Ajax was dripping with sweat as he returned home. Hours of training and yet he had almost nothing to show for it. For the first time since he came to this new world Ajax had finally hit a wall. He had previous experience with lack of talent, even after three weeks of apprenticeship he hadn’t unlocked the [Farming] skill, in fact he didn’t have it even after all the farming he’d done with mana all this time.

The difference this time however was that Ajax very much wanted to learn how to wield curse mana into more complex curses but he simply didn’t have the talent for it, not only that but because of the nature of his curse mana generation his Divine Witness trait didn’t help him with getting started at all.

While this didn’t mean that Ajax would give up on his work with curses he did realize that it won’t be anything more than a small part of his toolset. He still planned to learn some basic curses to improve the damage done by his cursed slash but his hopes of having curses be as big a part of his style as [Mana Augmentation] were cut short.

Ajax's ideal path to increased power, beside an increase in stats, was all of the scientific knowledge he had learned back on Earth. There was a lot to being an architect and physics was a good chunk of it, even if it did focus more on the mechanical side he had been forced to learn a much wider range during his college days.

The problem there was that he had a lot of things that he would need to not only relearn but actually rediscover in this world. Just as mana and mana concentration affected the speed required to break through the sound barrier so could it affect the rest of the physics he had learnt, this would mean that all he really had was solid guessed and not actual hard facts.

The second issue here was with the things that were so basic that they must be classified as their own category of magic. Ajax was willing to bet his left arm that gravity mana was thing, even with mana messing with things he had experienced gravity all his life and in all sorts of mana concentration and found it to work similarly in all of them. The problem here was that he had no idea what gravity mana felt like in the first place.

All of his current mana types came from either directly copying the mana type used by a monster or mage, or by playing around with his existing mana types in order to create new ones. It was already a minor miracle that he had stumbled upon void mana from shadow but currently there was nothing to help him gain gravity mana.

“What are you thinking about?” Theron asked as picked up on Ajax’s mood.

“The different mana types.” Ajax made sure to keep his answer ambiguous enough as he thought about it. “Trying to figure out how I can get a better look to understand some of them.”

“Can’t you do the same thing you did with the bees?” Theron asked.

“What do you mean?” Ajax was confused how his bees were the answer to different mana types.

“Well you got a little mana infused honey from infusing raw mana into the creation process, can you do the same thing to say wood and then set it ablaze to see if the mana turns into fire mana?” Theron asked.

Ajax slightly froze at that remark. While the process for fire wouldn’t work since the mana in the wood would affect the wood’s properties and not transform the idea into sound, Theron's mistake was in trying to apply it to a process that wasn’t natural to the infused item.

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The more he thought about it the more he realized that the idea itself had a lot of potential, so much so that Ajax was close to kicking himself for not having thought about it before. Sure there were few things it would actually work on but the things that it would work on should give him a lot to work with.

Ajax didn’t know if it was because he was thinking about it beforehand or just random chance because he now had an idea of how to get gravity mana. The answer was in how gravity worked, though its practical application was having things fall down gravity worked by having two things attract one another.

There was one other force that had two objects attract one another, magnetism. Sure enough there were natural magnets in this world but infusing one of them with mana would only affect its output directly without actually changing the mana into magnetic mana. An electromagnet hower was a natural process formed by metals when electricity ran through them.

If Ajax could learn magnetic mana he could eventually work it to find gravitational mana. This was clearly a long term project but one that he almost could wait to get started on.

“That’s a great idea.” Ajax said as he quickly picked up speed as he headed towards the house.

“Thank… you.” Theron was left slightly confused as he watched Ajax dash off in a hurry. Despite the confusion however Theron was proud, even if he didn’t know exactly how he had clearly helped his Lord.

“Hi grandpa!.” Ajax excitedly greeted Elija as he plowed into his office. “Quick question, in which of your warehouses do you keep your metal ores and ingots.”

Despite the joy Elija felt when seeing his grandson's joy while coming to see him the question quickly brought him up short as a small pit in his stomach quickly grew bigger.

“Now, Ajax I am sure you are very talented but I think its a bit early to be thinking about trying this.” Elija said after a long moment of silence.

“What?” Ajax was very confused, not only by the fact that his grandfather claimed to know what he wanted to do but that he also thought he wasn’t skilled enough to do it.

“What is going on?” Judy asked as she, Alana and Aurora were quick to follow Ajax here as they saw him dashing through the mansion.

“Ajax here is asking about our supply of ores and ingots.” Elija said as he felt a bit of cold sweat start to drip down his back.

“Now honey, are you sure you want to be focusing on that now.” Aurora tried a more diplomatic form of denial, her attempts were quickly dashed however as her granddaughter joined the conversation.

“Absolutely not!” Judy said as she looked at Ajax. “You are not trying your hand at transmutation!”

“You’ve started learning alchemy seriously for almost a year, most people have at least a decade of experience before they try it, and it's almost always a failure.” Alana tried a logical explanation. “Trying to work at it now would just be a waste of ingots, ores and other expensive ingredients.”

“But, I don’t want to try my hand at transmutation yet.” Ajax said.

“You don’t?!”

“You don’t?!”

“You don’t?!”

While Alana, Aurora and Judy had the exact same reaction Elija was quick to move the conversation away from transmutation, just in case the conversation would lead his grandson to once again start hounding them for ingredients as he did over the summer. “What is it that you need to know about the ingot and ore warehouse for then?”

“I need a few samples from different metals and ores so I can experiment with them using mana.” Ajax said.

“Why didn’t you just say so,” Elija said as he heaved out a relieved sigh. “No need to go to a warehouse for that, just go to our main shop and ask Sebastian for what you need, we should have a few samples of most ores and ingots to use as show pieces when making deals.”

“I was going to explain if all of you didn’t jump to conclusions.” Ajax grumbled to himself as he headed back out of the estate and towards his grandfather's shop.

The more Ajax thought about the process of getting access to gravity mana the more he realized that he had been neglecting a lot of his knowledge when forming his mental images when casting some of his elemental spells. The biggest failure of this being his ice magic, he knew perfectly well that it was the molecules lack of movement that represented the cold and that the best way to make his ice magic colder was to have that as the basis of his image and intent, yet he hadn’t been doing that.

The same could be said for fire but Ajax knew that there were multiple types of flames and that mana had a bigger say there than it did when creating ice. Nevertheless there was a lot more he could be doing now to increase his power and the first step for it would be getting those samples.