Ruho stared at the glowing bottle lying in the sand next to his head. Three sips. Not four. Don't die again. Simple instructions, except nothing about his current situation was simple, starting with the fact that every single part of his body felt like it had been run through a meat grinder and then reassembled wrong.
He tried to move his arm. His right arm, because it seemed slightly less destroyed than his left. The muscles didn't want to cooperate at first, sending sharp protests of pain up through his shoulder, but he gritted his teeth—carefully, because his jaw might also be broken, he wasn't sure—and forced his hand to move. Inch by agonizing inch, his fingers scraped through the sand, leaving little trails as he dragged his arm across the beach toward the bottle.
It was maybe six inches away. It might as well have been six miles.
His fingertips brushed the glass and he had to stop, had to take a moment to just breathe through the pain radiating from his broken ribs. Each breath was shallow and wet, accompanied by a disturbing bubbling sensation in his chest that he was pretty sure meant his punctured lung was still very much punctured. Blood kept pooling in the back of his throat, forcing him to turn his head and spit it out onto the sand every few seconds, the dark red staining the pale beach in a way that probably should've concerned him more than it did.
He tried again. Focused everything he had on just closing his fingers around the bottle. His hand shook violently, the muscles spasming from trauma and blood loss, but he managed to get a grip on the glass. It was warm to the touch, the liquid inside seeming to pulse with its own internal heat.
Now came the hard part. He needed to get the bottle to his mouth, which meant lifting his arm, which meant using muscles that were currently competing to see which ones could hurt the worst. He pulled, dragged the bottle across the sand, up over his chest—nearly dropped it twice, his fingers slipping on the smooth glass—and finally, after what felt like an hour but was probably only thirty seconds, he got it close enough to his face that he could tilt his head and press his lips against the cork stopper.
The cork was stuck. Of course it was stuck. Nothing could be easy.
Ruho bit down on it with his teeth, tasted blood and sand and his own saliva, and pulled. The cork came free with a wet pop and he immediately tilted the bottle, not trusting himself to maintain his grip long enough for a careful approach. The liquid hit his tongue and it was like drinking liquid fire mixed with the worst cough syrup he'd ever tasted mixed with something that his brain couldn't even identify except as wrong.
One sip. He counted. Made himself stop even though every instinct said to just chug the whole thing and deal with the consequences later. He swallowed, feeling the potion burn all the way down his throat into his stomach.
Two sips. Smaller this time because his hand was shaking worse. The taste wasn't getting better. If anything it was worse, like his taste buds had figured out exactly how much they hated this substance and were filing formal complaints.
Three sips. He forced it down and immediately let the bottle fall from his grip, not caring as it tipped over and spilled the remaining liquid into the sand. Three sips. That's what Azirel said. Three was enough. Three wouldn't kill him.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then everything happened at once.
The pain in his chest intensified, went from a dull roar to a screaming crescendo that made him arch his back and try to scream except no sound came out because his diaphragm was still torn. But then he felt it—something moving inside him. Not moving like things should move. Moving like living things, like his bones had suddenly gained awareness and decided they were tired of being broken.
His ribs shifted. Just shifted, on their own, grinding against each other as they realigned. He could feel them, could feel every single fragment of bone crawling back into place like insects under his skin, finding their partners, fusing back together with a sensation that was somehow worse than the breaking had been. The punctured lung reinflated with a wet sucking sound that he could hear from inside his own chest, the torn tissue knitting itself back together in a way that made him want to vomit.
His legs were next. The shattered femurs, the pulverized tibias, the exploded ankles—all of it moving, all of it reassembling itself. He could feel the bone fragments swimming through his muscle tissue, pulled by some invisible force, drawn back to where they belonged. The sensation was indescribable. Imagine every bone in your legs being broken and then imagine them fixing themselves while you're conscious and aware of every single moment of the process.
His pelvis popped back into its socket with an audible crack that echoed across the beach. His vertebrae realigned one by one, each adjustment sending a fresh spike of agony through his neck and spine. His diaphragm stitched itself back together, the torn muscle fibers finding each other and reattaching with a precision that seemed impossible.
The internal bleeding stopped. He could feel it stopping, could feel the torn blood vessels sealing themselves, could feel the pooled blood in his abdominal cavity being reabsorbed into his system like his body had suddenly remembered how to function properly.
And then, as quickly as it had started, it was over.
Ruho lay on the sand, gasping for breath—real breath now, full lungfuls of air that didn't bubble or catch—and stared up at the sky. His body felt wrong in a completely different way than it had a minute ago. Not broken wrong. Just exhausted wrong. Like he'd run a marathon and then immediately run another marathon and then maybe climbed a mountain for good measure.
