The thought of a mana disorder was enough to send Ulric into def-con 4. He had to get this magic shit under control and he had to do it sooner rather than later. The feverish effects hadn't seemed to impact his health or stamina yet, at least not so he'd seen last he'd checked. Paranoia given free reign he immediately called up the magical window into his being.

  "FUCK!" he yelled.

  [Status]

  There it was, mana sickness, with a whole litany of symptoms matching his discomforts. He had no idea when it had set in, exactly, or what specifically it represented, other than nothing good, as it was, as a percentage of his overall numeric values putting a pretty big dent in his overall function. Most importantly he had no idea how he could remedy it. He had a suspicion that his body was somehow completely na?ve to mana, his having been literally born yesterday. The only saving grace was that his core, whatever it was exactly, a magic organ maybe, was full and the effect of its saturation was bolstering him in opposition to the mana sickness.

  “The great magic bullshit giveth and the great magic bullshit taketh away.” Ulric snarked to nobody, staring at the hateful projection of Vardan crazy.

  Dismissing the window Ulric's brain started chewing apart the problem and arranging the pieces. The Watcher had said he was effectively operating an adult body with all that came with it including the spooky wizardry end of things. The Watcher had further suggested that there were consequences to this. Apparently one such was that as he approached some kind of saturation point his body became increasingly unstable. He wasn't currently experiencing anything too debilitating, but the lack of anything approaching restful sleep, food, which had resulted in a loss of body weight, and the manasickness were stacking up to have dire consequence for his stamina.

  He'd pushed hard yesterday, knowing that absent food he'd only be able to operate at full strength for a limited amount of time. It had been a good play, but now he was concerned that he'd missed something crucial in dealing with the new physiology of this body and its innately magical core. If this mana sickness progressed, he might be rendered immobile or unconscious and that would spell death if he had no way to obtain food or get to his water supply.

  "Okay, okay, okay." he chanted "Get your shit together and get things done."

  "First, drink as much water as you can hold and gather firewood from those splinters. A bunch of firewood, just in case. Second, investigate roots and soil for worms or edible bugs, this is not the time to be a bitch about food. Third, gather samples of the non-poisonous plants, from flower to root, and start testing whether they can be eaten. Might try cooking them first, didn't that denature most toxins? Shit I can't remember anymore, that documentary was eight years ago. Don’t eat mushrooms." Ulric was reciting whatever he could to cling to calm.

  Knowing that you're at the edge of panic and doing something about it are two different things. Ulric was getting adrenaline spikes that gave him the jitters and aggravated the waves of hot-cold cycles. He left the shelter and set to getting water. Hunger was there for real now but lost some of its edge as he drank. Ironically, he had so little fat that there was no way he could sustain himself without caloric intake. Guess having a trim physique had some unanticipated downsides.

  "Focus." he warned himself, trying to avoid mental tangents. A bad habit that had followed him from his previous life. Same soul, different body. "Don't lose your priorities in the noise." he finished centering his mind and gathered a heaping stack of firewood.

  He'd lost a fair amount of the piss and vinegar that he'd had the day before. Still strong, still in great shape but there was an edge to things that hadn't been there yesterday, just ever so much more cost to the motions. Ulric knew that this was probably less about the mana sickness and more about the lack of sleep. You can't hike like that without eating. He'd almost certainly burned the equivalent of two days resting caloric intake and he'd done it while also building a shelter and existing in a heightened level of nerves due to the strange environment.

  Wood gathering done he grabbed his spear and returned to the base of the roots to start digging around for whatever might be alive in the dirt. Stone had been broken by the roots which penetrated an unknown distance into the ground below. He suspected that they weren't as deep as might be suspected by drawing parallels to Earth trees like oaks. The taproot, while undoubtedly gargantuan, was probably being bolstered by the degree of load sharing and windbreaking made possible by the interlocked upper branches. If he had to bet, he'd eat dirt if a lone tree from the middle of this old growth wouldn't have fallen over under gentle wind. It was simply too tall, a kilometer and more with all those branches reaching out another half kilometer all around, made a hell of a top-heavy object and no matter how strong the trunk itself was the ground would never hold up to that kind of torque, see the terrestrial havoc around his water hole for evidence.

