"Gasp!"
Carmen jolted upright as though ripped from a nightmare, her breath sharp, her chest heaving. The room around her swam with shadows and silence, thick and oppressive. Pain lanced through her skull like a blade made of lightning, forcing her to squint through the haze.
But she could not—would not—wait.
Her gaze swept the room, wide with panic. Where was he? Her father?
She didn't have to look far. Dr. Grey lay collapsed nearby, his figure sprawled unnaturally against the wooden floor, as though struck down by some unseen force.
"Huh... what was that?" Carmen muttered, exhaling in a shiver of confusion.
It had felt like an explosion, though there was no fire, no broken glass or trembling earth. Just silence. And blood.
So much blood.
Her friends were scattered across the floor, unmoving. And then she saw it: the crimson trails painting their faces, dripping from eyes, nostrils, and ears like something torn from a fevered dream. Her stomach turned.
Some, like her father and James… they bled from every orifice.
Carmen reached for her own face, her hand trembling as she touched her cheek. The crusted streaks of dried blood told her she'd not been spared either. With shaking fingers, she wiped it away, fighting the rising tide of horror.
She turned back toward her father, ready to drag herself to his side, when a sound pierced the quiet
"Crunch."
Her body froze.
Something—someone—moved behind her. Slowly, she turned.
At the far end of the room, lying on the ground, was a figure—vaguely human in shape, but completely encased in a glistening, hardened cocoon of blood. It pulsed faintly in the dim light, like a heart beneath flesh.
Then again:
"Crunch. Crack."
The cocoon shuddered. A fracture formed, jagged and thin.
Carmen's breath caught in her throat.
It was waking up.
___________________
(Alexander's POV)
'Why can't I move? Ugh, what is this? It's so sticky. I can't open my eyes!'
Alexander's thoughts echoed through the void. His body strained against the invisible weight binding him, but every twitch was swallowed by the strange, suffocating substance wrapped around him—warm, wet, and sticky, like tar.
Time slipped by.
Eventually, the struggle ceased. He lay still, suspended in silence and shadow.
No one else stirred. Not Carmen. Not a single soul.
His blood, which had cocooned him, had trapped him in a sea of black.
Alexander stopped fighting the dark and let it help his thoughts flow clearly, though this was made very hard by his splitting headache. Alexander tried to remember what happened to him, but his memories just couldn't seem to connect.
'Last night… I was in my dorm. Alone. I remember lying down. And now… this?'
A cold shiver crawled down his spine.
'Was I kidnapped? Drugged? Imprisoned?' The fleeting calm he'd managed to build within himself began to splinter.
'Campus security... they'll come looking for me. But if they were going to help, how did anyone get this far in the first place?'
Whoever had done this wasn't clumsy. This was orchestrated. Precise.
His breath quickened.
'They're after the research,' he thought bitterly. My thesis... they must want what's in it.
But even as the theory formed, it began to unravel. It didn't make sense.
'Why go through all this? Why trap me in this... thing, when they could've just hacked the university servers?'
The logic crumbled beneath him like ash.
'No. This isn't about theft.'
'This is something else entirely.'
Alexander continued to have this inner dialogue with himself for quite a long time until he started to feel something different about his body. In the endless darkness, he felt something that he could consciously control within his own body. It felt like a mixture of water, gas, and electricity.
'Is that my blood? Why can I control it?' thought Alexander.
Out of sheer curiosity, he tried moving as much of his "blood" into his right hand as possible.
His hand started feeling stronger, and he even felt like he could sense the condition of his hand through this strange sensation. After taking a minute to process what had happened to his body, he once again started to panic, because whatever the force was, it was telling him that the tendons in his hands were a mess. But that wasn't the end of the damage that was done. His muscles had turned to pulp, and he realized that there was no blood in his hands. Not very much anyway.
'What is this strange force?' he thought.
It wasn't blood because he had already confirmed that he didn't have that much left inside his body.
As he was thinking, he realized that his right hand was healing at a speed that seemed slow but was still visible to the naked eye. There was no doubt in his mind that he survived only because this power allowed him to.
'It must be this energy. I don't know who did this to me, but maybe they aren't so bad if they gave a gift like this. Something so close to mana.'
As this thought settled in his mind, he was brought back to his days in middle school (and maybe high school too), when he would imagine that he had special powers or was different from other people. His wild imagination began to go into overdrive once again. He pictured himself flying among the stars of outer space and having battles that had aftershocks strong enough to destroy solar systems. Maybe that future was a bit too far stretched for the power in his hands, but at least he had something, right? After years of dreaming and yearning, he had something!
