There are moments that you forget as you grow old, the details fading with time, and there are other moments that will forever remain as a snapshot in your mind. While the background noise of the exact way the trees moved then might have not been imprinted in my mind, Tatiana’s stricken look could never leave me. It took me years to understand exactly why she was so startled, but by then it had been years since I’d seen her, and we didn’t talk like we used to.
Half an...
2021-07-01 05:53:05 +0000 UTC
View Post
Nose in the air, the wolf zeroed in on the scent. He wasn’t familiar with that particular type of animal, but the tanginess of death was hard to ignore. He had found some deer with that scent on them a week ago, still alive, their eyes taking him in with frightened expressions as they lay paralyzed.
He might have felt bad about it, tearing into them without a care for how they hurt, still alive while being gorged up by him and his pack, but that would be weird. He was a w...
2021-06-30 04:14:56 +0000 UTC
View Post
Hey guys, a couple of things to get through.
1) Thank you for being with me this month. you don't know how much I appreciate you guys caring enough about this story to want to read ahead.
2) If you are intending to finish with the story for a while or altogether (thank you so much for starting it at all) this is the 2nd to last update you'll get this month. Don't forget to stop the subscription! If you're intending to come back, don't worry, I'm not planning...
2021-06-28 06:05:17 +0000 UTC
View Post
James released a frustrated sigh, and maybe a small, tiny, miniscule sound of annoyance. She had been excited, at least initially, when she had set out to probe her mana. Especially so when she realized she hadn’t ever really paid any attention to it all before, or noticed it, really. To be perfectly honest, she wasn’t sure if she could always see her own mana or if it was a recent development. To be fair, though, it was a lot less visually stunning than the mana from the oth...
2021-06-28 06:05:06 +0000 UTC
View Post
In the past couple of hours, James had faced two foes: a goblin and a plant. Both had treated her to a surprise attack, and both had been defeated without the use of her ultimate Skill. Still, one of the two left her on the ground panting while the other let her continue going about her day.
The goblin, for all that it was the clear enemy since the beginning of the Tutorial, was not the harder of the two adversaries. That had been the plant. The plant that lacked teeth, cla...
2021-06-25 08:13:40 +0000 UTC
View Post
--Any chapter title suggestions for this one?
The poisoned notifications continued to pile up, but James refused to be a passive participant in her own poisoning. Granted, she might have caused it to herself by believing that she could weather whatever was thrown at her, and not really considering how poisonous plants could be, so really her role wasn’t very passive, but that was in the past. Now, she could react.
Leaning over, she forced herself to throw up, heavin...
2021-06-23 06:38:19 +0000 UTC
View Post
James refused to count how many fish she had just gone through. Maybe more stats meant increased appetite. She doubted that was true since she’d been eating less since going out to the forest on her own, but a girl could dream.
Maybe new stats meant increased appetite? She had gotten some levels from her morning fight with the goblin, and now that she thought of it, the first thing on her mind after every fight tended to be food. And after most fights she tended to level....
2021-06-21 06:34:15 +0000 UTC
View Post
Hi guys!
Since I'm transferring the Sharped Carps over to eventually be 30 edited chapters (rather than all my edited chapters and all my drafts making it so I don't have any back catalog- an unsustainable strategy), I thought I'd let you know I have a little side project so you don't get bored over the weekend. I'm basically using this story as my writing palate cleanser from Mana Anxiety:)
It's a comedic, reverse-Isekai novel called The Girl at the Station. Our protagonist Lady ...
2021-06-18 08:46:05 +0000 UTC
View Post
Beauty is an interesting thing. For so long I thought it was a miracle as my family doted on me. My eyes had revealed their graces at two weeks earlier than expected, opening up to the world but only perceiving it with the naivety only children possess. My teeth developed our race’s signature, coveted sharpness at a year old, eschewing the usual belief that such features were relegated to the nobility. My breathing canals were the purest the sleepy village had seen in decades. ...
2021-06-17 08:03:47 +0000 UTC
View Post
Dismissing the notifications, James went to get the dead fish, doing that awkward breaststroke with her head above the water. Grabbing it with a stray leaf that was floating by, she got out of the water. As opposed to the first time she handled the fish, her grip was confident and normal- not the furthest it could be from her body and with only two fingers helping it fight gravity.
Holding it easily despite its large size, she set it down on some other leaves she set up bef...
