Luckily the rain seemed to have satisfied itself thoroughly overnight as the next two days were clear and sunny. Felix spent almost the entirety of both, around 45 consecutive hours, practicing with inducing energy levels and attunements directly into mana. He still had to visualize the mana vibrating but he had internalized the right speeds for all of the different attunements he knew and had figured out. He was hoping to be able to do it instinctually, without visualizing anything, but he wasn't quite there yet. Energy levels were much easier to figure out as they were less finicky. Overall, all it took was practicing with the scale, as the oscillations were very tiny and very fast.
He also spent time figuring out how high energy mana was functionally different from low energy mana as well as what the different attunements did. He knew he wanted slower and faster mana as well as dense and light mana in the puzzle cube, but he didn't have an intuition for the different attunements and energy levels. He spent the second day building as much of an intuition as he could.
After the 45 hours of staring at mana Felix felt like he was finally ready to look at the cube again. He pulled out the sleek black cube that looked like a die made of obsidian. Each side held a slightly blue circle in the center and was still in a complete state, according to The System. Felix felt otherwise however as when he was completing it, he felt like something was wrong. It was both too easy and too awkward to be complete. He felt like the cube itself looked elegant and sleek and his solutions to each side were gauche and messy.
First things first, he did something he knew he had to do but was slightly worried about, he pulled all the mana from the cube and reset it. Rationally he knew that he was much better with mana control than he was when he had previously completed the cube, irrationally he was worried he wouldn't be able to do it again.
He started, as he had last time, by pushing mana into the cube until it wouldn't accept more. Once again, the blue circle on a single side lit up. Felix remembered this one as the side that he needed to spread the mana through evenly, despite the differing widths and lengths of the channels spreading from the center. Rather than starting right away, Felix looked curiously at the center of the first side, where there was a simple blue ring filled with mana in the center.
Felix still had a map of sorts of the entire side in his mind, but he had a different approach this time. This time, he spun the mana in the circle and gave it an attunement, he wasn't sure what attunement to start with but he figured he could restart if he got it wrong. On a whim, he started with the lowest speed attunement he knew of, light. In his training over the last 12 hours or so, he found that he could also control the color of the light by slightly changing the frequency or energy level of the mana. He started with red as it was the lowest frequency he could see.
As Felix began spinning the mana in the circle, it shifted to red then slowly spread out from the center. As it spread it would become lopsided with certain channels being wider or longer than others. When it did, it would stop entirely but all Felix had to do this time was reverse the direction he spun the circle and the mana would recede. Then he switched direction back to growing and shifted the color.
He knew the layout of the channels and so he had a rough idea of when he needed to shift the speed he spun the center circle, but it still wasn't perfectly intuitive to him. It took him a few hours to complete the side as he had before, but by the end he didn't have to switch directions at all, about half way through it had become intuitive. He slowly grew the light at first, adding to the rainbow then his speed increased until he was confidently filling the side, right to the edge.
This time, instead of another side lighting up, the same side continued to fill. The center of the ring in the middle that Felix had been spinning started to fill with mana. Felix filled it the same way he had the outside of the ring, except this time he didn't have a mental map ahead of time. It took him only an hour or so even though he had to switch directions a dozen or so times. The center of the ring was smaller after all. In the end, the colors formed some sort of drawing on the side, it seemed like a spell node but Felix wasn't entirely sure. It consisted of too many colors to be castable as far as he could tell.
Unless each color is a different attunement? But which color maps to which attunement?
Felix put it to the back of his mind for now as the next side had opened up. Just like before, the next side was about spreading a tiny piece of mana evenly across an entire side. There was another ring in the center so Felix spun it once again and chose a light attunement to start. This time, the ring grew without any input from Felix for a bit, then it stopped growing. Felix tried spinning the ring at different speeds but didn't manage to get it to grow again. He didn't want to manually spread it out as he felt that was likely the incorrect approach.
Instead, he began to spin all of the mana as it grew instead of just the core ring. With the mana outside of the core ring, he first spun it at the same speed, but realized the mana wasn't growing. He quickly figured out that he had to split the mana into rings and spin them each at a different speed. He had no idea why different speeds were required, especially when they seemed to increase and decrease randomly. He was mostly working with trial and error and it felt a little like he was trying to pick a combination lock to open a vault.
When he was finished and the entire side of the cube was covered with an even layer of mana the side lit up with different attunements and energy levels. Given how the other side had a second stage within the ring, Felix looking inside the ring and tried to manipulate mana inside of it. It was simple enough as all he had to do was fill it with a few points of mana, after that, the next step became more clear.
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The inside of the ring was filled with mana, but it wasn't even. Felix could feel that some areas were thinner but not naturally. The mana was being influenced somehow and the whole thing was made uneven because of it. Felix could probably fight the influence, but he figured a better solution was to play with the energy levels and attunements of the mana to try and even it out.
