Before Fen left Squad 42 to find Raisen.
When Fen first woke up in his new room, the only pieces of furniture inside were his bed, a desk, and a chair. Now, beside the desk was a smaller version of the small box in the main room, popping out from the floor. When Fen calmed down enough to notice it, he looked around it to see what its purpose was. When his finger tapped the side facing him, a holographic interface popped out in front of his face coming from the glowing veins inside of the rock box.
Seeing the bright interface appear before him, Fen took a seat on the floor and looked through it. The bright golden light hurt his eyes, but he was able to withstand it in the darkly lit room.
[Shop]
[Candidate 178-3001: Fen Altairus]
[Points: 841]
[Current Purchasing Level: Opfer]
[1. Destruction Magic Lesson. Cost: 350]
[2. Blue mana sword. Cost: 500]
[3. Fire elemental magic wand. Cost: 145]
[4. Fundamental Lessons on Magic (Book). Cost: 500]
[5. Healing...]
A list of stuff appeared in front of his face, giving him the name of the small box. The Shop itself was very strange, although it didn't appear to have any electronic parts or even mechanical ones, the glowing rock veins were formulated in a pattern that, when Fen touched the rock box, lit up and created the holographic interface. There was no screen, just patterns that upon closer inspection appeared to slowly shift across the smooth rock, somewhat resembling how a starfish in the ocean would look like as it crawled across coral.
The hologram almost seemed to made from floating miniature stars that combined to form the letters and numbers in the Shop.
The items for sale in the Shop cost a lot of points, but it appeared that Fen could afford a great many of them, so he assumed that the large number of points he had was worth a lot. Well, not that he knew how valuable a 'mana sword' was, but it seemed useful.
Tapping on an item on the interface made the lights disassemble themselves, before rearranging to show him a more detailed explanation about that particular tool. For example, when he pressed his finger through the item listed as 'Fundamental Lessons on Magic (Book)', he received a pile of text as an explanation.
[A textbook given to magically gifted children too dumb to understand how the flow of Mana works and interacts with the natural world. Any teenager seen with this book would be labelled as an outcast immediately for being too stupid to learn magic when they were young. An adult seen with this book has never been seen before, possibly because they were smart enough to realize how stupid carrying a book literally made for toddlers would be.]
[The information written inside the book is not necessary for anyone capable of manipulating Mana and experimenting with it on their own, but in the case that the one seeing this is an imbecile, then this book comes highly recommended by various elementary school students.]
…It appeared that whoever was in charge of writing the descriptions for the Shop had a very 'colorful' personality. Or maybe they were just very abrasive, Fen couldn't tell which one it was. Whichever one it was, reading the description was enough to make a vein pop on his forehead. The Narrator appeared to have some skill at getting underneath people's skin.
'Well if little kids are recommending it, then it must be a good purchase...' However, Fen decided to not buy it.
At least the description told him the basics about the item; if and when Fen became capable of using Mana, he most likely wouldn't need to purchase the book. Miko had helped him break past his low self-esteem back as a kid, and slowly gotten Fen to realize that he was not, in fact, stupid. Fen could be considered very intelligent, and so he doubted that he would need the book. Especially if it cost him more than half of his points; he didn't know how difficult or easy it would be to get more, so it was better to be thrifty.
Fen pressed back and then pressed through another item in the hopes that not all of the descriptions were written by the same person, otherwise he would have to endure wanting to spew a stream of curses every time he read through a description.
[Potion of Healing (Lesser). Cost: 100]
[Description: I don't know what you wanted when you pressed this item, honestly. Its a potion of healing. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. What? I have to tell them about the grades too? Fine. A lesser Healing Potion can replenish blood from, well, blood loss obviously, and in certain situations may even be capable of regenerating a lost finger. Usually Travelers carry similar products as their first aid.]
'Damn it. It's the same guy.' Pressing his temple, Fen thought about the narrator's words.
The Narrator's words made it seem like they weren't from modern Earth; nobody carried a potion while traveling near where Fen lived. He had never even heard of one being made after the ingredients for alchemical products (i.e. monsters) left Earth.
After firmly beating down his anger caused by reading the Narrator's writing, Fen began to search in earnest at the Shop, looking for anything that might be handy or looked useful while at the same time not being too expensive.
Much to his surprise (not) most of the stuff in the Shop wasn't that useful to him. The only appealing options were the Lessons scattered across his screen. However, none of them seemed really useful to him right now, most of them had descriptions labeling them as 'information even a child already knows', or 'requires possessing the ancient technique of throwing money at the problem until it fixed itself'. Honestly, this Narrator...
But while he was reading through the different lessons and their instructors, a familiar name popped onto the holographic interface, which finally gave him a lead.
[Introduction into Vitality Manipulation (Lesson). Cost: 700]
[Instructor: Raisen York.]
[This practice is completely bogus, to the point where even I started to regret ever trying to understand Vitality Manipulation. A waste of beer money. Crap, I can't put that in, ah, I'm sure nobody'll find out.]
[...If you're still reading this, congratulations, you forced me to reveal more information. Damned brat.]
[Vitality is the life force that flows through every single living being, and in theory, it's possible to manipulate that energy just like mages can manipulate mana to cast fire, ice, whatever we want. However, where learning magic requires honest work and dedication, to learn how to manipulate Vitality, hard work doesn't mean shit. What you need is talent and the correct body type to even begin. Just like electricity, Vitality flows better in some bodies than in others; that's part of the reason people die of old age or cancer.]
[Although I didn't have the talent for it thanks to my cursed luck, I paid enough money to alter my body to manipulate my own life force and learned the basics behind it. Enough to tell you that its definitely worth wasting the money and finding out if you have even a little bit of talent for it; the feats that I saw powerful Knights perform was enough to give me nightmares.]
