Humey, if there is an award for best chef in the world, you’re definitely in the running for it. I tried my damndest to replicate what I remembered curry tasting like, but no matter how much moss or nuts I ground up and added to the pot, I just couldn’t get it right. Then I just explain what it’s supposed to feel like on your tongue, the taste you’re supposed to experience, and the color is usually had to Humey and he just makes it. I don’t even know how, he just thought about it for a second, took a little sip of what I’d made so far, yet somehow salvaged it despite my failure. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous, but I’m actually glad that he has such an innate knowledge of cooking.

We had just gotten the pot covered with a lid and set down with Humey when our mischievous brother Tokols tried to slip in unannounced. Between his ability to mute sounds and camouflage himself, he almost got past us and into the bedroom unbothered, but using his magic signature as a target I managed to bop him with a wadded up towel. I was worried I had pissed him off with how he slowly turned to glare at me, but when I saw how tired he looked I understood that he was worn out. I offered the courtesy of signing a simple question of ‘are you okay’ to him, only for him to mutter about having an overflow of slip related injury patients. Yeesh, I guess this year really is an irregular rain season if the clinics are full.

Mibata and Juaki came back at the same time, each using an arm as a hook to carry the worn out Bahruk with them. They relayed that when the flooding started he was tasked with heading into the tunnels that were seeing the worst of it in order to punch holes between the passages and expand the other drainage rooms. A quick scan confirmed that he was in the low end of how much magic he should have and was dozing off in order to recover it, but by my guess he would be topped off by tomorrow. As for my mother and brother, both of them were redirected from their usual workplaces to offer aid in their own ways. Mibata was tasked with distributing mushroom rations to those in need, and Juaki worked with the captain in order to escort everyone injured to the clinics and everyone else to their homes.

The relatively good news ended there, and thus began the bad news. Missing miners, a few casualties, and an entire tunnel project collapsed on itself were the worst of it, with even a few witnesses saying that someone fell from an upper floor. The thought of drowning in a dark cave or falling down the city chasm made my stomach turn over, threatening to spill my lunch before dinner. I'll take being hit by a truck again before either of those ends.

Dinner time came and I went to rouse the exhausted Tokols, and only then did I remember that he had Tim in his care today. The look of fear in his eyes when I brought up the bug made my heart skip a beat and my mind spawn the image of him plummeting to his end, but my worries were brought to a rest when he remembered that my bug was being kept by Tuleni. Dang it Tok, don't scare me like that! He began spewing apologies as my spikes reflexively poked out, though doing so was a complete accident on my part. A quick explanation that I wasn't mad at him settled it and we both went back for supper.

Everyone ate, praised Humey for his cooking skill, and relaxed after a long rainy day. When it came for Raevu to go home, the duty was surprisingly taken away from Mibata by our mother, who ushered my friend out the door and guided her through the water pooling outside of our door. I guess she knew that she had the best odds of getting her home safely while not endangering herself, but I was still going to pace around waiting for her until she came home safe. Of course she did come back and bragged a bit about how she's seen worse on one of her hunts, then promptly began to emit warmth as she curled up in bed beside her sleeping spouse. Crazy mom, always the same.

Before I turned in myself, I decided to run an experiment on the hovering disc by scanning it for its mana content before setting it to follow and float next to me while I slept. I'll check in the morning to see how it's doing.

…

Ah good, another dreamless night of…what am I stepping in? All over the floor is a black powder that feels grainy, almost like metal filings. I looked up from where the powder was and saw its source, and my heart nearly skipped a beat seeing the terrifying black mass that was the hover disc. The entire form of it was covered in the stuff, and everywhere it crumbled away to fall to the floor it would sprout more and cause the disc to vibrate a little faster. I instinctively ordered it to drop, where it slammed into the floor with a crunch leaving a splat of wierd residue.

Mibata woke at the sound and locked onto the source, his eyes trailing up to mine with a worried look. He tossed his covers aside and went out of the room without bothering to ask anything. He came back a moment later with a bucket and a couple of not-apples, tossed me one of the fruits and set the bucket on the floor, then spoke to me before taking a bite.

“Eat first, then science.”

