Eramith
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Book 2: Chapter 78
🕑 Added 2023-06-28 13:01:00 +0000 UTCFelix placed his pocket home marble against a random wall in the city hall building and channeled mana into it. Just as it had every time before, a portal into complete darkness appeared and Felix stepped through.
He quickly illuminated the environment with a spell and ascended his tower to the lab floor where he settled in for the time being. He set up a couple light spells that should last for a few days and placed them against the walls. They were a weird combination of enchantments, wards and spells that at first, Felix wasn’t entirely sure would work, but seemed to have no issues whatsoever.
Before looking into any amount of soul harvesting, Felix decided he was going to start working on something else. As he and Noah had been running around the city taking stock of what they had, Felix made sure to pick up a few sets of the materials for himself. He hadn’t actually tried to make a mana battery yet and after checking in with Henry, neither had he. During the world event, Felix had found multiple large gemstones in the vaults he had plundered so, the rarest and most expensive material was already accounted for.
The blueprint he had memorized from the puzzle dungeon in the tutorial mentioned that the more flawless and solid a gemstone, the better the battery. On the other hand, even gemstones with flaws could make batteries, they just likely wouldn’t hold as much mana and were more likely to break down.
In theory, with an actually flawless gem, the battery could last virtually forever as long as it wasn’t broken externally. With flawed gems, the mana running through the gem constantly would aggravate the flaws and over time, they would grow and the battery would break. Luckily, a battery breaking wasn’t a very violent reaction, it usually just started leaking until it couldn’t hold mana any more.
He figured he should be practicing before he committed to using his best materials so he pulled out the gemstone he had the least hope for. It was a small greenish gemstone with some visible cracks deep inside of it. It was far from flawless and even it’s shape was slightly deformed. In theory it would work fine, it would just be a little harder to work around the flaws. With the other gemstones, he would wait until he had better materials for the rest of it and more experience overall.
The basic theory was simple, a gemstone was atomically stable enough with a crystalline structure to be able to hold mana without it spilling or leaking out. It worked similarly to how souls worked, holding onto mana like a mana pool. At least, that was how the blueprint had described it.
The other materials were simply to aid in the transfer in and out of the battery as well as the collection of aether to recharge it. The blueprint he had were for batteries that wouldn’t recharge themselves, requiring manual input for them to refill. Looking through the plans though, Felix had a rough idea of how he would make them automatically refill themselves. For now, he wanted to make some exactly to the specifications just to gain experience.
Using the same method as he had in the world event, with a solid mana form and Starmetal cast, Felix created the inscriptions for the outer housing of the batteries. To him, they looked essentially like an enchantment. He was pretty sure he could identify almost all of the individual components of the inscription which was why he was also confident he would be able to modify them in the future.
First, there was a series of channels that connected around the battery like a net. They would balance out the mana flowing in and out of the battery. For a flawed gem, he had to inspect the flaws and remove sections of the channels to minimize how much mana flowed through the flaws.
Those channels then had some components to normalize and even out the mana flow and some limiters so mana wasn’t shoved in or yanked out too quickly. Surrounding the channels and the gemstone at the center, the blueprints suggested creating a housing. The housing was mostly for durability of the enchantments but it would also need to be mana conductive so the battery was usable at all.
Lastly, to prepare the gemstone itself to store mana, it had to undergo a specific process. The gemstone had to be placed at the center of a complex spell formation that would push mana into it slowly. Then, he had to stop the spell formation and allow the gem to sit, filled with mana, for a period of time. Once it had sat long enough, Felix would start the spell formation again and continue the process. Finally, Felix would have to pull the gemstone off the formation when he thought it was full enough. This part had a high failure rate so it was recommended to be the first step before making the housing but, Felix had wanted to get a better idea of how the crystal would be used and how the mana would flow.
Knowing when to let the crystal sit, how long to leave it alone, when to start going again, how many times to repeat and when he was done was supposedly more of an art than a science. Being good at the process meant getting the more mana into a crystal and therefore a bigger battery. If it was done poorly, he either wouldn’t get much out of the crystal or it could pop like a balloon, especially if the gemstone was significantly flawed. Luckily it supposedly wasn’t a violent pop and was more like a crumble with some minimal force behind it.
Felix finished forming and modifying the channels to accommodate the gemstone’s flaws and formed a suitable housing fairly quickly. After that, he carefully placed the gemstone in the center of the specified spell formation and watched, both visually and with his mana senses. He thought about making the spell formation into a ritual so he could simply place the gemstone on the ground but he decided against it. Instead, Felix simply formed the spell formation in the air with his own mana and lowered it onto the gemstone.
For any normal person watching, Felix suspected there would be nothing to see. The gemstone simply lay on the ground, completely still with no glow or any other visual indication of what was happening. For Felix, due to his Reaper’s Sense which evolved from Mana Sight and showed him visually what his mana senses sensed, it was actually rather interesting. The spell formation first collected the aether and cycled mana around the gemstone slowly pushing mana in from all sides. Once it completed a cycle, it would push from all directions at once then go back to cycling around.
On top of that, Felix sensed and therefore saw, the attunement and energy levels of the aether being shoved into the gemstone. He suspected one of the reasons knowing when to stop flooding the gemstone with mana was more of an art than a science, was because of the variance in aether.
Looking inside the gemstone with his mana senses, he could tell the most instability was caused when high energy mana of a few specific attunements passed over the flaws. What happened was that the mana would get caught on the flaw like a hiccup. With the high energy mana, the hiccups were more aggressive and jumped further. He suspected they caused more damage to the gemstone but had no way to confirm that without some very specialized tools that he didn’t have.