  The roots had sheared and twisted during the fall creating spirals in the fibers that indicated extraordinary tensile strength.

  "Damn near metallic stress strain" he mumbled, investigating the roots. A glinting light caught his attention and he navigated to a ground level break where there appeared to be a small pool of yellow-orange glass. Gentle prodding with his spear gave a dull clink like a hard polymer or soft glass. Attempts to scratch the surface yielded little other than light surface traces confirming the hardness was similar to a quartz or silicate glass.

  "So…" he said. "Probably a resin of some kind, given its location in these roots. No sign of heat shocking or char or any kind of high heat source so not a melted stone. Clarity similar to amber, but harder."

  It was a theoretically sound solution to gargantuan tree physiology problems. Any tree this massive would need a source of interior support and a viscous, incompressible sap could allow transport of nutrients which mineralized on contact with air. Like pine sap on steroids. Providing both transport and structural function, he nodded his head, it checked out with what some buildings did using hydraulics.

  This was a gold mine. Worth deviating from his planned tasks. Ulric grabbed a large rock and struck the meter round bubble of maybe glass-resin near an edge, trying to start a fault. A few hard strikes and a stress fracture shot across the surface. Placing his spear tip along the crack Ulric used his hammer stone to drive the end of the spear down into the material causing the crack to deepen into a fault all the way through. From there it was a matter of using the spear to lever the piece away from the rest of the bubble. Both worrying and enlightening, his stone spearhead chipped several times as he worked it against the hard resin material.

  Ulric carefully ran a finger nail across the edge and was rewarded with a shaving of finger nail that revealed what he'd been hoping for: exquisite sharpness. Now if only he could generate a thin, shapable piece to use as a blade or lens, he'd be in business.

  A few experimental taps along the edge with wedge shaped rocks and his spear tip yielded mostly oddly shaped chunks that weren't useful. However, Ulric thought he was seeing a pattern in the fragments and changed the angle of his wedge, then struck once with force. A loud *Clink* resounded with surprising acoustic clarity and a two centimeter thick nearly flat piece fell on its side from his wedge.

  "Wunderbar" Ulric whispered. It had been his mother's mothers' tongue and he'd learned from her until her passing, taking childish pleasure in the joy it gave the old hell cat that one of her brood would carry on the language after she was gone.

  An edge check revealed that the twenty centimeter piece held singular sharpness. A few more careful sets and strikes had another two of the longer pieces and four or five smaller ones where they'd broken roughly in half. But each was flat and each was a razor where he fined down their edges.

  Handling those pieces barehanded was a fool’s game and Ulric stacked the glass-resin shards and left to retrieve some leaves and vines so he could tie a package for transport. Wrapping the shards like presents he tied the leaves shut gently and carried them back to his shelter, refreshing the fire as he entered. This next part might take some high heat he decided, and pulled a lit stick out of the fire to start a new fire outside.

  A few minutes saw a rather high flame from a rough pyramid of stacked sticks. As the fire got well and truly caught, he retrieved the large piece of resin and carried it back to the fire place. A wave of fresh chills had him squatting close to the flame but only for a minute. Time was not a friend.

  Small pieces of resin placed into the direct heat of the coals soon deformed and then combusted, releasing a bright yellow white flame that was, thankfully, smokeless, although it sputtered sparks of molten material that burned hot wherever they splattered. Extreme fire hazards inside any shelter he constructed, Ulric labeled the stuff in his head.

  A few similarly sized pieces placed near the edge of the fire likewise deformed but did not combust, instead flattening along the ground under their weight, and, eventually liquifying, releasing an acrid black smoke that he decided smelled like pine tar and acetone. A stick rolled in this liquid and removed from the flame gently smoked under the heat. Then, under an intense grey-eyed stare, the resin did what Ulric had been fervently praying to the Watcher's perfect tits it would do and re-hardened around the stick. This globule held the properties of the original chunk, similar color and hardness except for the cloudy smoke inclusions inside.

