Felix spent almost a week hunting down two natural treasures. One was a giant clear quartz guarded by horned zebra things and the other was another rock guarded by some kind of giant moles. Those were particularly annoying because they kept trying to burrow and stash the rock in caves and holes. The biggest slow down to Felix finding natural treasures in the plains, was the distance between them.

In the jungle, he traveled a couple hours and found some creatures wresting for dominance. Here, there were days worth of travel of somewhat empty space. There were lots of creatures, but very few of them were high level and none of them seemed to be guarding anything. After hunting down the rock that the moles were hiding away, Felix was a little sick of the plains so he decided to head back to the city.

You think that's enough random crap?

You know a lot of people would kill for even one of this 'random crap.'

Yeah yeah, you think it's enough?

Who knows, we can go set the trap and you can check it every few days to see.

How do we stop some random beast from taking it or guarding it like the panthers and all the other animals did?

Find someplace that's hard to get to. Sprites spawn everywhere and have no trouble moving wherever they want.

Any ideas on locations?

How about inside the volcano? Seems to be dormant so they should just sit in the bowl at the top. As a side benefit, the volcano should also contain all kinds of random materials from the eruptions in the past so it will help with the trap.

It's not really a trap.

Nah not really, make sure you save one of the treasures to attract the creature to you.

What do you mean?

Sprites are pretty playful and aren't scared of creatures, but they have no reason to come to you so if you hold onto something, you can hold it in your hand. Then it will want that and approach you, kind of like feeding a wild animal, but much easier because it doesn't fear you at all.

Any in particular I should save?

Nah, doesn't really matter. Choose whichever you think is the coolest.

Felix flew into the city which now consisted of two buildings and a bunch of tents. The other building was one Felix recognized, the Vault of Secrets, which was near the town hall building. Felix checked in with Noah who said he was going to take a little more time planning out the city before he committed to anything and didn't seem to need any assistance. With that taken care of, Felix teleported back to his tower, which conveniently placed him on the roof, at flew up to the peak of the volcano.

His tower was already located above a few layers of clouds but as he ascended to the top of the volcano, he passed through all of them. After flying for hours, Felix finally broke through the clouds after almost half a day, leaving only clear skies above him. It seemed his diving ring or evolved body had no trouble with the atmosphere and his cloak handled the cold without Felix even noticing it. He finally reached the top and looked down into the volcano. For how tall the mountain was, he expected the bowl in the middle to be bigger. It was still a few kilometers across, but that was still miniscule compared to how big the base of the volcano was.

Felix slid down into the bowl from the ridge. The bowl was completely deserted, only containing stones and gravel.

Like a big bowl of rock cereal.

Uh, I guess? What's the milk?

Lava?

There's no lava in the bowl, it's all way beneath it.

Yeah, I know. It just reminds me of a bowl of cereal for some reason.

I've looked through all your memories, and I have no idea how that could be true.

You've looked through all my memories?

Yes.

… I guess it doesn't matter, you are an ancient book.

Thank you for being a reasonable, rational person. The people who created me spent so much time wiping their memories, unsuccessfully, of mundane garbage that they didn't want me to see. I'm a book, I don't care.

I'd rather you see everything than try and wipe my memory, yikes.

Yeah, I never understood that choice.

Felix walked to approximately the center of the bowl and placed down all of the treasures except the ruby. He held that one back because he thought it looked the most valuable. The rest of them he arranged on top of a small pile of rocks, trying to make sure they didn't get buried. He also placed a mana battery for the hell of it since he hadn't seen his crude versions anywhere else, Grim figured worst case it wouldn't hurt. He also placed a high energy battery which was a malleable almost liquid ball and finally one with a lightning attunement. Once he was done with that, he headed back down to his tower and began to work on leveling his profession. He figured he might be able to kill two birds with one stone and set up a mana collection array for his tower. If it was a complex enough project, it should result in some levels.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He had two ideas for mana collection on his tower. He could set up a large, long running ritual that sucked up ambient mana and funneled it into a battery. The other option was he could create something like his mana core, but much bigger. A Mana Engine of sorts. A giant vortex of mana that used a spell form or something to keep it spinning and sucking in mana. The issue with both options, was that he needed some sort of giant battery.

With the second option, he thought it might be possible to have it solidify the mana and expand a core in the center. He wasn't sure that transitioning from liquid to solid automatically was possible though. His core didn't even do that. Either way, it should be a complex enough project to gain some levels. Otherwise, he could just enchant the outside of the tower or something, which was something he wanted to look into anyways.

He started with the first option because while he thought the second was more promising, he had other uses for strong mana pulling rituals, so it would be good practice. He inscribed his ritual into the tower and found that it shared the buffs of Atalus, so if he pushed mana into the stone, it would heal and his inscriptions would disappear. His first attempt was essentially a giant ritual made up of as many ambient mana collection nodes as he could fit into a single ritual. They needed somewhere to direct the mana for now so he stuck a light node in the middle, figuring it was the least likely to kill him.

