Corrin began walking out from behind the waterfall to taste fresh air when his stomach growled.
"WOW I am STARVING!" Corrin shouted at nothing in particular. Then his devilish grin showed up on his face.
"Maybe it's time to check out what this new body can do."
When Corrin made his way out from the cave, his new senses were assaulted by the multitude of things that he hadn't picked up on before. He was pretty sure that he could see brand new colors, his eyes could still zoom in on things far away from him, and if he focused on his ears he could hear the flutter of butterfly wings and the sounds made by the numerous animals in the forest.
He bent over to pick up a purplish flower nearby and smelt it. He could tell that it was toxic just from the scent, it was like some sort of instinct. He tossed that flower to the side and picked up another, this one colored red. It smelled fruity and Corrin knew it wasn't harmful.
"Eh, what the hell." Corrin said before biting off a petal to taste. It tasted almost the same way that it smelled, just much more floral.
"This is perfect," Corrin said out loud, "Now I don't have to eat raw fish, I can just find a bunch of fruit and berries in the forest."
"Well Corrin," Ophion interjected, "soon enough you won't have to eat raw anything. You'll be able to make fire through magic and you can cook whatever you want. That should give you enough motivation to practice."
Corrin began giggling excitedly. "You're absolutely right, my golden-eyed friend."
He sauntered towards a tree while flexing his muscles. He wanted to see how hard he could hit. He cocked his arm back and punched as hard as he can.
A sharp crack resounded through the area as Corrin's fist dug into the defenseless tree. As he removed his fist, he admired the crater that his fist had left which spanned the entire diameter of the trunk. As soon as he did that, he began to hear a rapid splintering sound come from the tree. He moved out of the way just in time for the tree to topple over just like it would if a lumberjack cut it down with an axe. Considering that just moments ago Corrin was underweight with no muscles to speak of, he did pretty well.
Corrin smiled widely. "I'm gonna have a lot of fun with that."
******
Corrin had put his new senses to work as he gathered various fruits and berries throughout the forest. He had gathered quite the stockpile and he thought that it would last him hopefully until he could cook meat. If not, he could always spend another hour scavenging.
He had seen several animals through the forest, but mainly kept his distance just like he did when he initially woke up. He didn't want to get in any fights, even though he figured he would probably win. He just wanted to wait until he could actually make use of everything from the animal. He didn't even have a knife to skin the animal or cut meat with, and he couldn't make a fire to cook the meat yet either. Nonetheless, he kept in mind the general locations of where he found animals for later hunting.
Corrin sat on the bank of the pool thinking about what he was going to do next while eating a meal of the fruit and berries he had collected. He figured that it was about time he started to form his mana heart, but he wanted to get in the pool and wash off the dirt and sweat that had accumulated on his body.
"Wait, what?" Corrin said as he looked at his reflection in the water. He had been too busy focusing on everything else around him that he hadn't taken a look at himself. He probably should have after the whole rebuilt body thing, but it just never occurred to him.
Instead of the jet black hair he had before, he now had much longer white hair. It looked very similar to how Ophion's hair looked, but a bit shorter. Corrin's hair went just a little past his shoulders whereas Ophion's went down his back. But that wasn't it. Corrin's original round, chubby face had turned into a quite handsome and angular one. Finally, Corrin's light blue eyes had turned into a bright purple that seemed to pulse with energy the longer Corrin looked at them. Corrin was very pleased with his new appearance.
******
When Corrin was done with his bath, he put his clothes back on and asked Ophion how he should go about making a mana heart.
"Be warned, it's going to take several days, Corrin. To start the process, you need to focus on your Daeman rune. Instead of focusing on it and thinking about the Workshop, you need to focus on how it feels. This is how you will understand the feel of how mana interacts with your body. Once you begin to feel that, you should be able to start to manipulate the ambient mana around your Daeman rune. The rune acts as a natural gate between ambient mana and your body. It also naturally charges itself by absorbing White ambient mana. Through understanding this process you will begin to understand how the flow of mana from the outside to your body works, and you will be able to manually hasten it. This is what you need to be able to do to form a mana heart. To actually form it, you have to absorb a huge amount of ambient mana, it doesn't matter what nature, and manually condense it inside your body. The good thing is that once mana is inside your body, it becomes much more willing to listen to you than if you tried to manipulate it outside of your body before having a mana heart. Any questions?"
