You can read this if you want to, I wrote the 4th chapter of the novel and thought I didn't want to just have everything come down to stats so I decided to create a power system. I was mostly riffing for an hour so it was pretty messy, idk if you want to read it though since I put some ideas I had while writing the system in it. So you might get spoiled. I have no idea if I'm going to keep writing though, half of this stuff might not appear. Just Writing novel for fun while I'm bored.

***

In Altera exists Mana, a magical energy that allows humans and beast alike to transcend their limits and become more powerful than people from Earth could ever imagine.

Mana is the lifeblood of Altera, it exists in everything, from its fauna and flora to mountains and rivers. It is simply the essence belonging to all beings. Even the air itself is abundant in mana, though in more places than others.

All humans of course have mana as well, but a majority only have a rudimentary understanding of mana and knowledge of its usage. This usage of mana is not any different from the common animals' use of mana, physical strengthening, and unlike animals, humans do not naturally increase the mana inside of them after adulthood as beasts do. Meaning unless they are a genetic freak of nature, there is a low chance that a random human can become stronger without learning how to walk down the path of mana mastery.

The definition of mana mastery is within its name, it is the process of mastering one's usage of mana, bending mana to your will.

The path of mana mastery starts with first understanding and feeling the mana in your body, not simply using it to increase your physical strength evenly throughout your body but learning how to move it throughout your body to target a specific portion of it.

if one took more than 6 months to enter the 1st stage, the chances of entering the 2nd stage dropped immensely. The same could be said of the third stage, the acceptable range to master the first stage was one year, any longer and there would be a high chance of staying at the 2nd stage for the rest of one's life.

It was said that if one did not enter their path before the age of 25, the chances of becoming a master later on were essentially zero.

It is generally recommended to start one's path to mana mastery at the age of 12, that is when humans usually enter puberty and their natural mana reserves reach their maximum, the more mana to feel the easier it is after all. This is also when humans gain the ability to use mana to strengthen themselves.

One way a person can learn to activate physical strengthening early is by being in a life-and-death situation, this can force your body to adapt force your body to go into a mana surge.

A mana surge is when a person's adrenalin forces all their mana into every pore of their body, this is much more potent than regular strengthening and the feeling can easily teach someone how to use it. Any lucky (or unlucky) child who experiences this can start learning Mana mastery techniques earlier.

Of course, there are always exemptions to every rule, geniuses who have a massive amount of natural mana or can even feel the smallest morsel of mana are an example. Some rich scions can simply pay for elixirs that help increase their mana or get a powerful master to teach them a mana mastery technique. Even rarer are the 1 in a million monsters who are just born at this level of mana mastery.

Mana mastery techniques are skills made by people to more easily feel one's mana, these techniques are actually cheaper than one might think, while a peasant wouldn't be able to purchase them a village leader could easily save a month's work of pay to buy one, even more affluent commoners could purchase one. This is because without someone guiding you to learn the techniques it's still damn difficult to feel mana even with them, since you would have to personally understand how the skill works. Last but not least, these techniques are only useful for the early stages of mana mastery.

Mana mastery techniques vary largely in their usage, that's because of how the mana mastery path diverges as one walks further down it, so there are different techniques for people with different talents.

Some examples are:

Punch a wooden plank for hours on end, only activating your mana at the last moment until the mana only activates inside of your fist.

Meditating in a quiet place, putting your focus on your breathing with your strengthening on, until one can feel their mana gently travel through their lungs.

Reading for hours on end, forcing yourself to stay awake with your mana, until your mana invigorates your mind and helps you stay awake.

Each Mana mastery technique will cause a bias in someone's body in how easy it is to send their mana to a specific part of their body, a bias difficult to fix. So one must pick a Mana mastery technique that aligns with the occupation they want to take in the future. The meditation technique is one of the few that creates no bias allowing someone to have more choices in the path they wish to take.

Some may look down on the first stage of mana mastery, but that is a mistake, being able to concentrate your mana in a single specific part of your body is a qualitative change in one's ability to use mana. Imagine a punch that only contained 10% of a person's mana, versus a person who forced all their mana into their legs only to redirect their mana into their arms at the last moment of the punch, that would not just be 100% of their power, but 200%, maybe even more.

