"Elric, take care!"
Ivy's voice echoed behind him, while Elric walked out of the restaurant in a daze, barely registering her words. His mind was spinning, trying to process what had just happened.
He headed toward the back parking area where he usually left his bicycle, only to stop short when he found the spot empty. Right—he'd come by Uber today. He pulled out his phone to order another ride, finger hovering over the app, then changed his mind and pocketed the device.
A walk might help. His mind was complete chaos right now, thoughts crashing into each other like waves in a storm. Maybe the physical motion would help clear things up.
He started walking, letting his feet carry him without any particular destination in mind.
There's really mana in the real world, he thought, unable to fully grasp the implications.
He touched his chest, feeling his heart beating slowly and rhythmically beneath his palm. But now, with his awareness heightened by what had happened in the hospital, he could sense something else—a faint pulse swirling around his heart, moving in sync with each beat.
Fragmented memories from his clone surfaced in his mind. Knowledge that belonged to Prince Elric, experiences from that other world filtering through their shared consciousness.
Mana.
At least, that's what the inhabitants of that world called it. Every creature there was born with it, this internal energy that flowed through living things like a second circulatory system. It was as fundamental to them as breathing, as natural as thought.
So I got it from my clone, Elric reasoned. It made sense, in a strange way. He could travel to another world and create a clone there—inheriting that clone's power wasn't really surprising when he thought about it. The ability to sense and possibly control mana had transferred back across the connection between worlds.
But why did his mom have it too?
That was the question that wouldn't let him rest.
Did mana already exist in this world, only recently starting to affect people? Or had it started affecting people on a large scale just recently? Maybe it had always been present, dormant, waiting for some unknown trigger.
Or was it just three years ago that it started?
The timing was too coincidental to ignore. The Sleeping Sickness had begun three years ago. His own ability to create a clone had awakened two years ago, roughly a year after the first wave of the illness.
He'd naturally not used the ability until now because he'd never really needed to—what was the point of living two lives when one was complicated enough? But as more time passed, the more anxious he'd become about his mother. Watching her lie there day after day, year after year, with no change, no hope of recovery from conventional medicine.
So in the end, a week ago, he'd used his ability for the first time, hoping desperately for something that could help her. Some miracle, some answer, anything.
And it had turned out to be true—there really was another world, and there really was power there.
In his own body, mana flowed constantly. It traveled from his heart through his entire system like blood, circulating endlessly. He could only sense it when it was activated, when it came into contact with another source of mana like his mother's. Otherwise, he could neither sense it nor control it consciously.
But his mother's mana was different. Where his circulated freely, hers was concentrated entirely in her heart, staying there without moving. Trapped, stagnant, like water in a sealed container.
So it's most likely related to mana, he concluded. The Sleeping Sickness, his mother's coma, the strange electrical sensation when he touched her—all of it connected to this energy that shouldn't exist in his world but somehow did.
According to the knowledge he'd received from his clone—memories that were simultaneously foreign and intimately his own—the people from that other world were capable of freely controlling mana. They knew about it the way people in his world knew about their own muscles and nerves. It was a fundamental part of their education, their culture, their entire existence.
If they understood mana so thoroughly, maybe there was also a cure there for his mom's illness.
The thought struck him. Doctors in his world had been studying the Sleeping Sickness for three years with no progress because they didn't even know what they were looking for. They were trying to treat a spiritual or magical ailment with physical medicine, like trying to cure a broken heart with antibiotics.
But in that other world, where mana was understood and studied, where healers and scholars had spent centuries learning its properties and applications—there might be answers. There might be a way to help his mother's trapped mana begin flowing again, to wake her from whatever strange state she was in.
Elric stopped walking, finding himself at a small park a few blocks from the hospital. The morning sun filtered through the trees, casting dappled shadows across the empty playground equipment.
Against every instinct screaming at him to stay safe, to avoid the trauma of nearly dying again, he made his decision.
He would travel to that other world as quickly as possible.