  Ulric immediately disassembled his stone spear and replaced the crudely knapped head with one of the long glass-resin pieces. It fit better inside the partial split notch thanks to its smoothness and a light heat to soften it. Rapidly pressing the sides together before the resin cooled allowed it to deform slightly adhering the two sides. A coat of melted resin sealed it and he then wrapped the spearhead with vines to secure it.

  Some light work with his old spear head and gentle heats had the new spear tip shaped and cutting a humming spin through the air. It would cut, as he proved by easily notching a piece of firewood. It probably wouldn't survive a strike against it's flat though, the resin was every bit as brittle as glass. But a stab would penetrate deeply and it made him feel slightly better about facing the source of yesterday's bestial roar. Nothing wanted a thirty centimeter long piece of razor in its organs, no matter how loud they were.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Similar work at smaller scale produced a small variety of shaped knife blades, including a hook knife and long bladed dirk. Ulric forgot for a time about his situation, obsessed with this approximation of glass blowing, the work of hands and mind on a concrete task absorbing him fully. About three hours after finding the miracle material saw Ulric holding a set of tools that would open up a host of applications in wood working, hunting, and general use.

  Using his old spear tip as a hand shovel, Ulric spent another hour and a half digging around in the soil looking for edible insects. He was "rewarded" with an earthworm the size of his wrist and around three quarters of a meter long. It released a sulfurous smell when attacked and he committed to cooking the ever loving shit out of it before choking it down. But it was food, the first he'd found in over a day.

  The worm was exactly as disgusting as it smelled. Even after cooking in the coals of his fire, it was like chewing spoiled egg flavored rubber that extruded slime when bitten into. The taste-texture combination nearly made Ulric vomit three different times, resulting in the meal taking even longer than it needed to. About a month of subjective gastric suffering later, Ulric was finished and washing the loathsome taste out with more water. It left only begrudgingly. A short foray to empty his bladder left him feeling slightly more optimistic about things. Progress. With that in mind he returned to the crude shelter.

  Sunlight had grown substantially since he'd left his teepee and Ulric looked up to see, for the very first time of his life, the twin suns of this, his new and original world. Both were smaller in the sky than Sol, the star of the only world he'd known for forty years, the two orbs rose in tandem. One was clearly larger, nearly the size of Sol but reddish in color. The smaller of the pair had an intense blue white light and was currently in front of its larger partner.

  "Binary star system?" Ulric was stunned.

  Binaries were notoriously difficult to form stable planetary orbits, they mostly tidally shredded their planets or blasted them with radiation. Unless these two were so damned far away that the planet was able to orbit their center of mass safely, well outside the reach of such tidal forces and destructive solar wind. The smaller one might be some sort of white dwarf, maybe being kept alive by the heat and gravitational pressure of its giant partner. A stable compression expansion cycle might lengthen the life of the dwarf and prevent cooling but Ulric wasn't well versed in stellar processes, especially not in the kind of subtle fringe case he was probably observing here.

  In any case, the pair was glorious to his eyes, hanging in that cloudless blue sky. Their heat washed down over him, dispelling some of the fever chills. Which of course led to sweat starting to bead at his scalp.

  Whatever manasickness nonsense, you can’t take this from me the reforged man declared to himself refusing to lose this moment. He watched with hands sunvisoring the gradual climb of the stars through this glade window. A few whispy trails of cloud streaked cirrus at high altitude drifted, but nothing that might indicate a change from the peaceful weather. He returned to the teepee, feeling better.

