Justin danced around in a little circle, waving his hands over his head.

“Aahahaaha! Yes yes yes!” he cheered.

As he turned he noticed the troopers were staring at him, mostly in amusement. One seemed nervous, while Tonero was suffused with curiosity.

“I can spend more mana to exceed the basic limits on volume!” Justin explained to them. “And so far it’s not a lot, either! Probably five times as much more again though, to get under. . .1.44 cubic meters would be the next limit, I think. And that suggests to me that any other limits can be exceeded with more mana. I am a happy Prominence!”

He turned back to the stand and his notes. Behind him, he could hear a couple of the troopers trying to muffle their laughter. He wrote down his observations about the past few tests, then started a new section.

Test 4: Basic Amounts, he wrote, and moved to the edge of the raised wall of stage platforms.

He created a new shortylith, and tried to create another on top of it.

Nothing happened. Too bad, he thought; I was hoping I’d be able to create a set of five at once, but it seems otherwise. Not giving up though. . . .

He pushed his dantian again, and to his delight, a second shortylith appeared on top of the previous one. The mana cost was much higher, about ten times a base monolith, and the time was about twice that spent on pushing through the one-fifth volume limit earlier. Justin wrote it all down under the Test 4 heading.

Another mana push, another shortylith; Justin repeated it four more times for a total of six of the boxy yellow barriers before he hit another limit. He paused to look around the stage. The troopers were essentially done with the clean up, so he called out to them. “All right, guardsfolk, everybody move off the stage and below its level, please! I don’t expect any trouble from this next test, but better safe than surgery! You folks below, move to the safety areas!”

“Yes, Prominence,” the Senior in charge below – Buru, that was the name - shouted back, from beneath the stage where the scratch mechanists crew assembled from the free squad members was crank-powering the under-stage machinery, under Tzo’s direction via the sound system.

He suited his own action to his words, returning behind his testing wall for his stand and notes before going over to the orchestra pit, lowering the stand the six feet down into it, then following it himself. He looked around, got a correct headcount of people in sufficient cover, and set his will.

This time he needed an effort that was more like a shove than a push, though still less that what he’d consider a haul, let alone a heave. It got him a seventh shortylith, and though the mana cost – the sense of it flowing out of him – was much higher than any of his previous efforts, he still couldn’t feel any emptiness or loss in his lower dantian. Good! He thought. Very good! Maybe I don’t have a sense for that, but I’ll be surprised if I don’t. Which suggests I have a big reserve already.

The other interesting new data was how his mana flow sense was far more acute to tiny fractions of a second than his normal senses. In terms of mana expended, the creation of a seventh shortylith felt twenty-five times longer than the creation of a monolith. According to the rest of his brain, though, it was still happening faster than an eyeblink. And if the powers-of-five tier structure was applying there as well, he had a maximum rate of mana expenditure limit.

He was hesitant about trying to push past that one with the same moar powah! trick he was currently using. He had no specific intuition warning him against trying it, but common sense suggested his dantian might be more vulnerable to damage from that kind of strain.

He recorded those observations and continued to shove out shortyliths, piling them up in more stacks of five. Somewhere around the third of those, the twenty-first shortylith total, he finally felt the dense reserve of mana in his dantain beginning to thin out. But the loss was the next thing to imperceptible; a single percentage point at most. And two more stacks of five later, he butted up against another limit. One shortylith at the 1^st Tier-by-amount; five more at the 2^nd; 25 more at the 3^rd. If the 4^th Tier didn’t cap out at 125 more than that, he’d eat Taiko’s scroll.

Justin took a deep breath, placed his hands on the orchestra pit’s wall, and focused. Put the next one. . .right. . .there, he thought, imagining it bridging the gap between two piles up on the stage that he could Barrier Sense without seeing. And he hauled.

The mana poured out of his dantian in a long rush, and the Tier-4-by-amount-total shortylith popped into existence. Five times as much mana as for any of the previous Tier 3 shortylith, and it did take a literal eyeblink’s worth of time to do it. One towards the fast end of the scale, closer to 100 milliseconds than not, but distinguishable by his normal senses.

