The next few days went by with a fairly clear routine for Magna, mostly filled with reading, eating, and playing with Faye.
He also started training his muscles, curious whether he could improve his basic stats that way, but progress turned out to be painfully slow.
Even after following Titus’s guidance, his strength only went up by one point in an entire week.
He never sparred with Titus again during this time. Titus never brought it up either, still seeming to regret what had happened last time, or maybe Celeste had simply forbidden it. Magna couldn’t tell which.
By the end of that week, Magna finally managed to trigger Gaia’s options again, though it had gotten noticeably harder.
He figured that without access to mana-rich food, filling the energy gauge from now on would take weeks, even months, in the near future.
’At this rate, the next trigger might take two, maybe even three weeks,’ he thought bitterly, lying in bed, his whole body aching from a full day of training.
But the moment he checked the options, all his pain and exhaustion vanished instantly.
"Worth it... Definitely worth it."
[Option 1: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to increase the efficiency of stat gains through training by 10x.]
[Option 2: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to gain a Mana stat.]
[Option 3: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to instantly increase all stats by 20.]
There it finally was. The option that could actually let him cast spells.
Still, something about it felt strange.
First of all, every single option this time revolved around stats, which made him wonder if Gaia’s choices had started narrowing in on stats specifically, ever since he activated the status panel with his last selection.
That also made him wonder whether his past choices had always been quietly shaping the next set of three options all along.
The other odd thing was that gaining mana as a stat didn’t really explain much on its own.
Even if he got it, it would just be a number sitting there, stuck at zero, if he had no actual way to store mana inside his body in the first place.
From what he had learned, Witches had a special organ inside their bodies specifically for storing and generating mana. Which meant Magna would basically need something similar himself.
’It can’t be a scam, right?’ The thought made him frown.
He tried looking at it from a different angle, wondering if Gaia, the AI he had built with his own two hands, would really try to trick him like that.
So far, aside from the pain, every choice he had made through Gaia had only ever helped him.
Also, every single time, there had been small surprises hidden underneath the short, vague descriptions of each option.
Like with the cold-blooded assassin option, where he had expected to only gain an assassin’s mindset but ended up gaining physical changes along with it too.
Another example was his last choice, the status panel.
He first had assumed the pain across his whole body was just a side effect, but later relized Gaia had actually created and spread microscopic sensors throughout his entire body, just so the status screen could track his physical stats in real time.
So when it came to gaining Mana as a stat, there was a good chance Gaia would give him some kind of organ along with it too, just so the stat could actually function.
The other two options were tempting enough on their own, but he didn’t even want to look at them too closely, worried he might talk himself out of his decision.
Even with some small risk of it being a scam, he stayed focused on Option 2.
Deciding there was no point overthinking it any further, he made his choice right away.
[Option 2 selected. Utilizing gathered energy to acquire a Mana stat. Prepare for sudden physical pain...]
"Pain? YES." For the first time, Magna actually felt relieved seeing the system’s pain warning, since it meant something in his body was really about to change.
It was proof this wasn’t just going to be some empty number added to his stat panel.
Anyway, he had to wait for the mutation to finish before he could see if his guess had actually been right.
Lying on his bed, tense and full of anticipation, he waited for the countdown to hit zero.
3...
2...
1...
Suddenly an unimaginable pain began to burn through his whole body, concentrating heavily around one spot in his stomach.
His stomach burned with an unbelievable heat, and it wasn’t just a feeling either, the moment he placed his hand over it, he could feel the heat radiating clearly through his skin.
After a while, his stomach and the rest of his body started turning red, and white smoke began pouring out of his mouth and nose, proving he really was burning from the inside out.
Back when Magna used to design games, he had spent a considerable amount of time researching which types of death were the most painful and what they actually felt like, all to make his games feel more realistic.
At the very bottom of that list, the most peaceful, least painful way to go was dying in one’s sleep, followed by sudden cardiac arrest and brain hemorrhage.
At the very top, the most painful of them all, was staying conscious for a long time while suffering extensive, deep burns.
Burning alive wasn’t just painful on its own either.
The thick smell of charred flesh rising off his own body, along with the smoke and heat drying out his throat and cutting off his air, choking him at the same time, doubled the agony even further.
Magna wished he could just black out right then and there, just to make all of it stop. But his body and mind held on stubbornly until the very end, forcing him to stay fully conscious through the whole process.
As his internal organs kept burning, he could feel something moving inside him at the same time, burned organs, nerves, and blood vessels being replaced, making room for something new.
For minutes, or maybe seconds, he lost all sense of time, unable to even guess how long it had actually been, enduring the pain long enough to feel every last detail of the mutation happening inside him.
Then finally, the burning sensation slowly began to fade, replaced instead by a spreading coldness. Magna finally began to lose consciousness, his mind sinking into darkness, finding peace at last.
***
GenF: If you want to keep track of all the mutations but have a bad memory, I’m writing them all down here. If you find it helpful, just let me know so I can share it every 10 or 20 Chapters.
1 - [Option 3: Expend 100% accumulated energy to double vocal cord size.]
2 - [Option 1: Expend 100% accumulated energy to instantly gain 3 years of physical growth.]
3 - [Option 2: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to enhance the five senses by 2x.]
4 - [Option 2: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to gain the core traits and instincts of a cold-blooded assassin.]
5 - [Option 3: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to improve stamina and endurance by 5x.]
6 - [Option 1: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to gain the speed of a mini-lizardman.]
7 - [Option 2: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to greatly improve your instinct for detecting nearby presences.]
8 - [Option 1: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to gain a status screen where you can track all your stats.]
9 - [Option 2: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to gain a Mana stat.]
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