It had occurred to me that over the last month, I had made basically no tech level progress of any kind. While some of that could be attributed to the inevitable “sigmoid slowdown” that you always see in game systems -- where the early advancements come cheap and easy and later require ever greater accomplishments to achieve -- the fact is that I hadn’t obtained any tech level advancements despite having done a positively huge amount of research and exploration. I had to attribute this to almost all of that research being on ways to use what I already knew about, or specific implementations of that knowledge rather than any kind of material advancement in know-how. I had to assume that whatever the tech-levelling system was, it didn’t actually operate on any sort of “research point” mechanic nor have some sort of “breakthrough” mechanic. It really made very little sense overall; my best guess about it was that by achieving some indication in the eyes of the system that I already was operating at some technological level, it would fill in all the missing blanks of expertise for what the people of a civilization ought to know to live at that level.

That’s not to say, however, that I hadn’t advanced in any sense of the word with what I’d done. I couldn’t let myself fall into the trap of thinking that advancement only came in the form of bolded text pop-ups. That way lie being a tool of the system rather than it being my tool. I had learned a few things in that period of time, actually. For one I’d learned more about how the isolation of specific traits in the alchemic arts was related to mana consumption; and further that there was a logic to how ‘spiritual’ or ‘conceptual’ something was and how “dense” it was in alchemic recipes. Meaning that there was an absolute upper bound to what I could hope to accomplish with the current model of my Biopunk knowledge’s progression path and its ability to engineer behaviors in organisms. At least… there was if I stuck to what that knowledge told me of how to accomplish things. I was making a special point of writing down certain thoughts somewhere other than my research station, just so that I could follow up with them later. I mostly phrased it all as recollections of things from back on Earth; stuff like computer games I’d played and books I’d read. Specific things I’d recalled from news articles and family events. Stuff that would help me to hold onto the way of thinking from back on Earth, and maybe sort through from time to time to have ideas about how to proceed.

An example of what that kind of progress could look like was my trying to observe how long it took to recover from complete mana depletion in various places or during various activities. I already knew that I couldn’t unlock the “arcanist” trait for whatever reason, but as I now had abilities that depended on the use and recovery of mana it behooved me to learn as much as I could about it. As a result, I had stumbled upon a realization that, honestly, I should have seen coming. Namely -- quartzite crystals, as part of their formation process, absorb ambient mana. Or, at least, something about their being formed reduces the rate at which I can recover mana even if I myself am not directly involved in the formation of said crystals. Given their clearly magical nature this shouldn't have really surprised me at all, and mostly it didn't, but in a way it did -- because I never experienced any kind of mana drain when creating the crystals and as of yet I had believed that all of the magical things I was pulling off required some investment of magical energy from me in order to do it. But somehow, in at least this one case, that wasn't true.

This opened up possibilities for me that I honestly hadn't considered until now. Up until now, I thought quartzite crystals had an alchemical relationship with light and heat, absorbing and emitting it. I thought that their ability to tremble or rattle was a sort of piezoelectric thing from flawed crystals emitting photons too quickly. What I didn't think was that there was actual mana involved in the phenomena, and now that I knew it was there, I had hopes for learning more about the nature of the world I was now living in. After all; if you can observe something in a medium, then that implies that you can also measure it in a quantifiable manner. There were also implications of the relationship of mana costs in alchemy to how "conceptual" the trait being worked with was. It occurred to me that since I first learned of the existence of the crystals I hadn't really tried anything in terms of integrating any of my other knowledge of crystals into the mix. I'd only tried to work with quartzite and took it for granted only quartzite could be made, and that what I was using quartzite for was all it could do.

So, while I spent time waiting for reports back from my new colony, I kept mostly everything in a maintenance cycle of growth according to my needs, stockpiling supplies I could now harvest, and basically preparing for "what comes next", whatever that might be. By way of example of this, I had the mining ants' digging enzyme harvested into sealed wooden barrels for later use and application in construction, going so far as to allow it to be seeped into the mud mortar of my existing buildings to create better joins. I used ossium rods as rebar to deposit fused-gravel to create a concrete analogue for new construction or support columns, and got a second basement layer connecting most of my buildings together, as well as a balcony for the second floor of my house. The alchemy lab, workshop, and warehouse all got second levels as well, not that I particularly had anything with which to do with them right now. The mining-ant tunnel chambers underneath the farm were dedicated to grow-vats that were being used for my crop plants and the cattle spiders, as a backup method of harvesting them. It seemed more effort to work, but the real trick was seeing if the ants themselves could be trained to maintain the vats, and it was certainly true that just in terms of total biomass the ants were a huge investment compared to everything I'd had before.

In the meantime, I myself spent my time puttering around with the quartzite crystals, trying out various ways of stretching my limits as it were with them. I had a lot of failures, a few of which made me quite glad of the fact that my labs weren't, for the most part, flammable. As a result of the first few such failures I found a use for the lab's second floor: I had a "remote" lab setup constructed that used clockwork arms to manipulate things rather than sit in the "hotseat" myself. It was slower going but it beat singing my eyebrows -- or eyelids -- off. Or losing a homunculus. They might not have minded being treated like disposable, soulless, tools but there was simply no way I was going to bring myself to treat them as such.

