The next morning Felix decided to take a look through the courses and books available in the vault on the off chance one of them would be useful for his core and channel endeavor. He wanted to just head down and check it out but he knew Noah was sending a barber and Amelia up to the tower, likely that day. Not wanting to miss them, he instead sat on the floor of the lobby and began some preliminary experimentation. First, he wanted to experiment with mana states. It was his understanding that it should be impossible to turn mana into a liquid, and further into a solid. Given he was doing a lot of things other people deemed impossible already, he wanted to give it a shot.
First, Felix drew out a hundred points of mana from his pool and held it in front of himself as a blob floating in the air. It was still in the mana dimension rather than reality, but Felix could feel it in front of him. He first tried to just squeeze it from the outside but he couldn't seem to hold it all steady. There was always a hole through which it squeezed out. He also tried creating a piston out of solid mana but he couldn't get the seal just right. He also tried creating a ball of solid mana then pushing mana into it but at a certain point, it simply slipped around the ball instead of pushing inside.
If he pulled it into reality then squeezed it, it would simply fall back into it's own dimension. Frustrated, Felix started to try random things, he tried to just touch it with his finger and surprisingly, it reacted. Not when he first made contact, but when he swung his arm through it. It took him almost an hour to realize it was reacting to his soul, which didn't reach to the tip of his fingers. He spent a little while trying to compress it using his soul with minimal success. He just couldn't apply enough force to make it work.
After all of his experimentation, he decided to just go back to the basics. He pulled out a blob of mana and tried to squeeze it. The results were largely the same but he kept trying, hoping that he might be able to develop a skill or that practice would help. Ultimately, it was neither. Felix slipped as he squeezed once again not able to hold the mana still but he just ignored it and kept squeezing. He figured if he was just practicing, it didn't matter. As he compressed the mana, it became easier the less mana he tried to compress. Once he realized this, he let go of all but a single point of mana, then he further divided that until he was left with just a miniscule amount.
While it was easy to compress the mana when he was only manipulating a tiny portion, he still needed to compress it a ridiculous amount. He also didn't have much practice forcing mana to do things as he felt like he had mostly been asking it up to this point. However, given a few minutes, Felix was pretty sure he had done it. The mana felt like it gave way at a certain point and just switched over. He then immediately let go and it reverted. He repeated the process and held it with his mana control this time. Given that this amount of mana was essentially unusable for anything, he repeated the process and added each little seed to a growing globule of mana.
He eventually managed to create multiple at once, creating a small factory of compression with around 10 compressions happening at once. Doing this, he had essentially infinite mana since he couldn't compress faster than he regenerated. Once the globule was about the size of a marble, he stopped.
Ok wonderful. What the hell can I do with this?
It took an extravagant amount of time and effort to make just the tiny liquid globule so he didn't want to waste it. His ultimate goal was to potentially have liquid mana flow through his channels and maybe even make up his core. He had to decide if he was going to keep his core and channels in the real world or the mana dimension and to do so he would have to figure out the advantages to both. He also wanted to try and make a single use mana battery, but he figured he would need to make it a solid first.
His first test was to pull a portion of the liquefied mana into reality. It felt a little heavier than normal mana did but otherwise there was no issue. It appeared as a blue tinted liquid not dissimilar in thickness from water.
I know it's dumb, but I kind of want to drink it. All the people in the book did it with plant liquid mana, never just pure liquid mana, so it'll probably be fine? Also it's essentially a drop, that shouldn't be enough to kill me, should it?
First, he touched it with the tip of his finger and nothing happened. After that, Felix decided to just go for it and he dropped the droplet onto his tongue. It was completely tasteless and a little warm but otherwise didn't invoke immense pain or anything. He swallowed it but didn't notice anything at all. He waited for a half hour, creating more liquid mana while he waited but ultimately saw no perceptible changes. His stats were the same and he felt the same.
That was kind of disappointing.
Next he wanted to try creating solid mana. He split his marble into 10 and tried to compress them once again. It was a little too hard so he focused on one piece and compressed that. Similar to when he created the liquid, the mana simply gave way at a certain point forming a tiny granule of sand. Felix repeated the process one by one until he had 10 grains of mana sand.
He pulled them into reality and they appeared as tiny blue crystals, like tiny pieces of glass. He didn't eat them this time, instead opting to just place them into a canteen he hadn't gotten around to selling. He was about to start creating more when he heard a knock at the door.
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He quickly bolted over and opened the door to find someone he didn't recognize at all. Standing in front of the door was a very young, very thin and very bald man. The only hair he had visible was a magnificent beard that did not suit his stature at all. The beard was fit for the burliest of dwarves and he appeared more like the thinnest of elves.
[E - Common] Human (Lvl 52)
[E - Common] Barber (Lvl 52)
"Ah, the barber. Please, come in."
"Oh ah… thank you."
"I'm Felix, thanks for making the trip all the way up here."
"Ah, uh… no problem. I'm Ray."
