That night I decided to go back to some of the powers I had made the night before. Heat and Cool had just been the result of me playing around with the Seebeck effect after discovering that how nanites connected to each other altered their electrical and heat conductance. By changing the direction the electricity flowed through them, I could increase or decrease the temperature of a target by ten to twenty degrees celsius. While that would be fine for warming or cooling things slightly, its performance was pathetic.
This time I took a different approach. The molecules in any object would move more quickly the hotter they were. So I had the nanites try to directly interfere with that motion, either speeding it up or slowing it down. While it was a bit more efficient than the first version, it still didn’t live up to expectations, so I saved it as Heating 2 and Cooling 2 respectively. Both of those started at level 2. It seems I did a better job making these powers.
Shock was basically just me playing around with ionizing objects, but as I had learned about the electrical conductance of nanite chains, I tried a different approach. I had the nanites connect together in the most conductive manner I had discovered and form a net. This net would then be placed on an item and form one half of a circuit, moving electrons from one end to the other at whatever voltage I told it to, adjusting the voltage by changing whether the nanites connected in series or parallel. I calibrated it using an electrical meter I had, and saved it as Shock 2. This time it went up to level 8. It seemed that I had managed to get the performance to near its limit, though I suspected that there were more efficient and better conducting ways I could connect the nanites.
With that out of the way I started playing around with my Flash spell. I took the basic light effect and made it adjustable strength, then ordered the nanites to stick to an object. The light it produced was at very specific frequencies, so it was fairly easy to reflect those by making a wall of nanites with a precise gap at those wavelengths. I saved this as Flashlight and it was assigned the level of 5.
‘Hey, Vera.’ I thought. ‘How are you getting these levels for the spells I create? Do you run a simulation and compare the performance, or what?’
‘You aren’t the first one to create these. In fact, even the most creative power you’ve created so far has been created by more than a billion sapient beings so far. I simply compare its performance to the other billions, trillions, quadrillions, or more variants of the power and assign it a number based on that.’
‘Huh,’ I thought. Somehow it seemed depressing that I hadn’t done anything original. Though I guess with the System being around for over two million years there wouldn’t be much room for improvement any more.
I went to make a smoothie while I thought about it, but something occurred to me. I was getting most of my nanites from these smoothies at this point, but it was slow and required me to drink something that I didn’t like. Could I just absorb the nanites directly? I sent some nanites into the powder and immediately started detecting other nanites. The vast majority of them, however, were identified as neutral, with only about 1% being beneficial and 1% being harmful. That was just like the ones in my body before I started altering them.
I ordered the nanites to connect with any that weren’t marked as beneficial and transfer their settings. Within a few milliseconds all of the ones I could detect were beneficial. I then ordered them to grab the other nanites and move them into me, expanding the area of the nanites to the entire container of powder. Checking the quantity of beneficial nanites in my body I saw it rise in a matter of seconds to over 1.5 billion. I saved this technique as “Absorb Nanites” and it became level 7.
‘Wait, it can learn things from what I program?’
‘Or course. The ability still needs to be adapted to you, and the brute force approach for new powers doesn’t use the best method the system knows about, just the easiest one to implement so that it is easier to learn.’
‘So, if I figure out a method that is better than the brute force method, it will adjust abilities I already have to use the more efficient method?’
‘Exactly.’
This was quite interesting. It meant that if I could figure out a better way to do something the system taught me to do, I could directly upgrade the ability without having to train it, plus it would instantly adapt the power to me so that it didn’t contribute to the mental strain of learning new powers.
Now that Align Nanites was so much better I used it on myself and saw the number of Beneficial nanites go to over 1.6 billion. Then I had an idea. Sure, the algae powder had massive numbers of nanites in it, but it and most lifeforms on Earth got their nanites from the air. So I connected Absorb Nanites to the Detection Field and told it to absorb any nanites that entered its field.
Deciding that I had developed my powers enough for the day, I ordered Chinese takeout and spent the rest of the night binging shows on WebFlix.
The next morning I got up and noticed that I was sitting at 0/14 mana, though my beneficial nanite level was up to 1.7 billion. Apparently leaving Absorb Nanites running all night had depleted my energy levels as it used energy faster than my Nexus Energy Recovery could restore it. I turned it off so that the energy could recover, and noticed that the ability was up to Level 2.
After getting ready, decided to run to the gym to practice my Parquor. I managed to wall jump up to a fire escape, take it up to the rooftops, and jump from roof to roof, improving my skill to Level 5. About halfway to the gym, however, I misjudged the distance and ended up slamming into the top of the wall. The shock caused me to miss gripping the top of the wall and I fell. Luckily there was a closed dumpster in the alley beneath me, so I absorbed the fall and rolled off of it, hitting the ground.
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My side, face, and chest hurt, so I sat up and laid against the front of the dumpster. I checked my status only to see that I was down to 31 out of 48 HP and had a “cracked rib” status effect which limited Dexterity. I laid there for a few minutes to let the wounds heal. When I got tired of waiting, I started wondering about how HP recovery actually worked.
Theoretically, if the waste products of the cells in the body were removed and more nutrients were given to them, they would be able to grow and divide more quickly, thus increasing the healing rate. So I ordered the excess nanites in my body to look for any metabolism byproducts near the damage and move them to my liver.
With that settled I gave the idle nanites a second command. ‘If waste levels are below (arbitrary low value), then figure out what nutrients the cell is lowest on and bring it to the cell’.
Fifteen minutes later my HP had recovered, but I had another six and a half hours before the rib was fixed. I decided that my parquor had ended for now, and walked to the gym.
Upon arriving Wan came over to me. “You’re a bit late.” Noticing that I was holding my side, he pointed at it. “Run into a problem?”
