A Tale of One Deviant (Book One)

Chapter 121: Major Mana Level Up

I woke up in the forge, blinking. I sat up instantly, looking at a wall.

"When did I fall asleep?" I questioned myself, looking around. And what was that dream? That creepy, despairing dream that told me I wouldn't have a future much longer?

With a distraught look on my face, I looked down at my hands, seeing them clench and unclench. Thinking about the things that flew at me, the black figures calling out to me from the ground. The corpses, everywhere, the wretchedness and sorrow, the death and agony in the fallen soldiers' screams.

My shoulder was continuously shaken, and I finally snapped up my head and looked at the side.

"Mr. Bhemus," I said, looking at Jose. Somehow, the beard was now a welcome sight.

"Mademoiselle de Libellule, we require your services again," he said while standing me up.

"Of course," I nodded, standing up. I stretched a bit before heading over to the product they'd been manufacturing for the last five weeks, leaving the first nap I'd taken in five weeks.

To Katerine, it was probably only about three days. She had apparently come to the front entrance again twice more, asking for Mr. Bhemus. She was turned away again each time.

Never once did she ask about me.

"Only a day left," Mr. Bhemus, Major Bhemus (that was his name, not a standing), told me as I walked up to the six silver circlets we were making. Each had three blood stones in it, cut perfectly so that they glittered in the light.

They were shackles. Shackles that, when put on, went on the forehead, the neck, the wrists, and the ankles.

They were for me. They were meant to suppress me, keep me from becoming too wild for when I lost my mind again. Chains that looked like they were necklace links or something that belonged on a bull would appear from in between the circlets, depending on how much they were suppressing.

I hoped, when seeing them, that I would lose the bet. I really did.

But no matter how much mana I poured into it from the dagger of Paivla, my eternal mana source, nothing seemed to fit. The little things absorbed the power of all six gods, all six that were from zero, which was higher than any being on this planet, to thirty-five. The mana stone that was supposed to be immovable that I had talked about before with Paivla, one with endless amounts, was drained in an instant.

On that first day, I learned that divine ore was scary. If handled improperly, it would act just like the dagger-it would suck you up in an instant.

The fact that they even had it so offhandedly was scary in the first place. Shouldn't that be under wraps, like at the bottom of a lake in a secret pocket dimension with lion mermaids for guards?

No, it was just sitting around in the basement of the Bhemuses, in their clan's section of the city.

I was supplying my own mana into this thing since the dagger ran out, and I was told that we were nearing the completion state. Completion state: when all parts of the item are assembled and the starting mana amount needed to make and activate the device, as a catalyst, is reached. After the necessary mana amount is attained, it's like the counter has gone from the negatives to zero. From zero up it can raise, and and then fall back to zero. That's the mana used to activate the object, like if you wanted to start a fan that was already made long ago with the "catalyst mana," you would pour mana into it so that it would run. When you stop pouring mana, the counter goes back to zero.

So far, I'm pretty sure these dang circlets have chomped down on over two million MPs. I've never been so wary of an object in my life.

My own mana count, from continuously pouring my vital stuff in for days upon days as they strike away at the circlets and shove them in the fire with tongs, has risen considerably. I'm not sure if it's a blessing or a curse, this 622,425 MP count that I have now. I hadn't slept for a while because I was extremely sick from how fast the mana raised, and it'd never been so bad before. Now, I felt like I was running an extremely high fever and my "sleep" was just me watching the fires of the forges, drinking mana potions sometimes as I continuously poured from a distance. I didn't show anyone I had the dagger, I just tapped the circlets once or twice while manipulating the flow, and then all of a sudden the black wicked tar on the handle disappeared completely, the mana all gone. It was just that half crescent dagger now, not a single speck of darkness.