Three days later and Felix hadn't found anything resembling guidance on spell form creation whatsoever. He managed to find a bunch of nodes, channels, sources, and spell form components on paper but, he was pretty sure he was getting duplicates, or more accurately variations. He hadn't tested them all yet, but a lot of the components he was filing away were eerily similar to each-other. For now he was mentally sorting and filing them all into a single section. Once he had tested their functions, he would file them in a more organized way that he was still working on figuring out.
He was likely going to have to have everything filed with ids or something then create multiple index books referring to them. There were just too many things he wanted the components sorted by. Number of connections, difficulty, category, element, function and more. Since his library wasn't a 7th or more dimensional structure, he was just going to have to have multiple reference texts to find them. There was simply no way to sort them by multiple different properties at once. That was also excluding the fact that some would need to be filed in multiple sections.
The other rewards he got from the rooms were about 70% materials and 30% components overall, though it had started around 50% each. Felix suspected the components were slowing down as he was getting close to acquiring them all. He hadn't gotten any exact replicas, but some were getting very close. From the spell formation, rooms the only material rewards he was getting were spell scrolls. The material rewards from the enchanting rooms did get more interesting though. He looted a ton of training items but there was more variety now, along with the ones he had already picked up, he also found: swords, chest-plates, boots, gloves, pants, shirts, cloaks, helmets and rings. He also found 5 common enchanting quills and 2 uncommon enchanting quills. Unfortunately neither held any effects and were simply basic enchanting quills.
Leather and cloth posed an interesting challenge to enchant, which he discovered in some of the rooms on the second day. Not only were they flexible, meaning they had to be properly secured, but the material also didn't engrave well, meaning the enchantments he put on them couldn't be too intricate. The work around for this was a chapter in his enchanting book he had skimmed over on his initial read, material inlays. Rather than relying on the rigidity of the material being enchanted, an enchanter could inlay a material into the object so that the enchantment was less likely to be damaged or distorted. Felix wasn't planning on practicing that on his own any time soon, mostly because he didn't have the materials to do so.
Felix had barely made it to his self imposed deadline on the third day. He had almost given up after two days of running through the same boring walls into similarly monotonous rooms but he had resolved himself initially to three days so he persevered. He was actually rather surprised he hadn't encountered any trap rooms though, he was barely 20% of the way into the dungeon and he was still relatively close to the rest room judging from his map. He figured most people probably just went down a single path to make it easy to travel back to the rest room meaning they would encounter trap rooms relatively early in their exploration.
Felix went to sleep that night, excited to do anything other than exploring the labyrinth the next day. After washing himself in the fountain, eating and drinking Felix was ready to start tinkering with spell forms. To start, he laid down on the ground and entered his Memory Palace. At the large desk in the middle of his library, Felix pulled multiple of the smaller desks over to surround himself with all of the spell components and completed forms he had ever seen.
Picking up one of the simplest spell forms he could find, Gust, Felix began to identify and dissect the spell form. In his previous attempts to do this very thing, Felix had fallen short because he didn't know where one component in the spell ended and another began. Meaning he also didn't know where to cut, and where he could modify the spell form when he wanted to splice together something brand new. Now, Felix had specific spell form components separated from spell forms. He could identify the components he knew in existing spell forms and remove those components making the process of dissecting and testing much easier. As if someone had lit a candle in a dark cave, he was now able to see just a few steps in front of himself.
Felix spent the first half of the day dissecting components out of spell forms and theorizing on what they might do. He also created a huge set of spell forms he wanted to test and prioritized the list to best identify individual components. If he managed to successfully identify all the components, he could actually start working towards making any spell he could dream of. As it was now, he could only make spells from the scraps of other spells, iterate and modify them in minor ways.
The rest of the day, Felix spent in the completely empty room connected to the rest room and tested out all kinds of spells. He was only using a tiny amount of mana by minimizing the experimental spell's size as much as he could. Ultimately, this made it take much longer than it would have otherwise. He almost gave in to casting the spells at normal size, when he accidentally lit himself on fire. He had accidentally combined a self targeting component with a fire node resulting in a minor fire being started right on top of himself. He only managed to burn away 10% of his health before he stopped it, but it did reinvigorate him to push through his original, agonizingly slow, but safe, testing methodology.
By the end of the day, Felix had managed to identify about a quarter of the spell components he had looted from the dungeon so far. Though a disappointing proportion, Felix had managed to figure out how to connect most of the components together which meant he should be able to create some of the simplest spells on the fly, given a few minutes. It was useless in combat currently, but if he could make it instinctual, he would be able to invent spells to fit the situation perfectly, every time. At least, that was his goal.
