As much as Spencer would have liked to just walk out and subsume himself amongst the raw mana that fell from the storm, he knew that he would struggle to hold a simple spell in his mind against the power from the storm, and if he lost control of the spell he would not have the will to rain the spell to heel, he could go too far, he didn't know what would happen, he had suspicions based on a few monsters that had to be dealt with from time to time, and he did remember the few wretched souls who found no shelter during the storm and the abominations that they became.

Though he was not a genius when it applied to spell forms and arrays, He knew that his best bet was to use an array to moderate, control and regulate the flow of mana. With an array acting as a buffer his weak body and mind would not be overwhelmed by the mana and not go into extreme oversaturation that could lease to dire consequences, and he did not plan on becoming a mindless monster.

Spencer had a few immediate concerns now that System was not translated into English, he had to quickly prove to the system the correct way for the humans to cultivate power and not be slaves to the system the mages had tailored for their own.

The strategies that the Generals and leaders had conveyed to Spencer were that earth did not have intelligence, we had been blind and deaf, hobbled and crippled, and advice, if they had been successful, was to inform Earth of its impending doom. The language was the first step, then adding human optimised trainers was the next followed by a bunch of information into the nexus to help prepare for the real invasion, these steps would require access to a nexus.

Spencer had a few ideas on how he could do that without beginning instantly dismissed, but that was secondary to his family and his personal power growth. If the war hammered into him and humanity was that a single powerful mage is a force multiplier and should never be discounted, this was another failure for Earth in its strategies. A few of the most decisive defeats at the hands of the mages had been because of our own inability to acknowledge the danger of a single mage, generations of warfare surrounding teams and numbers paled in comparison to a mage on a warship. The damage a single mage could do when left unchecked was insurmountable to our alleged modern militaries.

As he looked into the gloom outside, the staccato of rain was more akin to the sound of heavy artillery than was a constant towards the end. Memories of countless battles often result in a route or defeat. Unlike before, Spencer was not the lost soldier that he was, the return and this advantage he had been gifted with was not going to end in a foregone conclusion, and now the return of mana represented a new future and not the constant reminder of what he had lost.

Spencer had for the first time in a very long time felt comfort from the presents of mana and the rain was creating an energising aura. He did recall back to the first time he did what he was going to attempt, a process that he would not have completed or learned about until many years later.

His original challenge of not knowing how to control the mana when it entered his body was no longer a concern, even if his body, mind and mana were weaker now. He had decades of experience, and he would not be guided by the system's incorrect assumption, an assumption that the humans on earth were similar to the mages that left. Spencer knew differently, and he didn't have to make the same mistakes he had already made to learn.

The only path forward was to embrace the power that was buried deep inside every cell of his body.

He had time now, but he still could not squander it. The Mana storms would not last forever and he had the opportunity no human or mage has had in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, with as much raw mana as he was ever going to get access to falling from the sky, he would not only empower himself, he would find a way to do the same for his family. The only other predictable option available to him after the storm was by submerging himself in a leyline, and that would likely reduce him to atoms and he was not going to do that again, not yet anyway.

Spencer spent far too much time rummaging around the house, he was able to find the tools he needed or more accurately the tools that would suffice, mostly through trial and error than from actually remembering where anything was, not for the first time during his search he missed the crystal clarity from a mind empowered by mana, and neural pathways forged from the very essence of the universe, he would soon reattain that perk and the fog that covered his mind would hopefully reveal his memories, the fleetingness and forgetfulness of his current mine scared him more then he cared to admit, and his only fear was that certain knowledge was forever lost from the transmission through space and time.

A collection of texters, a bucket, a mortar and pestle, and a small knife were all he needed and the best he was going to get until he was able to get supplies from the hardware store.

