He kept playing with different scenes in his head, associating it with various emotions such as awe and fear, or peace and confidence. He noticed that while intents unrelated to storage did nothing to excite the flow of mana, they could strengthen his imprisonment intent.
As long as he kept storage as a core idea in his mind, he could pile other concepts onto it to strengthen it. The effect wasn’t huge, but if he imagined a huge crate with a beach as a backdrop, it was definitely more effective than just a nondescript background.
It didn't help much, as the intensity of the feeling was clearly much more important than its nature. He would be better off simply concentrating on the crate. What made this discovery significant was that it opened up a way to improve.
One of the reasons Avery was experimenting with visualizations was that he had no clue on how to enhance his intent. After all, if all that mattered was the quantity of intent, how could he train himself to “think harder”?
Instead, by discovering and analyzing all the intricacies of intent, he could not only stave off his depression, but also find ways to develop his control over mana. “Think of more things” was easier to do than “think of one thing better”. At the very least his progression would be very clear.
Of course, Avery wasn’t going to run off with just this initial revelation and go back to the grind for points. With his current rate of earning points, he had an eternity to earn an indefinite amount of points. It did not matter how high the price of an immortal item was, if it existed, he would eventually get it. Success would be inevitable, but repeating the same thing for billions or trillions of times would be mind bogglingly boring.
He would rather take the time to invent a clever way to earn points faster, risking wasting time contemplating impossibilities in the hope of finding a shortcut. It may take more time in the end, but it would give him a chance to remain sane.
He still had a lot to learn, and was determined to make the most of the infinite time granted to him to become a master of magic.
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He had only carelessly added a random idea on his storage intent, and it had been enough to produce a noticeable reaction. Would having more than two concepts help? Did any additional idea help, or only a few very specific ones? Maybe the concepts needed to be more intrinsically linked, instead of simply present?
Proceeding to test his hypothesis, he refocused on his original black hole and made it absorb the beach, and it indeed aided the mana flow faster.
In order to be thorough, he also visualized the black hole on the beach not affecting it in any way, as it was only wallpaper, painting quite the ridiculous picture.
He had expected a barely noticeable effect, but he was surprised to see the mana flow actually slowed down as compared to a purer picture of the cosmic entity.
He had used the same image as a background twice, but one time it was helpful, while the second time it was a hindrance. It wasn’t even a problem of needing there to be the right combination of elements, as devouring the beach was helpful.
Avery believed the picture was probably both helping and hindering at the same time, and the manner it was used changed the effect.
The beach should have a basic positive effect on the visualization in all circumstances, as it was adding an intent, but in other ways it was also harmful.
The reason he loved imagining a black hole so much was that it was one of the most terrifying, but magnificent things in the universe, a cosmic phenomenon extreme enough to bend SpaceTime and the laws of physics.
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With that in mind, equating it with a small sand beach really didn’t do it justice, tarnishing its majesty and actively damaging its image. Just like cooking where two good ingredients didn’t necessarily go well together, the coastal background clashed with the central picture.
Even devouring the entire earth could not portray the unreasonable transcendence of the singularity, because at a cosmic scale, even a planet was insignificant.
In an attempt to stay away from this banalization of the singularity, he decided against devouring any material object, fearing it would be counterproductive, and made it devour more arcane concepts.
He began imagining an endless sea of fire, an immense world of red and blue flames sustaining on pure energy. Then, inspired by some anime scenes he had liked, Avery made a tiny black spot abruptly appear slightly above the inferno, and the entire inferno was suddenly affected by a tremendous gravitational force.
An infinite amount of fire started rushing towards this tiny black spot, helplessly getting engulfed and further fueling its growth.
The black hole gradually grew bigger and bigger, slowly but steadily, consuming the inferno around it faster and faster, causing strange transparencies to swirl around it, as if in a kaleidoscope.
The raging fire was no longer settled in on a horizontal plane, but was rather forced into a mysterious vortex revolving in the inescapable embrace of its devourer.
The scene he visualized was striking, but in the end the results were underwhelming. He believed the gush of mana did speed up a tiny bit, but with how imprecise all of his observations were, he was always second guessing himself, wondering if he was imagining things.
He had never expected everything to go smoothly on his first try, so he immediately tweaked the scenario in his head, testing out anything he could come up with and attempting to measure their varying effectiveness.
He tried many things, from changing the flame's color, changing the size or position of the black hole, changing the way the black hole appeared, changing how defined the inferno was, changing it to an unfathomably deep ocean, or a combination of many ideas.
He even carried out his tests multiple times in the hopes of eliminating errors caused by his lack of precision. Not for the first time, he cursed his lack of even the most basic necessities, as having to remember and compare all of his research results without pen and paper was proving to be a nightmare.
After a few days of intense investigation, he tentatively concluded with a model to produce the best effect. The most striking difference with this new and updated scene was the interaction between the flame and the black hole.
Instead of directly devouring the flames, it was best the fire emit small immaterial balls of red energy, which would be bundled up and rise up until they were attracted and absorbed by the black hole.
The reason for the success of this particular prototype was still unclear, but he had tried this with the other three elements and had gotten similar results. He also got a significant boost when he combined the four elements together, but for some reason he found doing that unreasonably hard, and since he was getting tired of this scene, he decided to shift gears and temporarily focus on different concepts, to later come back and compare his findings.
His next attempt was to consume the concept of good and evil. He created a hell below and a heaven above, which he filled with angels and devils, from which dark and light specks rose. He did have an easier time imagining the mysterious concepts of "good and evil" being consumed as compared to the four elements, but the gains were very minute, far less pronounced than the four elements.
As Avery experimented with various concepts, he confirmed that concepts absolutely had to be relevant to the rune in order to be useful, and that it was not only an issue with the strength of his visualization.
The pertinence could be minute, as freedom and a treasure chest were both useful, but it had to be there. Even then, he was having difficulty depicting nebulous concepts, so the time it took to detail and clarify wasn't worth it.
The only exception to that were fundamental concepts, like Good and Evil, Space and Time, the Four elements or Life and Death. It did not seem to matter if the things imagined were true or not, as both the visualization of the four elements and that of the five fundamental particles were successful, despite the two notions being contradictory. Only their perceived relevance to the world was important.
He couldn't find a link between storage and these fundamental principles, and the best explanation he could come up with was that it was related to the nature of the world in general. Whatever the case, they were by far the most effective, so they became his favored field of study.