As sentients once again returned to the cavernous depths, Falc was not really paying much attention to anything outside of the test box.
The octuple
The D-4
Though it did not rapidly go through the grey parts of the sentients as the D-8 acid of the double-weave holder did, it could go through it in a good few moments in order to corrode the non-grey, squishy and vulnerable normal-sentient layer hidden underneath.
Which did in fact put his standard of calling the grey layer a colouration of the sentient instead of what it was- A protective layer- Into question. So he'd just be calling the grey layer a protective layer, until he found out what to name it permanently.
But that was just the achievements of the previous few experiments; even if the D-8
And talking about double weave slimes, that quickly lead to something more interesting.
A lot more interesting.
He had been experimenting, researching a few things he had noted. Now, only one of them had actually come out with conclusive results so far.
The development of nuclei hadn't gone that well, he didn't even really know what to do. Nuclei were strange, they were made of mana but were somehow material instead of spiritual. It wasn't as if there were some kind of thing were when mp was compressed enough it would start to attain physical form, from what he knew. But even if there were such a thing, there was just not enough mana put into a slime for a nuclei to be created.
No matter how big of a deal a nuclei was for a slime, it was nowhere close to as compressed as the D-18 string still just floating there... Actually, Falc didn't really have much to put mp into anymore. Slime aposte 1 could still take in an absolutely miniscule amount of mp, but was already gathering to the limits of its trash bin potential.
-But ignoring that issue, for now, as stated before nuclei were just confusing. He had examined its make-up, and it wasn't a solid weave of mp nor any regular pattern. It was something... Something more. The strange thing was that the slime water that it took the place of was nowhere to be found- And no, he could not find any of it in the schematic for nuclei that he had created.
But, the big problem wasn't him not understanding the nuclei. He would probably would only bother finding out how nuclei were formed without being free any sort of threat or time crunch, he didn't care that much about it. No, the problem was that he had no clue how to make the nuclei even with the blueprint. Normally he'd just be fine copying it over to the real world, but unlike normal blueprints that he obtained through normal means, it did not have a method to create it added on.
So, ignoring the unfruitful thing, he had been looking into double-weave slimes.
By creating 3 D-7 slimes and 3 D-7-7 slimes, he found that the D-7-7 had a slight increase in mp-harvesting speed. Not a lot, like less than 10% more. But, the more important thing was that from what he had found; the second weave did not increase the amount of mana required to create the nuclei, seeing as the D-7-7 had their first little fragments of nuclei form a bit before their lessers.
It did bring questions to his mind, as to how doubling the amount of weave neither doubled nor did nothing to the amount gathered, but it did put into question whether the maximum amount of mana he could put into a slime was doubled too.
And after a test, it could in fact take in double the amount of mana a normal slime could. Meaning the nuclei formation process had been accelerated by 100%!
...Which wasn't as impressive as it would've been to just create a slime with one, but it was way better than nothing. Even if in the test that discovered this a poor D-7-7 had died due to one slightly annoying fact, the double weave did not make one weave be able to handle double the amount it could previously. He could not just guide a bit of mp over and into a double weave and expect it to work out, he had to divide it between the two weaves which meant that the amount of himself that was required to cultivate a proper double weave slime had increased by around 30%.
Which was an issue, even if minor, since parts of himself were very much a limited resource which he didn't know how to get any more of.
If he were to someday create a D-99-99-... slime, how much of himself would he have to use?!
-After a few mental tests, and pratical ones too, he found a quadragintuple would take... 830%~ more than a normal slime of the same compression, give or take.
Troublesome indeed, but considering he had to deal with 40 weaves with only 9.3 times the self, it was in fact a lot better than he expected. And since technically he would only use 9.3 of himself while he was dealing with 40 weaves, it only took basic mathematical skills to realize that 40 divided by 9.3 was in fact less than 1 divided by 1, meaning it was actually more efficient and fast to deal with slimes with more than weave compared to normal. Since the speed of nuclei formation per 'Weave management unit' of spirit increased the more weaves were around.
