(4) May Seem Obvious

First things first, Nephthys thought, pulling up her stats. She was not entirely sure how she did this. It was an instinctive feeling, like moving her arms.

[Name: Nephthys

Race: Celestial Djinn

Class: Nova {Unique}

Level: 999+]

That was all well and good, but where was everything else? Prelude had stats like Intelligence and Strength as well as bars for health, stamina, and mana. None of those appeared in her current stats.

Nephthys, sitting cross-legged on her bed, balled up her fist and held it before her, squeezing it tightly. She felt good, strong. Addy had been careful to stay healthy in the other world, yet the way she felt now simply could not compare with even the healthiest she had ever felt over there.

She stood and walked to the center of the room, striking a fighting pose suddenly. She had not wanted to spend her hard-earned money on frivolities, but she had taken several classes throughout her life, mostly to find ways to exercise without expensive equipment or memberships. This included a few classes on fighting, and though she was certainly not close to competing in MMA, she felt she could throw a decent punch.

She bent her knees and braced her core, punching with all her might. She turned her trunk into the punch and felt the force transfer all the way from her legs, up through her body, and into her arm.

Crack!

She felt the rush of wind that her punch sent blasting outward, the covers on her bed ruffling behind her from the shockwave. That had certainly never happened when she punched back home. That both confirmed she was far stronger than she had ever been and lent credence to her Prelude stats transferring over, even if they were not presented numerically.

Sitting back down on the bed, she assumed a meditative position and cast her thoughts inward. She felt her heart beating, the blood coursing through her body, especially in her neck. In the silence provided by the room’s thick stone insulation, she thought she could just about hear her heart. That was strange. Did Djinn have hearts?

A fragmented memory of pain and violation surfaced, and she probed her body with purpose this time. There, sitting directly between where she imagined her heart and stomach should be, was a black hole surrounded by a glowing accretion disk. It seemed to oscillate between glowing a pale blue and a dark purple, the colors shifting when threads of the energy clashed.

It was strange how the information her inner eyes provided spoke of barely contained destruction, yet what her mind saw was beauty. It was like standing on a cliff, staring out at the sea. It was stunning, and somehow, the knowledge that it would kill you without even noticing only enhanced its awe and wonder.

What was this?

The notifications she had seen called it a Tesseract, which was…not helpful. Her knowledge of that word boiled down to a Sci-Fi McGuffin. It was a nonsense word that meant nothing. Sure, it was technically a four-dimensional structure, but the colloquialization was just ‘science-sounding thing.’

Her mind’s eye drew closer, peering into its event horizon, attempting to plumb its depths. There was something strangely alluring about it, as if it were inviting her in. Before she could even question whether it was wise, she poked her metaphorical head in, inhaling sharply at what she found.

“Holy fuck, man,” she said without thought.

Before her was an endless expanse, a void that extended farther than she could see. And it was filled with mana that swirled in enormous plumes of color, like solar rays. Some mana interacted and created even more vibrant colors, while other mana passed straight through, never touching or interacting. And this was all ambient.

Its source was a point so bright it hurt to look at, even to her inner eye. It was somehow both infinitely far away and right in front of her. It was so small she could not see it, yet it filled her entire field of view. It was a point of mana—or something mana-like. It was so infinitely dense, so thoroughly compressed, that when it ejected the occasional ray, the mana it contained was enough to make the entire space too bright to look at.

It was like a mana engine, like a nuclear mana reactor, that just kept pumping out mana and then pulling it back in to compress, or whatever it was actually doing. The sight was so stunning that Nephthys spent many minutes merely observing, floored by what she was witnessing.

And it was hers.

Focusing back on the present, she blinked a few times to rid herself of the mana singularity within her, which had somehow seared its image into her actual eyes, too. She opened and closed her hand, ensuring nothing had changed. Intellectually, she knew that nothing would have changed by simply realizing that such a thing existed within her, but she couldn’t help feeling somehow different than just minutes ago.

Breathing slowly, she calmed herself. Her mana pool was pretty unbelievable, even back in Prelude, due simply to her grinding, but this…this was something different altogether.

One of the key disadvantages of a Djinn is the lack of stamina. Although a Djinn’s mana pool increases dramatically from absorbing it, it must now also use mana as fuel for everything it does.

This narrative has been purloined without the author’s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

This means that a Djinn is constantly burning its mana supply doing mundane things. Walking, sitting, and even just existing cost mana. The boost to the mana pool was significant, but one ironically ends up paying even closer attention to their mana supply as a Djinn than before.

With this Tesseract constantly creating mana in her chest, Nephthys wondered if that would ever be an issue for her again. She could not even imagine the spellcasting required to put a dent in that amount of mana. Surely, the entire world would be reduced to ash before the mana ran out?

“Let’s see, how do I—menu? Magic…uh, spells?” she said aloud, beginning to feel foolish.

A torrent of images formed around her, tracing the air with multicolored pictures and diagrams like holograms in Sci-Fi movies. This manifestation was different, but she recognized the Spellbook from Prelude. Normally, it would just be a grid-based menu that the player could scroll through to assign spells to quickslots, but this was…actually, what was this?

The images were varied, but they shared a common theme. A diagram of wires running through what looked like an X-ray of a human body was the base, with the paths varying wildly. Some twisted, turned, and looped back on themselves and were lit in blue, while others nearly traced a straight path through the body in red, looking more like blood vessels than anything magical.