He sat up. Slowly, carefully, not trusting that this was real. His ribs didn't protest. His legs moved when he told them to. His neck turned without sending shooting pains down his spine. He was healed. Actually, genuinely healed.
He tried to stand and his knees immediately wobbled, threatening to dump him back onto the sand. His muscles were jelly, his sense of balance completely shot, but he was standing. On two legs that worked. That weren't shattered into a million pieces.
"Not bad, right?" Azirel's voice said in his head, sounding pleased with himself. "That's a mana-grade lower gamma healing potion. Pretty standard stuff in this world, but it'll fix up most basic injuries no problem."
Ruho took a shaky breath, his legs still trembling beneath him. "What," he managed to say, his voice hoarse but functional, "the fuck is mana?"
There was a pause. A confused pause.
"What do you mean what's mana?" Azirel asked. "It's... it's mana. Magic energy. The fundamental force that powers basically everything in fantasy worlds. You had all those manga in your room, surely you've read at least one isekai that explained the concept."
"Those," Ruho said through gritted teeth, "were doujinshi. Hentai. I didn't read manga to learn about shitty isekai mechanics, I read it to get my rocks off. There's a difference."
"You—" Azirel sounded genuinely baffled. "You only read porn manga? That's it? No regular manga at all?"
"Why would I waste time on regular manga when porn manga exists?" Ruho shot back, his knees still wobbling as he tried to maintain his balance. "I had priorities."
"Your priorities were terrible," Azirel muttered. "Okay, fine. Crash course on mana, I guess. Mana is innate magic. Everyone in this world has it to some degree. The amount you're born with is determined by adding both your parents' mana ranks together, then subtracting three hundred, then adding twenty points for each year you age until you hit eighteen. Training, diet, and potions can increase your rank as you grow."
Ruho's brain was still trying to process the whole healing experience and wasn't really equipped to handle math right now. "Okay," he said slowly. "So what's a gamma rank? You said the potion was gamma."
"Right," Azirel said. "So there are seven ranks total. From lowest to highest: Kappa, Zeta, Gamma, Omega, Sigma, Beta, and Alpha."
"That's not alphabetical order," Ruho pointed out.
"It's Greek letter order based on power scaling, not alphabetical order," Azirel said, sounding annoyed. "Do you want to hear the explanation or not?"
"Fine, fine. Go ahead."
"Kappa is one to two hundred mana points. That's your bottom tier, basically children and people with almost no magical talent. Zeta is two hundred and one to five hundred points. Gamma is five hundred and one to two thousand. Omega is two thousand and one to ten thousand. Sigma is ten thousand and one to twenty thousand. Beta is twenty thousand and one to fifty thousand. And Alpha is fifty thousand and above."
Ruho tried to process those numbers, his exhausted brain struggling to make sense of the scale. "Okay. So where do most people fall in that range?"
"Most races never make it past Zeta," Azirel explained. "Humans, elves, dwarves, the standard fantasy races—they're all pretty weak compared to monsters and magical creatures. The average adult human is around one hundred and fifty mana points for females, one hundred and eighty for males. Some people train their whole lives and maybe hit low Gamma if they're lucky and dedicated."
"Got it," Ruho said, his legs finally starting to feel more stable beneath him. "So what rank am I?"
Another pause. This one felt more sheepish.
"You're, uh. You're low Kappa."
"How low?"
"Around twenty mana points," Azirel admitted. "Which is about the same as a ten-year-old boy."
"Are you fucking kidding me?" Ruho's voice rose in pitch. "You dropped me into this world with the magical capacity of a child?!"
"I didn't design your starting stats!" Azirel said defensively. "The system assigns them based on your soul's inherent properties and—look, it doesn't matter right now. What matters is that it's going to rain in about two hours."
Ruho blinked. "What?"
"Rain. Water falling from the sky. You're going to need shelter, and you're currently standing on an empty beach eight kilometers from the nearest shore with no supplies, no equipment, and the magical power of a fifth grader." Azirel's voice took on a more serious tone. "So you should probably start figuring out your survival plan pretty quickly."
The words hit Ruho like a second impact with the lake. He looked around the beach properly for the first time, really taking in his surroundings. Sand stretching in both directions. Water on one side. Dense forest on the other, the trees dark and unfamiliar. No buildings. No people. No nothing except him and the empty bottle lying in the sand and the rapidly darkening clouds gathering on the horizon.
"HOW THE FUCK AM I GONNA SURVIVE?!" he screamed at the sky, at Azirel, at the universe in general.