As Fen read the small part about the narrator losing money, he felt a small amount of joy. Enough to make him chuckle a little bit out loud, the first time that had happened since he entered the Rift.
The description about Vitality didn't seem like much, but it told Fen a lot. If masters in Vitality manipulation were able to give the Narrator nightmares, then whatever they could do must be incredible, and help him survive the Program. After reading the descriptions of the Destruction Magic and other Lessons seemingly named by edge lords, he noticed that the Narrator always belittled the various Magical Arts or called it weak, so it was the first time that he saw a genuine promotion for a Lesson. Most of the time he just called the Lessons a waste of time.
The good news was that he recognized the instructor's name, it took Fen a moment to remember where he had heard or seen that name when he remembered the nice-ish stranger who guided him when he first arrived at the VPF facility.
If his memory served him well, Raisen had told Fen to look for him if he survived the Initiation. Finally, a plan began to form inside of his mind while he continued to search through the Shop for anything else that seemed promising, or seemed useful to keep around like a weapon or something similar.
After noticing his eyes began to hurt, Fen got up from the floor and closed out of the Shop, seeing that just waving his hand around the holographic interface was enough to turn it off. It just turned into particles of light that returned back into the glowing inscriptions on the rock wall.
That was something Fen learned from looking around the Shop; the strange glowing veins on the rocky Shop weren't veins, but actually inscriptions or arrays that worked together to power the holographic interface. Looking around him, the weird glowing lines on the walls also resembled an array, but Fen couldn't even begin to think about what it was for. He had just assumed that the veins produced light within the facility, but his new knowledge made him consider what the actual use for such a construction.
Wherever Fen went in the facility, the walls were covered in the glowing veins, so now that he knew that they were actually some sort of array his brain began to imagine what it's purpose was. Some sort of gigantic robot? A surveillance system? Fen cursed his limited amount of knowledge in that area, there was too much that he didn't know and so much that could make his life easier if he knew.
The only real piece of information that was able to help him now was Raisen and Vitality Manipulation. If he could only get some more information about that, then he would be able to start his plan to survive the Program. It was a long shot, but it was the only lead that he had.
'Damn, I probably look like crap right now.' He finally realized that his eyes were probably bloodshot from a combination of crying and staring into a bright screen, even if it was holographic. Shaking it off, he continued to head out. Emotions be damned, going home was priority number one.
Hoping that his eyes weren't too bloodshot from staring into the Shop for such a long time, Fen greeted his Squad mates and left to find the Training Hall with Raisen.
****
The old man was sitting on the floor, facing away from the door, where he was working on some sort of mechanical device when Fen found him.
To his shock, the Training Hall had windows that showed the outside, with the side opposite the entrance having a large glass window that showed nothing but the endless Void surrounding the facility the VPF built. None of the other rooms Fen had been to so far had a window, and seeing the Void again without any mental preparation put in him awe.
The clouds he saw when saw when he first exited the Rift weren't actually clouds, but clumps of celestial dust. The pictures he had studied as kid highly resembled what he was looking at right now, but if he was right, then that meant that wherever he was, he was in space.
Though, it was some kind of distorted space. Or maybe even an entirely different dimension, the Rift had the looks of something that could tear through dimensions.
The same could be said about Earth, it was also in space, but while the planet had an atmosphere and other factors like light pollution protecting it's population from seeing into the stars, the facility in the Rift had no such protection. The thought that he was seeing something that his family probably never saw before brought a small grin to his face, before it was washed away by the reality of how far he must be from them.
"Eh. is someone there? I already told you, the spider in your lunch wasn't me, so you better not be trying to pull a revenge prank on me-", Raisen said while turning around after getting off the floor, smoothing the creases on his pants.
"Oh! Fred, right! So you survived!" A toothy smile appeared on the old man's face, apparently happy to see Fen had survived even if he just assumed his name (He never told Raisen his name, but it was still super close. Like, scarily close to his real name).
"Did you buy the Lesson plan for the Intro to Vitality Manipulation? I guess I haven't been on the interface for while, so I must have not noticed."
"It's Fen, and no, I didn't. I just came to ask you a couple questions before I made a decision."
The happy grin on the old man's face transformed into a heavy scowl accented by Raisen's deep set blue eyes. His voice too went from youthful to scornful, and Fen could only describe the change to how a shop manager would react when he found out a potential buyer was just window shopping.
"Then why the hell are you here then? Get out, I don't have time for people who aren't buying. Don't forget to close the door on your way out."
"I would, but there's no door." Fen pointed at the entrance and, much to Raisen's anger, there truly was no door. "And you're the one who told me to come find you after I passed the initiation, thanks for not helping at all with that by the way."
"Damn that bastard Rakir! They put that idiot as the Narrator and now nobody'll come to my Lessons! And now they even took my door!"
"Eh, what were you saying? Oh, you're very welcome. Look, because I am currently lacking in funds," he said, pointing at the evident lack of a door for the empty Training Hall, "I'll answer your questions. If! And only if! You swear to purchase my lessons after."
"And the only reason I'm even considering giving out free knowledge is because your body's the right type to conduct Vitality, if not, then I wouldn't even consider it. Natural conductors are hard to come by, and even rarer to see manipulating Vitality. I hate to admit it, but even I wasn't one of you lucky twats."
Fen groaned, "Your Lesson's expensive, you know? If you elaborate on what you meant about my body being conductive, I'll accept that deal though."
Fen stuck his hand out, to which Raisen grabbed it and shook it. Rubbing his now aching hand (The old man was stronger than he looked), Fen began to ask the old man some questions.
"So what is Vitality? And how can I use it?"