06

The hacking of the ring took several hours, a time that Charles spent resting and recuperating before setting out again. It was not that the LAI was weak, but the encryption placed on it worked on parameters that were completely unknown to either it or Charles. Neither had ever seen magic before, and even after the mana had rearranged to resemble code, it still took time until they could make sense of what they were seeing.

A neural network was a black box. Trying to change the inside of a black box meant reverse engineering what each and every neuron, a quantum neuron made of mana on top of that, did in the network. Charles helped in the process, his eye implants displaying the colorful holograms that mapped the pathways of the mana neurons. Each neuron was a packet of condensed mana, connected to the others via something akin to a bridge of energy. Something that was detectable and thus exploitable.

In the end, the superiority of the LAI and of an engineer who grew up in a place where technology was just a part of life won over the stubbornness of the ring.

They shed light into the black box. And inside of the storage space, floating in the middle of an inscrutable darkness were all the items the ring contained. They floated without gravity or weight, without time or even a concept of space and distance. Each item was reachable just with the command of Charles’ mind, and the awareness of its presence inside the ring was a natural extension of his own awareness.

There was food and water inside. A gigantic mountain of it, in fact, enough to feed him for years. His mind’s eye quickly took summary of all the thousands of ready-made dishes, fresh ingredients, vegetables and meats. The water was stored in its crude form. There was no container for it, just a gargantuan cube of fresh water in the middle of the black shadows that engulfed everything.

Mountains of weapons laid beside the food, even though in truth they were neither here nor there without a concept of distance. And money, gold and jewels. A small treasure inside the unassuming ring, a mountain of stuff that would be invaluable to him and that barely took up any space inside the pocket dimension.

He fidgeted with the ring for a moment, his brain catching up with the flow in information about all the things inside. The LAI helpfully organized all the things into a handy list, one that resembled a game inventory quite a bit. After he was done taking inventory, he tried to take out something. He guessed that he would just have to use his will or thoughts, but feared that it would not be just that easy.

Surprisingly however, easy it was. He willed for something that looked like a fruit to appear, and after feeling a small amount of mana leave his body, he saw the thing appear out of thin air already in his right hand. He stored it again, and frowned at the mana leaving him once again. Worried, he checked with the LAI to see what the mana that left him meant, to make sure that he was not losing levels.

Level and level progress are unchanged. Creating new parameter for mana expenditures: Mana Units. Calibrating one MU to be equivalent to the cost of extracting one kilogram of mass. Total MU available are 167.77. Amount is consistent with level up bonuses, calculated at 100 base points multiplied by 1.01^level. MU recovery is 7 per hour, or 24 hours to replenish reserves. MU recovery rate seems changeable, suspected fixed value: recovery time. Fixed value would be 24 hours for full recovery. Observing for more data.

He sighed in relief. He was quite glad that he didn’t have to pay a level penalty just to take things in and out of the ring, and he was even happier still that he now had a way to quantify his mana. With that in mind, he could finally try to make some sense out of the system of magic of this world.

After eating some fruit, he eyed the water greedily. Drinking the blood had left a scar in his mind that not even having all this water available to him now seemed to fix. He willed for a small trickle of it to come forth from the ring, and placed the thing above his mouth. He drank and drank until he was completely full, his mind asking him to wash away the bad memories as if he was drinking wine. He never paused to think about it before, but he had been roaming the dungeon for several days, and never for a moment was he not worried about food and water.

In the past he had taken these things for granted, living the comfortable life in the Empire. It was a place where scarcity of resources was just a looming ghost in the distance, relevant for just the most ambitious of projects. It never even crossed his mind that he’d have issues in his day to day life, outside of his exotic work needs. But this experience taught him the real value of such things. Even with a ring full of supplies, he shouldn’t get too complacent or he’d risk finding himself in a similar situation again in the future.

There was only one thing that Charles wanted to try before setting off again. He was now aware, thanks to his mana perception, that the air itself seemed to contain trace amounts of energy. It was more concentrated in certain areas while less in others, as the LAI showed by coloring the holographic map of the caves, but it was always present. If he managed to find a way to send this mana into himself, then he could speed up his recovery rate considerably.

He closed his eyes and concentrated. He still wasn’t sure how the initial dam broke regarding his mana sense, meaning that he had no solid experiences to base his next actions upon. But this much was not enough to stop him, quite the contrary it motivated him towards figuring the mystery out. He no longer was in a rush for time, as he had both food and water to last him a very long time.

He used his mana manipulation to move the energy around, but felt that the naturally occurring one was not responsive to him commands. His internal mana moved as if it was a part of him, as naturally as moving a limb, but the ambient energy felt like mud in a swamp.

He frowned and redoubled his efforts. The damned energy will listen to him, no compromises. He remembered several processes he often used when working in the lab with a large number of photons to entangle. Perhaps this was similar, and the energy that he felt like it was his own was actually just connected to himself like entangled photons were connected to each other.

If that were true, then all he needed to do was use his own mana to touch the ambient one and slowly convert it into his own. He tried that. He extended his mana as a misty cloud all around himself, bringing his reserves to less than fifty after spending more than a hundred units. He felt the particles of mana, infinitely small and thinly spread out to cover the whole area, like an ethereal mist made of impossible glass beads. He stared in wonder, not with his eyes but with his new sense, as he felt the number of particles he was controlling. It was staggering, uncountable, infinite. It was not their number but their energy density that brought out their power, defying even the most common of conceptions about the nature of the world.

