One month later.

Spring was in full swing. Birds sang, flowers had bloomed to turn the grass into colorful carpets. Local insects that looked suspiciously like bumblebees buzzed around. The air was filled with cries of things trying to eat and fuck each other. It was all very distracting.

Viv closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The clearing she had used to test her blight spell was now a nice meadow dotted with plant arrangements that Varska had curated to make the place more zen. Or the Helock equivalent, whatever. It was nice.

Viv breathed carefully and extended a hand. Gestures were important until you got a good feel for it. She felt her own mana push out and willed the color to remain trapped inside.

It was an extremely complex feeling of separation, akin to feeling in two places at the same time. It was also unnatural, in the sense that she had to go against those instincts that made her so good at manipulating black mana. It had taken her weeks of effort to get it right.

Colorless mana gathered in a ball in her hand. Contrary to its black equivalent, this one was tame. No, more than tame. It was not ‘alive’.

Viv compared her experience to using software. Colors were the normal, basic functions. They were what the creator of the software had made available to the users. Thus, using colored mana felt natural to most casters, because they were manipulating the consciousness of Nyil in ways that it allowed.

Moving colorless mana was like delving into the programming of the software and changing its functions. Playing with the code, so to speak. With her experience of intellectual property rights Viv almost expected a sort of resistance from Nyil itself but it was not the case. Colorless mana just felt… neutral. Indifferent. It was not so much reluctance as inertia that made it difficult to yield.

Viv infused the energy in a pair of linked ‘seek’ and ‘north’ glyphs, and watched as the sphere flattened and gained an arrow pointing in front of her, to the deadlands.

“Yay, it worked.”

It was completely useless as things went for now, but, well. Progress. She checked her stats.

Current status:

Mana channels (apprentice mage)

Extreme compatibility

Divine spark: luck

Draconic Surrogate Mother

Mana distribution:

Black 100%

Current attunement: 19.1%