Mary thought it was high time to try and find out how evolution worked. Evolving weak plants was already within their capabilities as they lacked the innate manashield every creature had, as well as lacking any personal mana.

After getting some grass out of the park and some weed from the fields, Mary started her experiments. Planting all the plants in orderly rows, she carefully infused them with differing amounts of mana. The first got about a quarter of the mana needed to keep a light spell going for a minute.

The amount of mana a light spell needed per minute was the unit commonly used for low level spells and called Makdo, named after the man who defined it.

The mana in every consecutive plant was doubled, until all the twelve plants had been infused, though she infused every amount in two different plants.

The next thing to do was wait, so she did a simple quest with her team, continued teaching Starshadow the new spell and had her normal sparring session with Dehla.

On the next day after class she returned to her room and saw nothing changed, sure the plants grew a little but in essence were still the same as yesterday.

So, she equaled the amount of mana in each plant and continued infusing them with mana. This time, she added an additional Makdo, once again doubling the added mana per plant.

Twenty four hours later, she returned, and once again nothing had changed, so she repeated the process.

Finally, the first blade of grass evolved. Doing the maths in her head, Mary came to the conclusion that it needed between seventy three and one hundred and four Makdo to evolve that grass, so she took the rest of the grass blades, and infused them in steps of six in order to see if there was any change.

The wheat didn't show any change, so she just continued like before, while getting another ten grass blades to see of there was any difference when they were instantly infused compared to infusing the mana over three days.

A week later, Mary decided to finish her experiments on the grass. As it turned out, grass always evolved after adding exactly one hundred and twenty Makdos.

The only reason the first grass evolved had to do with its age, as it collected some of the ambient mana over time. By now, her room had thirty blades of grass.

The wheat needed way more mana to evolve. The first stalk of it evolved five days after she started her experiment after she added four hundred thirty eight makdo to it. A wheat plant needed a total of four hundred and fifty mana to evolve.

Now that she could confidently say she knew how to evolve plants, she decided it was time to change to living creatures. She had Starshadow bring her ten small lizards, each of which got his own cage.

Reasonably confident the creature would need way more mana than any of her previous experiments, she tried to start her infusion with one hundred Makdo’s.

Or she tried to at least, but the manashield of the creature blocked all but a miniscule amount of it.

Due to her mana control, she managed to break through the animal’s shield in little under a minute. After infusing the mana, the lizard instantly started convulsing in obvious pain.

Mary instantly withdrew her senses causing the creature’s mana shield to spring up once again, that didn't stop the pain though, and two minutes afterwards it stopped moving.

A careful probing turned out it was dead.

After killing half of her test subjects this way she gave up, the last one died with only one one hundredth of a Makdo.

Even if they were able to survive smaller doses, evolving that way wouldn't be useful and take longer than they naturally lived. Furthermore, both the grass and wheat had survived thousands of times more than that.

She would have to try and evolve a plant with a manashield to see if that was the case with plants in general or only with ones that lacked their own manashield.

To test that, the next time they were on a quest Mary infused a small tree with mana while they made a break. As it turned out, the tree died as well, though it needed longer than the lizard, managing to survive for ten minutes.

She had of course already heard of manapoisoning, it was after all quite common for mages to get once their last spell used up all their remaining mana, depending on the time it needed to get the mage to a healer, perhaps fifty percent survived the process though.

After that test, she was sure she would have to find another way, as that one would prove fruitless in the end.

She had another idea though, so she went to one of the enchanters and paid them to enchant all the empty boxes to stop mana from passing them.

Afterwards, she set her remaining lizards in the boxes, noted down their mana pools and filled each box with a different concentration of mana.

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Even if the experiment would prove successful, she decided to use the remaining boxes to stock up on lizards and go the other possible route to evolution.

As the headmaster had noted, Starshadow differed from normal falcons in two ways, his manapool and his behavior, so she decided it was time to try changing that.

As plants didn't have any behavior to change, she would forgo them and instantly start with lizards.

The first thing she did was finding out what food they liked best, which she then would use to train them. The training worked better than anticipated, and after only two weeks they started showing significant changes in behavior. She had trained each of them to do something different to get their favorite food, and her five lizards were by now known throughout the academy. Taimanu really liked them as well, often visiting her to watch her training.

After the mana pool showed a miniscule increase, Mary started increasing the concentration of mana in each cage like she did with the plants.

