49 - Chapter 48 - Day 2149
Several weeks had passed and Adya had not heard back from Rory regarding her project. She had spent the time working on her own projects and she was making some progress.
The first thing that she had done was transcribe the updated formations into a blank book to create an updated codex for Rory. Sai had created it in the style of a formal printed book as opposed to a hand written one with notes added. It was easier to work with. Based on his style of work Sai estimated that once Rory was comfortable with the designs, he would be able to produce the same formations anywhere between six and fifteen times faster. Even at the lower end, the productivity increase would be massive.
Next she had started to work on a way to compress the mana to create higher tier stones and coins from her own mana. She found it was relatively simple to create a tier 3 or tier 4 stone from her tier 2 regeneration. When she was doing it herself, or using her passive it cost her 1% of the mana to convert to the next tier up. So tier 2 to tier 3 was 1%, and tier 2 to tier 4 was 2%. She could push to tier 5 manually, but for some reason her passive would not work right when pushed to tier 5. The cost was still the same, so for her to manually create the tier 5 mana stones from her tier 2 regeneration cost her 3% of the mana converted
However when she tried the same thing using a formation, the costs were vastly different. Each tier increase cost the increased tier as a percentage. Further the costs compounded to an insane degree. So tier 1 to tier 2 was 2%, then tier 2 to tier 3 was 3% and so on. For a tier 1 mana stones to be converted to tier 10 would have a cost of 54%. Further running the formation still cost both stamina and willpower, though without extensive testing it was not possible to work out the actual cost. Sai theorised that the cost would also scale, but given the cost was so low compared to the amount of mana, it would only become obvious when tested at the millions or billions level. Sai had designed the formation to work on any tier mana.
Adya had the idea to create an artifact with no core, that could convert a person's own mana from their tier to any tier that they wanted. They would be able to supply the mana as in injection themselves, or use mana stones of any tier. Holding the device in would be required, and she would use formations to draw the required stamina and willpower directly from the user to pay the costs. This device, though more powerful, would be a niche item. In effect it would take away the need for a person to take time to condense the appropriate coin. In all other respects, the device would work the same. It would also use the simplified formation as it did not need to work with a willpower and stamina core, meaning that she would not need to risk her language being discovered. In fact, it would make it easier for her to hide what she was doing.
There would be massive implications to her releasing the second artefact, and she would need to discuss those with the elder before letting anyone know that it was even possible. The main reason that the lower tier mana stones were left alone and the price was fixed, was that it was not really very useful to the higher tier cultivators. They could use the lower tier stones, but would need millions or billions to be of any use at the higher tiers. Her ability to skip that and create tier 10 mana stones from tier 1 stones, even at such a ruinously high price would make the low tier stones a strategic resource in conjunction with her artefact. At that point the kid gloves would come off and wars would be fought over control of the low tier mana stone mines.
And while Adya was using her regeneration to create her own stones, the ones in the world were a finite resource. They did self renew, but even then ultimately they could only produce so many in a certain time frame. This invention of hers would upend the understood market for cultivation resources. She kept doing things that would cause her no end of trouble if it were to be discovered. In the short term she would be better off pushing her own skills higher enough to be able to convert her mana stones into tier 9 mana stones, then auction them off to create wealth. She could also create and supply her own cultivators with their own mana stones and stamina potions.
That was also another discovery that she had made by accident. She had been messing about and tried to dissolve her stones in powder format into water. At first the stones had vaporised releasing the energy in the air. She had tried various things just to see if she could make it work. She had found the answer by accident. She had started swirling the water creating a mini tornado in the glass, and then crushed the stone in the middle of the tornado. That had led to the energy being sucked into the water. At first some of the energy was lost, but once she had it working it only took a small amount of experimentation to perfect the technique to the point all the energy was retained. She had then left the rest of the optimisation to Sai in her spatial storage.
Sai had discovered that to create potions, she would only need to use 10 ml of water per 100 units of energy. This seemed to be tier independent. So a tier 1 mana potion would contain 100 tier 1 mana and would dissolve in 10 ml of water, the same was true for tier 3, tier 4 and tier 5 versions. It also worked exactly the same for stamina and willpower.