“Kind of.” I motioned for him to follow me and made my way to the empty Martial Arts room. After closing the door and turning up the radio I told him about my accident. “It will be about six hours before my rib is fixed.”
“In that case, we can’t work out this morning, or we risk aggravating the injury.” He thought for a few seconds, then looked at me. “So, how are you with guns?”
“Well, I know the basics. Shot one a few times when I was a teenager.”
“In that case, let’s go by my place and pick up a few things.”
An hour after that we pulled up to an indoors shooting range. He grabbed two duffle bags of guns from the back seat and we went inside. After checking in we were let into the shooting area where only one other guy was there at the other end of the shooting line, firing his AR15 at a target. Wan went through showing me various weapons and how to fire them properly. An hour later, after my aiming had went up to 4 and my Firearms went up to 5, the AR guy left. Now that we were alone I asked Wan if I could try a new power. “I guess. Just don’t draw attention.”
Nodding, I held up my hand towards the target. I took out one million nanites and ordered them to connect in the way that maximized structural strength, but was shaped like a bullet. A tiny needle floated in front of my hand. I then ordered them to accelerate towards the target as quickly as possible.
There was an extremely loud sonic boom and the shockwave shoved my hand backwards, knocking me off my feet. As my ears rang, I looked at my palm, which had several layers of skin blown off of it and was slightly bleeding, and stood up.
I coughed from all of the dust in the air, then looked down to the shooting lane to see that the target was obliterated and there was a large amount of concrete missing from the wall behind it, exposing the rebar within.
From the corner of my eye I saw the owner come running into the room. After getting the attention of Wan, they seemed to yell at each other for a while, with Wan not understanding what he was saying. After a minute or so, my hearing and Wan’s seemed to clear up, and I heard the owner say something about “bringing your 50 cal in again,” with Wan denying it.
“I was trying out some experimental ammo.” Wan said. “I think I overdid it a bit.”
“Is your gun even in one piece still?” the guy asked.
“Well, it’s intact, but I doubt it will fire again until I rebuild it.”
“Damn,” the man said, then went down to the other end of the range to look at the damage. The hole in the wall seemed to confuse him.
“APDS ammo.” Wan said, and the man nodded. “Yeah, I’ll find an outdoor range the next time I want to test it.”
“You seriously overdid it this time, man.” the guy said, looking at Wan. “Do you realize how much damage you did?”
Wan reached into the duffle bag and pulled out a paper bag, tossing to the man. “There’s two grand. Tell me if the repairs are more than that and I’ll cover them.”
The guy looked at the bag, then up at Wan, and stuck the bag into his pocket. “Fine.” he said. “You should probably leave, though. I need to call in the repair crew and they will be too curious about how this happened.”
Wan nodded and, after we packed up the guns, we left. Once we were driving, Wan spoke. “So, what was that?”
“I call it “Mana Bullet”. I figured out that I could do that when I was researching telekinesis. I didn’t realize how strong it would be, though.”
“Well, you should probably figure out how to weaken it. It was too much for an indoor range like that.” Wan drove out of town to an abandoned rock quarry 20 miles from town. “Now we are somewhere you can try something like that out at. But first...” He pulled out two sets of hearing protection ear muffs and handed me one.
After I put it on, he told me to try to dial it down and aim at some mannequins that someone had set up at the end of the area. I took out one hundred thousand nanites and repeated it, this time only causing damage comparable to a large rifle. I fired a few dozen more times before running out of energy and needing to switch to an actual firearm. By the time we had left, both Aiming and Firearms were at level 6.
Wan took me back to my place and, after promising to meet him at the gym the next morning, I decided to work with my nanites again. My nanite manipulation was only at level 5 now, despite the fact that I had technically slipped past that with some of the abilities I made, but it gave me enough control to try to work with the nanites and their recharge rate. My first idea was to drastically increase the storage amount for the energy. I didn’t know how my body generated it in the first place, but I did know that the nanites could store it. So I simply ordered the nanites to recharge to full. The ones that were critical to the System’s function in my body were only to discharge to a maximum of 10% and got priority on recharging, but the excess ones could discharge to 1%. All nanites were to recharge if the energy was available and to shift their energy to external nanites if they needed to recharge. I saved the program as “Nanite Capacitor”, Level 9, and noticed that my maximum MP had skyrocketed to 3/723, limited by the number of free nanites I had. Apparently the system recognized that this would allow me to store a ridiculous amount of energy. Now, even if I couldn’t regenerate the energy that quickly I could have a massive pool of energy to draw on, like running a cell phone off of a home solar power bank.
For the next several days we went to the gym every morning, with me parkouring my way there and during the nights I didn’t do much of anything. I had figured out how to reverse Shock 2 to recharge nanites, renaming it “Drain Electricity” and only recharged nanites at night.
At the end of the week Wan had to go back to work, so I went back to training on my own. I hadn’t bothered looking at the news during that time so I checked local social media only to find out that the news for the last few days had been covering a disease outbreak.
“On the third day of our coverage, new numbers have come in from the City Hospital. They admitted three thousand seven hundred and twenty two new patients yesterday with the standard symptoms of extremely high fever, hallucinations, and seizures. Authorities are still unsure what is causing it, but in a press conference last night the Chief of police claimed that it was related to an ongoing investigation into a local terrorist organization, but refused to go into detail. Several victims were admitted with bite marks.”
“Damn it.” I shouted. “I forgot about the primates we released. If they bit people they would likely become infected.”
‘It’s not your fault.’ Vera responded. ‘If you hadn’t released them your cover would have been blown and you probably would have been shot. Not to mention that you were under a mind control spell for the end of it.’
I sighed. ‘I guess you are right, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to fix it.’
I grabbed my jacket and left my apartment. It was about four in the afternoon, but I ran down to the hospital, hoping I could do something about the situation.