The Way Ahead

“Are you… Are you freaking kidding me?” Edwin didn’t swear, but that part of him was being heavily tested, “No! No, that’s not…”

Rillah dropped down right next to him, “What’s up?”

“Gah! What the heck, Rillah! What was that for?” He frowned, “Were you… were you on the ceiling?”

“I was close to it.”

“What were you doing there? No, how long were you there?”

“Oh, not long at all. I came when you called and decided to surprise you.”

“Well, I suppose you succeeded there. Wait. I didn’t call you?”

“You called for me? Are you alright, Edwin?” Lefi burst into the room almost right on queue.

“No… I… no, never mind,” Edwin sighed, “I was just testing out Bomb Throwing.”

“Did you manage to figure out… whatever you were testing about it?”

“You mean my testing to figure out why the Skill triggers really unpredictably? Yeah, I did.”

“Marvelous!” Lefi cheered, moving closer to clap Edwin on the shoulder, which Edwin didn’t dodge.

“You did? Congratulations!” Rillah wrapped him in a quick hug, which he enjoyed immensely. It was all too short, though.

Inion appeared from somewhere, seemingly materializing in the few inches between Edwin and Rillah after they disconnected, “What happened?” she asked breathlessly, which made Edwin mentally frown. What had brought everyone here so quickly?

“Oh come on, I wasn’t that loud!” Edwin complained, “Why did all three of you decide to come visit me at the exact same time?”

“We heard-” Rillah started, only to be cut off.

“There were many explosions from this room for hours, followed by sudden relative quiet and shouting,” Inion interjected, “I wanted to make sure you were alright.”

“...Okay, that’s fair,” he conceded, “I always forget how loud they are because Adaptive Defense helps make up for everything my earplugs don’t cover.”

“What happened, then?” Inion asked.

“Well, I just told Rillah and Lefi, but I was experimenting with Bomb Throwing and I finally figured out what makes the Skill trigger.”

“Oh you did? Good job!” she congratulated.

“Yeah, well if I could explain my findings to people…”

“Just go ahead and tell us,” Rillah added, “Or we’ll be here all day.”

“It might be easier if I show you,” he sighed. A quick tug on Unbound Tether summoned an Infused Phosphorus pellet to his hand, and he showed it to his spectators. “See this? This is a fire pellet. When ignited, the pellet expands into a fireball.”

Edwin held the pellet between his fingers and pushed with his Tether, sending the projectile hurtling towards the open window. As it passed over the windowsill, he twisted his hand to help trigger Firestarting.

WHOMP

The fireball enveloped most of the windowsill, momentarily blocking the view outside with white-orange flames. Then, it subsided into white smoke and some drifting flakes of black phosphorus slowly settling into place.

“See? No Bomb Throwing activation, because it wasn’t a bomb and I didn’t throw it,” Lefi looked like he was about to ask something but he preempted it, “Wait just a minute still. Next I want to show you what happens when I throw a fireball bomb,” he explained, holding up an identical object to what he’d just used.

He once again pinched the bomb between his fingers and pushed it with his Tether. As before, he twisted his hand as it flew through the windowsill- though this time he waited until after it was mostly outside.

BANG

The fireball was largely made of white flames, but the accompanying shockwave was unmistakable. From experience, he knew the fireball was about three meters in radius, from the base explosion’s one, and it completely blanketed the exterior.

“It’s exactly what I think it is,” Edwin explained.

Rillah frowned, “So what’s the difference?”

“No, no. I mean, it’s literally what I think it is. If I perceive something as a bomb, it’ll trigger the Skill. If I think of it as something else- like as a pellet- it won’t. If I don’t think of anything, well… I still need to do some more tests, but I think it’s the same as when I consider my projectile an ‘explosive,’ namely that it sometimes triggers and sometimes doesn’t. While I still need to do a bit of testing,” he shot a glare at Inion, who looked very ready to try and take words out of his mouth, “I’m pretty sure it then depends on if I’ve ever thought of myself as making a bomb somewhere previously. Now, there does seem to be a lower limit to what counts as a bomb- I can’t make a rock explode no matter how much I try- but I still need to figure out the exact criteria.”

