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Greetings, Readers. This is again your author, Eric Fretheim, online as Fushigi on this site and Discord, and as /u/ericthefred on reddit, BTW. I am again offering an afterword, after eight online volumes of Tiana’s story.
If you are a free chapters reader popping in to read this when you haven’t read the locked chapters yet. You might want to stop and come back after reading Chapter 408, because I might drop a spoiler or two here.
Volume Eight is complete. Many questions have been getting answered in this volume, and we’re firmly in the home stretch of the overall story arc now.
You might find the idea that we’re done with eight volumes surprising, since I neglected to mention the end of volume seven. That was more or less an effect of the fact that life was overwhelming me at the time, and I was doing pretty good to just post the chapters. I was also not 100 percent certain where Volume Seven ended until later. I ended up placing the end of Volume Seven after Chapter 353.
Obviously, Volume Nine is next. I’m not certain whether there will be a Volume Ten, because I may go with a ‘short version’ of the rest of the present day arc. Or, I may decide to bust it in two and do a long version.
I say ‘present day arc’ because there is a potential (not certain yet exactly when I will write it) future arc after a multiple decade timeskip, that I would publish as a separate story. Tiana is a character in it, but the main character would actually be someone else (a character related to the current case, but not born yet in the current story.)
Before anyone worries that I could just put the story on hold if life is overwhelming me, I want to say this: Although life has not been easy lately, it has also been a joy to have this bright spot in my life, a sort of continuously present ‘good place’, to offset the headaches. Writing this story is often a sort of refuge, a way to take a break from my troubles by diving back into Tiana’s world. Life would be worse without the happiness that writing brings me, so even if I have to take short breaks occasionally, there is no way I would ever stop.
After having neglected afterwords for two volumes (since Volume Six ended while I was struggling with my computer having died, losing the appendices I was planning to post and forcing me to rewrite already written chapters), I’m a bit at a loss for what I should really write here. I’m posting these as a way to establish the waypoints, really, so I could just put the words ‘Here ends Volume Eight’ and be done with what I’m functionally trying to accomplish. But I do want to take a moment to talk about things, so why not write about a specific plot point and make sure it is clear?
Tiana, at this point in the story, has become a significantly powerful creature, but in another way she is still a helpless pawn. This is because of the presence of a much more powerful entity in this world, against whom she has just had a seriously close brush with death. Although it was more of a clone jutsu sent out by him than the actual Astaroth, it was a huge reminder for her that no matter how strong you are, there’s someone stronger.
Let me talk for a bit, then, about the recent situation, as to why she can’t just heal herself up. The power to use magic is directly connected to the force of life, known in this story as pneuma. Pneuma is not something that is used up, like MP in an RPG, but rather something that tires and recovers. So a normal use of magic wears the user down until they are too worn out and must rest. If a healer casts [Restoration] on them, it can revive pneuma, but casting [Restoration] fatigues pneuma, so it isn’t possible to restore oneself with ones own magic.
However, blood is the physical organ which contains a person’s pneuma (in the form of lifeblood, pneuma and mana bound together, the thing that Tiana harvests when she feeds.) When a person suffers significant blood loss, as Tiana did recently, they have less physical blood, and therefore less lifeblood, and therefore less pneuma. They are depending much more on what is left for the simple act of staying alive, and have little or none to spare for magic.
Tiana can get mortal mana from her stored ‘condensed blood’ in her blood core because her body knows how to convert it for use to replace the unstable mana in the monster blood running in her veins. It is exactly the same action it performs when she feeds while in a normal, healthy condition.
But when she is short on physical blood, her body directly transfers the incoming lifeblood from her donor into her veins. She is literally performing a small blood transfusion on herself. This is actually a different function than her normal feeding. This is also why she doesn’t need sexual stimulus in order to grow her fangs. Fang growth in this situation is an analog to the shock response rather than the sexual response. The lifeblood in her blood core is not physical blood, so her body can’t use it that way. The pneuma in her blood core is not available for that purpose.
By the way, this begs another question: why must Tiana consume the blood of intelligent mortals such as humans? Wouldn’t chicken blood or something be just as good? This has to do with the nature of the ‘stabilized’ mana she needs to use in order to remain alive. Normal monsters are fully capable of doing exactly this, subsisting on any source of blood. Humans and other human-related mortals are the highest quality source, but normal monsters can prey on any mortal animal as well.
But the Immortal designers tuned Elder bodies (and thus, their descendents, the intelligent mortal species like vampires) specifically to use the highest quality ‘stabilized’ mana of humans (and thus, human-descended species like elves, dwarves, halflings, merrow and there many be others) and to be unable to use lesser sources. They designed them that way to make them dependent upon the mortals in their care, mostly to insure they kept the mortals’ best interest at heart. Otherwise, they might just farm cattle or something else less troublesome to manage than humans.
I hope that helps clear up any confusions on this subject. If not, feel free to ask me in the comments section, or on my discord server.
Well, onward then to Volume Nine, although I’m going to post three appendices first. These are rewrites of the appendices I lost when my computer died, shortly before the end of Volume Six, with some things brought up to date for the current place in the story.
Thanks as always for reading! It is a huge pleasure receiving comments, reviews, postings on discord and even DMs. Feel free to keep them coming!