That’ll do for Test 4, Justin thought. Regardless of how unappetizing the tedium of hauling out another one-hundred-and-twenty-five shortyliths to reach Tier 5 by amount was, he didn’t have the time. He wrote down his observations, dismissed the 32 Barriers stacked across the stage, and looked around for Ougo.

“Captain! Ready for some damage tests?” he asked.

“Yes,” the stern-faced man answered.

“Up on stage we go, then,” Justin said, retreating a few feet before dashing at the wall of the orchestra, leaping up to grab the stage’s edge, and pulling himself onto it. Ougo, with his superhuman cultivator’s physique – and perhaps some qinggong “lightness skill” added in – walked up to it and trivially rose up to the stage, as if stepping six feet up through thin air was perfectly normal. Which for him, it probably is, Justin thought, a little enviously.

Tonero, down in the orchestra pit, had picked up Justin’s stand, and now handed it up to him where he crouched at the stage’s edge. “Thanks, Tonero,” Justin said, setting it down beside him. He stood and held his hands out to the rest of the guards. “With the Captain’s permission, everyone’s welcome to come up and watch,” he said.

Ougo gave Justin another exasperated really? glance, but didn’t object. After a moment’s pause for any other reaction from their leader, there was a restrained but definite rush as the others hopped onto the stage with them.

Justin wrote Test 5: Basic Durability, and flexed his dantian to create a shortylith lying on its largest face next to the end of the raised platforms he’d been sheltering behind earlier. He bent down, lifted it up and pushed the large face flat against them, so it was resting on its 2.1 meter edge, with only the 0.72 meter width between him and the raised platform’s wall.

He put his back to it, and looking over his shoulder, lifted his right foot to make contact. Too close, he thought, and slid a foot farther away. This time, when he repeated the motions, the distance was right.

He crouched, chambered a gentle mule kick, and smashed the Barrier into dissolving stained-glass fragments of yellow light. As expected, he thought.

“And now, hopefully at five times normal durability,” he said, and created another one with a dantian push. The mana cost was again about twice normal, and when he bent to lift it up, he thought it was fractionally heavier, too.

Not a surprise, he thought, since the first one had enough mass beyond the air it contained to settle on the stage, and then fall over, rather than hovering the way a mass-less Barrier would. How would I. . .oh, yes; a see-saw would work fine for testing alterations to their weight.

Oh, damn, there’s another simple weaponization. Make dense ones and just drop them. Flechettes. Concrete bombs. Biggaliths with curved bottom edges and slanted lower halves for friction that will topple right over and squish things. Hmm. Given enough open space, that could be a good non. . .well, low lethality attack. . . .

Not the time now, Justin. Focus!

He paced off the distance again, and this time, put some force into his back-kick. He’d always had good leg muscle, and once again, the Barrier shattered into yellow fragments.

“And that’s my direct testing done,” he said, stepping back to his stand. He wrote the data down on the notes, looked at the space in front of the line of platforms, and shoved.

This time, the yellow glow was denser; not really brighter, but the Barrier’s translucency was reduced. Justin lifted the new one, noticing the greater weight. It was harder to tell how much more the five-times-stronger shortylith itself weighed compared to the 10 kilos of air inside it, but this time, the increase was unmistakable. If it wasn’t also five times the previous. . .yeah, no bet, Justin thought.

This time, he positioned it with the narrowest end against the hexagonal platform’s wall, so that its fifteen-foot-plus length stuck out. He indicated the other narrow end, and said, “At your discretion, Captain.”

Ougo stepped up, drawing his truncheon, and gave the Barrier’s narrow end a light tap with it, then a rap, and finally a serious smack, which broke it. “A punch from a strong man with some training, but no cultivation” he said, stepping back out of the creation area again.

Justin noted that down, said, “Tier 4!”, focused, and hauled. And felt his dantian thin out a tiny bit more. He stepped forward, got his fingers under the Tier 4 Density shortylith, and pulled it upright. Yeah, now the increased weight was making itself known. The T4 Density Barrier was around three times as heavy as the T1. Fifty, maybe sixty pounds. Not something he couldn’t handle, but a Tier 5? Ougo would be lifting that one.