"Pleasure to meet you Ray. Judging from your profession level, there must not be many barbers in the city. I take it you're a busy man then?"
"Uh, yeah think it's just me."
"Well, I don't exactly have many chairs… Oh wait, the dining room has chairs, follow me."
Ray simply nodded and followed Felix up the stairs to the second floor. Felix sat down at one of the chairs at the table.
"So, you took the pacifist option then?"
"Uh, yeah. Had fighter but Mike told me about it when he came by a few weeks ago. It's kind of convenient as a barber." To demonstrate, Ray pulled out a blade and poked Felix' arm. He wasn't expecting it at all so he only managed to flinch a little but it was completely unnecessary as the blade simply felt like a finger poking him. Ray explained, "It's literally impossible for me to hurt you meaningfully. People used to get so tense which made it hard to cut their hair, now it's a lot better."
"That is convenient."
"So how do you want me to cut it?"
"Could you get rid of all my facial hair, shave it clean. I usually keep my hair a few inches long, and keep it messy."
"Sure."
Felix wasn't the type to strike up a conversation and Ray seemed like the quiet type as well, that or he was terrified of Felix. The haircut happened without either saying a word to the other. Apparently Ray was confident in his work because he didn't ask for any other clarification or guidance. When he was finished Felix used the blade of a dagger to try and inspect. To him, it looked almost exactly as it did before the tutorial so he was very happy with the result. He also looked for changes from his evolution but didn't manage to find any particular stand outs. He did think his eyes were a little bluer, but he wasn't too sure exactly what shade they were before the tutorial as he never paid much attention to it.
Ray backed away a few steps and Felix stood up and thanked him.
"How much is it?"
"Uh, 100 credits."
That seems high, but I don't know cause I am super rich.
"How much to not tell anyone about my level?"
"Oh uh, I can't. Part of barber is I have to keep things told to me a secret, here."
As a Barber, this individual is soul bound to protect any secrets disclosed to them as part of their service. You may ask for something to specifically be kept a secret or give them permission to share releasing them from the contract.
"Oh huh. Good to know. Keep my level and anything else about my appearance and stuff a secret." Felix held out his hand to complete the transfer of credits.
Ray simply nodded and shook Felix' hand. Felix transferred 150 credits and Ray thanked him before leaving. Felix walked back up to the feast room to clean up the hairs as best he could but didn't find any.
Magical barber things?
Felix decided to keep playing with mana while he waited for Amelia to show up but this time, he wanted to experiment with attunements, affinities and energy levels. Theoretically, he could attune mana to fire simply by holding it near or inside of fire for a while so he started by trying that out. It didn't seem to do much and his magical fire had a nasty habit of trying to burn his mana. He decided to try with a different element and instead tried to shine light at it. This also appeared to do a whole lot of nothing so he gave up on that.
After a little while, he tried something new. He wasn't certain what was happening when mana passed through a node other than transform and he wanted to figure it out. He felt like there might be a connection there with attunements but he wasn't sure so he started casting the most basic spells, a ring connected to a single node. He very slowly poured mana, just a trickle, into the spell and tried his absolute hardest to follow and sense the mana as it passed through the spell. As expected, Felix sensed a whole lot of nothing happening as it passed through the ring and into the node.
As soon as it was in the node however, it started to change. He wasn't sure exactly how it happened, but the mana in the node just felt different from the rest. It was an odd intangible feeling, like he was seeing a new color for the first time. He could sense mana, where it was mostly. Now he felt like he could see mana, and it came in different colors. He also found that if he simply didn't will the spell to cast, it wouldn't, it would remain in the mana dimension. He realized he had likely been unintentionally willing spells to cast up until now by pulling them from the mana dimension into reality.
With the knowledge of that discovery, Felix started to create more of the same spell but with different nodes in the middle. Comparing the mana in a cold node to a force node, to a light node was enlightening. Slowly but surely, he learned the specifics and figured out what each attunement felt like. He made sure he could identify the attunements by themselves and all of a sudden, he began noticing the attunements of the ambient mana. It was generally a giant mishmash of attunements all over the place but it mostly consisted of the equivalent of black, the absence of any attunement.
The next step for Felix, was to try and create the attunements without a node. He had no idea how to go about it so he simply held a ball of unattuned mana next to a ball of attuned mana in front of himself. He compared the two and tried to will the unattuned mana to attune but it just wasn't listening. If he shaped the unattuned mana into a node, it transitioned almost immediately, he just couldn't nail down the process. He saw it changing colors but had no idea how to make it change colors.
He decided to table this issue for now and look at energy levels. Staring at all the pretty colors of the ambient mana gave him a pretty good idea about what the energy levels were. He had noticed that some mana was a certain color then other mana was the same color, but brighter. He had no idea what to do with that either though. He had no idea how to increase or decrease the energy levels of mana in any way, node or not. If he wanted to finally complete the Arcane level puzzle cube, he would need a way to change the energy level. He could already rely on nodes to change the attunement, but energy levels were beyond him entirely. . . . . .