While they trained, I worked on my own problems and the disaster that was now my mana channels. I was facing a few problems at the same time that seemed to build on each other, leading to a greater problem. I was reasonably sure that if I could find someone capable of channeling soul mana and access to the right life orb, they could solve my problem nearly instantaneously for me, but with our limited resources and contacts, that was completely out of the picture for the moment. Pryte had been nice enough to make that clear when I asked.

What I knew so far was any attempt to push my mana in any controlled sense past my core quickly started to cause feedback as it bled into multiple other mana orbs. My first attempt to channel just my life orb had still managed to pass through both of my elemental orbs, and the pain that it caused had set me back another hour. The switches I had built, in what felt like nearly a lifetime ago, were basically useless at this point. So that left the big question of how did I possibly regenerate my channels when I could get the mana to flow across them?

The first obvious answer was to remove all my other mana orbs and see what happened if I tried to channel with just a single one. Initially, it had seemed to be working, but the moment I released the energy from the life orb I had built into it, I found the new flaw. There was no way to direct it. The energy melted back across my body, even slightly feeding back into my core, causing a painful combustion of energies. Not wanting to try that again, I realized I needed something to hold my channels together if I wanted any chance at this.

After a bit more brainstorming, I left the garage in search of Elody and asked her to give me a hand with a new idea. I wanted her to take my shield orb if she was willing and try to place a barrier around my soul-core reaction to see if I could at least get enough mana there to trigger my mana tinkering ability. If I could hold that long enough, I might be able to get a single channel working again and slowly start to build them up from there.

"Theoretically, it seems possible, but I wish we had someone more studied in these reactions than me. While I'm not a layman by any means, it's never been a passion," she replied when I suggested my idea. I appreciated her honesty and passed her my shield orb for the attempt.

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Once she was ready, I felt the shield pop into existence inside myself, which was an odd feeling. I quickly moved to activate my mana tinkering using the now-contained mana reaction flow. The shield shattered, not in the normal taken too much damage way either. This was something I hadn't experienced before. All the little broken shards of the shield exploded into me, driving new deep daggers of pain as they melted away. I screamed in pain.

"Dave, can you hear me?" She asked, sounding panicked.

"Yes, just hurts a lot. It's starting to fade," I forced out the answer.

"Just sit down and breath," she ordered.

"Okay, that idea is out," I said after a few minutes of letting the pain settle while Elody examined me.

"Yes, it seems your soul now pushes far too much mana out to be contained by your core. We are lucky the shield absorbed the excess mana and not another core overload. You've had far too many of those recently," Elody explained.

"Yeah, back to drawing board I guess. You may as well go join the others in training. I don't really have a clue what to try next yet," I said.

"Remember, as I said, it is possible this will heal on its own," she replied.

"Do we really have time for that, though?" I asked.

"No, probably not," she answered, worry in her voice. "Just be careful, please." She left the garage after those words, leaving me to stew in my own annoyance at what my mana channels had become.

It was possible I could entirely rebuild the channels if I had the material, but just like with access to someone who could magically fix me, that was again a nonstarter. I had maybe enough material to make another tool or two, and that was even pushing it. I hoped trade would become easier once we had Traveler here.

I didn't think a simple core fortification was likely to fix this, but what if I finally gave in to the idea I had been considering? If Corey were directly part of my socketing system architecture, could he work to guide the energies during a fortification, push them towards what actually needed to be fixed? It seemed possible, though extremely dangerous.

The idea of the dungeon core having that much control over me was still worrying, but they had proved themselves time and time again, especially after the incident with the Jesters. In the end, I decided I'd give it a little more time to see just what kind of healing I might get naturally, and barring that, strongly consider the Corey option. As much as it may scare me, it might also be the only way to continue fighting in the way I will need to.

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