It was a while later when Matt finally opened his eyes. His entire body felt sore from the uncomfortable sleeping position of leaning against a sandstone brick wall while sitting on a hard, uneven floor. There was also some phantom pain from his stumps, which was an annoying reminder of what he had gone through.

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  He looked down expecting to see his missing arms, but to his surprise they were almost entirely regrown. “Guess it wasn’t phantom pain then,” he corrected himself as he moved his arms, making sure they were indeed real. His right arm was just missing a hand now, while the left one was halfway to the wrist. He tried casting [Mend], and was elated to see the familiar threads appear and begin regenerating his missing right hand on their own.

  A couple of minutes later, his right arm was as good as new, so he started working on his left one. It was surprising how little time and mana it took to repair a missing limb, compared to fusing stone, but then again you could attach limbs with sutures, but stone and metal required… more destructive methods.

  “A healer who died because he couldn’t heal his own limb would’ve been way too ironic of a headline,” he chuckled, more out of relief at having two functional hands once more than the actual humor or irony of the statement. When it happened, he had feared the worst. He didn’t want to think about it at the time, the what ifs and regrets tend to be haunting. Also, being too tired and too high on adrenaline from his recent victory distracted from it, which he was thankful for. Regardless, he was honestly glad that his journey as a healer, reluctant as he may be, hadn’t come to an end this soon and in this dumb of a way.

  He checked the new notification he had received after healing himself.

  [Mend] (common 5) → [Mend] (common 6)

  He stared at it for a few seconds, then at his healed limbs, then back at the notification again. “No… no? No… definitely no, no… but… nope, I’m not at that level of crazy yet. Can’t do it.” Any damage he had done to himself had been accidental. And while the prospect of more levels was alluring, self-mutilation was far down on his list when it came to getting those levels. He was suffering enough injuries as is.

  With his inner struggle concluded, he moved on to the next item on his agenda. The fight against the scorpion started replaying in his head. It was a tough one, and the fact that one swipe had almost killed him was very concerning. It meant he couldn’t afford to make any mistakes, which was an extremely unrealistic expectation. How was he supposed to fight perfectly if he didn’t know what his opponents were capable of? Also, knowing that he would be useless as a healer simply by losing an arm bothered him way too much. This time it had been on him, but next time it might not, which presented an easily exploitable weakness.

  Was it any different for other classes though? Cut off a sword wielder or a mage’s arms and they would be just as helpless, he wasn’t really any special in that regard.

  I guess it feels wrong because, as a healer, I’m supposed to heal. If I can’t heal my own arm injury, then what good am I? he asked himself. It might simply be an early weakness, something that could be remedied with levels, or at least he hoped. He checked his newly healed hands. They looked exactly the same, even down to the small scar on the back of his hand, near his thumb. A stray cat had nicked him when he was younger. And while the aftermath wasn’t a pleasant memory, it was still one he wanted to hold on to. A memory of what he had left behind.

  How or why it worked that way, he had no clue. It could be as complex as working on a subconscious level or as simple as not healing pre-system injuries. It wasn’t really an issue, but one of those curiosities you wanted to sate. Like wondering what happened for his mana wave to blow up both his arms the way it did.

  Thinking back, the mana wave was extremely powerful, but was nothing like the one the mentalist had used. He wondered if he could do a repeat, but without any body parts exploding.

  “No time like the present,” he muttered, slowly pushing mana into his left hand. It had just regenerated, and he hadn’t grown that attached to it yet.

  Matt closed his eyes and tried focusing on his mana pathways, the feeling of mana coalescing at his fingertips. He kept pushing more and more mana until all five fingers felt fully saturated.

  Next came the more explosive step, releasing the mana. Matt aimed his fingers as far away from himself as possible and tried to simply let the mana out. His fingers, however, had a different idea, fulfilling their long lost dream of becoming fireworks… without the fire.

  “SON OF A–” he cried, clutching his once again ruined hand while casting [Minor Heal] followed by [Mend]. Instant relief filled him, dulling the pain and regenerating his fingers in real time.

  He let the skill do its magic, choosing instead to focus on what went wrong. “It probably started when I became a healer,” he said in a sarcastic voice before continuing, “The mentalist used a staff to channel the mana for his [Knockback], [Mend] uses these weird threads instead, so maybe I need a medium to channel mana through.”

  The threads from [Mend] were hard at work fixing his fingers. He focused in on them, trying to observe how they functioned. The mana they used seemed slightly different from the one in his pathways. Mana in his pathways was a bright light blue, like the color of the sky, but the one passing through the threads was a very light shade of green. He assumed that was what life mana looked like, which led him to the conclusion that his mana was neutral, and the skill simply turned it into life mana before being able to use it.

  The Scepter of Life held a similar function, where it transformed his mana into life mana, which seemed to be incapable of causing harm, according to the description.

  Scepter of Life (Rare)

  A scepter infused with life mana, improving passive health regeneration.