It took him nearly two hours to figure it out as simply changing the attunement or energy level caused the mana to shift. Every change he made had cascading impact on the rest of the mana. He also had to manipulate both the energy levels and attunements to balance everything out. At first he wasn't sure he had completed the ring as he hadn't noticed anything, then he backed up and saw that the rest of the mana on the side of the cube had been warped. By balancing the mana within the ring, the rest of the mana had reacted and shifted. There was now another drawing of some kind on this side. It was only visible with mana sense though as it was drawn out with attunements and energy levels.
Felix made sure to thoroughly examine and record both drawings to the best of his ability in his mind palace before moving on to the third side. The third side was exactly what Felix expected, a moving labyrinth with pitfalls and traps that he had to map out in some way. Previously, he had filled the side with mana and ended with just a fraction of the mana he had started with. That solution was too crass for Felix this time around. This time, when he encountered his first pitfall, he simply filled it with solidified mana. Once he started doing that, the rest of the labyrinth was trivial. He wasn't sure if he had the correct solution until the side started to accept more outside mana every time he solidified some of it. Every time he filled a pitfall, he also felt like he had aligned a pin in a lock.
As he solved the labyrinth it also shifted to his successes, instead of every time he failed. It was like an every shifting lock he had to pick. In the end though, he arrived back at the ring where he had started. To his surprise, this wasn't the end at all though, the labyrinth continued within the ring and so did he. When he was finished, the mana drew out a similar, simple symbol which he still couldn't identify. He recorded it and moved on.
The next side was a labyrinth that relied entirely on his mana senses, this time though he felt the mana respond to the maze as he moved it. He realized that he was supposed to respond back. With some trial and error, he found energy levels to be the method of communication and slowly learned the language. When the maze thinned around him, he increased the energy levels. Similarly, when the corridors within the maze increased in size, he lowered the energy levels. With this side again, he felt like he was picking some sort of arcane lock, which was always a possibility. In essence, a locked chest could be considered a puzzle box, to an extent.
Though there was no symbol displayed at the end, the mana that he had led through the maze drew out a symbol, and he was recording it the entire time. He still didn't know what the energy levels were, unless it was a three-dimensional drawing and the energy levels were a way of encoding depth. He couldn't be sure though. This side held no ring as the entire side was invisible and part of the maze so he simply moved on to the next side.
He still had the mental map of what each and every button and lever on this side did and a solution to it's layout. He didn't however, know what would be different, it was possible there was nothing different, but he doubted it. He had a few units of mana at his disposal to complete the puzzle with and the first thing he tried was to change the attunements of the mana as he pushed the buttons. He didn't notice any difference so he tried it with energy levels, but still didn't notice anything.
Finally he decided to find out what would happen if he pushed all of the buttons at once. The buttons each seemed to open and close different doors around the maze and some opened or closed the same one. Felix started by solidifying mana on top of a button which required more mana than he was given, luckily when he solidified the mana he had, he was suddenly able to add more of his own mana to the equation.
With every button pressed, Felix filled the side, which didn't seem to limit his mana at all anymore, with mana. Once complete, he once again, had another symbol to record.
The last side had a familiar glowing circle in the center which he fed his mana to until it was satisfied. Once that was done, he began to balance the mana across the entire face of the cube. Instead of simply moving it around though, he manipulated the energy levels, density and attunement. At first he only adjusted the energy levels, but then the mana and the cube face itself started to respond to his adjustments.
Before he had slightly compressed some of the mana to adjust it. This time, the entire surface of the cube was moving, the mana was moving and they moved each-other. Some areas closed themselves off completely, others opened up. He knew more or less what was happening, on each of the previous sides some sort of symbol was being drawn out so he assumed the goal of this side was the same.
This side had a ring as well, but Felix had no idea what to do with it. He knew it did something, because the rest of the side didn't depict the clean symbol he expected. It was a little bit of a blurry mess still. With no other ideas, Felix simply spun the ring at the center. As soon as he did so, the ring filled with mana that changed attunement, not in accordance with the speed he spun the ring, but in response to it. The inside of the ring depicted what attunement he had to create next.
He followed it through a long series of random attunements, some a combination of multiple attunements which he created by spinning the inside and outside of the ring at different speeds. The mana outside of the ring also shifted slightly whenever he spun the mana at a new speed. In the end, the entire side was morphed into a clean and sharp symbol that Felix mentally recorded.
At first he was worried about losing some of the details of the symbols when he mentally recorded them, but his mind palace was not an actual library and was not limited to ink on paper. He was easily able to record the input from all of his senses so he could mentally replicate the completed cube itself, which was placed on a shelf he was dedicating to interesting magical items.
The cube was complete, this time to Felix's satisfaction, but nothing was happening. He was slightly worried he was still missing something, but he was pretty confident about his solutions as everything seemed to just fit and feel right. He examined the cube and it's six sides with arcane symbols now visible and had a thought.
These symbols look like spell nodes, what if they are? I just need to ‘cast' the spell?
Felix pushed mana into the cube which it accepted readily. He was relieved as his other idea was to try and create and cast a spell with those six nodes in it which would have taken weeks or even longer as they were drawn out with multiple attunements, energy levels and densities. Along with individually being the most complicated pieces of spell work he had ever seen, including enchantments. . . . . .