He was used to light and waves, photons being infinitely small like mana but carrying a discrete, quantized amount of energy. Making him able to count and calculate their exact number if he knew how much energy there was in a beam of light. Mana was different. It was not a single particle that mattered, because there was no single particle. Alone, a particle would amount to zero. But together they formed a dense veil, like a gas cloud that covered everything. And it was the amount of energy per unit volume that mattered.

Soon his control wavered and the cloud dissipated into more ambient mana, leaving him with an almost empty tank and nothing gained. Well, he had actually gained something: knowledge. He already knew that the LAI could exercise control upon his mana by using him as a proxy. All he had to do now was to ask it to keep the cloud shaped while he tried to grab and capture errant mana in the atmosphere.

He tried again, this time a much smaller cloud coming out of the measly 20 MU he decided to spend. Spending the mana, deciding how much to use and how to shape it was almost instinctive to him. The LAI furthered such control even more, making him able to control the output and use only precise amount of mana that he needed for a certain task. Now, if he could gather the ambient energy at least once, then he could have the LAI do it passively all the time by copying what he had done.

And then it happened. The cloud of energy under his control surrounded and subverted one that had naturally formed. And it made it into more of Charles’ own energy. He pulled the energy back into himself, grinning as he watched the small bar the LAI had provided him with to check on his total reserves fill up slowly. And as it was full, the excess energy kept entering his body.

“Where the fuck is it going now?” He asked out loud, and the LAI heard him and prepared a report.

Excess energy is being converted into experience. Create program to automatically sustain the gathering process?

“Well, yes of course!” He said smiling.

Designate amount of MU to dedicate to process.

“Fifty MU. Then feed half of the gains to the cloud while make the rest into exp.” He replied.

The reasoning was this. The 50 MU spent would create a cloud that could convert another 50 MU of ambient mana into his own after some time. Of those, 25 would go back to the cloud and 25 would go to increase his level. This meant that he now had a cloud of 75MU, which in turn could give him another 37.5 to increase his level and just as many to increase the cloud. A self-sustaining feedback loop guaranteed to make him grind levels insanely fast. The only limit being how much mana there was in the area he could control, which increased with levels and was now 5.2 meters wide.

He told the LAI to limit the cloud MU value to the highest amount ever recorded inside the area of influence, as there was no need to have more than that floating around. If he ever went to a higher concentration place, then the upper limit would increase to support the new maximum. A perfect plan.

His grin was so wide that he winced in pain as a muscle got sore. This did not deter him, but rather made him laugh all the harder at the absurdity of the situation. He went from rags to riches in a matter of an afternoon or whatever time this was.

And now that he was done, he was gaining levels passively without doing anything. He wondered whether to call bullshit and declare this a broken mechanic, but soon his mind reminded him of the power he had seen the other people wield before. They didn’t seem to even consider the enemies as they fought them, and treated their power as if they were walking in the park. He had a lot of catching up to do before calling himself even close to powerful, let alone overpowered.

He got up and made for the stairs for the next floor. He had spent enough time in here, and he was very curious about the outside. Perhaps the best choice would be to spend time in the dungeon and get more powerful, considering that he now had plenty of weapons and supplies, but he didn’t want to do that.

It would be boring. And a waste of time. What he needed to do was to see the state of things out there, and figure out the best way to set up a science workshop to study this world and its rules in an attempt to finally open a portal. And then sit back and relax as the Empire came and brought peace and prosperity to these lands.

Hopefully, before that time came, he would also be able to test some fancy weapon ideas he had. Maybe even power them up with magic. He laughed, but quickly restrained himself. Then, noticing that he was alone in here, he decided that he could let himself go a bit and enjoy his machinations. The roaring could be heard from quite far, the echoes coming back to his ears loaded with all the madness only he knew resided inside his plans as well.

But he was not mad, no. He just happened to thoroughly enjoy the act of creating, and using, certain technological tools. Namely: weapons. Weapons of mass destruction.

As the LAI auto-cultivated, as he had come to call the automated action, he spared some time to look around. His hands were free and his mind light, and the dungeon itself seemed to be quite different now that he was not constantly worried about his survival. He had food, he had weapons that could be taken out of the storage whenever they were needed, and he had the LAI that would take care of fighting for him. A perfect plan, and one that allowed his mind to finally relax and think.

There were loose stones and rocks on the ground, he noticed. They were of no particular value to him, but he knew very well that they would come in very handy as soon as he began building his machines. Silicon, quartz, and a slew of other useful minerals were hiding away under the bland exterior of those stones. And perhaps even some new interesting elements he had never seen before. He also knew that this was probably one of the very few times when he could waste mana without issues, and he had no way to spend it for anything while he gained a stupid amount of it. So, he pointed the index finger with the ring at the ground and started storing.

He vacuumed everything that was not a part of the walls. He could absorb quite the amount of stuff now that his mana was being replenished by the LAI as it cultivated, and although it momentarily stopped his level grinding by taking his reserves below 100%, it was worth it in his mind.

He figured out that he could lift things into the ring from as far as three meters in a circle around the ring itself, and take them out up to the same distance. He kept playing with various possible exploits and ideas the whole day while he scooped up everything that he could and while the LAI guided him downwards.

The enemies he had to fight were getting weaker and weaker, to the point of being almost inconsequential. He still left the fighting to the AI, having no need to dirty his own hands himself. By the end of the day there were more than four hundred kilograms of materials such as rocks, sand and gravel along with more than thirty corpses in his storage. And he had gained a level as well.

The ring was still at the same level, the action of taking things in and out of it seemingly moving the imaginary bar towards the next level but at a pace so slow it would have been impossible to notice without the digital companion. He suspected that such a level had been reached after quite some heavy use, and he would need to step up his game quite a bit if he wanted to bring out the full potential of the strange magical item.