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When she tried to identify the potions for stamina and mana the results were straightforward. For example the tier 2 mana potion was identified as Tier 2 Mana potion - 100 mana. So the system was providing enough detail to accurately identify the concoction. The problem was the willpower potions. They refused to be identified, with the skill returning nothing at all. It gave more credence to the theory that the system was actively hiding the willpower energy from anyone who did not discover it themselves. That was a problem she was not willing to spend time on, suffice it to say, she had uses for the potion even if the system did not want to identify it.
Her research and push to play with higher tier energies had also gained her many new levels in her skill Environmental Dominion. With the skill having reached level 77, she was making good progress. Still she felt she would need to increase her skills significantly if she wanted to be able to condense mana at tiers above tier 5.
The last thing she had spent time looking at was what she would need to do to reach tier 3. There were essentially two steps that would need to be taken to get her there. She would need to create tier 3 energy meridians that were able to supply energy to all parts of her body and then she would need to link them to the three cores that she had already condensed. This would take her to the peak of tier 2. Then she would need to simultaneously condense the energies in her cores to tier 3, and her newly created meridians to tier 4. While it was theoretically possible to leave them at tier 3, that would leave the possibility of her own skills causing her meridians to break if she pushed too much power down them. It was always better to have a pipe that was stronger than the thing it had to carry.
Since the meridians were in effect another circulatory system, Sai and Adya did not feel the need to reinvent the wheel. In fact the medical knowledge from the tech world had been an inspiration almost akin to heavenly enlightenment. The reason most cultivators struggled to be versatile was the meridians they had to create. If the design for the meridians went against the design of the body, then it would lead to blockages that would need to be broken down. This was exceptionally painful and led to the risk of incurring significant damage to the body.
Using the existing circulatory system as a basis, Sai had come up with a braid that would twist the three separate energy meridians around the existing capillaries, veins and arteries, using them as a guide. This would give her the ability to direct energy to anywhere in her body with ease, but came with one significant downside. The total length of the existing circulatory system was an astounding twenty thousand kilometers, or twelve thousand miles. That was not something she was going to be able to create overnight. Sai had run some experiments, and the results showed that a passive skill would be able to start and maintain the creation of the meridians at a prodigious rate of 1 meter per second per energy. Yet even at that pace it would take almost two years to just finish the meridian network. The other issue that they had identified was that only one process could be running to create the meridians at one time. The second process would start to cause corruption in the created meridians. There seemed to be some interference between the same process running multiple times. Still that would give her time to increase her energy control to take the final step to move to tier 3.
The only time she had breaks she had taken during this time had been to create her formations on a few more captured agents and spies from other houses. She had also asked Evelin to create a structured army made up of the captured mortals and to formalise their training. After telling her mother about them, there seemed little point in hiding them.
All this progress made her happy, yet she was still irritated that Rory had not come back to her yet. She checked and it was still relatively early in the day. She asked Sally to get Dexter, Phillipa and Evelin ready for another trip into the city.
Everyone was ready in short order and they left. Adya making sure to take the new codex with her. She also had her design for the energy compression artefact. If Rory had made good progress, then she would ask him to start on the second design. She also needed to find a way to create the artefact herself. This delay had made her realise, that while she may use his business to hide her abilities, she still needed a way to create artefacts herself end to end.
She would need to learn the processes and then build a workshop for herself.
Sai: Why would you do that? Why do we need to limit ourself to such rudimentary techniques? We need the raw material and we need to understand the processes, then I can work on creating a skill that can mimic a matter printer.
Adya: How long would that even take? Also what would be the energy requirements?
Sai: I would need to experiment to work it out, but we can use the mana scribe skill for almost no cost. That can be the basis of the skill. We would just need to fine tune it to control materials at a minute scale. Then we could effectively print the artefacts in our storage. We could even embed the formations inside the material to further obfuscate the designs.
Adya: What do we need to start the research and how much time would we need to get to a working prototype?
Sai: That is the thing, as we already have a starting point, we just need the raw materials and time. The rest is refinement.