Just after breakfast the celestials started molting into their nymph stage, they pulled free of the husk quickly and dried off even quicker. Once up I noticed that while their mentality was still child like, their ability to process information was much greater than their bigger sister's. I currently had two ideas to keep them awake, but only one can be attempted right now, the other one needed them to be in their adult form. First off I did my best to gently interrogate them for any scraps of information they could get from blue box as well as what their instincts said about their powers. There wasn't much to go on since they didn't have the genius trait so the description was vague, but they had a 'nascent light converter' trait which was 'a developing organ used for the conversion of mana into light energy' that told me how they made light.

It sounded like light energy was not mana, but it could be derived from mana in some way, and this organ did it automatically. So, did the organ itself knock them out or was sleep just a side effect of having all the mana they produced converted, meaning having no mana caused sleep? This information didn't change my ideas but it was useful to know exactly what I was dealing with. My first idea was to simply make them more robust in a magical manner, so they had the wiggle room to power the light without running dry. Unfortunately I had no 'enhanced mana generation' skill or trait or whatever that may exist so I could only try teaching them the one magical toughening skill I had, magic feedback resistance, via teaching them magic sense and giving them killer headaches.

I explained the idea to Victoria and she agreed it was worth a shot, and she wanted to try learning it as well because I made it sound cool. I held up a ball of dirt and squeezed it as hard as I could with dirt control so it flooded magic into the air, it was hopefully more easily detectable than a small bit of magic. I also did my best to describe what sensing magic should feel like, something similar to seeing light with your mind instead instead of your eyes. To Victoria I talked about using her own dirt control to feel for it, imagine her magic like a tendril or extra arm, and so she should be able to feel the magic as her spell pushed against mine. We sat there contemplating the concept of feeling magic for several hours before my wife let out a gasp of surpise.

"I think I got it!" She yelled happily, "I can feel a vague sensation coming from you, sort of like the feeling of sunlight."

"Okay, that is close, but you need to focus it more, try to match the feeling with the shape of my body, the shape of my magic." I encouraged while trying to send her a psychic picture of what I meant.

She squinted at me and tilted her head a few times as she tried to work out the feeling of my spell to the shape of it, when her eyes got really wide, "woah, you look amazing like this, like some kind of living fire."

"Thank you, now comes the weird part, try to lower the range so you can only just barely see my hand," I said while holding my free right hand towards her, "and then turn dirt magic on without turning magic sense off."

She looked at me like I said something weird for second a before she went cross eyed for a bit as she focused on lowering the range, "okay so, once I can only see your hand I just need to do both things as once? That doesn't sound so har-" instead of finishing sentence she grabbed at her face and yelled in pain before dropping both skills "what the hell was that?!"

I couldn't help but give her a smug smirk, "that is how you train magic feedback resistance, I've had that feeling for long enough that I am sure I have trained it to around level twenty. You remember when I lost my dark vision for a while? That is what happens when you don't have enough of it and see a magic explosion."

She thought about it before she nodded as she remembered what I was talking about and then asked, "does it do anything special when you have enough?"

"Well... a while back I accidentally tried to cast compress earth while using dirt control, and using two different spells at the same time was a terrible idea, it probably would have caused internal bleeding at the least but feedback resistance acted as a dampening agent and made it only extremely painful." I told her of that embarrassing incident and she frowned at me. "So it basically makes terrible magic ideas become bad ideas, and bad ideas into normal ones. The harder thing it did was let me learn compress earth in the first place, trying to remember the words to a spell someone else cast uses it."

She gaped at me for a moment before saying, "This sounds like an incredibly useful skill, I can see why you want the celestials to learn it."

"Well, now that you have it maybe you can help them learn, you are a lot better at communicating ideas and feelings through the mental link." I suggested to her.

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She nodded and started explaining things to them in the ant way, it was interesting to watch as not only were their antenna wiggling but their pupils were rapidly dilating and contracting as they tried to see something invisble. I handed control of the dirt ball over so I could head up to retrieve the hardened sphere, they can practice their mana sense as well as train their feedback resistance by slowly getting closer to it, since it is even painful for me to look at if I have in my hand. I also see how well the workers did over the night, and amazingly they had gotten to almost halfway around. I went along the perimeter and packed the dirt around the logs tighter to make sure nothing fell over, before asking the workers if they were okay, sleep was important so they could work efficiently. 

