Water pressed against him from all sides as he sat cross legged on the floor of the deep pocket, spine straight, and hands resting on his knees and his hair drifted slowly around his head… as usual.
[Haki]
[Trait: Immortality]
Strength: 5.9
Speed: 3.1
Agility: 9.8
Defense: 19.3
Spirit: 100.0
He looked at the numbers once and let the panel fade.
The problem wasn't that Spirit was too low, in fact, it was already absurdly high for a seven-year-old skeleton. It was that his flesh couldn't keep up.
He was stubborn though. Rather than immediately trying to align his other stats as much as possible with the spirit, he decided on a different route.
His eyes drooped again, and they got sharper, 'If the basin was previously my body's crucible, then now it would become my Spirit's.' His face looked as though he were about to do something cruel to himself.
'If someone out there with more experience than me becomes a threat, even if his spirit is half of mine, he would probably best me.' He knew it was not just about having magnitude alone, but also being able to wield direction.
'If I don't learn how to utilize these 100 points in my spirit down to the last precision, I will be akin to a table with one of its legs significantly longer than the others.'
He didn't want that for himself, but he also didn't know where to start from. It would have been easier if he had a teacher, but where was he supposed to get one out here… wherever he was.
Then, he heard a voice; 'Continue. Focus. Precision. Single Point…' the voice, which he had gotten all too familiar with rose up once again, it was a bit choppy but it was clearer this time.
"Focus, precision, single point…" he mused. What does it mean?
He had no idea, so he did what he felt at that moment. Remaining as still as possible, he let his gaze settle on a single point in front of him; there was a small hole in the rock a few hand spans away. It was nothing special at all, just a chipped imperfection, nothing more.
He fixed his attention on it like it was the only thing in the world.
'Focus on one thing,' he said inwardly. 'Then make it… unreasonable.'
He inhaled once, then let the air out his lungs in a slow stream of bubbles and then drew nothing further, not even a single breath.
He didn't heal himself like when he performed drowning iterations, he just remained as still as the hole in the rock he was focused on.
He wanted to experience more of this… focus, and the only thing he knew was in direct relation to focus was his spirit;
SHINGG—
He actively flexed his Spirit and it responded.
He noticed the world sharpening once again, it was so detailed that every swirl of sediment around that tiny hole in the stone became distinct.
He gathered his focus once again, but it was harder this time due to so many things distracting him.
He ignored every vibration from the waterfall's throat humming through his bones and every pressure change along his skin to the best of his abilities, then he held it there.
'Single point, single point…' he repeated inwardly.
Time ticked slowly…
His eyelids had not blinked, not even once, and his body remained still.
The benefits of his high spirit was evident, but the price of maintaining that level of activity for so long came shortly after.
*CRACK*
A bright, sharp pain lanced through the back of his head and it felt as if someone had reached into his skull and tried to twist his brain.
The outline of the little hole blurred and then snapped back into focus with too much detail. It was just too much.
[HEAL – Neural Structures, 30%]
He healed the strain before it could tear something essential or break his current focus, and as he did so, the pressure in his skull dropped significantly. Then, his spirit hummed;
[Spirit: 100.0 → 100.02]
It was a trivial change, barely a whisper, but it made him realize something;
'So that's the ceiling,' he thought, still keeping his focus intact.
'Concentrating spirit over a precise area makes my brain collapse in… less than a minute.'
He did not get annoyed, but rather, he thought; 'Having magnitude without structure is quite a waste,'
'Yes, that's it. I need structure' He thought of what he was about to do, and he could have sworn a small blush almost appeared on his face.
'Fine,' he conceded inwardly. 'We start with one point, this point precisely, on the stone. Then, we give it a story.'
But where could he get stories…
'Mana.' A whispering thought arose in his mind.
The term 'mana' rose in his mind and, for some reason, took up most of the space in it.
