Unfortunately for Alphonse, the bed proved to be too strong of an adversary. After he took a bath, he crawled into bed, only to fall asleep within a minute. He did not even have the time to return to thinking about anything, which was a common habit of his back on earth.
Upon closing his eyes, he could feel the warm blanket of sleep overtake him, dragging him into a deep slumber almost immediately.
"Hey! Wake up!" a voice nudged at Alphonse amidst his sleep. "Hey! You! Listen!"
Alphonse opened his eyes. He was greeted by a very provocatively dressed young lady sitting on his bed.
"Hey there, wanna play around for a bit" She whispered seductively.
'How did she even get in my room…' Alphonse felt lost for a moment.
The young lady reached out her hand, attempting to tough Alphonse.
"Kya!" She yelped as Alphonse grasped at her wrist.
"Hey. Don't tell me… Are you a succubus?" He inquired
"Wha- How could you tell?" She was clearly surprised, "Young mages like you normally don't have the mental strength to realize this…"
"Oh, so you are…"
"What? Why do you sound so disappointed?" She sounded offended and pouted, "Perhaps… you swing the other way? Sorry, I'm not an incubus, Hmph!"
"Nah, I was excited because I was no longer feeling exhausted."
"Huh? No, silly, you're not feeling exhausted because we're in your head. You would only feel tired here if you were mentally tired, not physically tired!"
"Oh, that's an interesting concept." Alphonse thought for a bit, "Say, let's say, for instance, I choose to study here in this Dream World on my own, would I retain memories that I've created here?"
"Of course you would, you would simply remember it as a regular dream, after all." She sneered, "Not that I would stay here to keep the Dream World open for you though. Now that you know that I'm a succubus, I can't extract your mana anymore.
"What? Why can't you? Does knowing that you're a succubus prevent you from extracting my mana?" He asked.
"N-no? You would simply refuse to give me mana by blocking your mana flow and not getting seduced by me. Normally, we succubi would seduce our targets and interact with them in certain ways to weaken them to the point where their mana would just spill out, and we would eat that up." She whined, "which is why we can't target stronger targets like the professors in this school, so we normally just target the new students to get our share of mana."
"I see. I have a proposal for you, miss succubus." Alphonse offered excitedly, "You keep this Dream World open for me, and I'll offer you my mana."
"What? Willingly?" she asked in shock.
"Yes. Willingly."
"I-I… I've never done that before…" although she was shocked by the offer, she was also quite happy by it. For succubi, it took some effort to recreate a dream world to seduce a target. And here she was, being offered a chance to obtain some fresh young mana at little to no cost. From what it sounded like, it didn't seem like he would need her to even interact with him. "Do you just want a place to study?"
"Something like that. If I can work hard in real life, and then come in here to study and go over what I learned in real life, then I could do well in this life too."
"I see…" she pondered at his word choice for a moment, but ultimately thought nothing of it.
"How much mana would you need per night to keep this room open?"
"Just enough to keep me full for the day. How much mana do you have?" She inquired.
"You see, that's the funny thing. Earlier today, I had just heard that we would need to develop our mana cores before we could use magic."
"WHAT? Do you mean that you offered to give me mana without even having any yourself? I can't believe you would try to trick me like that!"
��Hold on, let me finish." Alphonse held his hand up, indicating that he had more to say, "Earlier, when I checked my health after working out, it gave me a set of data indicating my health, mana, hunger, and condition. Although my health number was pretty low, I think my mana was relatively high."
"How can that be? Your latent mana can't be that high. Here let me check" She held out her hand.
Alphonse hesitated for a moment before grabbing hold of it.
The pair instantly warped to a pure white room.
"Okay, show me your mana," she ordered, "Just do what you would do to pour mana into a magic meter."
"Right… How do I do that?"
Her jaw dropped, "You're telling me you don't even know how to do that? How did you even get accepted into this school?"
"Hahah…" Alphonse's laugh was hollow while he tried his best to dig through the original Alphonse's memories. It didn't take long for him to remember the first time he felt the sensation of some type of substance moving around him as a child, only to be told that it was mana.
He was also able to recall the time he had tried to pull that substance that was inside him and inject it into a crystal ball at the examination. The ball had shown pretty brightly before cracking, so it was deemed that he had passed the examination.
"Was it… like this…?" Alphonse held his hand out, trying to replicate the same feeling. All of a sudden, he felt something in his chest, which flowed towards his arm, past his elbow, and into his fingers.
Then, as soon as it reached his fingers, he could feel a type of swelling in his fingertips before ultimately, a light blue-ish substance formed itself on his palm. Then more came out.
The few drops grew into a small ball, which grew into a ball the size of an egg.
That egg grew into a melon.
That melon grew into the size of a big rock.
"Okay, okay! That's enough!" The succubus exclaimed, "Don't wear yourself out before we even close the deal!"
"But I can keep going though?"
The rock grew into a boulder.
That boulder continued to grow.
It grew into the size of a small satellite.
"No, listen!" The succubus complained, "You need to save that!"
"What do you mean?"
"Although it will regenerate over time, you need to use your latent mana to establish your mana core! You must have used over a hundred units of mana already!"
"I see. I'll stop for now then." He tried to stop the flow of mana coming from his chest. Like a leaky faucet, it slowly came to a stop.
"Well then. I only need about fifteen units of mana a day, so it should be fine if you were okay with using a hundred just to show off like that. A little more and you would have probably passed out, you should be more careful!" She warned.
"Alright then, deal. What does fifteen units of mana look like?"
"Well," she gestured with her hands, "five units of mana would be about the size of a bread loaf… So about three loaves of bread?"
"I see, that's fine then." He thought about it for a bit, "How about this I'll give you five units of mana in exchange for keeping this room open, and the remaining 10 for teaching me about magic,"
"Wha- Why would I have to babysit a kid like you!"
"Hey, don't say that, you were trying to elicit free mana using devious means from a 'kid' such as myself just a moment ago…"
"What? No! I was just trying to convince you to give me some mana, there was absolutely nothing devious in it!"
"Alright alright," Alphonse didn't want to waste time arguing, "well then Miss… sorry, what was your name again?"
"My name is rather hard to pronounce in your Human Tongue, but you can call me Eve.
"Well then Miss Eve, I'll be in your hands then."