toria

Her dad snored steadily as usual, while Sarah cradled a warm load and a half in her jaw. Being so busy with work, he must have been backed up. So excited was she to make her dad come, Sarah didn’t know what to do now with a mouthful of it. Her first thought was to swallow it and enjoy the feeling of it sliding down her throat, but there would be time for that soon.

She heard her dad rummage around the kitchen, cutlery clanked together, and the microwave hummed for a minute or so before he collapsed onto the couch with the bowl of leftover lasagne steaming in his hands. Like muscle memory, he quickly switched on the TV and started wolfing down the food like a starving man. Only after demolishing half the bowl of pasta, barely paying attention to the random game show playing softly in the background did he turn to his daughter and notice the look on her face.

Noah had already made progress in slowing the flow of his mana and his bodily functions, and the headband was helping. His heart dropped to one beat a minute, and he all but stopped breathing. Typically, such a state would be fatal, but the more he slowed down his mana, the more he could forestall damage. Without mana flowing, his cells would stop processing nourishment and oxygen, but they wouldn’t wither and die, for the molecular processes of cell death were also halted. Caught in a near-perfect state of suspended animation, his physical senses operated at the lowest possible level, and he became more attuned to the flow of mana around him, sharpening his spirit senses.