Not as much as wanted, so harvest blood.

It's an odd feeling throughout most of the night-trying to focus everything on something you've only a little experience with. Most the time, the exact flow of mana through my form isn't something I've given a lot of thought about. I simply intend to perform some skill or spell, and my body will do what it has to. The closest I've ever done before was when I managed to create Touch of ****. Now, I had to shut out external sensations-feel the way my roots pulled up more than just scant water and nutrients from the soil, vines breathing in the air. At any moment, my mind is tempted to wander towards something more interesting-like what I'm going to do if I can't acquire sufficient explosives, or potential tactics in the coming battle-grappling with the unknowns, and potential ways to turn them into knowns.

All this has to fade. Just the way energy and matter flows through my poorly-differentiated. With the light of the sun-an epiphany as I manage to produce a Skill, like I had managed a spell before. Looks like not just magic works on this logic.

Meditation (Level1)-Focus absolutely on the bodies state-stay motionless with external senses cut off and emptied mind. Nothing else can be done while meditating. Multiplies health and mana regeneration.

Excellent! Just to test it out, I blow all of my mana on a few mana fruits before activating it-and then waiting a moment to recover. Fortunately, the knowledge of my enhanced senses still worked even in this state-in fact, it might have even helped. A form of biofeedback. And it told be that either this 'multiplying' was either not a particularly big bump, or it wasn't counting something. If I had to take a guess, the stuff I steal out of the environment with my roots and leaves isn't so much 'regenerated' as it is 'taken', so it was only boosting the stuff from my raw stats.

So, I try to see if there might be an alternative. I'd always avoided casting when I was out of mana-hitting that threshold always gave me an uncomfortable feeling, like that of a muscle screaming at it's limit. But just as a muscle could be **** to continued action at risk of injury, I try to see if my mana can be similarly ****-pushing through the feeling, even as it turns into outright pain. But it's not for nothing, getting the results I want: seeing my life plummet while I successfully make another mana-rich bit of produce, vitality used in place of energies. The ratio of life to mana isn't good, but it means a few important things. I didn't have to be remotely conservative about my usage. In fact, it meant not I was basically rewarded for being empty by letting me use both my life and mana regen as resources. Unless I might be getting into a scrap soon, might as well make use of it. Akira is going to have a quite a bounty to harvest when he next sees me.