Felix laid down in his bed to sleep for the night.
Ding You have gained 9 levels in [E - Special] Arcane Engineer
Holy shit. I feel like I've barely got anything done today. Why did I gain 9 levels?
The next morning Felix managed to accept the hard truth of the rest of the dungeon. He was going to be stuck with running the rooms and practicing enchanting almost entirely. It wasn't entirely a loss for his spell formation work though as he was already seeing a lot of similarities between enchanting and spell formation. He suspected he could incorporate enchanting components into spells, or vice-versa, down the road.
With that in mind, Felix set himself the goal of clearing every room in the dungeon. He was already loosely planning on doing so, but he needed a hard set goal in his mind to help him through the monotonous slog of completing over a thousand rooms with very similar puzzles.
That day, on the second room of the day, he found the test room.
Puzzle Dungeon A
You have demonstrated sufficient skill to be tested. Would you like to take the test?
Warning: Should you fail, you will need to begin demonstrating your skill from scratch before being offered another test.
Minimum Reward: Dungeon Map
Yes
No
Nope.
Felix left the room, mentally marked it on his map and continued on with other rooms. He wasn't sure if the test room was in a specific location when he entered, or if a normal room turned into a test room once he demonstrated proficiency, but he was hoping that once he found it, it would stay put.
He really wanted the dungeon map with the rooms all marked on it so he could cross them off one by one and spend less time running through the halls, but he didn't feel like he was ready yet. He might not ever feel ready, but the longer he waited, the better off he'd be.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
After the fifth room that day, Felix started to optimize as much as he could. Firstly, he split the dungeon into a grid and on each day, he would clear one square of the grid before heading back and sleeping. Secondly, he stopped buffing his intelligence and dexterity while traveling between rooms, then re-enabled them in the rooms. He also stopped buffing his strength and endurance while in the rooms where previously he had kept them going for convenience. This resulted in his sleeping for only 8 hours every 40 hours. This meant he cleared two grids each time he was out and missed one feast, but it also cut his estimated time to clear the dungeon greatly.
After four days, Felix realized he was clearing the rooms much faster than before and he managed to clear three imaginary grid squares before sleeping for the night. On the 6th day of his meticulously clearing the dungeon, he felt the boredom fade away almost entirely as the routine had set in. He was now completing rooms almost entirely on auto pilot which gave him plenty of time to do other things. At first he tried to optimize his energy cycling but didn't make much progress as it was already pretty good. He theorized a new method of cycling his energy but it was so drastically different, he didn't want to risk interrupting his routine.
He then started to try and enter a semi meditation as he ran and completed rooms. At first, he could do it somewhat while traveling but was interrupted whenever he completed a room. As he practiced, he managed to stay in a partial meditation at all times, though the depth varied, reminding Felix slightly of sleep cycles. It wouldn't be possible to maintain it in normal combat and he wasn't getting the full effects of the increased regeneration, but it was better than nothing.
The next thing Felix experimented with was manually regenerating his mana. Up to now, Felix had simply let his mana regenerate by itself. When Felix was following the trail of the Divine tier Frozen God's Mercy, he thought he might be able to do something similar, manually pull on the ambient mana to regenerate faster. First, Felix drained some mana with random spells, then, as he was walking in his partial meditative state, Felix tried pulling on the mana around him. He imagined pulling it into him and finally into his mana pool.
At first he thought it was working swimmingly, his mana was regenerating much faster. He started experimenting with imagining a void inside of himself, a blackhole, then finally spinning his mana internally and the ambient around him like a vortex. The first two didn't seem to do much other than being a mental aid. The last option he tried was way more effective than he expected though. His mana was restoring itself almost ten times faster than normal.
After completely emptying and filling his mana pool once with the vortex method, to push his new found ability to the limit, Felix realized something was wrong. As he depleted his mana pool using random spells. he noticed his spells were off. The spells were harder to cast, with some of them failing, something that hadn't happened to Felix in almost a month. They also had some odd effects, some of them were simply off aim, other times the spells he shot split into two, or shattered before hitting anything. There were odder effects too, like spells that changed color and spells curving in mid air.
When he first noticed it he was fascinated and experimented with a variety of spells before fear set in. He didn't use his mana at all for the rest of the day, but it seemed perfectly normal that night when he tentatively tested it again. He resolved to only use the method of regenerating his mana faster when the spell he was casting didn't matter, like Gust, he was out of combat, or before sleeping for the night, at least until he figured out what was going on.
