Discovering that he was a possessor was not a huge revelation to Marcel, who had already entertained the possibility. A flood of thoughts began clawing at his mind. The truth impacted him more than he expected.
'What happened to the real Marcel?'
'Was he gone?'
'Or was his soul still lingering, pushed into some shadowed corner, watching helplessly as I moved his limbs, breathed with his lungs, thought with his brain?', Marcel's mind was in disarray due to all the thoughts.
Until he calmed down by taking deep breaths, he couldn't control his possession; it didn't make him feel better that he didn't have control, but there was nothing he could do.
He needed to learn to control mana; that way he might be able to leave the body and possess a truly dead body, become a lich similar to the one from his favourite novel.
Marcel might have been inhabiting this body, but it was not his own. It was as though he were trying to sprint before even learning how to crawl. The instructions for cultivating mana were clear enough; the problem was that he lacked the necessary prerequisites to act on them.
This could be because I haven't fully integrated with the body, he reasoned.
"Or maybe the soul of the previous Marcel still lingers here, keeping me from completely taking over."
'Or perhaps… this is simply the way things are.'
His mind refused to rest, cycling through possibilities and retracing every step he'd taken since that very first day.
'The murky feeling I had when I first woke up… it disappeared the moment I learned this body's name', Marcel realised, as the pieces finally began to align.
Yet the revelation carried a bitter edge. If his theory were correct, then his progress toward acquiring mana would be stalled until he fully uncovered the history of the body's former owner.
Already, in his thoughts, Marcel spoke of the body as if it belonged to someone else entirely.
After some contemplation, he gave up on the idea of finding more about the body because he could not do anything about it at the moment.
When he suddenly heard the sounds of squeaks and sneezing, Marcel had not completed making his escape route yet, so he did the next best thing: he jumped into the pond.
This would undoubtedly contaminate the water, since his current hygiene was far from ideal, but survival outweighed everyday concerns like clean, safe drinking water.
As Marcel peered into the pond, he caught sight of the pudgy hamster, a leaf jutting out of its mouth. The sight made the creature look as though it were imitating a gangster, the leaf hanging from its lips like a crooked cigar.
The hamster sniffed curiously around the chamber, its twitching nose searching as though it were looking for Marcel.
Marcel suspected the hamster might have been the one to smear the medicinal herb on his wounds, perhaps as a strange form of thanks. Still, he wasn't about to take chances.
He recalled that, back on Earth, certain spiders would keep frogs as petsguarding their delicate eggs in exchange for protection and shelter. If an insect and an amphibian could forge such an unlikely bond, then why couldn't a massive, black-furred hamster that had very nearly killed him become something closer to a companion?
Nevertheless, the hamster continued its sniffing patrol until its nose brushed against one of Marcel's traps. It was a crude tripwire box trap, with a ton of substitutions. The box was nothing more than a little log precariously balanced on a framework of sticks scavenged from the forest. At its centre, a trigger stick waited to be nudged; the slightest touch would send the whole thing collapsing downward.
The log's lower edges had been roughly sharpened, meant to pierce into whatever was unlucky enough to be caught beneath. Yet, despite the crude design, it managed only to pinch the hamster's nose. The creature jerked back with a sharp squeak, more annoyed than harmed.
Marcel couldn't help but feel a pang of disappointment. With the limited tools he had, the trap had been something he was proud of, and seeing it fail so easily stung. He hadn't wanted to seriously injure the hamster, but he couldn't shake the sense of futility.
After enduring the minor sting, the hamster decided to leave the cave, but not before vomiting a fresh puddle of sludge onto the bed. He started to get a headache just thinking about all the work he had to do to fix the mess.
The entire encounter had lasted a little more than three minutes. Only then did Marcel notice a book meekly glinted in the sunlight from that shone from the roof of the cave into the pond.
The book was lodged into the ground, not lying flat as one might expect, but standing at an angle, as though someone had flicked a playing card that happened to stick instead of fall. The way it jutted indicated that it was either the randomness of chance or the uncanny sharpness of deliberate aim.
But before he could investigate further, his lungs screamed for air, and he was forced to surface for a breath.
Though his mind had been steady enough to hold out, his new body lacked the training to endure such strain. It was surprising that Marcel managed to hold his breath with this body for more than a minute.
An average untrained individual could hold their breath for about a minute or two. So, in comparison, Marcel did a good job with the body he had.
*cough*
*cough*
Marcel coughed as he took in deep breaths.
'I almost drowned', Marcel thought, 'huh!'
'Again, there is an inconsistency with my thoughts'
'My inner voice seems to go silent at times', Marcel exclaimed
Marcel realised that every time he used knowledge from his past life, such as making tools or so, the desync from the body increased.
However, when he ran away and hid in the face of the Hamster, he suddenly felt more in control.
'So should I just act like the owner of the body?', Marcel sighed, thinking about all that he knew, which wasn't much.
'So the only information I have about the original Marcel is that he was a scaredy cat'
'If I continue to do survival actions, I might desync and eventually lose the ability to control the body', thought of being in a situation similar to sleep paralysis did not appease Marcel
A few seconds of contemplation and phanting, Marcel jumped back into the pond and retrieved the book.
The book had bold words written in plain English "Magic for Dummies"