  Enchanted: [Life Attack]

  Enchanted: [Minor Heal] (common 5)

  [Life Attack]: Unattuned mana channeled through the scepter is transformed and charged into a life mana orb capable of dealing damage.

  [Minor Heal]: Recover a target’s health by a minor amount.

  Both that and the fact that it scaled with Intelligence led him to believe it didn’t use life mana, which would also mean that the Scepter of Life would not work as a medium.

  It was a reach. A logical one, but still a reach. He’d call it plan B. If nothing else worked, he could always circle back to it, but for now he would think of another way.

  It also wasn’t lost on him that so far, every one of his tests had resulted in intense levels of pain or harm. He didn’t know if he was too curious for his own good, or just dumb enough to not know when to stop.

  “The price we pay for progress,” he joked as he kept mulling it over in his head. Channeling through a medium didn’t sound like the right answer, even if it did somewhat end up working. It meant that a caster would be utterly useless without their wand, or whatever their weapon of choice was. A healer being useless due to having a limb exorcised made sense, eventually it’ll regenerate, so it was a temporary setback at best, but a caster wasn’t going to grow another wand, which made that solution arbitrary and needlessly restrictive. A wand should make it easier to cast, but what good were skills with that level of restriction attached to them? A sword slash did require a sword, but a magic missile was only about the magic. Granted, he didn’t know if any of these skills existed, but without knowledge all he was left with was logic, and so far his thought process felt logical.

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  “So it has to be something else,” he muttered to himself while opening and closing his fist, appreciating his fully restored fingers.

  The rest of the day was spent coming up with ideas and then dealing with the explosive spectacles resulting from them. He was on a timer, of that he was aware. The faster he finished a floor, the better the grade. And the better the grade, the better the loot… probably. He honestly had no idea, but expecting to get the best rewards with a D+ grade was a little too ambitious, or delusional. He desperately wanted loot if that wasn’t obvious enough. The dopamine rush from opening a chest or getting a first look at an item drop was indescribable. Some may say he’s addicted, but he preferred the term ‘enthusiastic’.

  Now, while he did love loot, he loved not dying even more, and if there was one thing the fight against the scorpion showed him, it was his lack of tools. He had no weapon, no offensive skills, and no prior combat experience, making his odds for survival concerningly low, which was something he didn’t appreciate.

  Trying to unlock [Knockback] was the equivalent of him putting his finger on the scale to try to improve his odds, and after hours of tests and countless lost limbs, he was proud to announce that he had made grand total progress of…

  Zero.

  Yep, he was exactly where he had been when he had woken up a few hours ago, even down to the missing left arm. It wasn’t all for nothing though, his control over the mana in his soul was much better. He wouldn’t call it instinctual, but he was certainly improving. The trick was to not control the mana, as counterintuitive as it may sound. Mana was like water, him trying to control it was akin to someone trying to push the sea with their bare hands, it just wouldn’t work. Instead, he slowly diverted its path, because being too obvious about it was also met with fierce resistance.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it worked extremely well. He could guide mana to any part of his body with little difficulty, as long as he was patient enough. Projecting that mana outwards, however, was a different story.

  He let that thought linger for a bit. Mana originates from the soul. He controlled it through his soul, but when he tried projecting it outwards, it was through his body. Why was that?

  The easy answer was that his soul had no physical shape. But was that true? The body and soul form one single being, him, so the same hand could be a manifestation of both of them, couldn’t it?

  It was a minor detail, one that he had completely ignored. The people who believed in the existence of the human soul considered it to be immaterial. A preconceived notion that had blinded him to this one simple realization.

  But... what if it wasn’t?

  He closed his eyes once again, looking at his soul from a distance. In front of him was the familiar silhouette, shining with a warm blue glow, illuminating the sea of darkness that enveloped it. He focused on his right hand and cast [Mend]. The first thing he noticed was how the mana in his hand turned light green as soon as the skill activated. The next thing was the tiny threads forming at the end of the mana pathways in his fingers before exiting through his fingertips.

  With that image in mind, he tried extending the mana pathways in his left hand’s index finger all the way to the fingertip. It was working, but in a very uncooperative way, like kneading a high-protein dough. It needed to be extended all the way from the source of that pathway, his wrist, or he could risk bottlenecking the mana by having some parts thinner than the rest.

  After a few minutes of what felt like working an annoying piece of dough that kept trying to return to its original shape, the mana pathway finally reached his fingertip. He dove back into his soul for the next step. “Now I just need to make the tiniest of openings an–”

  Mana came gushing out of his fingertip like a broken faucet, dissipating almost instantly, but the force with which it came out made him lose control of his hand, causing it to flail around uncontrollably, like a fire hose.