Not that he would be able to deal with all of them at the same time like normal due to constraints of the himself supply, but as long as he kept every batch from destroying each other while waiting for their time in the spot light it wouldn't be much of an issue. Though it would be less easy to fully automate than normal, he had a few ideas about how it could work.
He could maybe set up little wisps of himself on each of the slimes that would keep them from doing anything and then make slivers of himself that would attach to one of those wisps and partake in the imput of mana before hopping off to the next when the nuclei was formed. Though he wasn't exactly sure of the design just yet, since he didn't really have double-weave slimes on the production line yet.
But that didn't mean he wasn't interested in more experiments though, even if it seemed that creating a nuclei directly would still take a bit of time that didn't mean there wasn't something else he could look into.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Slime apostle 1- Long may he reign, btw- Had left a possible legacy for the future generations, the weave that had formed after becoming an elder slime had yet to have been tested for its characteristics. And it was obviously time to fix that damning fact and make the most of slime apostle 1's revelation, as to not bring dishonour to its name.
And though he did indeed have partial plans for the room beyond the test box, they had been in the works for a while, he could upgrade his title when he finally got an [Uncommon] schematic. And that was probably a good thing, he could just feel it somewhere inside him.
And no, it wasn't the instincts talking, those weren't him.
Anyways, first order of business was to see whether or not elder-slime weaves- The name was a work in progress- Would have any particularly interesting differences between it and a regular weave, so he made one or two regular slimes with elder weaves and a pair with normal weaves and started to test it out.
It jumped 0.6% further, he couldn't test out durability properly yet so that had to be put in the backburner. There was no difference with
But still, the increase was completely negligable. So he probably wouldn't bother using it, considering it had actually cost about 0.2 mp more. 0.6% was not worth 0.2 mp, especially not in this economy.
After a few moments of thought, slightly annoyed at the fact that his potential golden goose seemed to have been merely a mirage of lies, a possible avenue of value appeared in his mind. Maybe it could do better with the creation of nuclei? Maybe take in more mana passively or bear more of its strain actively, though he didn't exactly have high hopes considering previous discoveries.
...It was around 10% better at taking in mana passively- Though that might've been since it had just been born, or maybe a fluke of some sort.
Just to make sure, he chose to leave it there for a moment. Even if 10% wasn't that big of a deal in the short term, decreasing the time spent by 9% while not being filled with mp was a big deal if he looked into the future. He'd check the maximum mp intake later, he had to test this first of all.
But what to do while he was waiting? He had all this mp he had to use, and while he was indeed still creating slimes- Some of the higher-quality kind due to a reduced amount of sentients since the tremor- That didn't really mean he had infinite space in the slime plains even if he could eventually expand it... Maybe.
Well, though it was pretty stable it wasn't exactly at the level of one of the cavernous tunnels leading to the entrance. It was actually pretty annoying considering there was apparently a risk of a quake making it all crash down at any time, so a method to fix that was in high demand. And after a quick interrogation of his instincts, he found... That it had nothing. Really, what did he expect. They were always just getting in the way anyways, to think they would ever do anything positive was stupid in the first place.
Except teaching him how to aspect mana, which wasn't that big of a deal considering he wasn't actually even using it. And... Other stuff... Yea, other stuff.
But that didn't exactly mean it would be impossible for him, being a dungeon core himself, to find a method to fix the problem. It was just that he didn't really have much to base his deductions from, he'd have to look into it after he was done with his current experiments.
But he still had a lot of free mp that would soon go to waste when the slime plains reached maximum capacity, so he could probably look towards refining an old design to account for a certain habit of the sentients he had seen occur once or twice.
Certain sentients could propell some of their mana outward and towards a place before letting burst out and killing a lot of hard-earned slimes in the nearby area, and, well. While it wasn't very common for whatever reason, a sentient had come out of the kill room, alive, so they maybe knew about it. And then that could mean an explosive chunk of mana would came on down yonder into the little abode and kill all its inhabitants, not killing a single one of the casters...