He manhandled the T4 into position like the previous one, stepped back, and extended a hand. “Please, Captain.”

Ougo moved to the Barrier’s end, and worked his way up a scale of strikes, harder, and harder, until the T4 shattered into yellow fragments too.

He rubbed his chin in thought. “Early initiate level of chi refinement,” he said. “Twice as strong as a punch by an elite mortal at the peak of training and development, in comparison.” This time, he moved to stand by Justin, who was making a note of his assessment.

“And here comes my first attempt at a Tier 5,” Justin said, bracing himself. He imagined a shortylith with 625 times the durability of a Tier 1, and heaved. He didn’t get spots before his eyes, or need a deeper breath, the way he might with a similar, purely physical exertion, but the drain on his dantian was notable. It also took two somewhere around a half a second to form the Barrier, which happened instantaneously at the end of that delay, rather than forming partially over time.

“Whoof,” Justin said.

“Are you well?” Ougo asked.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Justin said. “Not used to feeling my dantian thin out like that, is all. It’s weird. And that,” he added, pointing at the solid yellow bulk lying before them both, “should stay flat this time, Captain. I think we’re reaching the point where the transmission of force from your strikes would damage a single platform that was bracing it. We’ll leave this one the way it is to spread the impact out across as much of the stage as possible.”

Not to mention how I couldn’t lift it without potion doping. . .and thinking of which - note to self: sub-prioritze diagnostic spells within prioritization of healing magic research when Library grimoires are first accessed; cross-reference with Norodo’s existing analytics on me. Because what if potion doping is a thing? Glad I got at least some baseline data from Norodo’s checks before I took it for the first time. . .where was I? Oh, right, avoiding damage to the stage. . .hmmm. . . .

“Or. . .wait,” Justin said out loud. “Human punching force caps out around one-thousand psi, because the bones can’t take more force. . .so maybe we shouldn’t. Let me think a bit, please. . . .”

Create a semicircle standing on one edge, that Ougo can swing into as it rolls forward? he thought. No; too risky. And I haven’t even tested for shape alteration capabilities yet. . .aha! Stacked on another at an incline! Yes, that could work. . .no; use three. . .four. One flat on the stage, aligned that direction; another parallel to it, maybe a meter away, with a third stacked on top. And the fourth perpendicular to the others, lower edge centered in the middle of the first one, with its far end rising higher on the other side of the stacked ones. That way the first one will distribute the radial downward force from Ougo smacking the higher end upward as much as possible across the stage, to reduce the chance of damage. Good. But this should be the last toughness test done here.

And also thinking of which. . . .

Justin went over to the raised hexagonal stage platform that had been taking all the punishment so far. Yes, the paint was scuffed on that one vertical wall. He examined it closely. It didn’t seem to have been knocked out of alignment – Sunwood was some tough stuff – but this wasn’t the time, let alone the place for materials testing to destruction.

“Tzo, I’m concerned about the damage done to the platforms so far. Lower and raise them a few times, would you? Captain, please have your troops report on the functioning of the mechanisms as he does.”

“Yes, Prominence,” Ougo said. He stomped lightly on the stage where he stood, and shouted, “You hear that, Buru?”

“Yes, Captain,” came the answering shout from below.

Justin went over to the other half of the stage, and started heaving out Tier 5 Density shortyliths according to his plan. Shortiliths? he thought, and shook his head. No. The ‘y’ is fine; ‘shortilith’ reads too much like some kind of lovecraft-adjacent ickery.

Gonna be fun coming up with names for the rest of the sizes, though, he thought, grinning. Chunkaliths. Heftiliths. Hulkaliths. Miniliths. . .mickeyliths. Goofyliths?

‘You’re a goofylith,’ he reflexively imagined Chloe saying, her tone affectionate and amused, and he stopped to take a couple of deep breaths to recover from the sudden sense of loss and misery.