  “What the fuck is the problem now,” he yelled as he held his wrist in an attempt to control the mana cannon he was now in possession of. He closed his eyes and tried to cut the mana to his index finger, but it was increasingly difficult to focus, and the strain on his core by its inability to replace the mana being wasted was starting to affect his mind. He could even feel a slight headache starting as his mana dropped lower and lower. After a few seconds of trying, and failing, to hone in on the opening he had made in his fingertip, he was finally able to seal it.

  “Why can’t anything be easy? Why do they have to make a challenge out of everything? What happened to ‘will it be and it shall’ talk? Fucking games making everything seem like a walk in the park,” he groaned in complaint before collapsing on the filthy floor, waiting for his mana to recover before diving back in.

  Two hours. That’s how long it took Matt to figure out how to let mana out on demand without his hand becoming an impromptu mana cannon.

  And how did he accomplish such feat, you ask?

  It was a mixture of hard work and fine tuning, accompanied by intense mana control practice and a plethora of logical thinking that led him to realize that he was an idiot for tunnel-visioning on his fingers. A minor detail that was so obvious in hindsight, yet it was one he had missed. That some parts of the body were natural mana gates.

  Yep, just channel mana into your palms, that was the magical solution, he grumbled inwardly. It wasn’t simply pushing mana to his palms, he had to control the influx of said mana while keeping it contained, which was easier said than done when mana acted like an annoying teen who wanted to do the opposite of what he was told. The rest simply fell on his palm and its ability to let mana out on demand.

  Did it piss him off that it took this long for him to try routing mana to his palms? Yes. Was he happy anyway that he finally figured it out, even if it took him two hours? No, he wanted those two hours of his life back, but at this point he’d take what he could get.

  After figuring out that directing mana to his palm was the answer, came the task of extending a mana pathway to the center of said palm, which was, for once, rather straightforward, involving the same kneading process. It did take more than an hour of nonstop work, but only because the specific mana pathway he was working, originated from his mana core, not from another pathway.

  Why did he use that specific one? Well, he was 60% sure he was gonna fuck something up, and he would rather if that something wasn’t connected to something else, that way he could limit the… ‘collateral damage’ so to speak.

  With everything in place, he started filling his hand with mana, then letting out a small amount at a time, rotating it in his palms while keeping it connected to the rest of the mana on the other side of the gate. When the mana being channeled in his palms started feeling too heavy to contain, he pointed his hands forwards, took a deep breath, and pushed it all outwards, forcing even more mana out of the gate, before immediately closing it shut.

  Mana gushed out with such force that he was sent tumbling across the floor and into a wall.

  He groaned as he pulled himself into a seated position. “Good news, it works. Bad news, I’ll need to test it out more to figure out the optimal amount of mana… also I think I broke something in my ass,” he muttered to himself as he rubbed his injured bottom, before casting [Minor Heal] and [Mend].

  He noticed a new notification that wasn’t there before and checked it out while [Mend] did its magic.

  Skill available.

  [Advanced Mana Control (passive)] (rare)

  Control is the basis for any and every skill, and while most need skills to help them control their mana, you have proven to have enough understanding of mana concepts to control your own. The user has immensely better mana control.

  Unlock skill? Yes/No

  Matt raised an eyebrow at the notification. A new skill was definitely the last thing he had expected from his ‘experiment’. He didn’t even know he could learn skills without the system offering them.

  “Why the fuck was I running around with no skills if I could just teach myself,” he complained in indignation, sinking further and further into the floor as he tried to make sense of this information. To be fair, he didn’t think it was that simple, but it wasn’t any less frustrating. He could’ve been working on… something… or the other. Probably. Bottom line was he would’ve been much better off knowing than not, what he would’ve done with that information was his own business.

  Needless to say, he unlocked the new skill.

  Skill unlocked!

  [Advanced Mana Control (passive)] (rare)

  2 of 15 skills allocated

  13 skill slots remaining

  He felt something on his forehead, which he assumed was similar to the brand he had received on his wrist when he had learned [Mend], but he chose not to give it much thought. Time was ticking, and he had already wasted way too much of it.

  The feeling subsided a few seconds later, at which point Matt was already in front of the portal. “Seems like now is as a good time as any to test it out,” he cracked his knuckles, excited for the next fight, especially with all his recent gains.

  Dungeon Tomb of the Guardian of the Dunes (Tier 9) floor 2 complete.

  Time to completion: 3 days, 14 hours, 9 minutes and 55 seconds.

  Grade: D+

  Checkpoint reached. Proceed to floor 3?

  Yes/No

  Okay, Matt would be the first to admit that he may have gotten a little too engrossed in his testing, but it definitely hasn’t been three and a half fucking days, yet that’s not the part that annoyed him, it was the D+... again.

  Matt, for his part, was holding it in pretty well, granted he kept hitting his head against the brick wall, but people called that a form of ‘emotional expression’, and right now he was expressing how dandy he was feeling. Yep, just another dandy rating on this dandy day.

  He sighed as he chose the ‘yes’ option, the familiar darkness enveloping and pulling him to the next floor.