I woke up to the comforting, terrible smell of stale vomit and cheap spirits.
For a brief, delirious moment, I thought I was back in the alley. I thought I had just passed out after a particularly aggressive night with Astra, and any moment now, a garbage truck would rattle by and wake me up for work.
Then the cart hit a pothole.
Pain rattled through a body that definitely didn't belong to a forty-year-old drunk. It belonged to a child who had tried to channel a hurricane through a straw.
I groaned, trying to shift my weight. I was lying in a heap of bodies. The 'Medical Wagon,' as it turned out, was just a wooden box on wheel filled with the unconscious, the beaten, and the blackout drunk.
My kind of people, I thought with a chuckle.
I tried to sit up, but my arms refused to cooperate. They felt heavy. Not tired-heavy. Lead-heavy.
I closed my physical eyes and opened my internal map.
Inside my body, the lights had gone out.
The glowing lattice of meridians-the plumbing that made a Magic Swordsman-was gone. Melted. Slagged. Where there used to be orderly highways of energy, there was just scar tissue and darkness.
But as I looked closer, zooming in with the "Understanding", I saw something else.
My blood.
It wasn't just flowing liquid anymore. It was... glittering.
Suspended in the red tide of my circulatory system were millions of tiny, jagged specks of white light. Raw Ambient Mana.
I remembered the forest. I remembered the vacuum I had created to break the Seal. I had taken in the world, and when my meridians melted, the world had gotten stuck inside.
I have no magic anymore, I realized. I'm a gravel pit.
I watched a cluster of mana particles scrape against the wall of a vein. It caused micro-tears. My body was eating itself alive from the inside out. If I didn't fix this, I wouldn't survive the trip to any camp. I'd bleed out internally.
Think, I commanded my sluggish brain. You broke it. You fix it.
I focused on a single muscle fiber in my forearm. It was shredded, looking like a frayed rope.
Techinically, I shouldn't have been able to touch the mana floating near it. Without meridians-the ethereal limbs that Mages use to handle power-the energy inside me should have been untouchable as smoke. But my strange sight did more than just show me the light; it laid the mechanics bare. I saw the weight of the particle. I saw its frequency. I saw its desperate, vibrating need for direction.
It wasn't magic; it was leverage. Because I understood exactly what the particle was, I didn't need a "hand" to grab it. I simply projected my Will onto it. I commanded the particle to move, and because mana craves purpose, it obeyed the one thing that truly understood it.
Come here, I ordered.
I pulled the speck of Raw Mana from the bloodstream It felt heavy, sharp, and indifferent. I tried to shove it into the gap in the muscle fiber, like plugging a hole with a rock.
Rejection.
The muscle spasmed. The mana particle wouldn't bond. It was like trying to weld stone to meat. They were two different states of matter.
Stupid, I chided myself. You can't mix dry ingredients without a binder.
I shifted my focus. Digestion.
I focused on my stomach. Even though I hadn't eaten in a day, there was a reserve of Vitality-the sticky, white life-force that Swordsmen used to heal.
I grabbed a glob of Vitality. It felt like warm glue.
I didn't try to shove the Mana into the muscle this time. Instead, I wrapped the Mana particle in the Vitality. I coated the sharp rock in the biological glue.
Now, I thought. Combine.
I pushed the coated particle into the torn muscle fiber.
It didn't reject. The Vitality grabbed onto the flesh, and the Mana sat inside it, acting as a reinforcement.
It worked.
But it was soft.
I poked it with my mind. It felt like wet clay. It was stuck there, but it lacked structure.
And it's slow, I realized with a sinking feeling. It took me ten seconds to fuse one microscopic particles. There's billions of them. I'll be dead of old age before I fix my left pinky.
I needed a way to speed it up. I needed pressure. I needed heat.
"Move it!" a voice roared from outside. "Why are we slowing down?"
The wagon jerked.
My attention snapped outward.
