I bring the slice over to the imprinted mana battery, I need to remove the outer shell part of the chunk I cut out, and then I can put it in the battery, I need to hurry, or else the atmospheric mana will pollute this chunk and another part will need to be cut out of Ustos’s soul.

I carefully start to slice off the shell, it’s harder than expected, thanks to mana not being a fiscal object it apparently doesn’t boast a natural resistance to being pulled apart, which means that if my hand slipped a little the whole thing could be sliced in half.

Nevertheless, my great dexterity shows its power like always, and the task goes through without a hitch.

I quickly put the slice of pure imprinted mana into the battery contender and seal it by activating a couple of arrays engraved onto it.

Now, I am only left with the shell, I need to cut out fingertip-shaped holes and place them into their slots.

After doing so with a bit more annoying effort, I put them in there reserved places in the finger part of the item and activate their own runes as well.

This means everything should be in shape, now if my rune work is all working well, the shells exposed to atmospheric mana should not break down, and the only real way to test this is to wait and see the next morning.

The next morning, I look at my masterpiece, it’s working. Looking at the soul shells in the device with my goggles I’m delighted to see them as good as the day I removed the from Ustos’s body.

Speaking of Ustos, he’s looking a bit drained, likely his soul converting his fat into imprinted element. No matter, I’ll put aside more food for him later.

But now comes the last step, testing if the item can actually do the thing that it is made for, which is to fake Ustos’s mana signature.

If I activate another array on the magic item, it should switch from passive mode to active, which raises the concentration of mana coming out of the battery, which will then get pushed through the mana shell, and turn into pure mana and color.

So, confident in my perfect design, I feed the array with mana. Nothing seems to happen at first, but I know you have to look very hard to find the color change.

I’ve tried it on myself too, it took me a while but I found out that my mana signature was purple.

Now seeing as Ustos told me that his signature was orange, this should also release an orange color.

I focus hard and look closely at the place the mana is supposed to be aminating from. And I smile, there it is, a very slight orange tint, barely noticeable to the eye.

I have done it! now there is basically no way I can get caught, I am free to do as I wish. With no chance of me getting caught, I will delight in the knowledge that this academy will be drained dry of all knowledge and be left in the dust by my great hands.

There is nothing left that these idiotic people can actually threaten me with, now all that is left is for me to blend in further and become truly undetectable.

And so time marched by, I started wearing those gloves everywhere along with the item in it. Mostly so nobody got suspicious of me wearing gloves while I did a mana signature test. Well, I say nobody but I mostly mean Keswick, the rest of the idiots in the academy don’t really care what I wear.

The device requires constant upkeep, so I need to cut out a chunk of Ustos’s soul around every month when the imprinted mana battery starts running out. The annoying part is that when I try remove parts, Ustos keeps flailing around in his char, which is all of course useless, yet still very annoying.

I even removed a couple of fingernails as a vorning but he still keeps flailing around. Now, unless Ustos Sudenle became a masochist, there is probably some soul shenanigans I don’t understand happening. Well, whatever, that’s currently above my pay grade. As long as it all works out in the end, I don’t care.

The magic theory teacher started letting us cast some more spells, still on magic paper though.

However, recently the instructor has been training us how to cast spells without all the magic paper and ink, with the hand only.

It’s very hard, if you want the spell to come out as fast as possible you have to simultaneously write five runes at the same time with each of your fingers, it’s like drawing a circle with one hand and a square with the other but ten times as hard and annoying. It’s either this, or writing down spells on paper in the middle of combat.

Actually, wands and staffs were created as a tule to cast spells as fast as possible without using one’s hand, which reduces the use of mana in combat, because using hand magic is more costly in mana than written magic because the ink used in written magic contains mana too. They are like pre-prepared magic paper spells but thay don’t become useless after one use, unfortunately, they require constant upkeep and are expensive, because mana-infused ink is expensive, so learning magic by hand it is.