[Chapter 22: Exciting things]
Magic is fun.
Really, no matter how cliché it may sound there is something deeply and almost intrinsically fulfilling about being able to shoot blasts of whatever after a lifetime without. It’s something that truly resonates with my soul or whatever it is that I have and I will never get tired of playing with it. Thing is, I haven’t really had the time to just sit down and play with it for a while, what with the cave under construction and all. But now that that’s completed, giving a look around the room taking in its refurbished form, I can finally start getting down to the fancy bits of magic.
Now while I do have a list of things to do like getting better clothes, finding more metal for future projects, and figuring out the bed situation along with many other miscellaneous things, I just built a working fireplace and ventilation into a cave through several meters of stone using a process that I can recall none of, so I’m using executive privileges to put magic on the top of said list.
But first, in order to truly understand magic, one must first remove all mana, finding understanding as it fills, at least that’s what I think I should do. I mean it makes sense to my logic, I only first learned how how to use magic after i had a vacancy in my mp pool. None of my books say anything about doing this, but in my defense, I only have the one book on magic from that dead guy and most of it is just the author bragging about all the magic he can use so it’s not very comprehensive. And if nothing says otherwise why shouldn’t I go with what I feel is best, its worked for me before and even if everything doesn’t go according to plan I’m sure I will get something out of it. So in respect of all the stonework I did I’m going to practice earth magic to empty my mp.
My goal is to level it up before my mp runs out, so I need to improve my method of converting mana into earth in some way. Before I was only able to manifest dirt, nothing near actual rocks. But the thing is, I just spent weeks doing stuff with rocks and stone: finding them, building with them, breaking them and now I would like to think I know a good deal about what rocks feel like, and what is imitation magic but man changed through feeling. So before even half my pool was gone a small rock lied in my palm and with it a notification.
[Skill level increased]
[Earth magic| lv: 2]
[Control earth magic with 20% efficiency]
Even after the skill level I kept playing with earth magic to burn mp, making bigger and smaller rocks to practice control. By the time my mp ran out I figured I could probably get another skill level if given a few more minutes. But that can be dealt with at another time, for now I have things to do, so I headed inside my cave to test some things.
Going into a meditative position I try to concentrate and feel the mana as is enters my body. It’s easier than I thought it would be as through concentration I can feel it as mana permeates my skin and enter the mana stream thing that I have inside me. After enough piles up over several minutes my mp ticks back up to 1. That’s really slow isn’t it, int is my highest stat so shouldn’t my mp regen be higher than? In fact, while I can’t be sure I don’t think it was any different from now. If that’s true then does int not have any effect on mp regen, so what makes it go faster?
Let’s see, I regenerate mana by having mana from outside enter my body and become integrated into the mana inside of my body. I think speeding up what happens inside my body will help, that seems to be more mana circulation’s job and it’s doing fine so I should focus on how the mana enters my body. Well what causes mana to enter my body in the first place, it doesn’t seem to work like heat because what I have inside is more than the outside and I don’t leak mana but regain it. So what then, does it just do what it wants to then floating randomly and being absorbed when it touches me, that’s what it seems like. If that’s really how it is, can I speed it up?
With no other leads I tried to figure out how to do just that, in order to speed up the regen I need to pull more mana into me, but how? I can’t physically affect the mana in any real way, but what about mana manipulation can that do something? To make this work I need to keep it simple, if I burn more mana than I take it it will be literally useless. So something small and close to my skin would be my best bet to actually get this to work.
Starting off I use manipulation to try and literally pull mana in the atmosphere towards me via scoops which works but not efficiently enough for me to use. So next I try using manipulation like a straw, pulling any mana that touch’s it inside, this is more effective but it gets clogged too quickly as it doesn’t move away from the straw fast enough. In order to fix that I integrated circulation in there as well to pull the sucked mana into my own stream, now we’re getting somewhere. Okay it works but the straw is tiny and can’t pull enough to be useful, so more is needed, more straws then? No, I can’t manage that many straws at once, then what about one big straw, like my entire body big? Starting small the mana straw’s borders slowly expand and begins to cover an increasingly large portion of my body. It’s rather mana intensive but it took me long enough to reach this point that my pool has almost filled up entirely. After the straw covers my entire body, becoming closer to a membrane of mana at this point, I now need to figure out how to make this work.
It can draw in mana that touches it, that much works fine, but it doesn’t increase my regen enough to even break even with its own costs. To fix this I need to both increase the amount of mana it absorbs, as well as decrease the cost of maintaining it. Decreasing the cost requires a greater familiarity with the construct so I’ll focus on increasing the mana absorption. Currently, it just absorbs all the mana that touches the membrane and making the construct bigger would be counterproductive. So the question is how do I draw in mana without touching it? A quick test showed that a vacuum doesn’t work, no mater what I do I just can seem to suck up mana. If not suck then pull maybe, but what’s mana attached to that I could pull… what about other mana? Mana typically exists in a cloud that permeates pretty much everything so mana is almost always touching other mana, if this can work I’d pretty much have the increase absorption part done.
Progress was slow from there, but the idea slowly came to fruition. Mana wouldn’t inherently pull on other mana, whatever connects mana together is too weak for that apparently. But it is possible to lace mana with a tiny bit of your own in order to connect with nearby mana, creating a chain of mana as it could be best described. And with a bit of practice the amount of mana absorbed became significantly higher than before. But I’m still getting a net loss so I think it’s time to move on to decreasing the cost.
Compared to increasing the absorption, this is relatively simple, I just need to make the construct smaller. Since size gives me nothing function wise, making it smaller will allow me to absorb the same amount of mana at less cost. The only problem is that it’s really difficult to do, but since I just spent practicing I should have enough know-how of the construct to make it work.
Starting off it’s easy to shave off some of the unneeded size, just a matter of actually making it smaller, but things quickly got trickier from there. Fitting everything I need to make it work became progressively harder as the size decreased, by now having gone from an inch to about a centimeter. And from there, their just wasn’t enough space for everything to work as it was. But I didn’t stop there, if it won’t work as it is now, then I just have to rework the process till it can work in a smaller space. Countless ideas were tested, processes reworked, taking out unnecessary bits of the absorption process, making some of the process internal where I have better control, when one idea didn’t work I took a step back and figured out what did, building upon my previous designs, speeding up circulation to account for greater absorption, my mind worked constantly changing and modifying ideas, acting as if being guided by unseen hands. This continued for a while until it was just a small shimmer on my skin and my mp regen grew passing the point of break even going as far slightly surpassing my natural regen.
[Obtained skill]
[Meditation| lv 1]
[10% increased mp regen while meditating]
It worked, I’m aware that one day things will take far longer to work the way I want them, but I’m glad that today is not that day. Wanting to test my new skill I just sat there concentrating on the mana as it enters my body a begins being cycled around my body. It’s an interesting feeling to say the least and just another fascinating thing about magic. This increase in regen will help me when I want to more actively use magic and might even help train some other skills.
[Skill level increased]
[Basic mana reinforcement| lv: 2]
[Str, Agi, and defense by 10X% with X=Int*0.2]
Cool