“So then it does respond to how you think of it? Is that so surprising?” Lefi asked.

“Well, no. I actually tested it, back when I was first experimenting, because that seemed like a very magic-y thing. However, I think I messed up the experiment because I didn’t realize it’s whatever is most recently thought about the object, and it’s super sensitive. I had to really, really focus to figure it out, absolutely no wandering thoughts.”

“Aw, that must have been torture. Guess I should have been here. It would have been way more fun!”

“Oh why, so you could distract him?”

“Yup! There’s gotta be some point where my Skill just occupies all of his spare attention and keeps his mind from wandering. It would be fun!”

“Oh, so you think you know what would be good for him? I’ll have you know that-”

“That… actually sounds like it might be useful,” Edwin cut in, “We should probably experiment with that at some point, yeah?”

“Most excellent!” Lefi was clearly eager to go back to whatever he was doing before he ran to check in on Edwin- that was actually quite nice, now that he thought about it. All three of them cared enough to see that he was alright… or, he supposed, it might be that they came in the hopes that he’d blown himself up at long last.

He chose to interpret it as the former.

Bill was such a good pony. Despite being stuck in an outbuilding somewhere between a stable and a barn for several months, he seemed perfectly content to just stay indoors, particularly as the weather was so cold.

When he’d asked Lefi, because of course he knew about horses, the adventurer had said it was actually a Skill most good beastmasters and trainers encouraged their beasts to take, namely Stabling (or Kenneling, for creatures such as dogs). It allowed them to not get restless in relatively enclosed spaces and require very little exercise to stay healthy.

He felt moderately confident that he knew which Skill was the one in question, actually. A faint brown aura surrounded and flowed around Bill’s body while he was in the stable, interacting with a similar-looking Skill that permeated the stables. While Anatomy was more focused on humans still, giving the horse a physical check-up still fed into the intuitive knowledge the Skill granted him, and so far as Edwin could tell, the pony was doing just fine.

“You make this too easy, you know that?” he told his horse, stroking his mane.

In response, Bill shook his head, neighing slightly before nuzzling towards Edwin’s side pocket.

“Little rascal,” Edwin withdrew for a moment, pulling out a carrot from the suspicious pouch and handing it off to the uncomplaining animal.

He spent a little more time with Bill, brushing his fur, but that was about it. Edwin had other things to take care of, after all.

The solstice was coming up soon, according to Rillah. It was one of four days in the year where she was all but totally cut off from all types of mana except for the one associated with the season she was in, but the power of that one type of mana was correspondingly massive. However, it meant that she would be totally incapable of doing her job- which required more wind mana than she could realistically call upon- properly or even accessing most of the tower’s enchantments.

A single day wouldn’t do much, of course, but in general she’d be almost incapable of using the tower’s magic for about a week before and afterwards, until she could call upon more than the smallest mote of wind mana without totally exhausting herself.

While there was no way that Edwin would have anything ready by that point which could actually do anything useful, it was a bit of a reminder that grumpy Enforcers or not, he did have a project to work on. While his foray into Alchemy Essentia was interesting, he couldn’t help but feel like he’d drifted slightly off-course from his original primary goal of replacing Rillah. In a good way! She was decidedly irreplaceable in lots of other ways.

…he had never managed to imbue his new shirt with warmth, unfortunately. He found himself unable to Refine the traits he wanted to get out of the process, as even when he Infused the garment (or any other cloth for that matter), it didn’t seem to have the same mana-structure he’d found inside of magical substances like stone or metal. Maybe because it was so full of Skills, and that was a sort of not-magic that didn’t really interact with Refining.

He probably should have checked that first, honestly.

It was arguably wasted time, but it wasn’t really, because now he knew how to perform some form of alchemy essentia, so he didn’t mind one bit. Actually, now that he’d done the procedure so many times between his practice runs and the actually important ones, he felt he might be able to start branching out slightly…

Anyway. He should talk more about the weather.

