Chapter 7 “Knots and Magic”

The ebbing and flowing of light and warmth had no impact on my obsession with paracord which had led to some substantial gains in my weaving, control mana, meditation, and exhaustion resistance skills. Especially when you consider that I had spent several days doing this. It turns out that paracord can scale nigh infinitely when it's made of mana. My final kern ended up being 100 braided threads with 400 woven strings around it. And my persistence in using multiple separate pieces of paracord in my knots led to great gains.

[ General Skill: Exhaustion Resistance has gained lvl 21-50 Rewards +30 Growth, +1065 EXP ]

[ General Skill: Control Mana has gained lvl 88-105 Rewards + 17 Mana, +17 Magic, +1649 EXP ]

[ General Skill: Weaving has gained lvl 13-57 Rewards +44 Artistry, +44 Growth, +1575 EXP ]

[ General Skill: Meditation has gained lvl 26-85 Rewards +60 Mana, +60 Growth, +3330 EXP  ]

[ General Skill: Knottology has gained lvl 1-30 Rewards +60 Artistry, +120 Growth, +465 EXP ]

Well that's odd, why would Knottology an action that would take massive amounts of dexterity and finesse to do properly, at least while you have something as piddly as hands, buff growth instead of those other stats? I wasn’t even using growth to tie my knots; it was all Intelligence, Willpower, Artistry, Magic, and Mana. Is it because I’m a plant? That's really the only thing that makes sense the system must be compressing my stats into one stat that will actually benefit me. Because what use does a plant have for finesse, dexterity, or agility. A plant only moves through growth except for a few odd ones out like venus flytraps and pitcher plants which utilize pressure or tension to close their leaves when conditions are met like a fly entering the pitcher or “mouth”. So my stats are getting compressed to allow for an applicable bonus. I’m glad the system doesn’t screw over immobile species by giving them useless stats!

I’m also very glad that I didn’t miss out on 6 days of photosynthesis because I was focused on Knottology. Now that I have massively improved mana control I should look for anything else I am able to improve right now. I have; root growth, water, trunk growth, and a way to both recover mana and avoid sleep covered. The only things I could really benefit from at this point would be improved photosynthesis and nutrient storage. While very useful for long winters, nutrient storage won’t help me if I have no nutrients to store. So I should improve my photosynthesis first.

Plants and microorganisms have been doing photosynthesis for millenia so I need to improve it in a way that it hasn’t already been improved. It is already highly water efficient and nutrient efficient. The major limitations for photosynthesis are heat, carriage of glucose, carriage of water, carriage of vitamins/minerals, and heat. For glucose, water, and the required substrates I can just use mana to speed up the ferrying process. For heat there are a couple major issues. A minimum amount of sunlight is needed to start the chemical reaction. But after a certain point there is too much heat and the stomata within the leaves have to close because there is too much water wasted. So I can use magic to keep the water levels and heat levels optimal. Actually if I could learn light magic I could create a deep purple, red, orange, and UV light which would be optimal for photosynthesis as those are the types of light most absorbed by the different types of chlorophyll.

So I need to find a way to accelerate my internal transportation, control water in such a way to prevent evaporation from my leaves, a method to maintain my optimal temperature for photosynthesis, and maybe a way to produce artificial light. If I were to utilize the skills of Sword Star Online I would need evocation to control the other elements, light (maybe), water, earth, life, and probably body enhancement magic. And all of it will have to be invocationless because I lack the required lungs and body shape to actually speak an invocation, not to mention not having any,

It would probably be easiest to start with earth or water magic given that my roots are surrounded by that element. So should I start by swirling my mana around to see if a change happens? Or should I try to see if neutral mana changes as it flows through a piece of earth or water?

Looking for changes sounds vital for improving my understanding of magic but will probably not unlock a skill. Let’s begin with swirling then.

I started manipulating around my aquifer taproot. A simple pulsation within that underground lake like ripples pulling to and from my root. Unfortunately while this did move the mana within the water it did not move the water itself if my mana vision is anything to go by. I did however get the shape of each individual water molecule, because they are each technically a separate item, and the shape of the aquifer when I pulled my mana back into myself.

This time instead of moving my mana I decided to yank the mana in the lake around. This still had no effect on the physical water but it did reveal a difference within the mana itself. The mana everywhere, even inside my body displays a vast slurry of colors always. But in each place there is a difference. In the air the silvery tones take the forefront but there is only slightly more silver than there is anything else. In the water a dark blue takes dominance but the amount of blue changes depending on where the mana is in the water. The further from the air and from the walls the more that dark blue is emphasized. The same phenomena is evident in the stone around my roots as well. The deeper the root I check around the more the gray-brown is emphasized.

This evidence brings me to a new thought: what if instead of manipulating the whole of the mana point I manipulate only the color of the element I want to move. Attempting to grab only the blue within a mana point of water was difficult. It felt almost as if whatever hand-finger-thread-thing I used to manipulate mana had difficulty grasping only that specific color. Eventually by slipping into meditation and narrowing my focus until I saw only that point of mana I was able to get my control fine enough to actually manipulate. With the gentlest of touches I slid my tentacle over the mana and it flowed with me. Instead of me yanking it around it followed my will wherever I spun it. Now I wanted it to interact, so I flowed a small piece of my own mana and I took my thinnest thread and pulled upon it until the blue took the forefront. Then I slid the two points together and pressed until the blue fused. There was a great jolt, for the scale I was working at, and the blue split off forming a piece of mana made wholly of water. The other portions of the merged mana twisted around itself until it split apart revealing two new pieces of mana with no elemental forefront which floated alongside the piece of pure water mana.

If my laughter could be heard by anyone wandering through this forsaken deep woods they would promptly be investigated for a user of demonic or necromantic magic. So great and deranged was my joy at receiving the following skills.

[ General Skill: Evocation Magic has gained lvl 1-10 Rewards +10 Mana, +10 Magic, +10 Wisdom, +55 EXP ]

[ General Skill: Water Magic has gained lvl 1-15 Rewards +15 Magic, +15 Wisdom, +120 EXP ]

[ General Skill: Decoding has gained lvl 59-60 Rewards +4 Intelligence, +2 Wisdom, +119 EXP ]

And I hit level 17, nice!

Doglia5

hope everything came out well! sorry if the table posted oddly I've just been copy pasting it from my spreadsheet. Getting this chapter to flow was a little annoying because I was having difficulty with transitioning into my description while maintaining flow.