Chapter 16: Lost in the Woods

Julius woke up face down in the dirt. His body was in agony and the pain made him breathless.

Gritting his teeth, he grasped some life mana from his core and sent it throughout his body. The small infusion took the edge off the pain and let him finally breathe again. He noticed something wet was pooling at his side, soaking his clothes.

It smelled like rust and copper, and with a quick inspection, he confirmed it was his own blood. There was a gaping hole on his side and it was leaking out like a deflated water balloon. At this rate, he might die from bleeding out.

He didn’t know where it came from but he needed to heal it fast or else he was going to die face down, ass up, in a pool of his own blood. If there were any time to create a skill for healing it would be now.

First, he had to focus on stopping the bleeding. He didn’t have any tools or bandages to staunch it, but he checked his core and felt that he had some fire mana, it must’ve regenerated while he was unconscious.

Rolling over, he concentrated on creating a jet of constant flame. It was hard to keep focused on it, his brain was muddled from either the blood loss or the pain. He couldn’t tell at this point. But eventually, he managed to create a soft red flame over his palm. Then gently lifting his shirt with the other hand, he pressed the fire directly onto his wound.

Julius couldn’t even scream, choking on his tongue in silent agony. The smell of burning flesh wafted from his torso. Once he felt like he cauterized the wound and could no longer take the pain, he released the flame and started to gather life mana towards his side.

Julius had understood something about life mana. It was different than fire and kinetic mana. Where fire and kinetic were like beasts that needed a firm hand to control, life mana was the opposite. It required a delicate touch and you needed to convince it to do what you wanted.

That’s what Julius needed to do, he had to envision it healing him while he softly infused life mana into his injuries. As he was delicately leading life mana into the location of the wound, he desperately tried convincing it to heal him, to save his life.

It wasn’t enough. The life mana was just floating around his wound, with no direction, just passively healing it. It was too slow. Julius tried to recall as much information as he had about healing. He wasn’t a doctor but he knew enough about biology to get by.

He imagined the life mana visibly healing his tissue, taking oxygen in, and breathing life into his flesh. Rebuilding each cell of skin bit by bit.

This caused a reaction, he started to feel his skin become itchy and feel his body requiring more mana to sustain this process.

Julius let it have it all. But it wasn’t enough, he needed something more. Thus, he used the same method he used for all of his magic applications, he just condensed the hell out of it. Julius didn’t have the required knowledge to carefully finesse his mana to heal him. Therefore, he would just need to brute force it.

Julius jammed as much compressed life mana into his wound as he possibly could. There was so much mana present, that his side started to glow a brilliant verdant green. Then, to his astonishment, his skin was seen visibly healing. Not very fast, but at this rate, his wound would be healed within ten minutes.

Ten minutes later, and with practically no life mana left, his side was healed. Admittedly, it was a horrendous job that any proper healer would be ashamed of. His skin was left horribly disfigured with burn scarring all across its surface. It was a patchwork of ugly healing at best, but it got the job done.

He also got a notification along with it.

Would you like to learn the skill [Heal]?

It seemed that Julius would finally get that healing skill he was desperately wanting. It would have been more useful ten minutes ago but better late than never. He accepted it quickly.

Congratulations, skill [Heal] acquired.

It also seemed like he had some notifications from the fight that he didn’t see.

[Thermal Compression] has reached threshold. [Thermal Compression lvl1 -> Thermal Compression lvl 2]

[Kinetic Release] has reached threshold. [Kinetic Release lvl1 -> Kinetic Release lvl 2]

[Focus] has reached threshold. [Focus lvl 9 ->Focus lvl 10]

[Focus] has advanced to level 10. Would you like to evolve the skill?

Julius was surprised, he always thought that [Unarmed Combat] would be his first skill to level 10 but it seemed like he was wrong. He wasn’t upset, and couldn’t see any reason not to, so he mentally confirmed to evolve [Focus].

Skill [Focus] is evolving… possible advancements: [Enhanced Focus] and [Combat Trance]

Julius learned about the possibility of choosing multiple skill evolutions when you rank them up. Most of the time, people get offered a general upgrade of the skill. Something that increases it across the board, but there could also be an option to specialize within a certain part of the skill depending on how you had used it.

For Julius, it seemed like he got an option that specializes in combat.

If it was before everything happened, the obvious choice would have been [Enhanced Focus] but now he was stranded in the middle of the wilderness with monsters lurking around. It was expected that he would be doing a lot of fighting. But he really liked how the general [Focus] worked. It was incredibly versatile and was able to be applied to everything that he wanted it to.

While the effects weren’t as dramatic as say [Thermal Compression] it was still a useful skill that gave a small boost to many other applications. However, his instincts were telling him that [Combat Trance] was going to be vital in the future.

In the end, he decided to follow his gut. It hadn’t steered him wrong yet.

Congratulations, skill [Combat Trance] (Uncommon) acquired.

He tried activating [Combat Trance] the moment he received it and it seemed like his suspicions were right. It no longer worked on everything, it took more manual effort to get to the same level of focus again.

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Despite that, it wasn’t as big of a difference as he initially predicted either. It appeared that Julius had been getting better at focusing regardless of the skill. The skill had been giving him a little extra boost, but nothing so extreme that it was detrimental.

However, his new skill appeared to only work while he was in combat. It was like the conditions weren’t right to activate it yet. Julius was sure that would change once he got into a fight.