"Yeah, so, basically, I just use my Daeman rune to suck in ambient mana into my body?"
"Yes, that should be your primary aim. After you absorb a lot of ambient mana into your body, you should be able to focus on the formation of your mana heart primarily and the continued absorption of ambient mana secondarily."
"I'm just going to assume I can't forge this thing in one go, right?"
"Correct. I reckon that it's near impossible. It took me about two weeks from start to finish for me. The reason it takes so long is because when you stop focusing on the condensing of mana into your heart, the condensed mana dissipates into the rest of your body and you have to restart condensing it."
"I see. I'll just have to figure out a way around that, then."
Ophion was a bit surprised by Corrin's answer, but then responded with "Whatever you need, I'll do my best to help."
******
It took Corrin about four full days of practice to be able to consistently be able to manipulate the mana surrounding his Daeman rune and be able to pull it into his body. Corrin's daily routine consisted of sitting on a fairly flat rock in the middle of the pool while cross-legged and focusing on his rune. He would only take a few breaks and it was mostly to eat. He had shown a considerable amount of determination.
On the morning of the fifth day, Corrin was feeling hopeful. He had had a while to think about a way to get around the problem of his mana heart dissipating when he stopped focusing. He wasn't sure how to stop his heart from dissipating, but he had an idea as to how to make it easier to rebuild after it did.
"Ophion, I have a question."
"Whatever you need, my friend."
"Is it possible for you to manipulate my Daeman rune?"
"…In what way specifically, Corrin?"
"I want you to try and continually absorb mana into my body through the rune while I condense the mana into my heart. That way, both processes would be functioning at full capacity instead of one more than the other, does that make sense?"
"Hmmmm. Theoretically, that could work. I'll give it a shot."
Corrin sat back in his place on his rock and closed his eyes. He had gotten used to sensing the mana around his body because of the Daeman rune, so now he just had to sense what was inside his body. Instead of focusing on what was near the outside of his rune, he focused on what was inside of his body near the rune. He was quickly able to sense the mana, and it looked like little particles of different colors, mostly white.
Then came the process of actually manipulating it.
Corrin began to try and push as many particles as he could to his actual heart to the best of his ability. As expected, it was very difficult. Corrin knew that he was influencing the particles, but they were only moving a few inches at a time. After a while, there was a lot of mana around his heart, but he hadn't actually condensed any of it yet. This is because he had formulated a new plan after he understood how difficult it would be to condense the mana into his heart.
He had already spent several hours at this point, and he was exhausted. Despite Ophion being the one who was pulling in mana into Corrin's body, it was still Corrin's body that was doing the work. Corrin was still happy, though, because the initial part of the plan had worked and Ophion was able to manipulate the absorption of mana into his body.
It was a little past mid-day when Corrin opened his eyes and looked at the sun's position, meaning he had spent a little over five hours pushing mana towards his heart. Thankfully, the time had flown by while he was working and he hadn't really noticed.
He went to go have his daily lunch of fruit and berries while explaining the next part of his plan to Ophion.
"So, Ophion, you don't really have to sleep, right?"
"Uhhhhhh, I guess not necessarily, no I don't have to sleep." Ophion replied, a little suspicious of where Corrin was going with this.
"So that would mean that you can continually absorb mana into my body even when I sleep, right?"
"...…"
"You can do that right, Ophion?" Corrin asked again.
".....come on man, are you really gonna make me do that?"
"Remember when you said 'whatever you need, I'll do my best to help' when I first started out with this? Because I do. I remember you saying that. And what I need you to do is to absorb mana into my body while I sleep. Thanks!" Corrin said with a big smile on his face.
"That's so unfair Corrin, it's literally so boring."
"What the hell else are you going to do, Ophion?"
"...fine I guess you got me there. Whatever. I'll do it, but that doesn't mean I won't complain about doing it."
"Thanks, partner."