'Well, I'm not going to waste a second dreaming when I can be having,' thought Alexander.
With this determination, Alexander began manipulating the energy he had already decided to call mana, for his own amusement, to heal his body.
He started with his feet first by slowly gathering all of the mana in his body in his feet. Through this experience, Alexander learned a few things. First, this mana came and went quickly. While he gathered mana in his feet, it would slowly disappear, only to be replaced with new mana that was absorbed by his body from what Alexander could only assume was the outside world.
Alexander continued to compress the mana in his feet, and he saw that the speed of healing in his feet increased again! He continued for a few minutes until he started to feel an uncomfortable pressure in his feet. It had also gotten much harder to force the mana into that spot.
This is when Alexander learned the second thing about mana. The mana that entered his body was outside of his control. However, all of that "unrefined" mana was pulled up into his brain and later returned to his body as a docile and obedient servant.
Alexander stopped his action of just healing his foot and instead started focusing solely on the act of bringing more mana into his body.
He fell into a state of deep focus and stayed that way for the next twelve hours! It was such a long time for a person to focus, especially in the 21st century, but something about this energy got all of Alexander's attention. He didn't even realize the time that had passed!
After these twelve hours, Alexander's body was both healed and saturated in mana. It was in even better condition than before everything happened. But the greatest difference was the fact that he had recovered his memories.
'I did it. It was an accident, but I did it!' Alexander was amazed and stupefied when he realized this fact.
'Are the others like me right now? They might not know what to do or how to heal themselves! I have to get up quickly!' Overcome with a desire to get to his friends, Alexander started pushing against his cocoon and heard a crunching sound, which delighted him. He continued to push and wiggle against his prison, which caused another "Crunch" and even a "Crack." He continued to push, tear, and pull away from his cocoon until...
"Dong!"
A dull thud echoed through Dr. Grey's home as Alexander was knocked out cold with a pan.
"Ugh..." Alexander woke once again to a headache.
'Why does this keep happening to me!?' thought Alexander.
"Oh my goodness, Alex! I am so sorry, I thought you were a monster or something." Carmen was standing over him with a cast-iron frying pan in her hands. She wielded it with strength that would be surprising for a pre-mana human.
She knelt down towards Alexander to help him to his feet, but he stood up by himself like nothing had happened. With mana circulating through his body, Alexander didn't feel the need to worry about such a light injury. As he was trying to clean as much of his dried blood from his body as possible, he asked Carmen whether anyone else was up.
"No, it's just you. Everyone else is still asleep," Carmen replied.
"I see," glancing around the room, Alexander took in the fact that no one was severely injured like he was. They were all bleeding, sure, but no one looked like they had any life-threatening injuries.
"I guess I'm just unlucky," said Alexander out loud.
"Yeah... By the way, would you mind telling me what happened?!" Carmen was dead serious with her question. Of course, she didn't blame Alexander, but he should still have an idea of what went wrong since it was his theories that left them all in this state.
"I, uh, don't know what happened." Alexander paused to look at Carmen and continued. "But, I don't think what happened is all that bad." Seeing the look on Carmen's face and realizing his mistake, Alexander continued quickly. "I think it actually succeeded beyond my imagination. Remember what I said about mana."
"Hu... that power from novels? Are you crazy!? Our friends are lying on the ground with blood coming out of their heads. Don't you think you should show some damn sympathy before you go and start saying this is something good!?" Carmen was fuming. 'What was the moron thinking!? Does he really think they were all going to get super powers or something?' She turned around and started walking towards James. At the moment, even he was more bearable than Alexander.
"Wait," called Alexander.
"What is it?" Carmen snapped back.
"I can show you," said Alexander softly. He raised his hand and focused on pushing the mana in his body into the outside world for the first time.
From the palm of his upturned hand, a silvery blue wisp of what looked like a mixture between plasma and gas rose and twirled in the air for Carmen to see.
"That's... not possible," responded Carmen with disbelief.
"It healed me and it can heal them too... I think." Said Alexander.
"That's, uh, good. Yeah," said Carmen as she was just barely keeping herself standing. Trying to process what this meant for the world was insane. 'Does everyone have that stuff, mana or whatever he called it, inside of their bodies?'
As Carmen contemplated what Alexander's actions had just done to the world, Alexander was actively trying to heal his friends.
Though, it didn't go the way he hoped.