  Ulric had been up and working for most of the morning and, unlike the day before, he could feel the exertion in his limbs. But. He'd gotten something to eat and he'd met two of his three goals for the day, with a bonus achievement which had substantially upgraded the range of his operations. Progress settled the panic he'd felt growing earlier and Ulric decided now was the time to retire to his shelter and start trying to figure out what the fuck this magic was all about. His manic avoidance of thinking about his body maybe eating itself due to strange magical shenanigans had to end, at some point.

  Inside the warmth of his shelter Ulric decided that there wasn't going to be any systematic way to figure out how a totally unknown entity like magic worked. He was a child handed a calculus book and told it could let him build a rocket ship, if he could only figure out how.

  First, it was important to throw away preconceptions. Nothing was true. Everything was possible. Only that which produced no effect at all was invalid. A bell tone, a flash of light, a spiritual familiar, bodily transformation, a puff of smoke, anything could indicate progress towards mastery and he wouldn't know what form it would take until he tried.

  Stacking wood on the fire to drive off another godsdamned wave of chills, Ulric then sat cross legged on his bed, closed his eyes, and tried to empty his mind of all thought. Minutes passed slowly, as he concentrated on nothing. The goal, for now, was simple. Feel the core. Try to examine this new part of himself. Attempt to detect any force or energy that moved or flowed from it. Clear the errata and hum of his brain so that he could perceive something he'd never felt before. Don't think about the Watcher's perfect tits. Do not think about the Watcher's perfect tits. Do…Not…Think…

  "Fuck." he sighed aloud. He was the biological equivalent of peak adult again, in an extremely healthy body, and, fever be damned, it had been three years since he'd been laid. He was now at half-mast, and his concentration was ruined. Ok. So, Ulric was not exactly a monk. Why did books and movies make it all seem easy? You just sit down and do some magic, no big deal. At no point did getting a rubbery one fuck up Gandalf’s business. Maybe it was because the Tolkien-wizard was so old.

  "Fuck." Ulric repeated. He was going in circles. Maybe he needed to put his hands to work to find focus. He'd never really been the sit and do-nothing type. Ulric's mind relaxed when he had something to tinker with, some kind of task to occupy him. The only time he'd really done mostly nothing was in the hour or so before sleep when he drank whisky and sat in his chair before a fireplace, trying to drown existential dread of the following sunrise.

  So, he gathered up the near finished leaf kilt and began running vine through leaves. He'd completed one full turn around his waist but decided that wasn't enough protection. If he ever ran into thorns or briars, he'd need a lot more to comfortably pass through without shredding the skin of his legs. Then he set about making another pass, the repetitive motion and gentle dance of flame granting him what stillness hadn't, peace of mind. In that sort of tired fugue, no thoughts ran. There was no need, his task was before him, it required only motion. The flicker, rise, and fall of fire made its own music in accompaniment. Time fell away and it wasn't until halfway through a third loop of leaves, when a rather intense hot spell caused him to sweat so much it stung Ulric's eyes to blinking, that he at last glanced up from his work.

  No magic. Progress with things. A better frame of mind. But no magic. And he was starting to really feel like shit.

  Ulric, now so close to the end of his project deliberately set himself to finishing the kilt by stringing the last of the leaves and then loosely wrapping the remaining three meters of this vine around the vines holding the leaves, to make a loose vine belt from which the covering leaves hung. If he found any palm type fronds it would be possible to attempt a basket weave to make containers or reinforce this crude garment. As of now though, this was as good as it would get.

  Taking the kilt-skirt to the rock pool, Ulric put it over his head, threaded his shoulders through and then let the skirt settle on his hips, just as he'd measured. A tied in set of double loops and a quick release knot saw the skirt closed and secured to fit using an additional run of vine around his waist that didn't have leaves running on it as a belt. Thinking about his set of knives Ulric fashioned a coiled vine sheathe for one of his long bladed glassresin knives and tied it to the belt.

  *PING*

  "What?!" Ulric looked around and saw nothing, at the same time he’d cried aloud by reflex.