He knows me so well. The fruit was devoured and the horrible thing was scooped into the bucket before being brought to the hobby room. Using my chisel as a sort of probe I began to poke at the mass until I could see the silver underneath, then with a careful claw I pulled it free and chisel thwacked it a few times to clear up the rest of the gunk. I was surprised with what I saw, and amazed at just how different it was.

The silver was pure and clean the day before, but today it had darkened and lost its sheen as it rusted away into that dark substance. There were pits, divots, cracks and missing pieces too, and when tapped it felt as though it were very brittle and near the point of breaking. The only part that looked semi intact was the crescent shaped area directly around the enchantments, and even those were starting to look quite dull. Alright improved scanner 3.0, let's try and figure out what went on here and see what this stuff is.

Decayed Silver

Mana Saturation: -100%

Physical Properties: null

Excuse me, what? Mana can go into the negatives now? Null properties? Every time I try something new my understanding gets flipped over and has to be picked back up again. I'm glad I ate that sugary fruit, because my brain is working double time trying to work through this. One step at a time and one issue before the next. How about I just look at it how it is and try to think of the process that happened based on what I have left to investigate.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Okay, I think I have a working theory now. What if the silver continued giving the enchantment it's magic even after all of the mana in the air it was siphoning was depleted, thus causing the effect to draw every last bit out of it to the point that it reached the decayed state? A negative number indicated that more than what was there was taken, which could mean that there is a difference between 0% saturation and 0 mana total. I remember seeing that the silver, despite always being at 0%, still had mana flowing through it even before being enchanted and kept some of that magic energy stored in itself. It could be possible that it’s like the mana stones and that when stationary mana gains some kind of physical density and can’t be detected by my innate senses. This is all just subjective unless I have concrete proof, but I think perhaps there is a way to test this theory.

There was actually another piece of this puzzle that I had seen before, back when I dabbled with mana saturation in the lab and hastily forced the mana I had fueled the samples with back into my collector runes. All three samples, whether iron, zinc or aluminum all became gnarled and darkened when I pulled the magic out of them, and I have no doubt that if I were to do the same thing to another object it would suffer the same fate. To test this idea I grabbed one of the chalk rocks I used for my slate and turned it over in my hands, getting a good feel for its color and shape as well as the data from the scan. Low conductivity, no saturation, and very low durability, just what I would expect. With that out of the way, I put a collector rune in the palm of my hand and set it to draw mana from the chalk and watched the reaction unfold.

At first it looked as though there was nothing happening, just a little wobbling from my own unsteady hands and a bit of dust floating around near it. Then there was this tugging sensation, as if the collector rune had caught something and was reeling it in forcibly. At last there came this pressure in the rune as the amount of mana it stored began to increase, and as the scanner confirmed it was being drawn from the subject. From white to gray, and from gray to black, the chalk darkened and cracked, crumbled and split as it lost all of its mana and became decayed. Even after it had become a darkened powder in my palm, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from where it had been.

The realization of what this implied made me more than a little anxious, but I had to see if the inverse was possible before I made any conclusions. I focused on the dust and conjured a filter rune beside the collector, one focused on gathering all of the decayed chalk dust into a singular clump again as I set the collector to reverse the process. The black lump popped and cracked again and again only to be forced back in place by the filter, but eventually the object grew back to its original size and regained its white color, returning once more to a small lump of chalk. A sigh of relief escaped me as I understood what this meant.

There was indeed mana in all matter, and with my powers I could alter how much there was. This alone is something I had already come to realize, but it was the scale that I imagined it being performed at that made me worried. Everything I did was under severe limitations set forth by myself so I wouldn’t harm others, but the thought of using this on someone with no restrictions and the intent to kill made me sick. Ugh, I don’t want to think about what that would look like or how painful it must be to be turned to ash. Pushing my focus back to the potential positive side of this, it was possible that I could scoop up all of the silver scattered around and recharge it back to its original form.

