I felt my mana crashing, knowing all too well that if I didn’t sit or lie down before I passed out, I would wake up uncomfortable. I didn’t care. I pushed past my need for comfort and even my need to eat, breathe, exist. Right as I felt the edge of unconsciousness start to surge, the mana sparked.

  I felt it bleed through my veins, and my cells drank it greedily, but it was too much, too fast, and I blacked out all the same.

  I came to a good while later, still hurting as expected from the fall. But I had felt it. The collar had triggered before I passed out this time.

  I began pacing again.

  It took several attempts, each missing my target, but after what could have been days as easily as weeks, I dialed it in. I could pace just fast enough, long enough, to trigger the spark, but still remain conscious.

  After I could trigger it, I focused on following it back.

  It still wasn’t enough. I was still too weak by the time I followed the spark back to the collar and would still pass out. I was determined, though.

  As time went on, I stopped focusing on following the spark back into the collar, and instead focused on what triggered the collar in the first place.

  My first clue was how the tendrils filled my body. It took several forced repetitions of exhausting myself to the point of the trigger and immediately stopping, so I watched to see that it was the same path every time.

  This did make some sense, as I had the feeling that the collar was just feeding energy into a natural process and not actually restoring me. Each time I pushed myself to the brink, I could feel the tendrils of mana snaking through my body with a familiar pattern. It was as if they were tracing lines of energy that I had never been aware of before. As I focused my mind on these pathways, I began to sense a flow that seemed to be my own.

  The collar must have been feeding the healing mana into something akin to a meridian, and then it fed through my existing mana channels. I wasn’t certain why this all made sense, but it did. I could only think that this was either part of Mord’s lessons on cultivation that I couldn’t fully remember in my state or something from The Way of the Void. Regardless, it was a start.

  From that start, I began to focus on what triggered the mana spark. I knew it had to do with the levels of something in my cells. Mana, health, vitality, or something else I didn’t know.

  I started pacing again. This time I watched the levels of, for argument’s sake, I was calling mana in my cells. I watched it drain as I paced. The conservation of some sort of energy instead of food. It was a magic metabolism. I watched as the cells in my leg muscles drained and were quickly refilled with the energy diffusing from everywhere else. I stopped moving and watched the energy rapidly come into equilibrium. Then did what I did best. I tried to mess with it.

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  I focused on keeping the energy from flowing into the legs. It wasn’t impossible, but it felt like I was trying to contain a firehose without getting my shirt wet. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to kink the hose somehow. Really, I needed to prevent my body from using my brain as a refill point.

  The only thing I successfully found was new ways to render myself unconscious.

  I was lying there, after only mildly preventing myself from blacking out, I was thinking how much this was bullshit. I was a magical being, and I had a body that had been built or at least rebuilt by a god, so why was my body so weak, and why was I passing out from mana drain?

  I thought back to what the witch had called me—a half-full primal. Mord had also referred to the Primals as beings above the gods. Mord warned me about not speaking of my aspects, and it made a strange kind of sense. The witch was freaked out by my aspects, calling me a monster. Half? Half of my aspects, so three. Which three though? They would have to be powerful. Vex did mention that one of my aspects was a step higher than death and thus a primal. That was probably Destruction. If I was right about that, it also meant that Creation was a likely candidate. That left four. Aura. Rune. Transformation. Soul. Aura and Rune were powerful how I had used them, but I doubted that the weave and weft of the cosmos relied on either. That left Soul and Transformation. Both had potential. Transformation was the essence of change, and as I thought it, I ruled it out. Yes, transformation was change, but not all change was transformation, just like how not all destruction was death. That left soul. It made sense. I met Vex in what she literally called my Soul. The same seemed accurate from when I met Ink in his world. Creation, Destruction, and Soul. I had one quarter of the concepts that made up the entirety of the universe, and a necklace was making me pass out.

  That was unacceptable. It was the thinking about the collar as a necklace that reminded me of mine. I had not seen it, and I was pretty sure that some fanfare or at least a little gloating would have surrounded the Emir or his cronies looting it.

  It was important. Vex gave it to me. Beyond that, it made efforts to stay with me. It was no mere bit of bling to enhance a Goddess’s arm candy. A what-if formed in my mind. A weak theory, probably caused by the weakened state of my body. I focused on pulling myself in, drawing in all my senses and cutting them off until it was just a thought, and I could only be sure of one thing: that I existed.

  My thoughts and senses flowed like honey. I lost the feeling of weakness in a body that I could no longer feel. I lost the dismay at the sight of a prison I could no longer see, nor smell, nor taste. Even my absent heartbeat faded from my ears. I simply was.

  I now understand Cogito ergo Sum. I was nothing more than a thought, but a thought could be anything, the truth of unlimited potential. I was no longer a ghost piloting a meat mech. It was around the time I was incorrectly figuring out my own Deus ex Machina, where my body was the machine that everything came into focus.

  I must have triggered the collar to keep my body alive, and it must have completed the cycle. I could feel my body, but it was also like playing a video game.

  I told my body to stand up.

  It stood.

  I told it to walk around.

  It started to pace.

  I could move my thoughts around my perspective freely. Switching from first to third person view seamlessly, eventually maintaining both at the same time. I could feel my senses extending out through the bars of my cell. I focused on my atomic sight and saw the bars were magically enhanced steel of some sort. I wanted to learn it, but I had other priorities.