  He wasn't imagining it, there had been a clear bell-like chime. It'd had an echoey quality like it'd been ringing in or near his head. Hold the empty skull jokes, please. This new event bore investigation. He was in the middle of a forest of untold age, had been moving through tens of kilometers of it with no sign of large life, other than the unknown terror roar, and hadn't detected even the faintest sign of sapience. Looking around his shelter, he didn't see anything that might have fallen over or made contact that could have produced the noise.

  Absent any source for the sound Ulric decided that it was some sort of auditory hallucination and he was perhaps sliding into a different phase of the mana sickness to which he'd yet to find a solution. Only one way to know for sure.

  “Status”, he whispered, concentrating on his personal essence. He couldn’t help but feel a little moronic, saying it out loud.

  [Status]

  Okay, Ulric thought as he examined the status, there's some new stuff. The mana sickness was still inflicting significant negative penalties, but he was slightly better off with food. Probably the reason why he'd been feeling so run down earlier but was better now, marginally. His core was still saturated was still taking the edge off the negative status effect of the manasickness, an uptick that had seemingly capped out the boon to his system. As to the tone he'd heard, it probably had to do with this new title.

  A focus on that innocuous seeming text pulled its Akashic link to Varda forth, presented it before his consciousness in the only form of magic that Ulric had managed so far to bring to fruition.

  He had gained enough proficiency in this clime to have gained a degree of familiarity with this fey place. Or so it would seem. The status indicated that this had tangibly improved his ability to move in this environment, his insight into how to use its resources.

  That sort of made sense. His hands felt better able to follow his intent and he fanned his fingers in sequence, watching the deft play of tendon and muscle. Did he cause the change in status or did the change in status cause a change in him?

  "Fascinating…" he whispered.

  The status truly was a link to the Akashic record, perhaps a two-way connection to all that was known. A real time universe memory, which snapshotted and could even communicate with the beings with which it interacted. This live update and notification were evidence that the connection was indeed going back and forth. His actions weren't just being recorded; the record was also reflecting back on him through the status. It was powerful and creepy. Was this how those loony toon Christians felt, with their imagined god peeking through the window curtains at every move they made? He very decidedly was not a fan of the idea. Still worse, he’d met a cosmic voyeur that, even as he stood here, saw everything he did and, perhaps, through the Akashic connection, thought.

  Ulric shook himself as if goosed to derail that train before it took him to heeby-jeebyville.

  Instead, he concentrated on the fact that whatever this magic consisted of, it respected his internal language conventions, it read like pure common English. The Watcher had indicated that there was a linguistic aspect to this connection. Some kind of species language? Was he actually thinking in a language other than post Collapse English? Had the tuning enacted some sort of subtle cognitive shift in which his language symbology had been translated into this world's native human tongue?

  Questions. Questions that only led to more questions. This entire world was a massive puzzle and Ulric couldn't be more thrilled about it. If not for the spookiness associated with an unknown organ which might as well be a closet particle accelerator for all he could figure out how it worked, and that also might be trying to murder him for reasons unknown.

  Check that, he knew way more about how a particle accelerator worked than this black box of a core. It's ability to inflict some kind of status effect on him was concerning as was the seeming inability for him to tap into a natural ability to utilize the mana it housed. The Watcher had made it seem like using mana was a completely intuitive process. Perhaps this was a side-effect of his prior life's mental conditioning. Magic had always been an impossibility. Like flying. Why would his brain have a natural inclination to do something it had never been able to do before? It was entirely possible that he was subconsciously restricting himself from an expectation that nothing would happen.

  Maybe it's kind of like that galaxy far, far away. You either did magic or you did not. There was no attempt to direct the mana, you shaped reality to your will through a conscious effort that was without doubt. Definitely an angle he hadn't considered before. His problem could boil down to a simple one of attitude.

  That thought made him snort a brief chuckle, his sense of sardonic mirth uncontainable. The power of positive thinking would be the key. Wouldn't that just be rich?