They understood my worry but they revealed that one of them was asleep while linked into their group, so she was basically sleeping for all of them at the same time. Their ability to use the group think in unconvential ways was weird, I asked how they discovered this would work and they admited they had worked until she passed out while linked but the link didn't break. They still had to move her as they worked since there was still the ten meter range limit, but she was safely out of the way of work. Still, I ordered them to have most of the group take an hour nap, one would stay awake to make sure the link didn't break but otherwise everyone else must sleep for that time. Then the one that stayed awake would become the new sleep anchor, they were slightly upset at work stopping, but did as I told them.

I headed back down with the ball in hand and the other two enchanted items encased in dirt balls to keep someone from accidentally, or on purpose, touching them. I stopped just outside the room and asked if everyone had gotten magic sense yet, and when I got an affirmative I told them to extend range slowly, the walls should have some magic in them from the hardening. A couple of seconds passed before I was asked how far they should extend it, I told them they should extend just far enough that they started getting a headache, the more it hurts the faster it improved. Before they could pump it to maximum I reminded them that an overload resulted in me becoming dark blind and losing the ability to mind speak for a day, Victoria looked particularly embarrassed since she was the one that scolded me for doing just that.

I kept watch for a bit to make sure no one was going to pull a magic muscle, then stuck the magic things I had carried down to the floor at intervals away from them with the orb furthest back. Seeing a uniform wall of energy will lose it's effectiveness for training quickly, but trying to understand a complex enchantment really helps. With that handled I called over the two workers who were taking care of the celestials and told them to join up with the wall making group. Now it was my turn to train, I needed more complexity with dirt control, and I had a few ideas to try but I needed to be at the river for a few so I headed over there. While moving I saw the workers did do as I said and they were all in a sleeping pile with one standing watch.

Once at the river I tried something I did before that didn't work properly, first I ground down some dirt into slurry a lot faster then befor since I had a fifth arm to work with. Using that I made a new hover board, it barely worked before but now I had five energy lines and that new mastery bonus. I sat on it in a meditative position and latched on with all my tendrils, with barely a wobble in my energy flow I lifted off the ground. So far so good, I ramped up the power and steadily rose up higher but when I reached roughly a meter off the ground the wobble in my energy started getting worse. I didn't push my luck and instead just stayed there for a bit, steadily gaining experience, after a level I turned on short range magic sense and carefully dissected what was causing the energy wobble.

It took no time at all to find the problem, even after the first compression the energy lines were not uniform, they were lumpy wavea instead of smooth wires. I settled my platform to the ground and did new compression idea from double casting harden stone, I grabbed a ball of dirt with one tendril and then attempted to push another tendril up through the first one. It caused a familiar pain from when I used the other spells, but it didn't seem to cause anything impressive to happen, so I decided to try the next stage. I grabbed a third tendril and pushed it down the middle of the second that was already being compressed by the first. The moment it reached the dirt ball and was a finished line the pressure in my brain kicked up several notches.

Still didn't officially compress it according to boxes, I hoped I was on the right track and wasn't doing this completely wrong. I mentally gripped the end of the line connected to me and started squeezing on the outermost line which squeezed on the lines inside of it. I slowly worked my way up the line, squeezing it into a casing over a high energy core, when I reached the middle of the cable it shuddered, almost breaking my concentration on it before it snapped into position and the outer lines peeled off by themselves leaving only the super compressed core. My headache melted away with the layers peeling off and I was pleased to see the light blinking in the corner of my eye.

You have gained trait "Magic Compressor 2"

Due to compressing the magic of a spell by a second phase without help

Perfect, let's see what it does... heh, another one point one times density compounding with the first version, not sure how dense that was but I knew it was worth it just for improving my ability to handle dirt control, let's see how well I can fly on a dirt disk now!