Today I decided that I need to learn the basics of other fields of Magic. I now have a plant that requires knowledge I simply don’t have in order to make good use of. Spellwood is essentially limitless on paper, in practice it is heavily limited by the capabilities of its user.

There was just one problem though, creating anything with Spellwood requires knowledge of external mana manipulation. Something I am completely talentless at. I am capable of forming a spell inside of myself and projecting it outward, losing all control after releasing it, but not manipulating mana to do anything other than manipulating plants or heal outside of my body, and even those are closer to internal mana manipulation than external.

It would take me years to master the requisite skills to make something truly useful with Spellwood. I could try to work around that by directly manipulating Spellwood, but the indirectness and the inefficiencies that would come with that method would make it just as bad as doing it the old-fashioned way.

The only reason I managed to build anything at all with it yesterday was brute force and careful instruction by a master, even then it took quite some time.

Of course, all of those problems all exist if i’m using mana. I have a completely different, perfectly usable form of energy available to me. Solar Energy.

When thinking about possibly learning how to create something useful I decided to check up on how my Solar Energy farm is coming around, and I was shocked. At first, I was worried, the size of the battery had barely changed, and the leaf had completely wilted. When I finally brought myself to check the actual quantity of Solar Energy my jaw dropped. There were several magnitudes of energy more than even my highest estimate. On top of that, the production was half of what my mana production is.

At first, I was excited, the energy was creating more of itself automatically and exponentially. Then I was terrified, the energy is obviously contained by the walls of the battery, but what happens if those walls fail? Even if all that happens is the energy gets turned into mana it would be terrible. On a small scale that reaction create sparks, if somehow a very large quantity of Solar Energy was converted to mana all at once without a driving will behind it, well no more grove then.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Acting on that instinct I spent roughly a quarter of the energy on increasing the size and the durability of the battery. Going from something that I could carry in two hands to a cube roughly as big on one side as the width of the biggest tree in my grove, which just so happens to be Willows parent.

This caused some unintended side effects, namely the fact that the production dropped dramatically, to the point that it is hardly noticeable. After a couple quick experiments I figured out that production correlates with the density more so than quantity. Quantity seems to be a multiplier, meaning it is useless unless the density is already really high.

So I made changes to the battery, expensive changes. I gathered up most of the Solar Energy in the center of the battery and put walls up to prevent it from leaking out. Then I designed it so that anything above a certain amount would overflow into the next section of the battery, and then rinse and repeat. In total, I made ten such basins to hold energy in, which should give me more than enough time to figure something else out.

I then realized another flaw in my plan, everything but the center would not have enough Solar Energy to maintain itself. So I put in nine leaves, each one connecting to a different basin, and each one producing slightly more than is required to maintain functionality, just in case we get bad weather keeping it from producing enough to maintain the battery.

In the end, I used up slightly more than half of the Solar Energy, and the production dropped by half. But with that I am significantly less worried about random explosions happening, I mean I still am worried about them, no sane creature that works closely with mages wouldn’t worry about random explosions, especially if some of those mages have more power than skill, just much less from the solar energy battery.

That took me the entire day. Mostly because I have little to no experience with using Solar Energy to create plants. Creating high quality work with Solar Energy is surprisingly easy, but when you try to use a finer brush it gets really unstable and more often than not fails, which wouldn’t be an issue if I wasn’t a perfectionist, I won’t be satisfied with my work until I can’t improve it any further.

Solar Energy seems very brutish and unrefined to me, it takes care of the broad strokes really well but struggles with the details. Even it’s violent reaction to mana shows this trait. Thinking about the two in comparison made me wonder if Mana was capable of producing itself, so I asked Mest.

He went to his room and grabbed an old, dusty stack of papers. After handing them to me he got back to what he was doing.

I guess I know part of what i’m doing tomorrow.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.