He had already been offered a skill to do what he had been doing up to this point, but with a slightly higher efficiency. Felix hadn't really taken time to experiment with it yet so he hoped he could improve it further before turning it into a skill. Plus he had many ideas for improvements.
The first thing he tried was to split up the general cycle of energy into multiple cycles. Currently, he cycled the majority of the energy in his body around so that he could pull energy into a single body part when the energy cycled by. That meant that the longest he would ever have to wait was a single cycle. The remainder of his energy was suffused throughout his body to allow for instant reactions. This was a good system allowing for him to react quickly with energy, within a single cycle, and still have access to 90% of his energy at any given time.
What he wanted to try, was to have a cycle in the center of his body and also have cycles running down each of his limbs. The main cycle would feed the sub-cycles in the limbs and they would loop back into the main cycle if they every had any excess. Theoretically, it should reduce the maximum latency by quite a bit, not that it was an issue before, but this was an easy improvement to make. This was also an intermediary step between this and what he hoped to do which was combine his mana channels with energy. His current plan for mana channels was to make something like a circulatory system. The major difference being, he didn't need to recirculate the mana or energy to reoxygenate it as far as he knew.
Theoretically, the energy and mana sitting at the end of his limbs for days should be just as ‘fresh' as the energy and mana sitting in his core. The only exception to that he could foresee was if he wanted to induce an energy level or if he wanted to have it maintain a high affinity. He had no idea if energy had energy levels or affinities though, so it may or may not matter for energy channels. The other things he had to consider were attunements and states. It should be possible for him to induce an attunement on the mana within his channels, the question was should he or was it worth it to do so. With states the question was could the mana be a liquid when he cast spells, or should he turn it back into a gas. Luckily, Felix had ample time to experiment.
It was relatively easy to implement his new method of cycling energy, unfortunately testing it was nearly impossible. He essentially had to test his reflexes which felt impossible without likely injuring himself. He could try and dodge Mana Bolts he fired at himself, but that wasn't a great option because he knew when and where they were coming. What he should do was find someone with high agility to attack him with a wooden stick or something. Unfortunately, finding someone with a higher agility than he had, even if they were entirely focused on the stat, would likely be impossible. Some rough mental math put that theoretical person at around 670 agility with a common class and profession focused on it. If they had some sort of fast projectile, that might work. At this point his best bet was to play 1 against many dodgeball, but Felix didn't want to go recruit people so he just settled with, ‘it feels the same so it's probably fine.'
His next test would be to figure out if energy had affinity. He wasn't exactly sure how to test this though as there was no such thing, as far as he was aware of, of ambient energy. All the energy he had ever seen was within his own body. In theory all living things had some though so he decided to go find some. He ran down the tower and bolted down the mountain into the courtyard around the Vault of Secrets. He found himself a big tree and sat down in front of it placing his palm against the trunk. He closed his eyes and entered a meditation.
In his souls space, it was just him and the tree, or at least what he could see of it before he closed his eyes. Felix tried to sense the energy in the tree, but he couldn't seem to find it. It was like the tree didn't have any at all. After trying for a little while to sense the mana in the tree, Felix gave up on that and decided to switch tacks. Instead of sensing the energy in the tree, he tried to pull energy from the tree, or more accurately cycle energy with the tree. He extended the cycle within his arm right up to his palm and tried to push it into the tree.
At first nothing happened, but then suddenly, the cycle connected and his energy was passing in and out of the tree. It took him a few minutes to realize though, that not all of the energy he was getting back was his. He expected it, but he couldn't sense it at first. Once he got used to it, he could suddenly see within the tree. He saw the energy as it slowly moved up the trunk from the roots and even some that traveled back down. Once he could sense the mana in the tree, the entire tree, even the roots and tips of the leaves appeared in his soul space.
He tried to pull on the energy within the tree. He wasn't trying to pull it out of the tree, but he wanted to try and move it a little bit faster. He succeeded in moving it, though not very effectively. It was moving faster, but by a barely noticeable amount. It was much less reactive to his will than his own energy was, effectively confirming that there was such a thing as energy affinity.