He had never liked the word 'mana', not since he had gleaned ideas about it from his integrated memories. It was too vague, and it seemed like just a convenient word authors from ages past in his previous world had slapped onto every plot device they couldn't explain with real physics.
Right now, though, whether he liked it or not, his brain knew 'mana' all too well.
'Mana is basically just energy' he thought. 'But until I experience it personally, I wouldn't make any conclusions.' He wasn't even sure the term 'mana' existed in this world. Heck, he didn't even know if there were other humans around.
He stared at the blackness inside the little hole, and entered 'delusional mode'. Just like when people listened to music and imagined themselves in an edit.
'Edit… what's that? Some parts of these memories seem… convoluted…'
'Anyways, let's see if, even in this world, delusion works wonders.'
'So, let's call the hole in this stone a 'gate for mana,'' he decided.
***
He inhaled once at the surface, then sank back down to the same spot where he had been, sat in the same cross-legged posture, looking at the same hole in the stone.
He looked at the 'gate for mana' and thought;
'Mana enters there.'
Then he waited…
And nothing happened.
Of course nothing happened, no glowing thread came out of the rock, no mysterious phenomenon, nothing. Reality just looked at him and remained… reality.
But in his mind, where his spirit lived, there was a 'world' where his mind wrote the rules, and it was called, 'Imagination', and this imagination, currently, couldn't have felt any realer to him.
'Due to my high spirit stat, every one of my mental experiences, even my imaginations, feel vivid.' He observed.
He focused more on experiencing this feeling for a while, then realized he was in control of it. Every single thing he thought of, came to pass in this… realm.
Then, he imagined a very thin, very faint thread of, not quite light, extending from that hole, slowly, through the water, and touched the space just in front of his nostrils.
He directed the strand inward, but before it passed through his nostrils, he did something;
He could mentally call up a perfectly detailed 3D model of a human respiratory system in perfect detail, from its nostrils, to the nasopharynx, to its trachea, then to its bronchi, followed by the alveoli… he could track the rate of oxygen diffusion across membranes and even calculate partial pressures.
All of these were the added benefits of his integrated memories, but he pushed all that aside and declared coldly;
'That would be unnecessary mental clutter.'
He visualized his internal environment being quite empty. No organs, tissues… none of that, at least for now.
As he did so, the imagination continued, and just as the 'mana' reached his nostrils, he drew it inward, then downwards; from his nostrils, down through his throat all the way, till it reached a point just below his navel.
He named that point 'Anchor.'
He just let the imaginary 'mana' pool there for a while, but, it felt wrong, and… unstable. He related the feeling to that of balancing a ball on the tip of a pin.
At that moment, his awareness wavered, and as a result, the strand of 'mana' reversed through the path it had initially followed, back up his lungs.
He flexed his neck muscles, veins appearing all over, then he said through clenched teeth;
"I. REFUSE."
Then his instinct immediately returned his face to a calm state once more, enlightening him that brute force wouldn't get him through with this.
He silently endured this feeling of pain, greater than any he had felt up till this point, then ordered the 'mana' to obey once more.
As it did so, he contemplated on why it had dispersed before, then it hit him.
'Structure, aren't I trying to build structure?'
He needed some type of form, shape, container, anything.
'A triangle? No, maybe a sphere? That might actually be feasible but…'
He needed something that could control two things at once; motion and containment
'Continue. A curve…' Instinct suggested from the back of his mind.
He had gradually learned to recognize this inner voice, not as a separate being, but as an integral part of himself. It was as reliable as the physical pangs of hunger which basically just said: 'I'm hungry.'
This was exactly how Instinct communicated with Haki.
'A curve. Right, what am I to do with that?' Haki thought. If he could, he would have given Instinct a dangerous side eye.
Thankfully, his new mind, ever faithful to old obsessions, reached immediately for one thing.
Mathematics.
It delved into it, past the simple additions and subtractions, and into complex applications; differentiation, integration… then, it descended into the structural parts of it and landed on a single aspect.
Archimedes.