On the 8th day of running through the rooms, Felix finally found the blue room, at least he assumed it was the blue room. He walked into a room that was much larger than any of the previous rooms he had tried before this. Just a few meters into the room was a podium, beyond it the room grew horizontally giving it a conical shape, with the podium at the tip.
Felix walked up to the podium and placed his hand on it. In front of him, floating in the air, a spell form appeared made of light, similar to a hologram though, Felix suspected illusion was the more apt name. On the podium, beneath his palm, three small drawings of shields appeared with enchantments drawn into them. Felix lifted his palm and examined the enchantments. He was pretty sure the spell form was some sort of fire spell as he recognized the fire node, though he wasn't sure about the rest of it.
Looking down at the enchantments, one of the shields was enchanted with a lot of durability and force, making it effectively heavier. Another was enchanted to heat up every time something was blocked. The last one, Felix had trouble identifying. He recognized the cooling effect node and saw the channels running from them into what he assumed were sources, though not any he had ever seen before. He mentally recorded all of the enchantments then touched the last shield with the cooling nodes.
In front of him, a gout of flame fired from the right side at the far end of the room towards a shield that had just appeared. The spell appeared to be a Flame Thrower, though it was much more effective than the one Felix had created. Instead of spraying out around the shield, the flames were simply swallowed as frost grew along the edges and crept inwards on the shield.
Oh man that source is insane, it consumes the mana of anything it blocks I guess. Gonna file that one away as Vampiric Source. It also means the Flame Thrower it showed me sends mana with the flames instead of just converting it all right away like I've been. Probably to extend the range, if I had to guess, but it also opens up the possibility of the spell being eaten by an enchantment. It's also possible that spell form was modified to make it convert less mana than it should, intentionally suboptimal for the purpose of the test.
Felix quickly tried casting the new Flame Thrower for himself but realized it consumed a ridiculous amount of mana, almost 10 times as much as his, for effectively just a longer range. He filed that spell form away for modification at a later date. This also made Felix realize that he could simply cast the spells he couldn't identify to figure out what they did, though there was always the chance the spell was designed to light the user on fire.
The next spell was a simple mana shield and the enchantments on the podium were displayed on swords this time. There was an extra forceful swing, a heated blade and a durability enchanted blade. Felix specifically looked for a vampiric source as he suspected that would rip through a mana shield easily, but didn't find any. He selected the extra forceful swing enchantment right after mentally recording the enchantments as well as the spell forms. He also made sure to pay special attention to how effective the enchantment appeared and recorded that too in his mind.
Not only did he estimate quantitative values, but he also realized there was nothing stopping him from recording the entire memory onto a page in his library. After all, his Memory Palace was a library because he chose it as such, it didn't have to be restricted to what could appear on paper with ink. He also realized he might have to change his mental library to contain crystals containing entire memories at some point, or maybe leave the books but have them project memories when opened.
The next spell Felix had to cast to identify, but it didn't appear to do anything. He did recognize the cold node so he chose the heat and durability enchanted breastplate. The spell was cast into a wall of water and fired icicles. When Felix had cast it, he didn't have water in front of him, so it simply uselessly froze the air. Felix had run through 20 choices in the room before things got more complicated. The enchantments started to become very similar and overlap.
At 40 choices, the enchantments appeared to have the same effect, but had different executions. The sources, channels, sometimes nodes and overall layout differed, but the effect was conceptually identical. Felix was spending more and more time deliberating, trying to analyze the enchantments, sometimes having to simply choose the most stable enchantment of three identical enchantments. At 60 choices, some of the enchantments were the same, with each of them containing a slight flaw. The flaws were in different places and Felix had to choose which one would affect the outcome the least. He had gone from choosing the best option, to the least bad option, something that irritated him greatly.
At 80, the spell forms and enchantments were partially obscured. Sometimes it was the nodes, other times the channels, Felix just had to make a best guess. At first he had found it easier as he had less to scrutinize and compare. After a few choices though, the parts that were obscured differed from one to the other. On one, the nodes would be obscured, on another the channel and on the last one the sources.
Occasionally throughout the test, the spell forms and enchantments flipped. Felix had to choose the best spell instead of the best enchantment, which was much harder with Felix's limited understanding of spell formation. With each selection, Felix was becoming less confident until he was essentially just guessing on the last 5. At 100 choices, the test ended causing a chest to appear with a familiar rumble of stone grinding against stone just to the side of the podium. The chest made an audible click sound and Felix walked over and opened it. . . . . .