Restart Again: Volume 1 by Adam Scott (pocket ebook reader TXT) 📕

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4. LESSONS OF THE PAST

My cell was damp. It had been damp since the ceiling started to drip after I first arrived five days ago. Or, at least, what I assumed was five days. There were no windows in the prison; five sides of my small box were made up of grey cobbled stone, and the sixth was wrought iron bars. Furnishing was sparse, consisting of only a small cot and a raised seat with a hole meant to be some sort of toilet. I had been pleased to find that this world had at least some concept of sanitation: The “toilet” hole traveled down into the darkness, where I could hear constantly running water, most likely a sewer.

Surprisingly, I had taken quite well to prison life. I received two meals a day, comprised of a stale chunk of bread, a thin stew of questionable makeup, and a cup of water. The guard who delivered my food was the only human contact I had throughout my stay so far; The three cells I could see looking through the bars were empty, and I never noticed any patrols walking by. The hallway outside was lit by torches ensconced between each cell, which kept the interior of the cells relatively dark.

I performed body weight exercises and calisthenics at least three times a day. With the meals lacking any sort of real nutrition, physical atrophy was a real concern. Otherwise, most of my time was spent in meditation. I had a lot of information to sort through and a lot of emotions to deal with. I was still furious with Melrose and Sherman, but as time passed, I became more disappointed with myself. I should know better by now. Even after she betrayed me, I still had some sort of unconscious trust in her. Another lesson learned. I knew that making internal peace, even one based mostly on anger and resentment, was important to making it through a period of isolation like this. A lesson already learned...fortunately, I suppose. 

Being completely unsupervised between meals left me time for more interesting trains of thought. I found it was a simple enough task to draw my sword from the ether around me. The mana draw was more pronounced as my scabbard was much farther away than usual, but I had been working on expanding my mana pool for decades, so it was a non-issue. Apparently, this isn’t a prison usually used for magically inclined inmates. That might prove useful, should I find the need to...leave unannounced.

Some of the things Melrose said during our second encounter had also piqued my interest, and I was finally ready to begin looking into them in earnest. “Without incantation, without a catalyst? What sort of magic is that?” The memory was crystal clear in my mind. She had obviously been taken by surprise, which told me that magic was not a common occurrence among the general population of this world. Incantations and catalysts...seems like a typical ‘wand and chant’ method of spellcasting. I had been working on a theory for the true nature of mana in my previous life, but now I felt like I had all the pieces to prove it. I shuddered momentarily. Thinking about living multiple lives still feels so...unnatural. And that transition between them, that void. It’s…I let the thought die, choosing not to remember.

I had always believed that magic, in the classical sense, was possible. As far back as my first life in 21st century New York, it was a thought I often pondered. A power, lying dormant within humanity, just waiting for someone to crack the code of how to access it; It was a nice dream to get me through the listlessness of my mundane life. However, that dream started to become a reality when I found myself in a new world.

On first glance, one could be forgiven for thinking that the world of Alderea was the same as my own, with nothing particularly magical to be seen. However, when I finally began to train in sword combat with a knight passing through our town, I realized there were more subtle powers at play. Any fighter worth his salt knew about “Combat Enhancement Techniques”, which, through intense focus and grueling practice, allowed the combatant to heighten their battle prowess in a multitude of ways. For the week that I practiced with the knight, I was only able to begin to use the most basic enhancement he knew, “Lesser Agility”.

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“Alright, kid, like we practiced. Wide stance. Deep breaths. Picture a—”

“Yeah, Brusch, I know. Picture a river flowing through me.” I cut the knight off, frustrated. “You keep saying that, but it doesn’t get me any closer to actually understanding what that means.” I was standing with my eyes closed, holding a dull sparring sword out in front of me in both hands. My body ached in multiple places from where Brusch had smacked me with a similarly blunted blade.

The knight sighed with an almost audible eye roll. “I told ya, kid. Ya got the energy inside ya, but ya don’t know how to get it out.” I felt a finger poke me roughly in the middle of my spine. He traced it up my back, across my shoulder, and down my arm to my sword hand. “Ya don’t move the energy by yourself. Just let it go. If ya stop holding it in so hard, it’ll flow all on its own.” He paused for a moment. “Once ya know what it feels like, you’ll understand what I mean.”

“That’s great, except to know what it feels like I would’ve had to have done it already! And I can’t do it if I don’t know what you mean!” I opened my eyes and turned to glare at him. He was pudgy for a knight, barely fitting into the rough chainmail and boiled leather he wore. He was bald, with small sunken eyes and a long wispy moustache that seemed