Once I had returned to the fourth floor, the first thing I did was add another layer of trees and kill every beast surrounding the forge. The existence of lure potions scared me. All it would take was for someone to throw one into the center, and my forge would be ruined.

The monsters didn't even have to attack directly. Just the existence of giant insects, stampeding wildly, would be enough to ruin my work.

While I doubted that another layer of trees would help, there was no real harm in expanding my safe zone.

However, once that was done, I started my experiments. My aim was to understand how mana moved at a macro scale. For that, I finally raised the silver and iron pole with an empty center, which I previously used to search for iron deposits, and started my incredible experiment.

Which was to push mana from one side, and try to observe its movements before it dissipated.

It was a simple experiment, but it would help me better understand mana in its natural state. Merely observing didn't help. Only a limited amount of information could be derived from looking at a glass of water. Worse, in my case, that glass was opaque, and I could only look at it from fifty feet away.

It was impossible to overstate just how bad my understanding of mana was. For example, whenever I broke a shell, the mana cloud disappeared soon after. However, I didn't actually know what happened. Was it some kind of energy that disappeared completely like light? Maybe it was like heat, and it searched for some kind of equilibrium with its environment, and I just lost the ability to perceive it once it dropped below a certain level...

There were limits to what indirect observation would bring. I couldn't even assume that it didn't disperse just because of the existence of mana-dead locations. After all, heat dispersed, but there were still places that were freezing and boiling hot on Earth.

Trying to deduce fundamental working principles from macro systems was an extremely difficult task. Admittedly, even direct observation wasn't easy. Or, the ancient philosophers wouldn't have had such misguided assumptions about the way the world worked.

"Let's start simple," I grumbled even as I pushed some mana to the center of the pipe, using Mana Control to deliver that as a ball, hoping that the mana would follow the pipe's direction.

The aim of the experiment was simple. I wanted to understand how mana moved in its natural state. My observations weren't exactly conclusive. In its free state, it reacted similarly to something in between liquid and gas, however, it was not consistent It changed freely for no reason … well, no apparent reason, at least.

However, whenever I used the perk Mana Control, it turned into some kind of extremely malleable tactile material, not unlike some kind of soft plastic. It had been similar to when I used Mana Manipulation, but, for the lack of a better term, it felt more … liquidy.

"I wish I studied material sciences more," I muttered. When I had been studying, I had readily dismissed anything mechanical or material-based as an area of study, feeling that they had long reached the bottleneck of development, instead choosing to dabble with computer engineering before I finally picked mathematical sociology as my final direction. After that, I abandoned anything on the physical side, though I still worked on the software part.

Coding my own models, at least the core components, was always easier than trying to explain them to someone else.

However, my lack of grounding on the more experimental side of things was coming to bite me in the ass. I probably could have come up with a lot of interesting experiments if I had been more familiar with the more esoteric side of the material sciences.

Instead, I needed to start from scratch.

"Let's begin," I muttered.

[-5 Mana]

The setup for the experiment was simple: Maintain a hold on the mana using Mana Control, bring it to the center of the pipe, and shift to Repair the moment I let go of the mana, hoping that it would give me enough time to observe it.

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It failed.

Spectacularly.

The mana just dispersed before I could get a sense of its movement. I repeated the experiment, this time with more mana. The result had been the same, but I didn't let that stop me. I repeated the experiment a hundred times.

The only thing I gained, was the dispersion shape of the mana being slightly affected by the pipe. Unfortunately, even that was a bit doubtful, as the silver and iron mixture had let the mana pass through. Whether there was no resistance, or there was only a slight resistance, I didn't know.

"Back to the drawing board. I need a material that resists mana better," I said. Unfortunately, due to the way Observe worked, I needed to rely exclusively on metals.

Worse, while the Mana Forge offered many materials, it didn't exactly come with an analysis report. I instinctively knew which metal would hold a better edge, and which one would be more durable, but it didn't index them based on their mana resistance.

I was curious whether it was not available, or it was something that would be unlocked once the conditions were fulfilled — whether it was finding the raw materials, or reaching a certain skill proficiency.

However, that question, at least in the short term, was just one of idle curiosity. I needed far more gold than I currently had in my possession to improve them further … and, that was assuming I could infuse enough mana to trigger a System response, which was not exactly a given.

"One step at a time," I said to myself and started on my experiment.

The first step was easy. I just needed to make a box, put mana in, close the box, and watch its dispersal. It was a simpler setup than the pipe, which, I had to admit, was a bit too ambitious of me.

The first rule of experimentation was to start from the most basic alternative. And, for that, I had to go back to the third floor, as the ordinary materials would have been just destroyed on the fourth floor.

Luckily, I had kept my third-floor forge intact, just buried. I made a dozen boxes made of available materials. Copper, bronze, iron, silver, and, with the tiny amount of it I had, gold. All except gold, I had created both pure versions, vitality-only alloys, and mana alloys of.

Then, I infused several bursts of mana into each material, trying to get a general sense. Of the pure materials, iron functioned the best for my purposes, while gold performed the worst. Of course, another way of saying that was that gold might be an excellent conducting material for mana, but that was currently not the experiment.

Also, technically, I couldn't call that effect conduction without a lot more experiments. After all, I still didn't know whether the mana was disappearing, or just reaching a point below my detection capabilities.

Then, there was the performance. Across the board, mana alloys performed the worst, letting the mana pass through easily. "Interesting," I grumbled, my mind already wondering whether that fact had anything to do with better mana alloys allowing for stronger enchantments. Maybe it was creating a medium to collect the environmental mana.

"One step at a time," I said again while still taking notes. One benefit of working on the third floor, it allowed me to use paper.

Meanwhile, alloys made out of Vitality were more of a mixed bag. Some of them performed better than their pure variant, some of them worse. None of them were good enough to work for my purposes, but it was still valuable. It meant that, possibly, there was a solution.

"Next, the shape," I said, and forged a hundred different shapes from pure iron, from simple cubes of various sizes and thicknesses to exotic curvy shapes that would have challenged even the most complex 3D printer.

I didn't expect much, which was why I was surprised to notice a hexagonal prism performing excellently, somehow forcing mana to linger inside for a significantly longer time. Yet, the moment it started slipping through the surface of the metal, it started dispersing.

There was no reason I could think of that would cause a hexagon to somehow work better … but then, that was the point of experimentation, wasn't it? To understand how things had been working.

"Let's find an answer," I said even as I forged a dozen hexagons, of varying sizes and shapes. Then, I started pushing mana inside and observing the results. Soon, I had a sheet of paper in front of me, and I started trying to find a formula that explained the phenomena.

Unfortunately, it was a very tedious calculation by hand. The simple arithmetic operations didn't give me any results, but that wasn't too much of a surprise.

However, after going through some common formulas, I actually managed to find a good formula. One of the classics.

Newton's law of cooling. I first played with the transfer coefficient and transfer surface area, confirming that those two rules held true. Then, I started increasing mana density, and calculated the rate of the mana transfer.

I found out that, similar to heat energy, the higher the mana difference, the faster the transfer.

Interestingly, the formula only worked when I assumed that there was a certain gap between environmental mana and what I could detect from the environment, which was very strong evidence for my theory that the disappearance of the mana meant that it was below my detection threshold.

It had many interesting conclusions, but none of those conclusions were really relevant. Especially since I still wasn't certain whether the core conclusion I had driven was accurate, or if I was misrepresenting the principles.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the luxury of repeating the experiment a hundred times in different forms to conclusively confirm it.

I still had other experiments to run.