2021-06-16 07:21:18 +0000 UTC
View Post
While the start to the day couldn’t have been any more exciting, its continuation was decidedly not. Uneasy with the recent events, James decided to stay close to home and maybe try her hand at cooking the Sharped Carp again. With her haul from the cottage, she was sure to make something of at least decent quality. After all, she had salt now! Not to mention a bunch of other spices.
After washing off the remnants of the morning fight still on her in the river, she went to...
2021-06-14 23:53:27 +0000 UTC
View Post
Ok, first, an announcement. I'm not home this weekend, so there won't be any updates during that time.
But... I'm not home this weekend. So what better time to come up with possible side stories?
These are the possible topics I came up with. If you have any specific ideas, or some other thing you want to explore altogether, leave a comment:)
The one rule is that a side story can't further the main story. For example, people in the clearing right now? They have their own thin...
2021-06-12 06:46:14 +0000 UTC
View Post
James woke up to the sound of an animal sniffing at her. In her sleep-addled state that didn’t mean much, and she tried to push the animal away, turning on her side. Maybe this was a dream about being a veterinarian. But her hand didn’t budge a thing, and, blearily opening her eyes, James’s brown eyes met those of a goblin.
Suddenly it registered that her lovely little treehouse stank. Or maybe that was just the goblin breath. She was staring at a goblin. She had just...
2021-06-11 07:10:10 +0000 UTC
View Post
Reaching a tentative hand forward, she touched a wisp of silvery blue mana. Like in the weird dimension she had just returned from, it started to swirl around her without her feeling a thing. Absentmindedly licking at her ice cream, she took her hand back.
Looking around the small ice cream shop, she started to register how everyone had mana in them. Her mother had a sickly neon green color of mana residing in her chest. It left her in weird vines, almost like a plant with ...
2021-06-09 22:50:25 +0000 UTC
View Post
Mana Dance [rare]:you’ve seen mana in its pure form and danced at its magnificence. You scoff at those that treat it as just a force to manipulate for their benefit and the mana acknowledges and rewards this outlook. Dance to the beat of the mana and gain (marginal) greater fluidity and conversion rates in your casting. Effects increase with Skill level.
The Skill was surprising in so many ways. Not least of which that it implied mana wa...
2021-06-09 06:32:19 +0000 UTC
View Post
Hi guys, thank you so much for all your support, I just wanted to tell you a bit more about the Chapter Title Suggesting Skill!
Both goblin meat and sharped carp sashimi connoisseurs can directly suggest names in the comment section. If you want to vote on a title you can 'like' that comment to show your support and I'll take that into consideration. If your title gets chosen I'll give you a special shout-out at the beginning of the chapter:)
Seriously, though, thank you so much f...
2021-06-09 03:55:45 +0000 UTC
View Post
Her trip back to home base was uneventful. She might have noticed the goblins giving her some extra attention if she had any ability to care, but… she didn’t. She just wanted some sleep.
Now she was all snuggled up in her treehouse, the orange mana veins threading through it, providing more warmth than ever. It seemed like every time she came back to the tree it had nurtured its abilities even more. In turn, her treehouse became more and more homely, something she incre...
2021-06-07 07:31:18 +0000 UTC
View Post
50 Mana Manipulation
You’ve gained Skill Mana Manipulation [Common]!
Mana Manipulation [Common]:Mana is a natural occurring force in the System unified multiverse. You have taken your first step on your path to manipulate it. Level 1.
Would you like to integrate Skill Mana Manipulation [Common]?
You’ve gaine...
2021-06-04 06:47:35 +0000 UTC
View Post
Well, she had sunk her time into getting better at manipulating the mana outside her body. She was far from good at the exercise since it still took intense concentration, but at least she could semi-reliably do it. Now James turned her focus to the grey and beige covering herself. Could she move it? Was it even a good idea to?
Being a scientist, she tried to establish a baseline with which she could compare any experimental result to. Estimating her beige mana coverage at ...
2021-06-02 05:46:41 +0000 UTC
View Post
Being in the color world for long enough, beige and grey started to collect on James again. This time, though, whenever that happened, she would scratch at the colors until they went away. She could think clearly enough to know that she should do that. Or perhaps she maintained enough clear headedness on that particular thought since it was the last thing she tried before she seemingly went under again.
She would have probably stayed in that weird limbo state if she weren’t...