His basic design for his mana accumulator hadn’t changed much from its initial inception. It still consisted of three parts. First was the gatherer itself, which would scoop up the ambient wind mana and deliver it to the storage, the second part of the device. The final part was the injector itself, whatever he’d use to take mana from the storage and feed it into the enchantments.

Fortunately, the tower seemed to be adaptable enough that so long as he provided enough magic to it, it could take care of itself. Whoever made it was really impressive, to make such a critical job into the mage’s equivalent of turning a hand crank. That just left Edwin with the challenge of actually making his accumulator.

He was imagining some sort of mana structure, a funnel made of something repulsive to wind mana. Then, some kind of filter- made out of wind mana, perhaps?- that would block everything but that single type of mana, and then it would feed into the storage?

Prototyping sadly didn’t work with magic. Levels in the Skill had practically been flying in comparison to how much he used it, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. Regardless, while it did allow him to simulate an entire alchemy set, perfect for Apparatus, it didn’t give him any information on how to influence mana. Maybe after his next tier-up.

The storage was still key. Depending on what he was able to make, that would influence both parts 1 and 3, because he didn’t know how to get mana into or out of it yet. Molai was the obvious candidate, yes, but there were still so many issues that trying to use the flower might present he didn’t know…

Well, it had been some time since he had last tried to refine Molai.

Perhaps his manaclave would help in that regard? If he could somehow set up the situation where he could extract the mana-absorption trait from the dried petals… well, no. That would require him to Refine the petals first and then he could manipulate them with his manaclave.

It was a pity he couldn’t Refine the flower petals while they were in the manaclave, because the loosened magical bonds between the different traits might help him in his endeavor, but even with additional practice, if he tried adding any mana to the setup besides what he needed for the device to function, it would all unravel.

Perhaps he could do it bit by bit? The main problem with trying to Refine molai, after all, was that the plant would absorb all of his mana before he could actually Refine it. The only problem was how long it would take to get any kind of meaningful results. A half a petal of molai would produce almost no dust or liquid, but if he could use what little he had in his manaclave, he could then speed up the process somewhat by directly extracting the desired property from what he had.

Or maybe, he realized, his Visualization would help? If he could somehow make an acid-like manifestation of his mana, would that help eat away at the molai? He’d tried combining Refine with his visualization, of course, but concentrating his mana was still really slow and yielded really tiny amounts of workable mana. He hadn’t tried using an acid, but it was conceptually similar to how his manaclave functioned, so maybe?

It could work. He’d have to give it a try, probably also with really tiny amounts of molai so as to successfully overload its absorptive effects. Edwin nodded to himself. It was worth a try, if nothing else.

It wasn’t easy, of course. Nothing ever was, when it came to mana, but after a few days brainstorming different configurations to synthesize acid, he had a breakthrough.

Because of how many things boiling water could already dissolve, he started with that, but then turned down the temperature, while still keeping the dissolution at full strength. To do that, he had to make a virtual manaclave separating out the different components of his magic within his own magic, then pull out the temperature of the water, imagine purifying the resultant dissolving water, and only then did he have the right kind of vaguely-acidic mana he’d need.

Even thinking about it after the fact made Edwin’s head hurt, and without Inion and Rillah’s guidance for stretching his visualization, and how to layer his visualizations for more complex results, he would have never managed it. As it stood, he used every last level he had in Visualization and definitely felt the lack of any further. It was… a lot. But he could do it!

Trial seven. Using five milligrams of crushed molai petal and thirty seconds of mana channeling, he narrated to Almanac.

With his not-boiling acid potion-mana (a thought which made his whole setup feel even more ridiculous) on hand, Edwin triggered Refining. In his mental image of his mana, he had a hearty supply of acid, but then he fed it over a Bunsen burner burning a Refining flame- pure white and almost painful to look at- and boiled off what was left of the… non-boiling water.