I went ahead and cleaned up all of the scattered black dust before everyone else began to rouse from their slumber, and back at my table I bid farewell to the now destroyed floating disc I had made. How odd that I felt a tinge of regret seeing it break down and be formed into a silver sphere, even after all of the things it had done to me. No, I realized it even before I recharged the silver, it was my own lack of understanding that made it operate that way, and even in its final moments it was doing just as I had made it to. Perhaps I’ll remake it using some method of enchanting it to be less potent and more stable than the initial design. Oh what the hell, might as well try to figure out how to make more flying pucks just so others could make a game out of it, because what’s the point of making flying disc if not entirely for entertainment purposes?

Rolling the silver ball in my hand, I began to think of ways that I could fix the problem of having the silver decay and how to keep it from being such a mana hog, but it was then that I remembered that my design wasn’t ever the same as the drone I had copied the idea from. I took out the spy device and looked it over again, and sure enough it was clear that someone had come across this issue before and was using materials specifically made to prevent it. If the gold acted as an insulator to keep the mana from bleeding through to the inner components and the simple channels made for the silver were there to focus the mana more efficiently, then that means that even how much power they enchanted it with was metered as well. Here I was thinking that they were using poor quality components because that was all they had, but only now do I realize that whoever made this took into account every kind of problem it would face, even down to its detection and range. My hat is off to you unknown craftsman, you have earned my respect.

Then that brings me back to the problem of making low power enchantments. If my blood is a super conductor for mana then how am I supposed to make anything that won’t rip itself apart or blow up? Maybe that’s what all of the other trace elements in the drone enchantments were actually put there for, dampening the power of blood and making their drones operate at low power. Crap, that means that if I wasnt to do this the right way then I’m going to have to find some sort of book or guide to enchanting so I can figure out what all this stuff is. Maybe our dear old scribe master has a book tucked away in his private collection that I can borrow.

This thought couldn’t have come at a better time, because it was now that others were stirring and rummaging through the kitchen for breakfast before the working day. I quickly jammed the keys of my typewriter and printed out a detailed explanation of my experiment before stuffing the log into my bag and zipping out into the main room. Upon my arrival there was a surprise knock on our door, and in the doorway was none other than the big bad captain of the guard herself looming with her head craned down to peer inside. She locked eyes with our mother and made a motion for her to come over, then the two had a conversation behind the closed door. What was she doing here, and why stop by our place? My question was soon answered when Juaki came back in and addressed the boys.

“Sons, we have important duty today. There is much damage from the rain that needs to be stopped and prevented on the high floors, then we go down one at a time and do the same.”

My brothers all agreed and began to shovel their food into their mouths faster and pack extra snacks into their bags. I pointed to myself with my head tilted, wondering if I was going to be part of this too. Mom looked at me with her eyes narrowed and arms crossed, an early indication that she was having none of it.

“Kayrux cannot help. Too much danger if cannot speak or call out in hard rain, and your writing board not work if it gets wet. Go to scribe hall where it is safe. No arguments, this is demand.”

With that she turned away and slung her bag over her shoulder and marched out the door. Great, so because I’m mute I’m a liability now? Of all the things that could piss me off, it was her being bossy and being dismissive. My teeth ground together in my mouth as I held back a snarl, then a hand landed on my shoulder from behind followed by a elbow nudging me in the side from the other direction. Mibata and Tokols were at my side, looking at me apologetically. My gecko-faced sibling flashed a myriad of colors before settling on green as he spoke up to me.

“It’s alright Kay, we’ll be safe. Just take care of yourself and go do some scribing, or whatever that old books-for-brains elder has you do.”

The taller brother rolled his eyes at the remark, but still held onto me reassuringly.

“Indeed. Do not take our mother’s words as condescending, you know she is only concerned for your safety.”

I know that, I just don’t like being told no or that I'm not able to do something. They saw how my face changed into a smile for them and gave me a quick squeeze good-bye before they chased after her. Humey had just finished packing his bag with an absurd amount of foodstuffs and hurried for the door, but on the way out he turned to face me and signed the words “I love you” to me before sloshing through the pond outside the door. I can’t stay grumpy with those three cheering me on, so I might as well push on with a smile on my face. I followed after Bahruk as he left for the lifts as well, and in the back of my mind I was excitedly anticipating the day ahead, unwilling to let a little negativity bog me down. Well, at least until I caught sight of the deluge coming down from the heavens into the main chamber of the city. Today’s going to be rough, one way or another.