After a quick check to see that Victoria was still asleep he prepared for his first test, to measure how much actual mana he was dealing with in the immediate area, and while he was at it flush the water tanks of water so that they could start collecting the mana without contamination. Stealing his body with a small body empowering spell in the air, he braced himself for the onslaught and opened the back door, failing to negate the shock from the strength of the storm as he was knocked off his feet, the shock and force causing his mind to lose its grip on the spell and the small strength it gave him fizzled out. Before he knew what had happened he was already a few paces outside and the bucket held in a death grip was already half full.

Making sure to not spill or contaminate the liquid he collected from the storm with any of the water on the ground, Spencer crawled back to the threshold and slid the bucket inside before closing the door.

Noting the level in the bucket with one of the markers and fumbling with starting the timer on his watch, he slid the door closed and crawled back into the gloom and darkness.

The rainwater was not the H2O that would normally fall from the sky, but liquid mana and, like many things would have taken the denizens of earth years to figure out that phenomenon that created the mana storms, but by then the world was already beyond recognition from the earth of old.

With a grunt of disdain again at the slowness of his mind and body, he tried to focus on the task at hand and with the house's wall hard-pressed to his side, he was able to shuffle on his hands and knees around to the water tank on the side of the house, with the darkness surrounding him he could barely make out the lever valve, the handle was no more than a meter from his face. Through touch and tracing, he was able to unscrew the cap and then release the lever to the feel of relatively warm water that sprayed out, compared to the liquid mana falling from the sky.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The sound of the rain created an odd sensation as he knelt in the mud, it was akin to being deaf, only able to feel the gushing water running over his hands and knees, but not able to hear the sound over the oppressive drone of the rain.

It took a few minutes for all the water to empty and the liquid to be exiting the valve to then be replaced by the tingling cold of enriched mana. With a heave Spencer shut the valve and screwed the cap back on that was held in his hand in a vice grip, out of fear he would lose it if set down.

Now satisfied with a tank that was starting to fill up with only mana and extra not being flushed into the storm drain. Spencer had a few ideas on how to capitalise on the excess mana, and he would be able to get access to mana from the rainwater tap in the laundry. Tracing his way back around the house, he made his way back around and to the glass door. It was always strange to Spencer how much mana affected light, the light rune for example used almost no mana at all, seemingly able to create light with no heat and being ridiculously efficient, and how raw mana almost at random would create light, however, the rule was, when mana condensed into its liquid state, it would start to absorb the light around it creating this unnatural darkness akin the darkness found in the Mariana trench and deepest parts of the sea, or the trench might have been close to the rising level of mana, a theory that was never tested in his time, due to the leviathan like creatures that would soon call the ocean there own domain.

This effect could not be more evident to him now, the light from the window was only visible when he opened the glass door, and as he moved through the threshold he could see the darkness seep into the house almost as if it was crawling in with him or more scientifically the light was being absorbed by the mana outside.

As he sprawled back into the house and slide the door shut with his foot, the light blazed around him once again, the glass door closed acting as a physical medium that delayed the light absorption by the mana. With eyes slightly blinded he zeroed in on the bucket that was close to being filled when he left, which was now half empty.

Spencer stopped the timer and glanced at his watch, about half an hour had passed. A quick calculation of the mana to dispersion rate, and he was at the rough rate of 10L of liquid mana Per hour to its pseudo-gas state. After a few more minutes of thinking and writing his calculation down convinced he was wrong, he was now shocked.

He flicked his will across the house to confirm, a will that was slowly building in strength with the more he practised, and out of the six light runes he had scribed onto the walls in crayon throughout the house, only two had burned through the material used to draw them.

However, what shocked spencer was that it was not the typical enchantment burnout or the type he expected. The crayon that was acting as the medium or sigil path for the mana to travel and create the light effect, a small glowing sphere above the last rune in the centre of a triangle of runic scripts. The overloaded was that of the crayon material, which destroyed the spell form, as opposed to the typical burnout that was an absence in the available mana, being ambient in this case but often a mana batteries such as a crystal or human, the end was the same, a lack of mana caused the structure to fizzle and stop, normally damaging the spell form and stopping it from working without fixing the small faults.