Unacceptable really, so there had to be a counter. Though the explosions did indeed affect stone and the like, stone was waaayyyy stronger and resilient than any random slime variant he could dish out, so he took inspiration from the little nuclei nursery attached to the slime plains and took the lower half a meter of all sides of the walls and hollowed them out another half meter back, though it was then covered snuggly by like 0.2 meters of hard stone.
Then he just placed a few double-weave
...
Then it was time to check on the elder slime weave test to see if the higher mana gathering rate still persisted, but something else caught his eye first.
In the elder slime weave-holding slimes floated a few slivers of a certain arcane manifest, while the normal slimes didn't even have a mote of nuclei to their name.
Falc didn't even know how that was possible, even after checking it still only took 10% more mana compared to the regular slimes. If that was the difference, then it could at most have a trace of their vision-giver. Though maybe that was wrong, since he had yet taken a look at the underlying principles of its creation, but based on previous notation this shouldn't have been possible if it only had 10% more mana to its name.
And though he could easily go 'Meh, who cares, all I really need to know is that it's better than normal somehow', which he would if he couldn't find the reason for it, but knowing would feel nicer than no knowing. Maybe it'd even tell him how to make even better slimes!
...That didn't seem as impressive as he'd like to admit, but it was true that faster nuclei creation meant a quicker turn-over rate for high-investment slimes. And that was important, really important. A D-17 slime was really expensive, if inceasing it's cost by a mere 0.2x3^17 mp would increase the chance that all the mana invested did not go to waste by merely 5% or so, it would be very much worth it in his eyes.
So he had to take a closer look, a small peer into the innerworkings of the slime's weave, a few gazes given to the slow dripping of mana through the elder weave slime's entire being. Then, with the experience he had just gained with the elder weave slime he did it with its normal counterpart for a quick look.
And he remembered that he didn't really know how the whole flow of mana inside a slime worked, which was completely his fault. But, honestly, did he care? No, not even slightly. If he were given a choice between extra point of mp and getting a schematic on how mana flowed through a slime, he'd pick the schematic. But if it were 1000 mp or more? Mana would take the trophy home. Which wasn't a lot, since he got that in a certain fraction of a cycle that was basically just a waste of his time to actually calculate.
But he knew a quick fix for his lack of basic knowledge that he really should've known considering the amount of time he had been handling and attempting to enhance slimes, he just had to look at how much mp came to the end of it's path and how much entered, maybe that would show him something? Well, it would, as shown by the fact that the elder weave had like 70% more mana at the end of its trek through the weave in comparison to the normal slime even if it had the same amount of mp entering into the black box.
In simple words, it had a 70% increase in efficiency in bringing mana to the nuclei, which brought about 56% to the end point. Though it didn't seem that good honestly since Falc himself had never once in his pretty short life had lost even a single thousandth of a point of the stuff while moving it about, even if he had lost it when he let it dissapate to the air or something similar.
Maybe he could just directly force the mana past all that idiocy and give the poor wasteful slime a 100% efficient method to transport mp.
So he did that with the normal slime, forcing all the mana that would've entered the slime the normal way and plopped it where it was supposed to go, and it... Sort of worked? For some reason the muscle threads and normal threads seemed to creak for a few moments, before it for some reason both fell apart and exploded from internal pressure at the same time.
...Strange...
Very strange indeed...
Well, it wasn't as if a normal slime was that big of a deal, he'd take another look.
And there, he found it; some of the mana not found at the end was missing because it was taking it to do the important job of maintaining itself. Not all of it mind you, but still, it was kind of important. But just taking away the mana from a slime didn't mean it would die in mere moments, the increased speed of nuclei formation and large amount of mana passing through the slime then caused the internal pressure that ripped the threads.
An interesting discovery, but still, the elder slime weave wasn't really fitting for his current production line. So, he would just see why the elder weave had higher transport efficiency!
After looking at the nuclei creation process a few more times, since that seemed a little more important.