25 – Calm Down and Breathe

Jonny wasn’t entirely sure what to do when he got to the ritual circle. He knew he wanted to check it out, and try his breathing technique there, but now that he was there, it felt a little weird. Was he really just going to sit there and breathe? Would it even do anything? And more importantly, what would Igrette think?

He glanced up at the old nun. She had been watching him like a hawk ever since he killed the badger. In retrospect, that was probably not the smartest way to display his skill. He had been so caught up in finally getting to fight that he didn’t even consider that a five year old piecing up a magic beast like that would look suspicious.

Should I just tell her about my past? he wondered. Maybe she’ll let me fight more if she knows.

He narrowed his eyes, rubbing his chin as he thought. He never really had any kind of big reason for keeping his past a secret. He was mostly worried they’d take him off to a lab to cut him open and figure him out if he did it before he could defend himself. But Igrette seemed pretty trustworthy. Right?

“Yes?” she asked.

Oh, shit, I was staring, he realized. Eh, I’ll think about it more later.

“Nothing,” he said, turning away and looking back at the stone table.

Well, if she already thinks I’m weird…

He walked up to the table and jumped onto it, sitting down in the center. There were dead badger corpses all around, but thankfully, the center of the circle was free of blood. It was free of snow too, which was kind of weird, but it was probably just some kind of weird magic stuff.

He sat down, and gave Igrette one last look before closing his eyes and beginning to breathe. Just like always, once he started, the breathing technique felt right. His mana compressed, and decompressed as usual, sometimes getting so dense it felt like he could form a core layer, and other times it was expanded so far he felt he was on the verge of bursting his mana channels.

But that was it. Being here in the circle didn’t seem to do anything else for him. He still couldn’t absorb the mana, which meant that using the breathing technique here wasn’t any different from using it back at the orphanage. And yet, for some reason, he still felt like doing it here was better.

Why?

Since what was happening inside his body was not any different from usual, he instead focused his senses outward. The mana here was at least three times denser than it was at the orphanage. Why that was, he didn’t know, but it was important for some reason.

One thing he noticed about the higher mana density was how much easier it was to sense. He could feel it in the air, swirling and twirling with the wind, and bouncing around whenever it hit anything solid. He could feel it in the stones, solid and steady, rejecting the mana of the air when it got near. He felt it in the snow, rigid, but delicate, and emanating a strange sense of cold.

None of it affected him. When the mana in the wind hit his body, it just flowed right around. The mana in the stone below him sometimes left to join the wind, but never went into him, no matter how he willed it to.

He frowned. There was something that had been bothering him for a little while now. It was clear that his Null Syndrome was keeping him from absorbing and emitting mana, but that didn’t seem to affect people. If he was truly blocked, then that would be impossible. He assumed it was just because they were talking to him, but now that he was really focusing, that shouldn’t have mattered. The wind was touching him too, and so was the stone, but they couldn’t give him mana.

It must have been because they were alive, or maybe because they were human, which somehow let them bypass it. He idly wondered if he could use that to get his own mana. Right now he was dependent on donations, but what if he could just take it? Was that possible?

He set that thought aside for later. It was definitely something he needed to look into, but it didn’t help him as he was, and he felt he was straying further from what was useful at the moment. He was at the ritual circle, and his breathing technique felt good here, despite having no apparent effect on its efficacy. So why was that?

He focused his senses all around him, trying to find something that would indicate any level of personal usefulness, but saw nothing. The mana was denser around the stones, but that was about it. It didn’t affect him any more than the mana at the orphanage.

Only when he was about to give up, did he finally see it. It was his lungs. When he breathed in here, there was more mana in his lungs. The mana couldn’t pass through the inside of his lungs any more easily than it could pass through his skin, but it was the only thing that changed between the orphanage and here, so he figured he had to be on to something.

He tried a dozen different things to affect the mana in his lungs, but nothing worked. It felt the same as the mana in the air around. Completely separate. It ignored him, entering and exiting his lungs without ever acknowledging his presence. When Igrette called his name and broke his concentration, he was almost glad, because he was making no progress, and was getting frustrated.

“Jonny?”

He opened his eyes and sighed.

“Okay, I’m done,” he said, getting to his feet.

“What were you doing?”

