I realized that I forgot to read the report Mest gave me yesterday, so I read it today during my downtime.
It was about how mana behaves at different densities, and once I managed to figure out how to read it properly it was pretty interesting, if not exactly relevant.
The first page or so went on about why they were doing this. They took entirely too long to say that they wanted to know how the world will change as ambient mana density increases. They also explained that the units they were going to use was based on how far from ‘today’ till mana reaches that density, and based on how old his report looks ‘today’ could mean decades ago.
One thing that was noted was that creatures born and raised in areas with high mana density are naturally a lot better at pretty much everything than they would be otherwise, but if you take it too far then once they leave that area of high-density mana then they slowly become sick and eventually die as their body no longer has enough mana to support themselves. Powerful mages seem to be exempt, likely as a result of their control of mana, though they are still weakened. We will start to notice a quantifiable difference from that within the next one hundred years.
Around a thousand years from now, an occurrence named mana storms start to appear. The people studying it have figured out that what's really happening is basically like what makes people sick, ambient mana randomly comes together in a shape capable of actually doing something, only on a much larger scale. The people running the experiment were worried that diseases would become more common at that point as well, they determined that unless all that mana was added all at once we should be fine, as anything alive would have gone through a thousand years of acclimation. Trolls only last to nine hundred.
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It is also around that time that they weren't able to get anything able to live, with the exception of some particularly potent undead mages, and even they weren't able to create anything else in there. People that entered reported feeling elated and powerful before succumbing to what the report called mana poisoning, something I believe I heard about when I read the Origin book. It was one of the problems they had with making life I believe.
Once we get to ten thousand years something interesting happens. Many materials simply begin to dissolve, nothing to common at that point but the higher the density the more stuff begins to dissolve. For example, mundane metals begin to dissolve at year five thousand, while magical metals like mithril manage to last to six. At ten thousand years dirt starts to dissolve, though only slowly, at twelve stone. The only substance that was able to completely withstand any level of mana rot, as the researchers called it, was dungeon cores, though only the live ones. How they got a live dungeon core into a room with that much mana is beyond me.
They weren't able to go beyond fifteen thousand as the mages in charge of keeping the mana contained had started to get mana poisoning, despite the fact that there were hundreds of them. I guess whoever funded this experiment really want it to succeed.
There was not a single mention of Mana creating more of itself, it was mentioned that the stuff that dissolves actually gets turned into mana. That made me wonder if what was actually causing the Solar Energy to create more of itself was it being dense enough to turn mana into solar energy, but a couple quick tests, with the assistance of my children, I was able to disprove it.
There were two moons out tonight, one of them was pure white, the other a glowing purple. According to Mest, the purple one is one of the few Moons that they have sent mages too, and none of them returned alive. Nothing they have tried has fixed that so they kind of gave up.
Other than that I mostly focused on dissecting myself. I managed to figure out every aspect of what makes my left-hand move today, well I mean those parts do a lot more than just that but many of them intersect in my left hand.
Anyway, Good Night Diary.