I 'looked' at the sky.
A moment ago, the ambient mana in the atmosphere had been drifting lazily, like dust in a sunbeam. Now?
It was rigid.
The white particles in the air had stopped moving. They were aligning, pointing straight down. Like compass needles finding North.
And I was North.
Ominous, I thought.
"Sergeant!" a driver shouted. "Clouds! They came out of nowhere!"
I pushed my perception higher. Above the caravan, a massive, swirling knot of energy was forming. It wasn't a natural storm. It was a reaction.
My 'Understanding' deciphered the intent of the sky instantly.
Flow.
The world ran on flow. Mana moved. Blood moved. Life moved.
I was a blockage. By trapping the mana in my blood and refusing to let it cycle back out, I had become a clot in the veins of the world.
And the world was looking for a way to clear the blockage.
It wants to ground me out, I realized. It was to punch a hole in the bottle to let the pressure escape.
"Drive!" the Sergeant bellowed. "Outrun it!"
You can't outrun physics, I thought.
I looked back inside my body. I looked at the "wet clay" in my forearm. I looked at the mana-saturated blood pumping through my heart.
I was a walking copper wire. I was the most conductive thing for miles.
I could try to dodge. I could try to hide.
Or...
I looked at the 'wet clay' again.
To make clay into brick, you need a kiln.
A crazy, desperate idea formed in my mind. The kind of idea that only a drunk or a genius would entertain.
I don't need to hide. I need to use it.
"Brace!" I wheezed to the unconscious drunks around me. Not that they could hear me.
The air pressure dropped. The hair on my arms stood up. The static charge was screaming.
Come on, I challenged the sky. Fix me.
BOOM.
The world turned white.
It wasn't sound. It was a physical hammer blow from God.
The lightning bolt struck the roof of the wagon, punched through the wood, and found exactly what it was looking for.
Me.
It hit my chest.
It didn't act like a normal strike. It didn't just burn the surface. It dove into me. It found the conductive, mana-rich blood in my veins and used it as a highway.
For a split second, my blood turned into liquid fire.
PAIN.
It was worse than the Overdrive. It was worse than the knife in the alley. It felt like every cell in my body was being boiled.
But in that same second, the reaction happened.
The heat flashed through my circulatory system. It hit the muscles where the Vitality and Mana were sitting loosely side-by-side.
The heat cooked them.
The 'Wet Clay' didn't crumbled. It Sintered.
Under the impossible voltage, the Vitality fused with the Mana. The soft glue turned into hard, dense ceramic. The mixture snapped tight, locking into the muscle fibers with a bond stronger than nature intended. Into one single mass.
The reaction cascaded. From my chest to my arms, to my legs.
My body seized. My back arched off the floorboards.
Then, the lightning exited. It blew out the iron rim of the wagon wheel underneath me.
CRACK-SMASH.
The wagon lurched violently, the rear axle shattering. Wood splintered. Horses screamed. The cart slammed into the mud, tossing the drunks around like ragdolls.
I hit the wall of the wagon and slid down.
Smoke was rising from my skin. My clothes were smoking rags. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe.
But I could feel it.
My blood was quiet. The glitter was gone. The 'blockage' had been cleared, consumed by the forge.
Outside, the oppressive weight of the sky lifted instantly. The clouds began to disperse, their job done. The target had been neutralized.
But I wasn't gone.
I was just... heavy.
My muscles didn't feel like meat anymore. They felt dense. Solid. Like I was made of lead and wire.
It didn't fit the Swordsman system and he definetely wasn't a Magic Swordsman. He was something else.
Rank 1: The Alloy.
My consciousness began to fade, the pain finally dragging me under.
Outside, I heard the Sergeant cursing. I heard the confusion.
Sorry about the wagon, I thought, my mind drifting into the dark.
I closed my eyes, and for the first time since the gorge, I didn't feel broken.
I felt forged.