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There were a few successes, however; I got deeper insight into what was causing the limit on the growth size of the crystals, on why they had to be either in absorb or emit mode (and it did have something to do with the pressure on them, as I'd thought), and even on the impact of mana availability on their formation. I even got System's acknowledgement of this when I wrote of it at the research table, advancing me to Standard Quartzite Manipulation… but not when I wrote of it beforehand at the library/study desk. The implications there were tickling a corner of my brain but I didn't really know what it was.

The quartzite infodump largely told me more of the same with regards to what I had already learned. I had already figured out how to double the final size of the grown crystals, and could infuse them with sanguinism growth and healing essence. The idea of adding rarified alchemical essence vapors to the crystal growth process was something whose technique I now knew implicitly like the back of my own hand. The biggest new item however was the notion of fibrous quartzite. It was incredibly delicate and more so the longer it was, but at short lengths could "sap" one crystal to deposit to another. That is to say, I could now link one or more crystals together, though this was an "always on" connection. I could have a single heat-absorbing crystal over an open flame for example be connected to a crystal that absorbed heat and emitted light, and connect that to a third crystal that absorbed light and produced tremor motion (as tremor crystals didn't or couldn't absorb heat while in motion). There would never be a need for a recharge phase. Splitting a single charging crystal to connect to two or more could also be done.

With this discovery I immediately saw the potential benefits for my homunculi's clockwork harnesses, as the fibrous connections could allow them to use the faux kerosene as a primary fuel for always-active operation at an even higher level of operation. One that might even permit light combat duty (read: the ability to run away from things or punch something with a knife in a manipulator arm and have it actually hurt). I set one of my five local homunculi to that task while I explored further potential use of the new crystals in understanding the nature and/or behavior of mana. I wound up creating several "novelty" crystals as a result of this -- infusing them with various vapor-essences that didn't really seem to do anything, even as I "knew" they wouldn't. I was more interested in whether the "useless" crystals still had the same mana absorption penalty that useful ones did. What I learned was that the mana cost was indeed higher… unless I had just used my mana to work with whatever essence was stored in the crystals. Was there some sort of "flavor" or "transformation" of mana? I wasn't sure.

~~------------~~

My next series of experiments proved to be much more useful. Given that the crystals actually had some relationship to mana that didn't come from me, I had the brilliant idea of attempting to alchemically render down my quartzite crystals and see if I could thus determine from the process new information from the interaction of different "tech-trees" that they wouldn't have given me just from the straight info-dumps I gained when unlocking a tech level.

As it turned out, I in fact could gain new insight that way. I learned for example that the older a crystal was, the more "crystalline" it was; a fresh crystal could do X amount whereas a crystal near its end of life could do X plus another tenth or so. Or, rather, I learned why this was so, when the material structure nominally didn't change at all during the entire working life of a crystal. And it boiled down to the relationship they had with mana. The older the crystal, the less "quartzite" essence it had and the more quickly I could regenerate mana nearby the cauldron I was rendering it down into. This was good news, as it meant that I could now definitively state that my quartzite crystals were in fact storing mana, though I was still stymied by the notion of actually shaping or storing it in any meaningful manner beyond what the crystals already did.

At least, I was until I stumbled on the thought of my bioluminescent shelf fungi which I was using for underground lighting. Or, rather, investing quartzite essence into them. Turns out, what happens is that they grow a light sand-like layer around themselves early on and don't mature enough to reach another generation. That sand furthermore didn't seem to really do anything more, either. My alchemical analysis showed it to basically just be regular quartz. A good find if I ever discovered myself to be running out of the stock material, not that I believed I would be anytime soon. On a hunch, however -- and because I really didn't have any other paths before me -- I tried a few more approaches, eventually trying to hybridize the sand fungus with light essence. This, unlike my previous uninteresting results, actually caused the development of a crystalline fungus. As in, it appeared that the entire organism was made out of crystal, and it glowed lightly.

More importantly, unlike quartzite, I could shave off pieces of it without the whole thing breaking apart completely. I could even grow a second generation of the new, bizarre, plant. I was entirely flying blind here with regards to what I was doing in terms of if I was even making any progress towards my eventual goal until I tried capturing the spores of the crystal fungus in strips of moist linen while under the influence of a growvat's light crystal, drying out the linen, and thus getting a resultant powder that I could "shake out" of the linen. In itself that again wasn't all that useful but given what I already knew about quartzite absorbing mana during its growth phase, I figured the spores had to be more sensitive to the stuff than the grown fungus and that I could maybe observe some specific trait for this when rendering them down alchemically. And I could. It about knocked my ass out from the pain of sheer mana burnout, and it took me three times as long as normal to even start recovering my mana pool when I finally isolated the damned trait, but I got ahold of a "base mana interaction" trait essence.

When I saw that, as a bio essence trait, I could even culture it for further accumulation without having to repeat the process I had thus far gone through to get more of it, I wound up laughing hysterically at having tricked this damned planet and its system into getting a workaround. So what if I couldn't manipulate mana like a wizard, if I could make minions or tools that could do it instead?

The news I got the next day after, when I finally "came up for air" from my research and bothered reading the activity reports from my homunculi, actually managed to put a serious damper on my good mood. My damned mine was under siege. By elves. Fucking bark-and-vine wearing goddamned wood-elves.