I didn't know what mana was at first.
I just knew something was there.
As a newborn, my body was useless. Limbs flailed without coordination, my neck refused to support my head, and my voice betrayed me every time I tried to focus, turning thought into crying.
But my mind worked.
Better than it ever had on Earth.
In the quiet moments, when my parents slept, when the house settled, when even the wind outside felt still—I focused inward.
And I felt it.
A warmth, deep inside my lower abdomen.
It wasn't pain. It wasn't pressure.
It was space.
Something invisible, yet undeniably present. When I concentrated, the space responded. It pulsed faintly, like a second heart that hadn't learned its rhythm yet.
Instinct told me this was important.
So I experimented.
At first, I did nothing but observe. I let the warmth expand naturally, ebbing and flowing with my breathing. Slowly, it began to fill on its own, as if drinking from the world around me.
Mana.
though I didn't have a name for it yet.
Then I made my first mistake.
I tried to pull more.
The result was immediate and unpleasant. My head throbbed, my body shuddered, and a foul, heavy sensation mixed into the warmth, like mud stirred into clear water.
I stopped.
That was when I realized something crucial.
Not all of it was the same.
Some of the energy felt clean. Light. Sharp.
Other parts felt dull, contaminated, wrong.
So I changed my approach.
Instead of letting everything flow in freely, I filtered it.
Painstakingly.
I rejected the murky energy, focusing only on the clearest strands—the purest mana I could sense. It was slow. Infuriatingly slow. Like trying to drink rain one drop at a time.
But the result was undeniable.
The mana inside me felt denser. Heavier. More real.
I compressed it.
Again. And again.
Even as a baby, I understood compression. My past life had been filled with control—breath control, muscle control, pressure control. This was no different, only internal.
Mana didn't resist.
It yielded.
The more I condensed it, the stronger it felt. And strangely enough, the more space it seemed to create for itself.
That discovery alone would've been enough.
But I didn't stop there.
When my body allowed it—during rare moments of alertness—I crawled.
Slowly. Quietly.
I fell often. Hit my head more times than I'd like to admit. But eventually, I learned how to move without making noise.
That's how I reached the books.
I couldn't read at first. My eyes were weak, my focus terrible. But letters became shapes. Shapes became patterns. Patterns became meaning.
While my parents slept, I studied.
History. Medicine. Natural philosophy. Magic theory.
That's when the pieces finally came together.
Mana was universal.
Everyone was born with it—along with something called mana capacity. A metaphysical container tied directly to physical development.
For men, it formed in the lower abdomen.
For women, higher—around the chest.
Mana capacity grew as the body did. Once physical development finished, the container stopped expanding.
That terrified me.
But my experiments continued.
One night, I pushed myself too far.
I condensed my mana until my body shook, then forced it outward—circulating it clumsily until there was almost nothing left inside me.
I nearly blacked out.
But when I recovered…
The container felt bigger.
Not refilled—expanded.
The mana regenerated naturally, just as the books described.
But the space it filled had increased.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
I tried again.
And again.
Each time, after exhausting nearly all my mana, my capacity grew, slowly, subtly, but undeniably.
The conclusion hit me like lightning.
This only worked because I was a baby.
Most people didn't even feel mana until adolescence. Those who learned to manipulate it did so between twelve and twenty, long after their growth had stabilized.
And the average person?
They never learned at all.
By the time warriors trained their mana pathways or mages refined their circles, their containers were already fixed.
They were strengthening what existed.
I was still building it.
Mana pathways came next.
I discovered them by accident—thin channels that responded when I pushed mana through my limbs. When used, they strengthened. When ignored, they faded.
Warriors relied on them to enhance their bodies.
Mages didn't use them at all.
Instead, they cast magic circles—directly consuming mana. A privilege reserved for certain bloodlines.
Skills, too, existed.
Inherited. Racial. Awakened through obsession or desperation.
And sometimes—rarely—
Random.
As I lay in my crib, pretending to sleep, my breathing steady and my face innocent, I felt the dense, pure mana swirling quietly inside me.
I wasn't strong.
Not yet.
But I was doing something no one else could.
I was rewriting my foundation.
And this time-
My body wouldn't betray me.