A full day and one full recovery later, I was ready to try again. I didn’t really know what I’ve done to use up my whole mana pool, but I was determined to not repeat this mistake. I’ve got a gist of how to use mana coat properly from watching Felicia, because of course she was faster in picking this up than me. Geniuses sure have it easy.

Good thing is that I don’t need to be a genius, to learn from one. Even if she didn’t intend to, she already showed me the trick to completely coating oneself with mana. Looking back at my previous approach, it was kind of stupid, since from the start all I’ve done was trying to extend the coat from my limbs.

Why haven’t I thought about releasing mana with my whole body instead of a small part, I don’t know. All I know is that because of this mistake, I ended up falling even more behind, while Felicia was close to moving to another technique. I know she’s better at learning than me, but I can’t just let her outshine me that quickly.

Okay, so now I have to focus again, but this time I will do it differently. Previously I managed to meditate myself into oblivion, ending up in an unconscious state, in which I drained myself of mana. This time, I had to focus conscious manipulation, and instead of trying to extend the coat from my limbs, I had to create coat from the start on every part of my body separately.

This was a bit different method from the one Felicia used, but for me it was perfect. It required a bit of thinking, since I had to control many segments at once, but if my theory was correct, then I should be able to create something akin to scale armor.

I began to release mana using my whole body, but then I ran into another issue. The drain was much bigger than doing it just with one part, and if I didn’t form the coat fast enough, I would empty myself again. Well, since I already decided to go with “scale” format, I could just do them one at a time.

To my positive surprise, I managed to achieve the mana coat first time I tried, without wasting that much mana. The problem was it took me close to half an hour before I finished. Sighing I dispelled the coat, and decided to try again. It took me a bit more time to concentrate than before, but the reason for that might have been the cat girl desperately trying to fly while crashing into every possible wall.

To improve my performance, I had to either increase the size of a single segment created, or make more of them at once. I tried the former first, but because the surface area was too great it wasn’t exactly easy to cover every part of my body tightly enough. Forming it to fit my shape exactly was like shaping a really hard cardboard, it was possible, but still took too much effort.

The smaller segments didn’t have that problem if I made them small enough, but each one increased the amount of time needed to create the coat. I wasn’t sure if this was how you used this technique, because neither Felicia, nor the dragon used this method. He has shown us his mana coat once, and it was extremely uniform and fit him perfectly.

I had no idea how the “mana scales” would work, but for some reason I liked idea of them better than the uniform coat. All I had to do, was to deal with each scale taking almost as much time to create as the big ones. Along with the amount of them, the time needed increased explosively.

Okay, so let’s try out creating them simultaneously. I started with two scales in the same time, succeeding without any problems, but when I tried three, a slight headache appeared. I still had no problem with directing mana, it was just that my head was pulsating with a small amount of pain.

I succeeded at creating four, five and even six scales at the same time, but as soon as I tried doing seven, I nearly collapsed in pain. It was just too much. I couldn’t take the strain of doing that many things at the same time and my control also started wavering, so no matter how much pain I endured, I was unable to do better than six scales at a time.

It was six time faster than before that’s for sure, but it still took half the hour at the amount of scales I was intending to use. I could make them bigger, but then I risked them hanging loosely, and from what I’ve seen this resulted in them being very brittle. I had no idea why sticking to the body made them stronger, but that was apparently the case.

I wanted a strong armor for myself, but being unable to deploy it effectively would make it almost unusable. I could of course keep it always on, but it put a strain on the mana, having a small passive drain. It wasn’t enough to outshine my regen, but even walking put a strain on the coat, resulting in it needing more mana to keep itself intact.

There was one thing I could try, which was getting a skill helping me think about multiple things at once. I was quite lucky, since my internal library had information on the exact skill I needed, and if my theory was correct, all I had to do was to repeat my coat creation until I got it.

And sure enough after a couple of tries, I got the skill.

[Proficiency reached. Gained skill [Parallel thought lvl. 1] ]