2021-06-02 05:43:14 +0000 UTC
View Post
Prof hadn’t enjoyed himself like he had in the Tutorial for a long time. Years maybe. And he felt a little guilty about it. After all, he had started it all with James. And she had seemingly disappeared. He had tried asking around about her after knocking on her apartment door and receiving no reply for two days in a row. But nobody knew where she was if they had ever even registered that she existed. It seemed that James’s ultimate goal of being known by practically no one w...
2021-06-02 05:41:42 +0000 UTC
View Post
There were colors surrounding her, moving, and playing around her. What James currently was, she couldn’t really say, since, looking down, she couldn’t spot her body. Weirdly enough, this didn’t scare her. Who really cared?
Reaching out with an invisible limb, she tried to touch one of the colors, but she didn’t feel a thing. There was neither resistance, nor sparks from the pink color she seamlessly passed through. There was some sort of reaction though, a...
2021-06-02 05:40:20 +0000 UTC
View Post
The clearing wasn’t much of a clearing anymore. As the System-enhanced humans encroached on the forest it increasingly started to resemble a temporary town. Only a temporary town because all the work looked suspect and perhaps even ugly, as none of the builders had any sort of true building inclination. Accordingly, the clearing space had also grown as the woods around it were cut down. This also served to give the Tutorial group space to see the goblins if they were attacked.<...
2021-06-02 05:37:19 +0000 UTC
View Post
She didn’t turn around in her sprint the whole time she held it, slowly feeling as the ground got back to its normal, largely flat, shape under her feet. Doubling over about a minute later, she turned around and looked back. The cottage was a surprisingly long ways out, her sprint had evidently been a lot faster than she thought. It was probably all of her new points in agility that she hadn’t noticed affecting her until now. It was like what Christian had said that first day...
2021-06-02 05:36:03 +0000 UTC
View Post
James was enjoying herself. Hiccup. Properly enjoying herself. With things other people would enjoy too, so she wasn’t even being weird. Turns out old wine bottles had high alcohol contents. And they were pretty tasty. So, James was enjoying herself in this dungeon she found.
It had taken her a while to get drunk though, but James had proven herself determined. It was probably a byproduct of her high vitality stat, so really, she could call this System experimentation.
<...
2021-06-02 05:34:21 +0000 UTC
View Post
Apparently, the door was unlocked, and fairly easily dislodged, as it opened with her knocking motion. Hesitantly stepping into the dusty environment, James coughed a little and waived her hand in front of her face. With the sunlight streaks visible in the particle-filled air, she examined the living room she found herself in.
The three-seater couch was a soft cream color, facing the left wall where a nice, opulent fireplace resided underneath a large flat screen TV. There ...
2021-06-02 05:32:08 +0000 UTC
View Post
Two days later, James was looking a lot better. Finally over that critical 90% of health points, she was also finally feeling better. Her whole-body bruise was replaced with a healthy, natural glow. It also helped that it didn’t hurt to breathe anymore.
Despite not being totally fine, she had enjoyed her two-day break. With her new fire starter and dagger, she had finally been able to enjoy cooked fish. Compared to the nutria, it was miles better. The fish didn’t really...
2021-06-02 05:30:33 +0000 UTC
View Post
54 minutes and 7 seconds later, James reappeared outside the dungeon’s cave. And it was like breathing in fresh air for the first time. She hadn’t realized how stifling the dungeon’s green mana was to her Mana Sense. While it still lingered around her, the mana didn’t feel as condense as it did there. Finally, she could sense the world again.
Remembering her lessons from the dungeon, James tried to observe the world around her for threats. Despite feeling s...
2021-06-02 05:28:56 +0000 UTC
View Post
For all that the fight took less than a minute, James looked worse for wear. Her left palm was covered in blisters, her left arm was cut, her right wrist was twice its normal size, and it hurt to breathe. Not to mention that her whole body just looked like one big bruise. Even her eyes were swelling up as if she had gotten a black eye. And it hurt.
James was learning that ignoring pain during a thirty second fight, with the adrenaline pumping through you, wasn’t ...
2021-06-02 05:27:33 +0000 UTC
View Post
James stared at the stairs leading downwards, and, with a big sigh, began to descend. Her breakfast had been the leftovers from the night before, and they tasted all the worse for it. Apparently, the appeal of having meat disappeared after a day if it was nutria. Bringing up her stats, she was satisfied that everything was topped off.
Name
Class
James King
Pure Castor (7)
Race
Human, sub-omega ...
2021-06-02 05:25:49 +0000 UTC
View Post