Mana didn’t always make a lot of sense, apparently. What mattered to his visualization was apparently that he’d made something close enough to an acid that he could then treat it as though it were one. He hoped that one day he’d be able to apply it to more things, but one step at a time.

In any case, by the time Refining was done with its preparations, he had just a tiny amount, just a few millimeter-equivalent sized drops of concentrated Refining mana acid. He’d already prepared his target molai with more on standby, and there was nothing more he could do.

With a deep breath, he allowed the mana to drip onto the molai.

Instantly, half of what he’d brought was just gone. The dried and crushed petals absorbed it like a sponge, cutting off his connection to the mana. Then, it overloaded, dumping similar but disconnected mana into the mixture and almost disrupting his attempt.

This was as far as his previous trials had gotten- the molai absorbing and discharging his mana until he had nothing left under his control. This time though, he felt the corrosive nature of his ‘acid’ at play. The molai had released its mana really easily, the instant it reached saturation. That was probably a good sign?

He’d need to rely a lot on Alchemy for this, he could already tell, and possibly just have to figure out what he did after the fact. It pained him, but if it was the optimal way to go about things….

Well, he’d make it work.

He felt the mana structure of the molai unravel beneath his fingertips. Doing it like this damaged it somewhat, but he could make do. He didn’t need it to be that strong after all, he was more after the effect and if the final substance didn’t hold onto mana as tightly… that was almost a benefit.

Bit by bit he broke down the little molai he had, and as soon as the tiny pile was deconstructed, he added another dried petal. He didn’t know what trait he was refining, but that wasn’t really an issue.

It wasn’t the first time he’d tried adding in additional Refining substance to an ongoing Refinement, but it wasn’t any easier than the first time he tried. The fresh molai scooped up a hefty amount of his Refining mana, but enough fortunately remained that he could keep the reaction going, and with just a bit of a mental twist, the molai began to dissolve.

Nearly an hour and a half later, Edwin came out of his Refining trance, completely mentally exhausted. Even his magic felt tired, having spent so long trying to corral larger and larger amounts of disconnected mana.

The results were well worth it, though. A large pile of white dust sat before him, practically radiating possibility, and flickering with magic. One moment, it felt like nothing, the next moment like a dry wind, followed by a gushing spring or a brilliant light, then a raging fire and…

Huh. What had he created?

With a bit of trepidation, he pushed a tiny bit of mana- just freecasting, a single drop of neutral potion-mana dripping onto the pile of molai.

Instantly, the flickering sensations Ritual Intuition fed him vanished, replaced by a steady sensation of typeless mana emanating from the substance, as though it were his exact shade of personal magic.

Edwin grinned. Well, you never knew what you might find. He’d wanted storage, but it looked like he’d found his filter. He cut off the trickle of mana he was feeding the pile, and the flicker returned immediately.

Interesting. No retention whatsoever?

A bit of testing later, he’d developed a working theory for what he had on hand, and noted it in his Almanac log.

Results: Success! Hypothesis for resulting material: Standard Refined Molai seems to have excellent mana-emission and mana-absorption properties, though only of a single type at a time- defined by contiguous mass.

It might be able to work as a conductor, but it definitely would work as a filter. Weird that that was the default result for Refining Molai, but maybe it had to do with his methodology? Further testing required.

With his initial plans for molai somewhat scrapped, Edwin found himself in the position of needing to find a new mana storage device… or did he? He’d revised his plans to try and simplify them a fair amount: instead, he’d plug the filter directly into the ritual circle. All that he would need for that was a substance that was easily workable and mana-conductive.

He was in a port, and while the alchemical options available were really sparse, surely he could find something that conducted mana. Heck, it was built into the tower, the lines etched into the floor. While he hadn’t yet figured out what element they were mainly made of, he knew it wasn’t iron, gold, silver, or copper. The latter two were included, just in relatively small quantities, but there was some element present that he just didn’t know what it was.

