Web of Blades - Chapter 16: Vision

“That’s one problem solved,” Akari said to Glim. “Now let’s fix these stupid eyes.”

She turned around and stepped back toward the entrance of her cave. As she walked, her stomach growled for the first time in weeks. The hunger pains had always been there, but they’d been overshadowed by everything else. The memories, the cold . . . 

It was still cold as hell in the Storm Garden, even with her Aeon soul feasting on the mana. But she could deal with a little weather. Especially once her Cloak technique was back in business.

As for the food . . . what did people even eat around here? Her grandmother had mentioned hunting, but Akari hadn’t seen any wildlife.

“Don’t forget to sleep.” Glim stretched her transparent blue arms and yawned. “That’s an option now, right?”

Akari nodded. She’d been too scared to sleep before, but now that fear was gone. The storm had failed to kill her, even at her lowest point.

She spent the next few hours pushing the stolen power through her soul. The pain dulled as she adjusted to the sensation, and her mana reserves returned to full capacity. Then she conjured a stylus and formed the sigils for a fresh heat ward around the cave’s entrance. They glowed pale blue against the dark stone, and the temperature rose by more than a dozen degrees.

Finally, she curled up on the damp floor and drifted off to sleep.

~~~

Akari woke sometime the next day, feeling clear-headed for the first time in weeks. Talek. Her thoughts felt a hundred pounds lighter, like she’d been carrying boulders in her skull this whole time. Masters could survive for weeks without sleep, but that didn’t mean they should.

She formed a cup out of pure mana in her hand and stepped outside into the dark haze. Rain hammered her bare shoulders as she scooped up water from the nearest puddle and took a long drink. As always, it tasted like minerals and old stone.

The cave’s warmth welcomed her back a second later, and she plopped down to start brainstorming.

Glim sat cross-legged beside her, floating several inches above the ground. “Was your grandma right? Can you really fix your eyes with mana?” 

“Maybe,” Akari muttered into her glass. “But eyes aren’t like muscles or bones. I can make them tougher, but tougher eyes don’t see any better.”

“Okay. So what makes them see better?”

Akari strained to recall the details. She’d researched this topic online before her Apprentice and Artisan advancements, but the results hadn’t been promising. People talked about removing their glasses, cycling mana to their eyes, and straining to see through the blur. Apparently, that improved vision on their next advancement. 

Easier said than done. Akari sure as hell couldn’t go months without her glasses. Anyone who did must have a milder form of myopia. 

What’s more, plenty of experts had poked holes in this approach. Squinting would engage the ciliary muscles around the eyes, and mana would strengthen those muscles. But stronger ciliary muscles didn’t mean improvement. In some cases, they could lock the eyes into a state of over-focus, masking the problem even worse.

Or so the experts claimed. Kira was right about one thing: no one had actually tested this in any detail. They just wore their glasses and got on with their lives.

“I have no idea how this works,” Akari said to Glim. 

“Guess it’s time for some experiments, then!” Glim put her hands on her hips and glanced around the cave. “We’ve got nothing but time, right?”

True enough. Even with her glasses, Akari hadn’t seen any food around here. She stood no chance of hunting or foraging without her vision.

“You said squinting was bad,” Glim noted.

“I never said that.”

“Well, you thought it!” 

Akari shrugged. “Myopia happens when the eyeball grows too long. Light hits in front of the retina instead of on it.”

“So . . . your eyeballs are too long?”

“Pretty much. Squinting just cheats the optics.” She gestured vaguely at her face. “Like trying to fix a broken bone by flexing harder.”

“Well, good thing you’re a Master then. “You can change your body at will.” 

“It’s not that easy.”

“Says the girl who opens portals and rewinds time.” 

“Fair enough, I guess.” Masters could control their involuntary body parts—things like heart rate, digestion, and blood flow. But eyes were trickier. They weren’t just muscles and tissue; they were extensions of the brain itself. 

She might as well cycle mana to her prefrontal cortex and tell it to make better life choices. Even dream artists couldn’t pull that off.

But she didn’t need to fix her eyes in a single session, or even a single day. What if she could make her vision one percent sharper, then lock in those changes with her mana? Those changes would compound over time, regardless of how the eye functioned.

Akari conjured a new stylus out of pure mana and formed several shapes on the cavern wall. These weren’t proper sigils like her heat ward—just rows of simple Espirian characters, like what you’d see on an eye doctor’s chart. The top characters were about the size of her palm. The second row was half that size, and so on.

With that done, she scooted to the opposite side of her cave, seven feet away. Her back pressed against cold rock, and she drew her knees toward her chest.

Every character was blurry, including the top one. Oh well. She already knew her vision sucked. 

Squinting helped, but she avoided that for now, recalling the warnings she’d read online. Instead, she experimented with a dozen other approaches. She opened her eyes wider, blinked the images into focus, and rocked her head from side to side. Not squinting through the blur, but clearing it away.

Sometimes, she experienced a glimpse of sharp vision— just a fraction of a second when the top character snapped into focus. When that happened, she cycled mana to her eyes and encouraged them to hold that shape. At least, she imagined it that way. Akari didn’t know all the science by heart. But that didn’t matter as long as it worked.

Did it work? Akari couldn’t tell. Her eyes felt sore by the day’s end, and her vision felt even worse than before. 

She formed a blade of sharpened mana and cut rough outlines beneath each floating character. Her Master brain should recall these placements with ease, but Akari preferred something more solid. Masters could still make mistakes, after all. 

When she woke the next morning, Akari reformed the glowing mana characters over the outlines and sat on the cave’s opposite side.

This time, the top letter was clear enough to read. Not sharp, but better than before.

Akari smiled as she settled in for another day of work.