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Felix was quickly realizing though, that he wasn't sure if it mattered. The real test would be if his energy lost affinity when it was sitting at the tip of his toe. He realized he didn't need to test it at all though, there was energy moving glacially slowly through the tips of the roots on the tree and it didn't seem to be any different. Realistically, energy should never be losing it's affinity even if it was far away from his soul or he left it for years. He did want to eventually cultivate and grow his soul and have it reach the extents of his body, so that even the tips of his fingers would have his soul suffusing them. That was a low priority long term item though.
The next step was to figure out if it had energy levels, just from looking at the tree though, he was pretty sure the answer was no. All of the energy felt identical other than some of it moving slower with his will. The energy in his own body was constantly spinning and yet it was the same as the energy in the tree. It was possible there was a different way of increasing the energy levels of energy, but Felix didn't feel like he had time to experiment with it, and he didn't think it would be worth it.
Lastly, the experiment Felix was least excited about, figuring out if he could liquefy energy. He didn't need to sit in the courtyard and didn't want to be surrounded by people so he stood up-
Fuck me. I forgot to replace my disguise.
Felix looked around and saw multiple groups of people whispering, staring and pointing at him. He couldn't think of anything to say so he just left, as fast as he could. To the crowd, he seemed to almost vanished in a gust of wind.
Felix made his way back to the top floor of the tower and began trying to compress energy to the point of it liquefying. Unfortunately, he quickly found out he couldn't move energy outside of his body. Inside of his body, he tried to isolate a tiny portion of energy in the tip of his finger and began compressing it with all of his will. He managed to compress it, but he never felt it turn into a liquid. It felt like it was close to or maybe even denser than a liquid would be, than the mana was, but it wouldn't quite shift.
Well, if it's just as dense it's essentially the same thing so, should work fine.
Next he moved onto mana experimentation, the first thing to test was whether or not he could cast with liquid mana, or if it had to be a gas. Furthermore, was there any benefits or downsides to doing so. In order to test this, he would have to create enough liquid mana to cast a spell though, so he started working on that. It took him a few hours to create enough, rather than the dozen or so he expected in large part because he found a much easier way of creating it. Instead of creating the tiniest possible balls of mana one by one, he realized he could create them in streams. He would have normal mana be pushed towards a point where he funneled and compressed mana turning it into a liquid. He could manage about three streams at once and had them pouring into another empty canteen.
He kept going until the canteen was full which entirely drained his mana multiple times, luckily using low affinity mana didn't slow down the process at all. Felix pulled a thin stream the width of a thread of mana out of the canteen and slowly formed it into the shape of a very light instant gust spell. He figured it was the safest option, using only diffused air and not being channeled. He could have shaped it the way he was used to, entirely mentally, instead of manually weaving the spell form but he wasn't very confident with liquid mana and this felt safer for some reason.
Once it was complete, the spell instantly cast without Felix having to do anything, unlike how it normally was. The spell, had he cast it normally, would have created a light wind, which in hind sight might not have been noticeable on the top floor of the tower. The spell with liquid mana, created a shockwave of air instantly breaking the sound barrier and possibly even creating a vacuum in it's wake due to how much air it pulled around it.
Felix was yanked off the ground by the air being moved and got launched off the top of the building. Unfortunately, he didn't react fast enough to push himself back up as he was slightly stunned from his eardrums being ruptured. Felix slowly came back to full consciousness and found himself falling from the sky above the mountain being whipped around by the strong winds around him. Luckily they weren't nearly as strong as the wind he had just accidentally created, but this high up the mountain, the natural winds were enough to make it difficult for him to right himself.
He was running low on mana so he pulled on the ambient mana and waited for the last minute to cast Feather Fall. Luckily he was smart enough to have closed the canteen he had filled with liquid mana, unfortunately he was not smart enough to have placed it in his inventory. Felix spent almost an hour trying to find the canteen which ended up being effective training of his mana senses, but was still annoying as it had vanished onto the mountain side somewhere. He had a pretty good idea of it's general direction, but the winds on the mountain made it's possible landing area vast.
He found it lodged between two large rocks, dented and beaten but otherwise intact. The mana inside was of a slightly higher energy level and slightly attuned but not by any significant amount. That did answer another question he had about liquid mana. He made the trek back over to his tower and thought about sitting in the lobby this time, but if the same thing happened again, it would be worse if he hit a wall. Instead, he sat outside the tower a hundred or so meters away on the mountain. . . . . .