic convictions, but it all seemed rather contradictory.