~~~

Another week passed as she reaped the storm’s mana and trained her vision. By the seventh day, she could read the third line on her makeshift chart. Those characters had been a total blur when she’d started—just blobs of blue light against the dark stone. 

Akari also noticed more practical changes. She could look down and make out her individual fingers and toes. Not just vague flesh-colored shapes, but actual digits with knuckles and nails. 

And when she looked outside, she could almost see the horizon where the clouds met the sea. She tracked the distant flicker of lightning and saw the rain as individual streaks rather than gray static.

At that point, she extended her training outside her cave. Her surroundings were still a blur of rock and rain, but it wasn’t as bad as before. She navigated through deep canyons and over ridges. She even made a portal to a nearby island. 

Getting lost was no longer a concern. Now that she’d fixed her mana problem, she could make a portal back to her cave at any time.

Unfortunately, her search yielded no food. 

Each island looked the same as the last: bare rock smoothed by centuries of rain and shallow depressions filled with stagnant water. No plants, no animals, no sign of life.

“We could try fishing,” Glim suggested.

Akari glanced down at the raging sea, a hundred feet below the floating island. She’d never been much of a swimmer, and the Inner Sea had mana beasts that could kill a Grandmaster in one single bite.

“You first,” Akari said. Then she glanced up at the sky. “What about the kyrins? What do they eat?”

“Maybe we should find one and ask it.”

Akari rolled her eyes, but Glim had a point. They were clearly in the wrong part of the Storm Garden.

On the next island, Akari spotted movement in her peripheral vision. She spun toward it, gathering spacetime mana in her hands.

A blur of gray and white darted between two boulders. Some kind of bird? It was too fast to track without her glasses—just a smear of motion against the darker stone.

Akari crept closer, preparing a portal. If she could just get a clear look at the thing . . .

The creature burst from its cover before she’d taken three steps. It shot past her head with a screech that pierced straight through the thunder, close enough that she felt the wind from its wings. Akari stumbled backward, her foot catching on a loose stone. She hit the ground hard, and her mana dissolved into a cloud of golden mist.

By the time she’d regained her footing, the creature was long gone.

“That went well,” Glim said.

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying—maybe fishing’s not the worst idea.”

Akari might have agreed if she were at her full strength. But all these weeks with no food had taken a toll on her body. What if she ran into more Kazaru artists right now? Or a pack of kyrins? Could she even fight in this state?

~~~

Later that night, Akari woke to the sound of footsteps outside her cave. She cut the mana to her heat ward and opened her eyes to pitch blackness.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ She sent to Glim.

‘Yeah,’ the mana spirit replied. ‘Something’s coming.’

‘Thank Talek. I hope it’s a wild cow.’ She’d settle for some insects at this point, or even a walking mushroom.

The footsteps grew louder over the next few heartbeats. Voices followed—two people, speaking Shokenese. A golden light cast long shadows over the jagged rocks, flooding through the mouth of her cave. 

Akari sprang to her feet, cycling her spacetime mana for a fight. She focused on the mainland and prepared to open a portal. If these were jade artists, she’d have to end the fight fast.

Then a blurry figure stepped into the entrance of her cave, carrying a glowing crystal. A young woman, judging by her build, with long black hair that whipped in the wind. She wore modern clothes instead of animal skins—a black combat bra and form-fitting shorts.

The figure took a slow step forward, but didn’t cycle her mana. “Akari?” she asked in a soft voice.

Akari dropped her combat stance and tried to blink the woman into focus. “Sholan?”