I need something that will emulate a soul; it should naturally detach imprinted elements from imprinted mana.

Thinking about it, why bother making something that will emulate a soul when I can just take the part of the soul I need? I have Ustos in captivity, after all, so why not? I can just remove his soul’s fingers and attach them to some sort of device. Then artificially push mana through and let the stolen part of the soul do the rest of the work of breaking imprinted mana down.

So how to do this? I need to somehow make a device that will let a part of a soul survive without the mana core.

I start looking through the soul anatomy books in the library, searching for any information about preserving souls. Surprisingly, I got lucky and found something relatively quickly.

Preserving a soul isn’t that hard. When a part of a soul is removed, it loses contact with the mana core, which, along with providing the chunk of the soul with constant mana, is also apparently responsible for giving it instructions to change shape. Those signals are sent because the soul automatically has to adapt to the state the physical body is in, and apparently, the mana core also manages this.

When a small part is removed, it merely remains a weirdly constructed chunk of dense imprinted mana. Of course, if the chunk just remains in the natural atmosphere, it will be whittled away by atmospheric mana, like wind blowing on a pile of leaves. So you need to put it in some sort of container that will protect it from the elements. Fortunately, some idiot named Benoit Gurieli invented such a thing, for medical purposes.

Hmm, I would also like to know a more in-depth description of how the soul turns imprinted mana into normal mana.

This topic also didn’t take long to find, and it actually turns out to be very simple. The reason imprinted element removes itself from mana is caused not by the mana core, as I thought, but by the imprinted element itself.

Imprinted elements can apparently sense if they're making contact with the outer shell of the soul. They have some sort of instinct to remove themselves from the mana particle if, for some reason, it goes past the shell, and after so it will return to the mana cipher to attach itself to a new mana particle.

With this, the design starts coming together in my great mind. If I take a piece of Ustosi’s soul and remove the shell on its surface, I will be left with a pure condensed imprinted mana that is highly susceptible to collapse and drainage. Then I will put it into a container, and instead of using this chunk for silly medical purposes, I will use it as a battery for Ustos’s imprinted mana.

Then separately I will also cut out five shells from the surface of Ustose’s soul, one for each finger. Then I will attach the mana battery and the soul shells together. The outer shells will be sustained by the mana flow and naturally defend themselves from atmospheric mana.

Finally, I will add mana breaches to each shell, like the mana breaches on the end of my fingers. And when needed, I will push out Ustos’s imprinted mana from the battery, which will then flow to the outer shells and pass through the mana breaches, so all conditions will be met for the imprinted element to detach from the mana particle.

It’s perfect, well except for a couple of things, all of this should be seamless and should not be caught by any observers. I need to somehow shove all that into a glove and make it seamless enough that any observer won’t catch anything whilst I do a signature test.

Also, I don’t know if wires that can transport imprinted mana without screwing up something exist.

Although those problems should not be that big of a deal, in the end, I haven’t even laid out a blueprint of the item yet. I just thought out the general idea of the device.

But now comes the real annoying part, turning my idea into reality. Since my combined experience in artificing is two one-hour lessons by a very monotone professor, I am not very qualified to create the runes and designs of this gadget. I don’t know how much of anything functions, and I merely know the very basics.

So what to do? Well, the library has plenty of different designs of items stored away in its books. While I do not currently bear the credentials for creating any magic item from scratch, why bother doing such an annoying thing?

From what I have read, items in these books have their designs divided into different easy-to-understand parts such that a reader could easily recreate any example given In the real world. I will use this to my advantage.