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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 101
🕑 Added 2024-06-03 13:40:52 +0000 UTCIt has been over two months since I started experimenting with Professor Sageira on safe ways to replicate rapid internal mana flow.
We came up with a few theories, but in the end, that was all they were, theories. It wasn't until we began to apply the theory to live tests that I found out that the academy ran a lab rat breeding farm, and I was relieved that Professor Sageira was not actually referring to me as a lab rat… I hope.
Within those few weeks, we tested a few mana flow theories with the rats. We first started by first replicating what the hobgoblin shaman did. We proceeded with Professor Sageira sacrificing a rat to empower another rat with blood magic.
This resulted in the rat receiving the sacrifice of the other rat to balloon to the size of a fat house cat. But in the process of doing so, the rat who had never wielded magic before, and now had more than one soul in its body (or at least part of one), started screeching, bashing itself against its cage, and clawing at itself and anything in the environment, and after doing so for almost half a minute, of thrashing around its cage, it suddenly went still, bleed out of all its orifices, then popped like a balloon.
The worst part of that experiment was that I was near the cage to observe to take notes… let's just say I had to borrow some spare clothes from the lost and found bin on my way back to the dorm.
After that first failure of an experiment, many more followed, and many rats lost their lives. All in the pursuit of science… or magic… whatever.
Eventually, we decided that taking just one approach at a time was not really that efficient and decided to run multiple test subjects at a time, but seeing that it was a bother to transport multiple cages with rats to the Cells, and the administration making a fuss about not wanting the Cells to be used for long-term experiments, Professor Sageira decided that this experiment was not the kind that would cause catastrophic explosions and decided to have the experiments held in her private lab.
In her private lab, we had many different cages with individual rats in them, and after remembering the exploding rat and the strength it displayed before it popped, we decided it would be prudent to get reinforced cages instead.
But in order to start the experiments, I needed to know how to stimulate the flow of mana in the rats’ bodies. That is why Professor Sageira had to teach me healing magic, unofficially of course.
Healing magic is highly regulated due to how dangerous it is, so she only taught me the part of healing magic that allows me to manipulate the mana flow in other bodies and said that she would only teach me the rest only if I officially take a class for Healing Magical, and if I do, she said the kingdom would record my name on some kind of watchlist.
As for why I would be on a watchlist if I took up the Healing Magic class? She later explained to me that sometime in the past, a healer was using his Healing Magic to assassinate the political and business rivals of nobles, merchants, and civil servants under the pretext of a house call, the assassin would heal the target’s main ailment, but at the same time make abnormal growths in the body that will cause strokes or heart attacks a few weeks later. After this came to light and the assassin was caught, it was a public and political shit show, and all licensed Healing Magic practitioners were heavily regulated.
Eventually, thanks to the sacrifice of multiple rats, I got the hang of stimulating and controlling mana in a foreign body, and our experiments began.
Professor Sageira went with the approach of replicating a “safe” version of what the hobgoblin shaman did by using Soul magic instead of Blood magic. When I asked why, she explained to me that Blood magic was the quick and dirty bastardized version of Soul magic, a low barrier to entry skill that has driven many a power-hungry mage to madness in their search for quick power. Soul magic, on the other hand, was a hard and dangerous subject to practice due to the risk of backlash upon failure and hurting one’s own soul, and from what she explained, soul damage was not fun, not in the least.
Those who suffer soul damage would feel greatly weakened physically and mentally and have a hard time healing in the case of physical injury due to the soul’s difficulty remembering the body’s natural form, this sometimes causes the wound to heal wrong, causing excruciating pain, and if the soul damage is really bad, the person would become a vegetable even if the body is 100% fine.
So when she practices Soul magic, she isolates herself in a corner of her lab behind multiple wards and isolation arrays in case I get hit with the backlash.
As for why she is Soul magic instead of Blood magic? She explains that with the use of Soul magic, she can purge the “ego” from the sacrificed soul that would cause madness when introduced to another body, and only use the power of the egoless soul.
So far, she has been able to integrate the egoless souls into the rats, and besides the same growth of the first mad rat that blew up, we noticed a marked improvement in the rats' resistance to slightly higher increased mana flow. The only problem we are experiencing now is the rats that were integrated with egoless soul started dying a week or so after integration.
As for me, I took the more… how do I say it?... natural path.
I had 20 rats, and I would set each one of them at a different percentage increase of their normal mana flow and see what their natural limits are.
After much observation and some casualties, I have estimated the rats are able to withstand an additional 20%-25% of their normal mana flow before showing signs of mana pathway degradation.
So after some discussion with Professor Sageira, she helped me craft small arrays that will constantly keep the rats at a set percentage of mana flow while we are away from the lab. We set the arrays to start at a 15% increase and week after week, we increased it by 2%. By the 3rd week, almost half of the rats died, we thought it prudent to leave the setting where it was for another week to give the rats more time to acclimatize to the increased mana flow. The week after that we made only 1% increments. But things were not going fast enough.
Eventually, we decided to use other means to accelerate the acclimatization process, Professor Sageira managed to get some Mana Relaxing potions that are supposed to relax overused and stressed mana pathways and mix them in with the rats' water supply. This greatly accelerated the process, and we were able to increase the mana flow rate of the arrays.
By the time we were able to get the rats to 50% increased mana flow, we only had four survivors, they were stable but barely alive.
“I think this is a solid lead, rats do not naturally have the ability to use mana, so they can only do so much, but you as a human who is capable of magic from a young age should be able to go beyond a measly 50% increase. So prepare yourself the next time we meet up, we will slowly try to increase your mana flow. I will stop you the moment I see something go wrong.” Professor Sageira concluded.