If the first stage of mana mastery is called the breath stage due to its goal of learning to feel one's mana as though it were air in your lungs, the second stage is called the storage stage, this stage is more simple than the first stage yet still difficult. It pertains to moving the location where someone stores their natural mana. Natural mana typically (typically because some geniuses are born with their mana gathered in another location, these people are aptly named the chosen ones) gathers inside a person's abdomen, the second stage is all about keeping your mana in a single location on your body until the mana treats that location as its natural storage area, this is why the bias caused by a Mana mastery technique is so important.

The reason why this stage is considered difficult is due to balance, the ability to move mana is still important and keeping your mana in one location for extended periods is antithetical to that idea. If a person were to focus too much of their time they may lose their ability to efficiently move their mana, of course, this is less important in certain paths, the augmenter path being one.

Some examples of paths that correlate with certain parts of the body are:

Mind: Mages and Elementalists

Muscles: Knights and Barbarians

Bloodstream: Augmenters and Beast tamers

One of the rarest parts of the body to into your mana storage and most difficult is the soul. This body part is purely used for the Prophet's path, a path created by the gods themselves to bestow their believers with divine mana. (It's known to be purely used by Prophets but that is only because that's the only orthodox path that uses it, there are a small number of people who use their path as their storage, there are just too few)

The third stage of mana mastery is the Bond stage and is the final stage of mana mastery, not because it is the peak of mana mastery but because it is when people choose their path and walk down towards it. There are no more stages, only your path.

The Bond stage involves an ability that is gained in the breath stage, it wasn't mentioned in the storage stage because while it is incredibly useful in that stage, it is disconnected from the stage process. This ability is to take outside mana into your body and purify it, turning it into your natural mana, this of course increases your mana storage. The 3rd stage is all about this ability, but it ignores the step of purifying the foreign mana, instead, it uses this foreign mana to create a bond with the source of the mana. This bond is the beginning of every path as it is this stage that is the start of a person's path to transcending their humanity, becoming more than human by fusing with an outside source.

Knights fuse with their chosen weapon by constantly circulating their mana between their weapon and their bodies until their mana becomes one. Some knights choose not even their weapon but their armour.

Mages create a grimoire and steadily transfuse their mana into its pages, in this way, they are fusing with the grimoire outside their body and not changing their body itself. This is akin to adding an extra limb.

Elementalists absorb a heavy concentration of mana from materials that have a large amount of concentrated elemental mana unit they can summon that element with a thought and even breathe out the element. Elementalists in fact can use 2 body parts as their storage, the mind or muscles. Those who choose the mind can control the element of choice outside their body while those who chose their muscles become walking embodiments of said elements

Barbarians consume ores and materials until the mana of said ores permeates through their body, turning them into walking weapons. Barbarians are actually one of the most diverse paths there are, the reason for it being called the barbarian path is actually xenophobic, the barbarian path came from a continent east of Saltera. Calling people who use this path barbarians is basically a slur. In the continent that barbarians originate from, the sub-sections of the path are called pugilists, berzerkers and martial artists. There the path is called the Martial path.

Augmenters directly replace parts of their bodies with those of beasts, as a path used by the wealthy, the rarer the beast they transplant, the more powerful. The path begins by replacing one's blood with beast blood to more easily accept the transplant of beast limbs.

Beast tamers are ironically one of the most frugal paths, outside of feeding one's bonded beast, a beast tamer can start with a weaker beast and help it evolve into a more powerful one. This path is done through swapping one's blood with their bonded beasts, creating a connection with the said beast.

One misconception to clear up is that the people who walk a path are not called by the name of a path, someone at stage 1 can be called a knight, but someone on the knight path is called a weapon master.

The titles are as such:

Kight path: Weapon master

Mage path: Arch-mage

Barbarians: Martial King

Elementalist: Embodiments of Nature

Augmenters: Royal Beasts (Those that fuse with dragons are called Royal dragons, these people are mostly found in the Alponse royalty)

Beast tamers: Beastial Champions

Prophets are simply called Prophets

Another reason why the stages end at the 3rd stage is that once someone enters a path, their evolution is entirely dependent on themselves, they must discover what direction they want to take in terms of their mana mastery.