Frostbitten Wayfarer

On Zoe’s way to the park, she stopped by the sandwich restaurant she frequented and grabbed two decent sized sandwiches filled with plenty of colourful vegetables. She planned to sit in the park for a while and didn’t want to get too hungry.

She made her way to Kaira park and sat down at her favourite bench, rolling the mana orb around in her hand. She hadn’t filled it up anymore yet, wanting to do some testing with the exact numbers it provided.

If she spent a full day dumping every bit of mana she could into the orb, she’d be able to know the amount of mana that she regenerated every day. And from that, she could determine her rough mana regeneration per second. It wasn’t super useful for her to know at the moment, and she imagined she could just ask somebody or maybe read a book if she ever got to a library.

But testing was fun and helped pass the time. It gave her a goal to work towards, and she was excited to discover something on her own even if it was already common knowledge to people.

She stood up and grabbed a stick, scratching deep grooves into the dirt at the edges of shadows cast by the trees surrounding her. When the shadows made it back to the markings on the following day, she’d know twenty four hours had passed. Or at least, close enough, as long as that was how long a day was here.

There was no reason for her to believe they weren’t at least close to the same length though. Each day that passed felt the same as any other to her. She could just write down her total mana per day and double check with somebody else later anyway.

Zoe sat back down at the bench, pushing mana into the glass sphere. She found that she had some control over how quick her mana rushed into the sphere, and spent a few minutes trying to stabilize herself at about three quarters full. For the first day, she decided against using her meditation to speed up her regeneration. The first day would provide her with a baseline that she could work off of later.

She watched the mana orb’s fill indicator in her identify tick up by one every few seconds, wondering how mana worked. She was only spending one mana every few seconds, yet the stream of power that she felt was always present. It would have been imperceptible without her experience with meditation, but now she could feel the slightest pull of energy drifting out of her and into the orb.

[Mana Orb - 172]

She chuckled. When she bought the orb, a small part of her was expecting to fill it overnight. Smash through the maximum storage and make herself millions. But this was going to take multiple days. Most of the mana in it came from her pool so far, not her regeneration.

It was an easy job at least, hold the orb for a while and dump all of her mana into it. But the hourly rate? Abhorrent. She understood why it didn’t seem like the job was everybody’s favourite thing to do.

Even at her low level, she could go gather klir for an alchemist or help out with somebody’s restaurant and make much more.

Though, she supposed that nothing stopped her from doing those jobs while charging the mana orb with whatever excess she had either. It didn’t seem like there was a maximum rate she could dump mana in so every few minutes she could just pull out the orb and dump a few hundred into it, then let her mana recover while she worked on something else.

Might be an idea for later, but she wasn’t sure if that was going to be necessary anyway. Sure, she could make more money, but the same could be applied elsewhere. She could add in some passive income while she was practising her archery, or working on getting a skill for her dagger. The drain the straw dummies caused for her mana was very little so she’d have plenty of excess there too.

Hours passed and the shadows stretched across the park as Zoe thought about what this new mana battery job meant for her future. If Ren would buy all of the mana she could fill, she’d never need any other job, probably.

She tried to figure out how much mana she’d need to buy a storage item. If she wanted a four bag item then that would be eight gold, at least. Maybe more if the prices weren’t linear or consistent. Ten gold, she figured would be a safe estimate if Henry was to be trusted.

That would be the equivalent of a thousand silver coins, or three million mana. She watched the mana orb tick up every few seconds, grimacing.

Maybe she would need something else at some point. If her rough estimate of one mana every four seconds was even close to accurate, three million would take her twelve million seconds, which would be two hundred thousand minutes or three and a half thousand hours.

And then that was before taxes, which she would have to be paying if she made that much too. She pulled out the tax sheet she got before to try and figure out how much she would be paying. Fifteen percent for the first ten gold earned, but the first five are non taxable. So she’d be losing just under one gold, or another few hundred hours to offset it.

Plus all of the money she’d spend on food over those couple hundred days which adds up, eventually. It was approachable, she thought. But not for a while, she didn’t need a storage item bad enough to deal with taxes yet. Maybe after she classed up she could spend her extra points on even more mana and speed up the process, too.

Though that begged the question of did Ren really need unlimited mana? He had been buying everything for the last four years but was that because he needed a ceaseless supply, or because nobody sane would dedicate their entire life to filling mana orbs for him so he never ended up with enough.

She continued wondering as the night passed, opening her second sandwich and eating it. Food safety told her not to do that but she’d eaten literal poison, some veggetables and bread left out in the cold air for a few extra hours just didn’t seem to bother her as much anymore.

As the sun rose, she started watching the deep grooves in the ground that she drew, waiting for the shadows to line up again. As soon as they did, she stopped pouring mana into the orb and checked the total.

[Mana Orb - 20943]

Twenty one thousand in a day, she decided. Her timing wasn’t perfect and a nice round number would be easier for her. One thousand mana per hour would be twenty four thousand per day. She was three thousand below that, which was an easier number to work with and she could just subtract it later she decided.

Three thousand divided by twenty four was one hundred with a remainder of six hundred. Six hundred by twenty four was twenty with a remainder of one hundred twenty, which would leave her with one hundred twenty five mana.

One thousand mana per hour minus the offset of one hundred twenty five left her with eight hundred seventy five per hour. Divided by sixty was about fourteen and a half mana per minute, or one mana every just over four seconds. Close enough to her estimate from before, so she felt satisfied with her math.