  Ulric decided he'd had enough sitting inside his teepee. He'd been there for several hours between the abortive meditation, the work on his bomber new leaf kilt, and his examination of the problem of magic. Setting a few larger sticks in the fire to build up coals, and grabbing his spear, Ulric decided to head down to the rock pool for some water and then try to find a plant leaf that could be used for basket weaving.

  Spear in hand, Ulric exited the teepee and thought about his magic problem while he walked. His core was saturated. His system was full of excess magical energy and responding negatively to it, but also positively. The pseudo-fever had intensified proportionally to the mana saturation and he was experiencing a substantial loss of bodily integrity, enough that the status reflected it. So, this wasn't just in his head, a stress induced malaise, he was actually experiencing feedback from the operation of his own body. Normal biological systems didn't operate this way. Nothing evolved to produce a secretion which killed itself for no reason. Unlikely that creatures born with a core would constantly be sickened by its function. He was probably doing something wrong. Maybe the people and creatures of this world naturally exuded mana, sort of valved it off passively. Maybe he didn't because his core was producing a higher-than-normal amount thanks to Watcher fuckery dialing it up to eleven. Maybe his cells had a mana acclimation period and this was a normal response to first exposure. Maybe he was just full of shit and trying to put a good face on it.

  Having reached the rock pool Ulric drank deeply, the cold water a relief from the heat under his skin. Deciding he'd sweated enough to justify some hygiene, Ulric undid the knotted vine belt, glassresin knife securely thereon strapped, and stripped off his kilt.

  Some handfuls of water wetted his body and he went over to the rocks to find a relatively smooth stone with which to scrub himself, in the way of the Romans. His skin was puckered with gooseflesh, that water friggin cold! He found a useable stone relatively quickly and went back to his pool, wetted his body again, and used his improvised strigil to scrape the filth from his skin, but away from the pool, to prevent contaminating it with his filth.

  When he was satisfied that he was clean enough, and also tired of that steady wind freezing his nipples off, Ulric got his kit on and saw his way to the sunlit clearing. Here was what you thought of when you thought of a magical forest. Just a color orgasm. Blues, greens, eight shades of yellow, a shade of crimson redder than long desertified Wyoming's electoral ballots, this kilometer long break in the otherwise endless dim forest was like a gem encrusted pillar. The passing of the giant had made a way for the young children of the wood to express themselves in floral joy.

  He'd tested some forty varieties of plants for skin toxicity and allergy. Unfortunately, Ulric had not gotten around to trying for ingestion, he'd been distracted by the glassresin. He needed food, hunger was setting in with insistent pangs, despite the worm. Gods he did not look forward to digging up another one of those, but he would, if nothing else could be found.

  It was relatively late in the day by this point, the twin suns having dipped below the dense canopy and cast a sort of vivid yellow-orange ambiance on the world. Ah. The golden hour. Aptly named, he thought.

  Ulric needed a basket. It was too late in the day to risk a digestive fiasco inside his shelter before bed. The thought of shitting himself inside his shelter in the middle of the night, or scrambling around with shards of broken roots, rocks, and what have you in the dark was not a pleasant one. So best to occupy himself with a low-calorie project like trying to remember his blind date from a decade ago where they'd gone to a basket weaving seminar. It had been fun, from what he recalled. The whole day really. Weaving. Dinner. Sex. Cuddling. Sex again. And waking to find a beautifully handwritten note thanking him for a marvelous evening followed by a notification that she'd been married and his attention had inspired her to try and make it work. Fuck. He'd made himself sad.

  Dying and being reforged had solved many of Ulric's problems. It had not, unfortunately, solved the one where he'd made himself miserable and had a tendency to let his mind eat itself over past events. Enough, he told himself firmly. New life, new possibility. This world had magic. It was magic, in some way. He had magic too, and, obviously, he had to have some way to use it. He would not allow himself to be consumed by a past that he could not change and did not, in any way beyond identifying mistakes not to be repeated, matter. He had been granted what so many people longed for at their death beds. A second chance. His would not be wasted.

  He promised.