One of the lizards had died once again even though the manaconcetration in its cage was only two times that in the air.

The maximum they could tolerate was an manaconcentration fifty percent higher than normal. As the species weighted about a fifth of Starshadow she thought it reasonable that they wouldn't need a fifth of his manapool to evolve too. If her estimation was correct, she would have the lizards evolve in time, though it would probably take three years to do so.

Mary was five months in the new term and one announcement brought her out of her studies like none other could have, their team was finally allowed to do the first adventurer class advancement. Afterwards they would have to change their team and form a new, with other students in the academy.

Advancing through the Nickel and Zinc ranks was just as easy as both previous ones, so they all were reasonably confident they would be able to complete that quest as well.

Their quest was scheduled to be completed in two weeks time, they would be the first of their classes to do it as they were the first to reach the required amount of completed missions.

Like with all advancement quests held by the academy, they would be accompanied by one of the teachers.

Though this time the teacher would prove even more important, as they would do said quest in the neighboring dwarven kingdom of Muiden. It was said to be among the most advanced countries in magical enchantments and machinery, though severely lacking in spellcraft.

So all things considered Mary was already quite giddy to visit a different culture.

Of course they would only visit the outskirts of the kingdom, so she didn't expect anything too different from home, but it would be interesting nonetheless!

Of her team only she knew the dwarven language as learning a different language wasn't all that useful for most of the empire’s citizens, they would never leave it after all.

Even though, they all had to learn the spells required to communicate with different people. Sadly those spells only worked for spoken language and had no use for written one.

While communication through these spells was widely used, all successful merchants had long ago learnt the language of the country they were trading in.

It was even more important to learn other languages for nobles as it was highly impolite to use your own language or use spells when visiting other countries.

Anyways, she was currently teaching her group the basics of the dwarven tongue, something she thought appropriate. After all, they already had language lessons, but were currently taught one of the elven languages which was spoken in the second country within easy travelling distance of the academy.

From what she gathered, they would be hunting a Hugbear, a powerful evolution of a bear that had an ability to add mana to his roar, which would shortly incapacitate his foes.

Furthermore, the beasts fur bunched up, creating some kind of quills, making it look like an overgrown hedgehog. The beast liked to grapple and ‘hug’ its opponents, his quills piercing most iron and leather armor while doing so.

Luckily, while quite fast and a deadly predator, it couldn't take much punishment as the fur covering most of its body pre evolution had grown together to form the quills so a lot of its skin wasn't covered in the thick fur of normal bears.

As far as she could tell, the beast had lived in the proximity of the city for quite some time, but until now hadn't bothered the dwarves in the area. Something had enraged the monster though and it had started hunting them.

There weren't many adventurers that liked to get up close and personal with such beasts.

The borders of the empire and its neighbors always were safer than the rest of their countries as the respective armies had heavy patrols in the area and as such took care of most powerful beasts they ran into.

Without work most powerful adventurers tended to life in the center of their counties, only leaving them for beasts the army couldn't handle or didn't care about.

Being faster and nearly indiscernible quiet in forests it was way more dangerous than most adventurers liked.

Even thinking about it made Mary snort in disgust, over half of the existing adventurers were content to stay in the lower ranks. Another third stayed in the middle ranks doing the same. With only ten percent, the upper and leader ranks were the smallest and most powerful group in the guild.

Intellectually she knew that there was no need for all that many powerful teams as most threats the people faced were easily taken care of by the lower ranked adventurers, she just couldn't understand why they were happy staying there when they could easily advance.

Mary really looked forwards to the fight, and had already prepared several possible ways to fight the monster depending on terrain, weather and distance to them. She was reasonably sure they would once again succeed without losses, or would if they weren't protected by the teacher.

Sadly, her lizards would probably die if she kept them in their boxes for the week they would need for the quest, so she decided to set them free.

Once the midterm holidays started and she returned home, she would recreate the experiment and have  her mother look after it, as the time she would spent away from the academy would only increase.

The rest of two weeks passed in a crawl, even spellcrafting couldn't get any excitement out of her and that had been the most interesting of the lessons by far.

While sorcery helped you to cast any spell of your affinity, Mary found out it didn't do so in the most efficient manner, so learning how to properly structure your spells helped to conserve your mana and gave her spells additional punishment that normal sorcerers lacked, never bothering to learn basic magic theory. Of course that didn't apply to any of the more powerful ones.