As Ray's body was being pushed through a portal to the new world, he felt like his soul was passing through a very thick membrane. Not a very comfortable experience but he was still panicking about the mana and his soul power battling in his soul sea.
Many things in the new world are very different to the old world, with the concentration of mana being one of them. After the creation of the black portal, his body was practically empty, like a dried sponge. There was a dead zone in every direction for 500 meters and old world mana is so thin that it would take a few years for it to return to normal.
In such a state it was natural for him to not be able to absorb any, the pull of the portal was many times stronger than that of his body. But now that the portal was finished, with the excess mana being poured into his soul sea, and even more importantly because he was now in the new world, his body began to quickly absorb mana. Like a clogged drain was just cleaned, mana quickly poured into his body, but with how dense new world mana is, it was practically unnoticeable.
His capacity was not that much initially, so his body should have quickly returned to its previous peak, but that was far from what happened.
For a normal mage or cultivator to increase their capacity, they have to absorb mana into their mana core, but that increase in capacity isn't permanent. If they use mana, then they would have to add more mana to their mana core to restore the lost mana. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's not as simple as 'just add more mana to your core'.
Adding mana to a mana core is a long and tedious process, meaning that mages, cultivators and awakened have a long cool down time after using mana. For some it was faster than others but at the end of the day it required a lot of focus to do so, as they had to guide the mana every step of the way.
For those who had great control over mana this isn't as much of a problem, but most people have rather mediocre control. And frankly, they don't need to. Awakened far out number mundane mages and skills take control over mana for them, and by the time they realize the shortcoming of skills they would either be too dead to care or too powerful for it to matter. It doesn't matter if skills use a lot of mana if you have enormous amounts of mana, and at that level they don't fight that often so they have more than enough time in between fights to recuperate. Only until they try to compete at a greater scale do they truly realize how bad their situation is.
But for a flow user, Ray included, it was vastly different. When your mana capacity is increased, that is a permanent increase. Meaning that with just the ambient absorption of mana through skin, or actively through breathing, one can easily return to their peak. This wouldn't matter for Ray if not for the fact that all the mana that went to the portal was passed through his body first.
The portal was drawing many times more than Ray's maximum so his capacity naturally increased with it.
If a normal mage's mana was just a blob of water, then a flow user's mana was a blob of water in a container. When a normal mage increases or decreases mana then it has no effect on the future, but for a flow user an increase in mana passed capacity means an increase in the size of the container but a decrease in mana has no effect on the container.
This is one of the many benefits of mana being a part of the body and not a foreign object. If you exercise you increase your maximum stamina, but if you exhaust yourself after that, your maximum stamina doesn't drop as well.
The increase in mana in Ray's body was so great that had it not been for his prior month of training, and more importantly his talent making every part of him grow equally and balanced, his blood vessels would have ruptured and he would have died of internal bleeding.
In his soul sea, as if stimulated by the increase of mana in his body, the yellow orb started to glow in a golden light that covered every part of his soul sea. Under the guidance of this golden light, the two combating energies seemed to have calmed down and began the process of merging.
After all the mana from the portal entered his soul sea, it closed itself and the place that looked like space was folding in on itself returned to normal. The now mixed mana and soul power returned to the sea and to his amazement, separated once more. But this time instead of smashing back into each other, they stayed separate, with the mana staying as the sea and the soul power condensing into what looked like a large mass of land.
Before he could even question what he was seeing, with another flash of golden light, the black orb and the platform smashed down into the center of the large island leaving the rough and hilly landscape with a flat center.
From his perspective, instead of his soul sea, it looked like he was floating above a large black island with a flat center surrounded by the bluest water imaginable.
He floated down to the surface of the island, but unlike before the sea didn't move away from him. If not for the fog a few hundred meters away from the edges of the island and the lack of any form of life, or sun, he would have thought that he was on a tropical island instead of inside of him.
He moved to the center of the island and discovered that instead of being stuck into the ground, the black orb was floating at chest height above the ground. As he looked at the floating black orb, now more visible, a wave of information rushed into him and he instantly knew how to operate it.
With no hesitation he reached forward and touched it, and with a little bit of soul power, his mind was instantly returned to his body.
He opened his eyes to his body splattered on the ground in a truly strange place. To his left was a dense forest and to his right was a vast desert, seeing these two opposite biomes next to each other was an interesting site and he would have gone and investigated further if almost every bone in his body wasn't broken.
"From just how high up did I fall?" He bent his neck which was surprisingly not shattered and looked at his mangled body.
"Hurts like a mother f*cker, but I can't stay here. I don't know what wild beasts could be lurking in the forest or under the sand." As a response to the pain, his brain automatically numbed most of it but the little bit that he could feel was already making it hard to breathe.
He quickly used his spell version of regeneration and his soft tissue quickly regenerated, but the main problem, his bones, wasn't solved. Regeneration could heal bones, but with how his were now, they would set in various strange angles and would definitely stick out of his skin. Remembering seeing John move items with his mana alone before, he tried to do the same but to put his bones in place. He tried it on a rock nearby and even though it was difficult because of the density of mana around him, he managed to get used to it after a few tries.
"Well without further ado." He tried moving a bone fragment in his left arm and almost bit his tongue because of the amount of pain.
"Holy f*ck, I didn't know something could hurt that much." It felt like someone peeled back his skin and covered him in salt as the bone fragment cut his internal flesh and rubbed against his other bones as he tried to push it into place.
With no other option he gritted his teeth and slowly but surely fought through the pain and moved his bone fragments into place one by one, fitting through the pain of his insides being cut up. With the repair of his arm, his mastery over both regeneration and his mana control increased, but it still took a very long time for him to fully repair his body.