If the current rate of dispersion remained consistent with the rates he was familiar with after the storm and in a normalised mana area, then currently spencer was in an area 70 times normal mana, more ambient mana than what a baseline area would have, just how much was outside then.

“Fuck me, no wonder mana is falling from the sky, the ambient mana is so high it is skipping crystallisation and forming liquid in midair.”

Glancing at his crude light runes, the ridiculous mana levels answered the question of why they were still going glowing strong a few hours after. This would change his plans slightly and he could do a few more extra things to help his plans along.

First Spencer need to refine his materials, Mana was for all accounts, odd. So far as they had discovered it worked in three states of being. Pseudo-gas was the most common and this permeated everything to some degree, this type of mana would interact directly with the Aether or spirit realm and was the most common form to use for spells and mana devices, however being the most common was not an indication of its most versatile state, it was just the most abundant. The other two states were the tangible forms that could be seen without mana sense of some type, the solid mana crystals and Liquid mana.

The most common type, the pseudo-gas form could be baseline with relative ease and to create a mana crystal from normal ambient mana baseline would require all the mana in an area roughly the size of a 10m squared cube, this would create the basic size mana crystal about the size of a marble, after creation, this would hold 100 units of mana and be coloured a neutral light blue unless it was elementally charged, that however was not currently relevant.

For context a baseline mana crystal could power a light rune indefinitely and also build up a surplus of mana overtime, in a mana vacuum with no ambient mana, an example being the void of space between solar systems, that same light rune would use one point of the stored 100 units of mana every year. After a hundred years of no mana absorption, the crystal would dissolve as the last mana point was used.

The mana crystal could also be created from its liquid state, this only happened naturally underground and in rare circumstances where the dispersing liquid mana was at a high enough density it would solidify into the crystal, this would look akin to ice on a lake and often act as an insulation layer to the liquid mana, stoping any dispersion into the ambient mana.

When liquid mana did expand into a crystal solid, the ratio would be 1:10, being a single drop of liquid mana would grow to the size of your fist or baseball and contain closer to 2500 units of mana, an exponentially high amount than the volume would suggest.

As a crystal or solid the mana could be stored with relative safety with almost no noticeable bleed off into the ambient mana, the crystal also could store more power than in its liquid form or more densely store the power, this was called overcharging and would cause the mana crystal to glow, there was no known limit to how much each mana crystal could hold except for the difficulty once a ten-time threshold has reached. The max capacity for a 100 mana unit crystal could hold 1000 mana, however, any mana over that 10x number would naturally and passively bleed mana if left alone with a rate of 1 unit every few hours depending until it was back to the base level of 1000.

That crystal would also passively absorb ambient mana until 10x more had been cumulated and once full would become denser and slightly larger by a slight fraction of a fraction of every few days. It was not known why natural absorption would increase its size but not artificial methods were known to earth before.

The relative safety of solid mana was its predictability when force was applied to the crystal. If for example, you destroyed a mana crystal, it would explode with a visible cloud of mana almost instantly raising the ambient mana for a short time, before the mana would slowly disperse into the surrounding mana. This was extremely helpful for mages with a weak internal mana core, was spells could be fueled with the intentional destruction of mana crystals

The liquid state was the most power-dense form and could easily be absorbed, transferred and used in spells, this form would later be described as a transitionary state, however, it was the most volatile by far and exposure would always result in unpredictable results unless meticulously directed with a spell array. When mana was in its liquid state the downside was that it almost instantly started to turn into its gas form. The speed of which was visible, similar to melting snow, and would raise the level of ambient mana in the local area. This transition from liquid to gas could be stopped with physical containers, slowing the rate that is dispersed into pseudo-gas, by being held in a spell array or other command array, or by shear strength of will.