Next up was to figure out what meditation did. She wished she could stop it from levelling, as blasphemous as that felt, just so she could get more accurate numbers. But this would do for now, as long as she had a rough understanding of her abilities she was happy. She checked what her meditation level was starting at.

- Meditation (26)

Zoe stood up and stretched, then went to buy a couple of sandwiches for the next day of testing. When she got back, she roughed up all of the markings she made, covering them with loose dirt and made new markings where the shadows had moved to.

Then she sat down and repeated the whole process over again but trying to meditate at the same time. It took about a half hour of practice to get it working right. Balancing her focus on the mana indicator, pushing mana into the orb and also pulling in the wild energies that surrounded her was a bit tricky.

In the end she settled on small surges of mana every ten minutes or so, dumping in a bunch all at once so she could spend most of her time just focusing on meditation. It worked much better than trying to do everything all at the same time, constantly.

Her meditation was broken almost every time she dumped mana into the orb when she started. But as the day dragged on she became better and better at maintaining her meditation while she pumped the orb with a surge of mana.

She tried to estimate her mana regeneration to get an idea of what she could expect, but struggled to manage tracking her mana, dumping the mana, maintaining her meditation and also counting the seconds as they passed.

Zoe fell into a trance, the day passing by in what felt like a moment as she focused on her meditation. Her stomach grumbled as the sun rose, and she realized she hadn’t eaten either of her sandwiches. A few hours was one thing but these ones had been sitting out for almost an entire day.

Maybe it was weird but poison was poison and food was supposed to be food. Did it matter? Poison would damage her health but would tapeworms just be regenerated out too? She wasn’t sure, and wasn’t sure she wanted to risk it. She could just go grab some breakfast in a bit.

She continued her meditation and waited for the shadows to reach the grooves again, and then stopped, checking the mana orb’s number and her meditation level.

[Mana Orb - 47593]

- Meditation (32)

Minus the amount that was already stored in the mana orb left her with twenty six thousand six hundred and fifty. She chuckled, it ended up being almost exactly one thousand, one hundred and ten mana per hour. If she was a little bit better with her meditation she might have gotten it to all ones.

So from eight hundred seventy five to one thousand one hundred was about a two hundred forty difference, or just over twenty five percent more. Her meditation was also just over level twenty five. It wasn’t perfect, but with her mistakes throughout the day and her not totally accurate time keeping it seemed like a good enough theory.

Meditation gave a one percent bonus to mana regeneration per level, she decided. Next was trying to figure out how much mana each point of wisdom actually gave her.

She had fifty wisdom and with her non meditation mana regeneration that worked out to seventeen and a half mana per hour per point in wisdom, if it was just a flat rate. If it was a percentage of her total recovered then with fifty wisdom and five hundred mana, she was recovering one hundred seventy five percent of her mana per hour.

With fifty wisdom, that ended up being three and a half percent regenerated per hour per point of wisdom. It could be a mixture of both, though too, she thought. If it was a mixture, then what were the ratios, she wondered. She could take a guess, but without being able to increase her mana to check yet she couldn’t do much more. For now she just made a note of both the totals so she could cross reference it later.

She groaned, standing up and stretching. The math was enjoyable, and she felt like she had a better understanding of her limits but she was sick of it. It was time to grab some food for the day and finish filling up the orb.

When she got her sandwiches she devoured one on the way back to the park, dumping mana into the orb as she walked every time she was almost filled up. There was no benefit to being specific with it anymore so she could get a couple extra hours in while she walked around eating.

The day passed and she finished filling the orb in the middle of the night, with the moon high in the sky.

[Mana Orb - 60000]

Zoe smiled. It took her almost three whole days to fill, but it was an easy twenty silver. She’d definitely buy another orb and at least work on filling it while she did other tasks and stop by Ren’s every so often to sell them off.

When the morning sun began to rise she made her way back to Ren’s house, knocking on the door. He opened it, looking just as put together as he did the previous time. His black suit with not a speck of dust out of place or a visible crease anywhere even to her enhanced eyes.

Zoe pulled out her mana orb and handed it to him. “Sixty thousand mana, twenty silver plus the ten for the orb, yea?”

“Yes, would you like an empty orb instead of the ten silver?” He asked.

“Actually yeah, that’d be better. Are you sure you’ll just buy all of the mana I can give you? Cause if you will I’ll probably be back very often.” She asked.

“If you must insist, my limit is one hundred fifty thousand every day. I do not get anywhere close to enough on most days, I doubt you will exceed that any time soon.” He summoned a mana orb and two silver circles, handing them to Zoe.

“Alright, thanks a bunch. I’ll be back in a few days then!" Zoe said, smiling.

Ren smiled back, feeling grateful and relieved. “Thank you very much.” He stepped back inside and went to close the door.

“Oh actually wait!" Zoe called out before he did.

“Yes?” He asked.

“What do you use all the mana for anyway?” Zoe asked him, wishing she could see inside his house better.

He sighed, “I have some mana intensive experiments I’m working on. Will that be all?”

“Could I see them?” She asked, beaming the brightest smile she could.

“Perhaps someday when they are functional. Now will that be all?” He asked, feeling a little annoyed.

“Yea, that’s it. Thanks again!” Zoe said, the door slamming shut as soon as she did.

She pushed in about half her mana into the orb and put it back in her bag. It was time to go find somebody to finally teach her how to use her knife. Or maybe a post office. Whichever came first.