Chapter 22: Upgrades

  Gaia World, Day 11 After the Shattering

  Now that the external distractions had been eradicated, the pressure in Pawel's knee rapidly surfaced and dominated everything. Even the smallest move somehow involved muscles connected to the damaged joint.

  His entire being concentrated on the pain and the extra pressure in his body created by the thorn. All he wanted was for them to be gone.

  He changed position from sitting to lying in hopes of relief, but the movement only sent fresh jolts of blinding, sharp pain.

  He cried out loud, and tears dropped from his cheeks.

  "Oh... god... that hurts!"

  Pawel just lay there motionless, whimpering for almost a minute, not able to think coherently.

  His first formulated thought was: "I need to get it out! GET IT OUT!"

  He reached for the foreign object in his kneecap but stopped.

  "Would it not make it even worse?"

  "In first aid they say to not remove things from your body yourself."

  "But I can't expect any help from others."

  He deliberated like that for a while, torn between instinct and logic, completely forgetting he had new game-changing tools at his disposal.

  When realization finally came, he grasped onto it with the desperation and rationale typical for a drowning man.

  "I can make it go away with magic!"

  He stilled in a position that in a different situation would have been too uncomfortable for meditation, with a stone biting deeply into his ribs. But the relief of just not moving was enough now.

  Without the practice from recent days, he'd have failed. But the way things were, Pawel cleared his mind from any verbalized thoughts. Still, his will continued with two simple goals and priorities of his panicked and tormented self:

  "Make the pain go away,"

  "Get it out,"

  "Make it stop SOMEHOW."

  Things he had in abundance in this state of mind were clear goals and absolute focus. So the large quantities of improvement mana he had gotten today jolted into motion immediately, seeking means of realizing those goals by itself—as there was simply no doubt in this iron will that making it happen was possible.

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  Contemplation on "how" hadn't even appeared in Pawel, so the arcane force he instructed found its own ways, free of human doubt or bias, only having Pawel's immediate desires as rough directions.

  Creating something new is usually harder than improving on existing structures, so mana searched for existing abilities to potentially expand on them.

  What was there already?

  The majority of it was the idea of mental effort to speed up natural regeneration and healing significantly, using and spending supernatural energy—created by Pawel's concept of nature's magic, the same thing that he was using now.

  Second was active effort to fight off diseases, illnesses, and regulating body functions related to that, like temperature—improving natural means significantly, also spending supernatural powers gathered from kills, created by Pawel's concept of nature's magic.

  Two other abilities were passive and formed by purple aether, permeating directly from the anomaly—a building block of any magic affinity—absorbed from every kill and immediately used by the subconscious. Wild, conceptless mana—raw spiritual power.

  First was very familiar to nature affinity: it was regeneration speed-up. It could be used and improved upon.

  Second was foreign to nature's affinity: strength improvement, by means other than body, muscle, and tendon. It was weak, and when the force Pawel employed on the task to heal prodded this ability—it was blocked from changes.

  Verdant essence poured into three available abilities, but it was like a river filling a child's balloon. Previous gains Pawel had gotten from his fights were just a fraction of what he had available now.

  Established abilities expanded as fast as possible, but there was so much more power that had to go somewhere, and expansion wasn't fast enough.

  Had Pawel done it himself normally, steady and methodically, he'd perhaps gradually just improved on what existed. But now there was pressing urgency.

  He needed pain gone NOW.

  He needed thorn gone NOW.

  And he needed to be healed NOW.

  On the other hand, there were some external and rigid rules of the arcane restricting the verdant mana at Pawel's service, like the law of gravity deciding how water flows.

  It had no real will on its own, but it wasn't an inanimate thing like water exactly. It was one of the countless arcane, after all.

  When it pushed to directly remove the thorn, it could, but this action was FORBIDDEN for its kind.

  When it tried to alter the mind and block pain, it could, but was again FORBIDDEN.

  When it tried removing nerve connections—destruction is FORBIDDEN.

  But healing, creation, and growth? That was its principle.

  In microscopic spaces between nerve cells—so small that it was at the molecular level, at a scale impossible for mundane physics—there begun the growth of small, countless fibers, connecting to the nervous system and later every cell in the body.

  Their growth could be executed by nature affinity mana alone. However, there was a more organic solution: every plant and living thing needs fuel of some kind, and conveniently there was a source in the form of the hated thorn. It wasn't being directly destroyed, removed, or moved by the arcane—it was metabolized by new growth, so no rule got broken.

  Fibers assumed parasitic characteristics, taking electric signals from nerves around the knee to jumpstart their own connections, dimming the pain momentarily.

  As more mass was consumed from around the knee, the structure spread all over the body, gradually reaching every cell, and like every living thing, searching for more fuel.

  Now every hostile virus, every bacteria, every lingering infection, every pimple—even fillings in teeth—everything not being part of a healthy body begun dissolving and used as fuel for this new parallel plant-like nervous system.

  As removing all foreign and toxic objects was completed, all forms of regeneration and healing kicked in—knitting torn skin, growing missing parts of teeth—now much faster than was possible before, and additionally supported by the new fibrous structure reaching everywhere—using its stored fuel from decomposition to assist the arcane-fueled process.

  The entire thing took around half an hour, and most of it was establishing new ways and expanding abilities—new and old.

  The new fibrous organ now lingered as part of Pawel's body, passively working all the time to attack any invaders and heal any damage.

  There wasn't any disease in the mundane world that could harm Pawel now, and most poisons would not be fast enough either.

  He sighed with relief, relaxing his entire body after leaving meditation and looking at his knee.

  The thorn that was sticking out fell out, with anything that used to be inside Pawel's body just cut off cleanly.

  He managed to fix everything.

  Of course, had he just removed the wood lodged in his body manually and then healed with means already available, the pain would have been gone, and the thorn removed, without need to spend "evolution mana" on upgrading regeneration. But Pawel was not in a sound state of mind to realize that at the time.

  He was no longer in a mood to look for more trouble this day, so he gathered his stuff up and began his way back "home." The pain was already gone, but his mind still wasn’t convinced the leg was all right, so he subconsciously spared it, limping as he walked.