Eventually, after a half hour or so, the gemstone crumbled and small pieces of it were scattered across the floor up to a meter or so away. Felix had been completely distracted examining the mana and had forgotten to let the mana sit, pausing the spell. Felix had expected it to crumble though and luckily had a few dozen gemstones he could keep practicing with.
He pulled out the next most flawed gemstone he had found, a small red gem which looked like it had been split off from a larger crystal. Once again, Felix formed the spell, placed it onto the ruby like gem and watched. This time, he didn’t bother making a housing or channels as he figured he should wait until this part was complete and had a decent idea of how they would work. Once he had a viable gem that had been prepped with mana, he would simply modify his original channels to fit that gem.
Felix watched the mana be forced into the gemstone from each side and once again, watched as the mana forced it’s way past the internal flaws of the crystal. This time, he also spun the red gem just a little every time the spell completed a cycle. The blueprint hadn’t mentioned it but he figured it made sense given what the spell was actually doing.
He paused for a bit between each cycle, as the blueprint had mentioned, and hoped that that would be enough. Once again, the ruby shattered after a dozen or so cycles. Felix was trying to pay attention to when it was at it’s limit but as far as he could tell, it just suddenly exploded. They seemed exactly the same they had before he started pumping mana into them.
For his third attempt, Felix ditched the spell entirely. Instead, he intended on replicating what it was doing simply using his mana control. Realistically, it didn’t seem like it would be that difficult and it would give him more control over the process. He also planned on expanding the process.
Instead of a two dimensional circle around the crystal, there was no reason he couldn’t push mana in from every direction, in a cycle then finally, at once like the spell did. Above all, he was also going to neutralize all the mana he used so that only the lowest energy, unattuned mana was being forced into the gems. His hope was that this would greatly decrease the stress put on the crystal and so it would be less likely to explode.
He pulled out another green crystal, this one a darker and deeper green rather than a light almost teal green like the first one had been. This time, Felix placed the crystal onto one spell that simply lifted it up into the air using a little force. With it floating in front of him, Felix then started pushing mana into the gemstone in small bursts, cycling them around it’s surface in three dimensions. Once he had gone all the way around, Felix pushed a small burst in from all directions. As soon as he did so, the crystal burst into a thousand pieces. Considering it had only taken him about 5 minutes, he was pretty sure he had done something wrong.
It was entirely possible the gem was actually far more flawed than the previous two and he just hadn’t noticed. It was also possible that this gem had less flaws but they were more significant. Ultimately, he couldn’t be sure.
What he really needed was to get one to succeed then work from there. Also, having access to better tools so he could examine the inside of the crystal would make the entire process much easier. He thought about what tools he could use so he could feel the inside of the crystal and realized he didn’t need any, or rather had all the tools he needed already. He honestly felt a little stupid he hadn’t thought of it earlier.
Felix pulled out the next crystal and stuck it in his soul space, then changed his mind and dumped them all into his soul space. In his soul space, it was possible for him to examine the inside of the gems to a certain extent so he could better judge which of them were the most flawed.
Once he picked one out, he began using his mana control to push mana into the crystalline structure. In his soul space, he was able to see so much more of the crystal. As the mana was pushed through the crystal and bounced around inside, he saw the structure start to vibrate slightly every time it pushed through a flaw or bounced off a face.
This time, Felix stopped pushing mana through the gem and let it rest whenever he felt like the internal vibrations were too much. He would let them calm down then start again.
Now he felt like he had a much clearer idea and better understanding of what was going on. After about thirty minutes, he stopped entirely and let the gem rest for a little while to fully cure. While he waited, he pulled the finished housing out of his inventory. He quickly adjusted the channels and housings he had previously made and retrofit them to this gem then identified the resultant battery.
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[E - Uncommon] Mana Battery (172/172)
[Very Slow][Tiny]
A battery containing mana.
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Wow. That’s even worse than the ones I found in the very first tutorial dungeon I ever entered.
Felix tossed the battery in his inventory and turned back to the gems remaining in his inventory. For the next few hours, until the auction, Felix pushed gems right to their limit so they would shatter and he could examine why. His best guess was that the internal resonance from all the vibrations caused them to crumble.
He didn’t manage to get any gem to their limit without crumbling but, he had a much better idea of how far he could push them. He only managed to fashion a single other battery and still hadn’t managed to beat the batteries he had found in the tutorial.
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[E - Uncommon] Mana Battery (213/213)
[Very Slow][Small]
A battery containing mana.
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He was very happy with his progress though. He figured without more in depth instruction from a person or book, trial and error was basically his only option. He was more than happy to blow through a thousand gems if it took him a thousand tries to make great batteries. He knew it would take much longer than that to master the process but he hoped the batteries would at least be usable by that point. He didn’t have any more time to practice now though as the system screen for the auction appeared before him.
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Auction
Welcome to the post world event auction! You participated in the world event and have been automatically invited to the auction. Anything you store in your inventory or have equipped will be teleported there with you and the same will apply when you return. Any items you wish to auction off should be on your person when you are teleported as it will not be possible to retrieve them later.
You have not chosen to invite anyone to the event as your guest.
You will be teleported to the auction in 5 minutes.
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Felix quickly grabbed Nova and had them clean up the gem fragments on the floor and in his soul space, which they were more than happy to do. After that, he placed them in their usual nook in his robes, resting against his chest and waited 5 minutes until he was suddenly teleported.