While it did create a massive beacon of light, Felix could see the pull from the ritual on the ambient mana, and it wasn't great. He made lot's of attempts to space out the source nodes and place them in complex patterns. Ultimately, he decided it wasn't going to give him the suction he was looking for. It did net him two levels though, so it wasn't completely worthless. He figured the experience would also be useful one day for enchanting because he spent a long time experimenting with the optimal placements for source nodes.

After that he moved onto his second idea. He doubted this one would net him any levels, but he was pretty sure it would be very effective at collecting mana. The plan was to make a ritual that generated a vortex of force, then enclose it in a shell where the only openings were tubes running into the ambient mana spatial dimension. Theoretically, the vortex would then pull mana from the ambient and funnel it into a source in the center. He was just hoping he could make the force enough to compress the mana into a solid.

The first thing he did was design the ritual. It was a simple ritual that took mana and generated a vortex using force nodes that pointed clockwise and inwards. The force nodes at the center were the strongest and pointed almost exactly tangentially with just a slight inwards angle. It was a lot easier to design a ritual from scratch now that he had crafter's intuition. It showed him where the ritual would fail if it did and where it would be the most stressed if it didn't. He fired up the ritual and almost crushed himself, the only thing saving his life, being that he was powering the ritual. So when he got sucked into it, the power source for the ritual vanished. Once he recovered he had lost almost a quarter of his health so he decided to find another way to test the ritual, one that didn't involve being in range of it.

He constructed a small mana battery of just five thousand mana and used his mana control to place it on the source of the ritual from as far away as he could get. It immediately got sucked into the vortex though making the test a short one. Felix's next attempt was to have a massive ritual surrounding the vortex with a time released connection to the vortex ritual, this would allow for him to fill the outer ritual with a bunch of mana then run away and observe. This time, he got to watch as the vortex sucked in the air around it. He hovered a few dozen meters away where the pull was negligible but he could still see the intricacies of the clouds around him getting sucked into it. The creation of the ritual netted him a whopping three levels, even before he did any work to optimize it.

The next step was going to take forever, but it had to be done. Felix created a giant rounded disc of solid mana that resembled a wheel of cheese. He first made one just under a meter wide to test the theory before he committed days to crafting the full thing. He made it thicker than he usually did because the force of the vortex was more than he had expected and he wanted to be as safe as possible. He modified the ritual to be powered by the mana in the engine and inscribed it onto the inside of the shell before closing it up. He then attached simple tubes around the outside that connected into the Aether as inputs. To start it up, he simply moved some of his own mana over the source of the ritual until it had enough to sustain itself.

He watched as the ambient mana was sucked into the disc and spun around the vortex until it finally made it to the middle, and disappeared. He watched it happening and couldn't tell what was going wrong because whenever he tried to follow the mana visually, it would simply vanish. It got to the center and spun very quickly but just enough of it was leaking out somewhere that it never managed to compress. Eventually he figured out that it was leaking back into the ambient mana so he tried something he wasn't sure was possible, but hoped it was. He extended the shell of the engine into the dimension ambient mana rested in. Essentially he took the three dimensional shell and extended it into the fourth spatial dimension to make a four dimensional object. It was so simple in hind sight, he almost kicked himself for not realizing it.

You realize you're annoyed you didn't figure it out sooner, and think it was so simple, when most people would consider that impossible, and find it difficult to wrap their heads around?

I guess, but it was very simple. I also have a lot of intelligence, so that probably helps.

I don't think so, I've been trying to figure out how that works and, as you know, it doesn't really help with ingenuity, understanding abstract concepts or anything like that. After having asked the guild more questions, I don't think the stat is helping you much with this, maybe a little.

It's not that complicated. It's like the shell was a piece of paper, then I just stretched it out, like stacking more papers on top of it. I did have to enclose it on the other end though and it is technically hollow in four dimensions, but it's not that complicated.

I'm pretty sure I understand it only because I am literally in your head.

Felix shrugged and powered the engine back up. This time, the mana was forced to compress itself in the middle. It didn't seem to turn into a solid, but he did manage to turn it into a liquid. He manually felt at the mana in the middle and sensed that it was about halfway through it's liquid phase. He waited a little while to see if it would compress but after waiting for an hour, he gave up. He deconstructed the engine and worked on optimizing the vortex ritual at much as he could.

He spent a day and a half optimizing and fiddling with the ritual and the shell until he was satisfied with the design. Once the vortex was optimal he had also iterated on the shape of the shell until it too was as optimal as he could make it. The tubes turned into jet openings and the shell gained an odd shape with rings and divots in it that seemed to help with compression and suction. He still didn't manage to compress the mana into a solid, but it was very close so he decided to move forwards anyways.

He was about to start on the full shell when Grim stopped him.

You might want to check the bait. I figure this is gonna take a few days and we want to minimize the chances that it gobbles up the treasures and runs away. Also to make sure some bird doesn't just steal them.

Good point. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .