52 - Chapter 51 - Day 2172

The inclusion of void metals had thrown all of Adya and Sai’s planning for a loop. It was astounding how they, with all their experience, had missed such a design flaw. It had forced them to look through their assumptions and redesign the device. It would actually need moving parts. The idea was that you would pack in the mana stones and lock the device. The formations would convert all the mana stones to a liquid state, then create the mana coins.

The need to lock the device and additional shielding could be explained by minimising the mana loss, not that there would have been any with her formations, but not everyone could create formations of that quality. The design effectively included an airlock, if the core was not in the right housing and received the right access permissions, permissions that would rely on the system for authentication, then the failsafe would destroy the core. The design would need to be machined in such a way so as to make it almost impossible to tell where the seams in the core were. They would also need a lot more void material and additional formations to make the new design work.

Adya had decided that she would create all the formations herself. That would speed up the process immensely. She would also need to get Rory to procure a significantly larger supply of void steel. She sent Dexter with the designs and additional instructions. There was no need for her to visit herself.

She had also been working on her energy control and had managed to get herself up to tier 6 stones. The cost profile still held true as it had for the previous tiers. If she used a passive skill to create the tier 6 stone of any energy, the cost was a flat 1% per tier. So tier 5 to tier 6 still only cost the 1%. However when she tried to get her formation to do the same, and now she could get her formation to that level, the cost for the same conversion was 6%. It looked like her internal processes would save her a staggering 45% or energy as compared to her best formation.

Adya and Sai could not understand what was causing such a massive discrepancy. The instructions were identical for both processes. They had tested multiple permutations, including using external energy sources, and yet still could not identify any reason for the loss. Was it possible that the system was taxing the formation? Was there some other fundamental difference between formations and skills? More questions that would require research to answer.

Adya went back to her practice and research. Her meridian formation was progressing at pace thanks to the custom skill. Apart from the pain there had been no other issues. Her Environmental Dominion skill had hit level 100, then refused to improve or evolve. She did not know how to push it forward. Even the incremental increases in the amounts of energy she could hold simultaneously was not enough to push the skill forward.

This complete lack of information on what was normal for the system frustrated her, but no one was willing to provide her any answers. For the time being she was stuck with trial and error.

Dexter returned a few hours later to confirm that Rory would have her new device prototype ready in two days. He had anticipated her needs and placed a significant order of materials. Lastly he had been in touch with Gauri and managed to purchase two large smithies to create more materials for their projects.

Adya went back to her passive skill research. She had multiple goals in mind, and she wanted to achieve them all with a single passive skill. First she wanted to compress her ability to create energy stones into one skill. Currently she was using up three of her slots for the same task. The inefficiency was not an issue yet, but still rankled her sensibilities.

The end goal for her was to be able to ‘gift’ a passive skill to her retainers. Though she had not managed to get details about the system from anyone, from observations and random snippets of conversations, Adya had pieced together the difference between skills and spells. To her understanding, a spell was a single action, something along the lines of shape mana in a particular shape. A single instruction. A skill on the other hand, was effectively an app. It would allow her to do a variety of things, as was the case with her Environmental Dominion skill. She did not need to activate all the functionality of the skill at the same time. She could set conditions, and provide inputs, and the spell would produce a result based on those initial conditions.

She had realised that she had vastly underestimated the level of complexity that a single skill could support. She wanted to push the limits. She also wanted to solve a number of other problems that she had been thinking over for some time.

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First was an issue that Mai had raised. One of the biggest issues in transportation was the need to carry water. It increased the burden immensely. She wanted to create a passive skill that would allow anyone to be permanently hydrated. This was more complex than simply creating water. That was easy enough to do. She could create around 2 milliliters of water per second and drop it into the stomach. That would be such a simple solution.

Yet that would create some other issues. The reason people did not just conjure water to drink was due to not understanding the nature of water. They just thought conjured water could not be consumed. The real issue was that conjured water was pure distilled water. Drinking enough of it would lead to the person dying as they slowly lost the electrolytes in their bodies. So she would need to create a version of water that had the right impurities, the minerals that would allow the water to be drinkable.

Even that was not enough, she wanted to push the skill to its limits. So she wanted to create a skill that would monitor the mineral levels in the body in real time, and then adjust the mineral content to ensure the body maintained the right levels. She had used the way her military combat suit would monitor her vitals and relay information back to her HUD as the inspiration for this.

The second application she wanted to create was the ability to communicate with anyone who had the skill over long distances. Even if it was just the ability to send short messages. Currently the only way to communicate at range was to use expensive talismans that were extremely limited, or large scale formations that were even more expensive to run and maintain.

The third application she wanted to create was in two parts. She wanted to see if she could get a passive skill to deposit something directly in her inventory. If that worked, then she wanted to provide the energy stone creation ability, disguised as a training passive, to her retainers and allow them to create energy stones for her while simultaneously increasing their energy control.

She had a lot more ideas, but that was the basic functionality that she wanted to achieve, and then condense all of those functions into one passive skill that she could grant her retainers. It would make the trade caravans much more secure. If she could add the ability to update the passive remotely, then she could add further features as she perfected them. It would also let her use her retainers' wasted energy generation capacity to create money from nothing.

Her goals were lofty, but it was good to have targets. She also had her mother to test her iterations with. As Gauri already knew about her ability to create mana stones and about her storage power, she could help in testing those capabilities.

She would start with a simple passive, just to test if the theory was even possible. There were so many things she could add if she thought of a passive skill as potential hardware.

Adya was so lost in her research that she did not even realise that three days had passed. She was jolted out of her focused state by Sally notifying her that the new device had been delivered.

Adya stopped her research and proceeded to the same room as last time. The device was significantly larger and heavier than the last iteration. Adya wasted no time in taking the parts apart and testing that they worked in the way she wanted. The mechanical parts worked well enough. Adya tried to inject any energy into the device when it was in its closed state and found that she could not. The same was true when she tried to sense any energies after placing stones in the device. She was satisfied with the results of her testing so far.

Adya moved on to the next step. The artifact now had a lot more formations than before. She found it ironic that the security parts of the formation represented more than 99% of all the work. The actual formation that would create the coins was miniscule in comparison. She started to engrave the multiple formations into all the components. There were several that were required, and it was good that she was able to work on them all simultaneously. Still it took her the better part of two hours to complete her work.

Then began the extensive testing. She still had the list of tests from her previous attempt, with additional scenarios added. The testing took her late into the night. Finally she was satisfied that the artifact was working as intended and secure. Sai reevaluated the timelines for other projects based on their experiences of creating this first artifact. The main part of the plan was in place.

Adya used the resulting information from this project to redesign the artifact that would allow for the compression of mana tiers. She checked the time when she was finished. It was very late.

She still had several things that she needed to do. She would send Dexter off with the new designs as well as ask about the cost of materials and amount of labour required for both artifacts from Rory. She would also need to ask her mother about the shipping costs for the devices.

Along with a cost representing her work and additions she would be able to come up with the cost of creating each artifact. Only then could she proceed with contacting the elder and progressing the next step of her plan.

If everything went well the next day, she should be able to send Jarel to contact the elder in the next few days. Then she would see how well her plans survived in the real world.