It was the weakness of Alchemical Analysis, he realized. If he hadn’t been able to label a substance in another object, he wasn’t going to find out what it was. For all he knew, the lines might have been made of mostly-pure titanium. Or maybe platinum. Heck, it might have been a completely new element not found on Earth.

How that might work… he had no idea, unless it was either seriously radioactive or the laws of physics and chemistry had been edited to make more room on the periodic table. He might be able to test that, actually? He’d look into it later.

Some playing around with Alchemical Analysis had also revealed that he could determine species! Namely, it told him that Rillah was 50% Human, 50% some unknown species (which he promptly labeled as elven). There was probably some clever way to use that new capability, but he didn’t know what use that might be. Maybe as a way to identify if people were related if he could tag people based on heritage instead of just species, but that wasn’t too generally useful except as a way to help him avoid putting his foot in his mouth.

(Interestingly, it also revealed that Lefi wasn’t 100% human, only about 90%, but what the remaining 12-ish percent was remained a mystery that the adventurer himself remained frustratingly unhelpful in cracking.)

Anyway.

Perhaps he could make something that was conductive to mana? Perhaps he could work with copper. It had decent electrical conductivity, perhaps he could edit that in some way to make it magical conductivity? If he could refine out the electrical conductivity of copper and replace that with a mana conductive trait?

While he couldn’t ignore the filtering trait of molai, it was technically conductive in that it could decidedly hold mana while also not keeping the mana trapped. It was definitely close enough to at least try, and Alchemy whispered that it might just work.

Sounded like a plan to him. Also, he might need to reevaluate his habit of ignoring Alchemy’s baseless information when doing exploratory research. He needed to find the weird patterns before he could understand them, after all.

It took a… really long time to Refine metals. Like molai, they had a really high mana capacity, but fortunately unlike the annoying flower, he retained his connection the entire time and so didn’t have to resort to any particularly fancy tricks to render down Refined materials. It just took time and power. Lots… and lots… of time.

It felt a bit like corrosion, to Refine copper. He could feel his mana, acting like an acid, slowly dissolve the metal one atom at a time. It stole away nuclei and electrons one at a time, snatching them from their established crystal structure and binding them to mana itself.

Did Infusion have something to do with bonds or electrons? Perhaps Refining worked by interrupting intramolecular bonds somehow, reducing it to a powder? He hadn’t encountered any Refining products that ended up as a gas, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

Still, by cannibalizing a pile of ves he eventually assembled a decent amount of copper, which he then Refined into a faintly green pile of Refined dust. In theory, it should be superconducting but Edwin didn’t really have any way to test it.

It still served as an excellent trait-solvent, though.

Edwin had redesigned his manaclave a few times, with the latest iteration being a single Apparatite sphere he could just rotate to move his sample from one trait-powder to the second. It was tricky making sure that the powders wouldn’t mix, but he got it without too much difficulty.

He triumphantly loaded up the device, ran through the procedure and…

Nothing.

Well that was disappointing. A bit of prodding showed that he did successfully remove conductivity from copper, but there hadn’t been any change in the mana conductivity. He shouldn’t be that surprised though, he didn’t have that much experience with Essentia and this was a bigger change than the native temperature of an object.

Annoyingly, his normal cheat of asking Rillah or Lefi what the substance Identified as didn’t work, as it only ever came back as ‘alchemical copper.’ Apparently custom-made, brand-new totally novel altered variations of a metal didn’t count as ‘common knowledge’ or something. Truly, life was fantastically unfair.

He kept most of the failures for later testing.

The solstice had come and gone to no particular fanfare in the tower. The weather had been mild, Rillah used very little wind mana, and the days marched on. Outside there had been some celebration going on near the shortest day of the year, but after how his last trek into the city had gone, Edwin was more than happy to stay inside and mess around with his potion set.