“Breathing.”

“Breathing? Why?”

“I dunno. It felt good.”

“It did?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did it feel good?”

Igrette leaned in, clearly interested, and while he knew it didn’t work quite as well on Igrette as it did on Helen and the other nuns, all he could do was shrug. He didn’t know why it felt good. It just did.

“Is it related to your mana?”

“Yeah.”

“What happens to your mana when you breathe like that?”

“It, uh, condenses. And expands.”

“But your mana is already pretty condensed, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“And you can condense it more when you breathe like that?”

“Yeah.”

“And what about when it expands? How far does it expand? Doesn’t it hurt?”

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Why is she so interested? Wondered Jonny.

“A little,” he replied. “But not that much.”

“Does it feel like exercise?” she asked. “Like you’re straining your mana channels the way you strain your muscles?”

“Actually…” he started. Then his eyes widened in realization. “Oh!”

“Yes, I think that’s why your mana capacity has been increasing faster lately. It’s a known training technique. It works differently for ordinary people, because we have to constantly absorb to keep the mana cycling, but just increasing throughput can strengthen your mana channels and allow you to hold and use more at once. Or in other words, the more you use, the more you can use. That’s interesting. Very interesting. Have you been breathing like this a lot?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, you would have to be to be growing as fast as you are…” Igrette rubbed her chin, then frowned. “Is there something special about doing it here? Why did you want to do it in the circle?”

“Uhhhh…”

Jonny considered how much he wanted to share. He had been trying to keep his efforts secret from Helen and Igrette, since they didn’t seem to approve of him trying to form a core, but he had already shown Igrette this much. A little more couldn’t hurt.

“I dunno,” he said. “I think it’s ‘cause there’s more mana in my lungs.”

“In your lungs? Can you absorb that mana?”

“No.”

“Then what makes it special?”

Jonny shrugged. “Just feels better.”

Igrette grilled him for a few minutes, trying to get details out of him, but since Jonny didn’t know those details himself, he ended up doing a lot of shrugging. And while he was a little worried she would dig deeper into why he was doing it and find out he was trying to form a core layer, she thankfully never connected the dots.

She also asked him to do a bit more breathing while trying some things around him. In one miniature experiment, she conjured up some mana and held it in front of his face for him to inhale, which didn’t do anything, and in another, she had him try to focus mana specifically in his lungs as he breathed. The latter made him feel stupid for not trying it himself, but sadly, it didn’t do anything. Not immediately, at least, though Jonny felt there might have been something there.

In the end, unfortunately, they found no success. No matter what Jonny did, he could not absorb mana, and they learned nothing new about his condition. Well, nothing new to him. Igrette seemed fascinated by the fact that he found the breathing technique to be satisfying. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but figured it was probably some nerd stuff. As far as he had seen, she was a nerd for internal mana techniques, and his breathing was technically an internal mana technique.

They returned to the orphanage as the other children were waking up. Most didn’t even notice that Jonny had left, but Tommy did, and he became so annoying later that day that Jonny had no choice but to tell him where Igrette had taken him. Tommy immediately got pouty, wondering why he hadn’t been invited. Once he was done pouting, though, he pointed out something that Jonny hadn’t really thought about.

“You just punched it?” he asked.

“Yeah?” replied Jonny.

“She didn’t give you a sword or something? ‘Cause she uses a sword, right? I thought she was gonna teach you to use a sword. She said she was gonna teach me.”

Jonny was stumped at that. Now that he thought about it, it was pretty weird to pit a child against a dire badger without even giving him a weapon. And Igrette was definitely a swordsman first and foremost, but she had never said anything to him about teaching him about swords. Jonny was satisfied with his body, since he was used to fighting with just that, but Igrette looked really damn cool with that sword, and now that Tommy had brought it up, he was a little annoyed that she hadn’t offered to teach him yet.

The two spent a few minutes theorizing about why Igrette hadn’t given him a sword, and why she had never even tried to teach him to use it, despite the fact that he had nothing left to learn about hand-to-hand from her. Ultimately they just decided to ask her why, since they couldn’t figure it out. Igrette was visibly annoyed that Jonny had told Tommy about their morning escapade, but once she was done making sure he kept quiet about future trips, she gave an explanation that left Jonny disappointed.