Spell Weaver [Book 2 Complete]

After a few minutes of messing around with the mana in his Core, Alex decided to stop and see if he could get some outside advice. He glanced at his mana pool in the floating blue window before dismissing it.

47/60

Leaning forward, he rolled his desk chair closer to the edge of his desk, where his cracked phone lay.

If he stuck with the analogy of mana being water in a pool, then what he’d been doing so far felt like the equivalent of a toddler splashing around in the kiddie pool. The mana hadn’t been pushed or moved to any effect, just thrown from the Core to dissipate in his body.

Navigating to the Nexus Hub website, Alex checked for any notifications or recent forum posts.

He was mortified to see an article posted 20 minutes ago, one with a picture of his silhouette as the thumbnail.

His stomach jumped up into his chest. Worried that he’d be easily identified, he pulled up the article and zoomed in as far as his phone would allow.

He let out a sigh of relief when he realized the picture was too hard to make out. The light of the portal behind him made him look more like a dark outline than anything else. On top of that, when he moved away from the Rift, he’d covered his head with his jacket.

Alex scanned the article just to see what they were saying.

‘John Riley’s group of five enters yet another Rift!’ ’…protectors of the city…’

Blah, blah, blah…

‘…rescued a solo Awakened from grave danger. Judging by the state of the poor soul that was…’

He forced his face to go deadpan as he skimmed the article.

It didn’t really matter since they didn’t actually know who he was. But, for some reason, it really rubbed him the wrong way to think that the article was written as if he were some damsel in distress.

I fought that monster on my own. Thank you very much.

Backing out of the article, he began to scan through the other articles. There wasn’t much of interest there.

An idea came to him, and he locked his phone, scooting the chair up to his desk while double-tapping his keyboard to wake up his computer.

He quickly turned on his VPN and created a throwaway email address. Then he made a new account on Nexus Hub with a silly, throwaway username.

His main goal in all of this internet cloak and dagger was to make a post asking for more specific information. While this wasn’t abnormal, and he had even tried doing it from his main account, he hadn’t known anything about anything last time. Most of the posts that were just asking for information never went anywhere. The only people commenting on those were others with more questions.

Alex had a feeling that if he added some information about his experience in the Rift or made it clear that he’d been awakened, then he might actually get some responses this time.

He opened the page to post a new thread and paused.

What should I ask? There are so many questions. What should I share? Enough, but nothing too revealing?

He remembered the advice John had given him, about not sharing information on his skills and traits.