Edwin wished he could say he gained some clever insight over the next few weeks and his dozens of Essentia experiments, but honestly all he was gaining was sheer practice. The levels he earned in Alchemy were helpful, sure, but what he primarily refined was his own technique, and the ways he could tweak his manaclave’s function to more effectively swap traits. He hadn’t had any luck in just directly editing a substance’s natural traits, just swapping similar ones between substances.

The only real change he’d encountered with his copper-editing experiments was mixing in a bit of Refined copper dust with his Refined molai dust. He also found that for this kind of trial, the margins for success versus failure was measured in milliseconds. His copper had to go essentially straight from dissolution to replacement, and that was only possible because it didn’t matter if copper got mixed in with the molai.

Those two discoveries were actually related, but that was besides the point. Because of the massive difference in densities between the two substances, he could separate them again later, but it added even more time onto an already time-consuming procedure. Heck, starting his manaclave already took nearly half an hour thanks to the volume of mana needed in its use.

This time, though, he knew it. He’d succeed totally, and the copper wouldn’t glow but do nothing else, it wouldn’t just make all the mana he tried to pour into it just skate right along the surface, it wouldn’t suffer any of the many unique failures he’d experienced over dozens of experiments.

This one would work, he could feel it.

The workbench in front of him held a single crystal ball, suspended off the table by Apparatite supports. The crystal ball was far from clear or even solid, and held in its center was a tiny bowl, just barely larger than the copper disk- formed from half-a-dozen ves beaten into a uniform mass- it held. A faintly green-tinted copper powder completely enveloped the disk, and a large pile of white dust was mounded at the bottom of the sphere.

Edwin took a deep breath, and pulled on his mana. He fed it through Basic Thermokinesis flame and the Unbound Tether press, through a Refining crucible and ignited in Bomb Throwing. It was lit on fire with Firestarting and filtered through Fey’s Caress. Over time, the combined pressure and heat was imbued into his mana, and it was in turn fed into the crystal sphere.

If Edwin had his eyes open, he would have seen a slightly reddish glow begin to suffuse the manaclave, but Ritual Intuition told him everything he needed to know. Alchemical Dismantling was at full work, gently coaxing the copper to magically melt and mix with the copper it was surrounded by. Bit by bit, the metal complied, its structure weakening under extreme conditions.

Then, complete collapse. The copper’s conductivity disassociated, and the copper dust it was buried in shifted and flowed.

Edwin flipped the contraption upside down with a sharp shake, sending white and copper powder flying into the air, mixing and combining around the copper disc. He could feel the magical aspects of the molai mixing with the familiarity of the copper… and then it settled into a single pile, flowing smoothly into the copper disc.

With a triumphant grin, Edwin unsealed the container as he allowed the manaclave to dissipate. The air inside hissed as the pressure was released, and the fire-like mana blasted out like actual hot air.

With what basically amounted to Apparatite chopsticks, Edwin delicately fished out the copper disc at the center of all of this. Was it glimmering slightly? This was a big moment, all that was left was to drip a bit of his basic mana against the coin and see if it conducted it properly. With bated breath, he summoned a drop of mana at his fingertip and let it fall…

…where it promptly splashed against the metal’s exterior with minimal absorption, the disc apparently no more mana conductive than normal unmodified copper.

Dangit. He hadn’t mixed the copper and molai enough, it seemed. Or maybe he’d used too much molai? Should he try introducing just a bit of magic to the familiar conductivity, instead of the other way around?

…Okay, maybe next time he’d succeed. He had a good feeling about this one!

Level Up!

Skill Points 1112→1142 (Avg level: 57)

Adaptive Defense Level 48→49

Alchemical Analysis Level 44→47

Alchemical Dismantling Level 54→55

Alchemy Level 96→98

Anatomy Level 45→47

Basic Thermokinesis Level 41→44

Bomb Throwing Level 60→62

Improbable Arsenal Level 42→43

Outsider’s Almanac Level 138→139

Prototyping Level 44→45

Refining Level 43→46

Ritual Intuition Level 53→54

Sapper's Apparatus Level 66→67

Stamina Manipulation Level 14→19

Unbound Tether Level 26→29