The process for someone joining the Guild on recommendation was far more in-depth than I’d have imagined, considering that the normal way of joining just required me to do something that I would have done anyway. It makes sense of course, though it makes me wonder whether it was even worth it.
Max still had to take the combat test of course. I expected him to do quite well, better than me even, given his higher level. I didn’t consider that he’d have to take on the test for a higher level, the 10-15 bracket apparently, which means that his Kobold was slightly larger, and armed with a blunt weapon. He prevailed, but his combat score actually ended up lower than mine at 16. I aimed to change that.
Max carried his luggage upstairs easily, nowhere near as easily as Anehlia managed but that was only to be expected, and picked a room. Before he even had the chance to settle in however I stole him away to the training room and put him before a training dummy, broadsword in hand.
“I don’t know what the best weapon for you to use will be in the future, it all depends on where you put your Stats. If you get a lot in strength then a heavier weapon would be better, whereas with a constitution-focused build something smaller that makes it easier for you to attack whilst taking hits might be better. I don’t fully trust my judgement just yet either. With Proficiency higher, I can get a more effective analysis.”
Obviously, I decided to start his training quickly. There honestly isn’t much of a reason to rush, but I never liked just sitting down for no reason. I considered letting Max choose his own weapon, and obviously I will in the future, but for now I thought it best to get him a decent level of skill in the weapon that I myself am most comfortable with. Hence, broadsword.
At this point I expected some sort of a comment from him, but he actually took to training much better than expected. It seems that his lack of proper Skills got to him more than I initially assumed.
“We’ll start with a diagonal slash, it’s the first thing I practiced. Just copy my movements for now.” I performed the move on the dummy in front of me, heavier than the previous one I moved now that I had someone to move it for me. I paid much closer attention to it than previously. Any mistake I make could get passed down to Max, and without Skills to correct him bad habits will quickly form.
I did it twice more before Max started to copy me, at which point I stopped to watch him. Already a few corrections jumped out at me, though the biggest issue was with his legs. He wasn’t moving them at all, which severely limited the amount of force he could put into his swings. His arms were slightly longer than mine, obviously meaning that he has a longer reach and has to be slightly farther away. There were also a few things that he copied mostly correctly, but I was now realising were mistakes that I myself had made, like his grip on the handle.
Whilst I corrected him, I got the notification that I was hoping to see.
Proficiency Lv 14 --> Lv 15
Current bonus: Lv 3 --> Lv 4
The bonus increasing confused me at first, the next increase should have been at Lv 16, until I realised. Skilled was finally giving me a visible benefit! And not only that, I finally have confirmation that the bonus it shows is the final calculation of it, rather than the base, which is convenient. There was no more reason to dwell on my level up, beyond realising that it should make it easier to teach, so I got back to focusing.
Max took much longer to learn swordsmanship than I had, by the time I was happy with his Proficiency with the diagonal slash I decided it was too late to bother learning anything else. This was to be expected of course, not only do I actually have a Skill to help me, but it also levelled up a second time whilst teaching him, leading to me realising more mistakes in both his and my forms. It was starting to get to the point where I’d have to learn more formal swordsmanship in order to figure out how I’m supposed to help him improve further, I could clearly see what needed to be changed just not how.
That was a worry for another time however, there’s still a lot more that I could teach him, plus he wanted to take the next day or two to actually get settled in, figure out the lay of the land and such. It would probably be a good idea for me to do so as well, not that that means I will. At least not fully.
Fortunately for my mental health, there were a few PC games that I could play which would also help me with training. Most games have pretty extreme variance in their difficulty levels, because whilst most people don’t have Skills that would help with them, it doesn’t makes sense to exclude those that do. All I have to do is play on the highest difficulty that I can manage, which is usually a little more than I prefer. When I tested it I found that I was noticeably better than before, playing one of my favourite roguelikes. I didn’t get very far when I turned the difficulty up of course.
Late at night, when I was still playing, something strange happened. First I felt something in my chest, sort of like drinking something that’s just a little too hot for you to handle. That feeling slowly increased, until it all at once disappeared. It didn’t disappear silently however, as every magical appliance in my room suddenly lit up, and afterwards my computer restarted. I could have sworn I saw a flicker from the System as well, but it was the wrong colour, and I was just looking right at the glowing bracelet.
The next day, I decided to talk with Max about it over breakfast in the Guild Hall. There were quite a few people in here, and a bit of a buzz that I assume is from whatever happened last night. On a table near ours I saw Anehlia.
“Did you notice that surge last night?” I asked between mouthfuls of bacon, “The one that made all the magic light up?”
“No, though a bright light did wake me up. I didn’t see anything though so I just went back to sleep. Where you awake that late? It was three in the morning!”
“…No. Of course not, that would be ridiculous.”
“I’ll just be truthful here, I don’t believe you. But anyway, I heard some people talking about it. This person called Anehlia was calling it a Mana Surge, apparently everyone over Lv 50 got some sort of message about it. She swears she saw the system flash up in a different colour, but no-one else saw so they don’t believe her.”
I furrowed my brows. So she saw it too? It’s not proof of anything, but it warrants further investigation. I almost just went straight back to eating, until I remembered what I told myself I would do. That is, communicate.
“I believe I may have seen it too. It wasn’t even for a second though, and it could easily have been a trick of the light with the way that everything was lighting up. I wonder what this was though? Mana surge you said?”
“Hmm,” He hummed, having just started eating when I asked. He swallowed, then continued, “Yeah. I didn’t really ask too many questions, I was hungry you know? But you could probably go and ask Anehlia if you want to know more.”
“I might just do that. Not yet though, I want to do some more research on my own though. Surely it can’t have just happened here.”
-----------
Later, I learned that I was only right on a technicality. It happened all across the city, but only in the Guild halls. That means that it’s probably related to the ley lines somehow. Unfortunately people don’t know much about them. Occasionally someone with the right Skill will come around and be able to see them, but that still doesn’t allow them to look further into them at all.
The problem is how extradimensional they are. Mana comes in through ley lines from a 4th direction that humans rarely get the right Skills to look or move in, which means that the rare people that can see ley line scan only see the infinitely small slice that exists in the same place as us. The chances of someone getting both necessary Skills are of course astronomical, and no-ones ever been lucky enough.
I guess I don’t really need to be trying to figure this out though. It’d be much more beneficial if I were to focus on levelling up, so that if I actually want to figure it out in the future I’m prepared for it. It’s just… something is telling me that this is important. Like, almost immediately so. It’s probably just anxiety though, it’s been a stressful couple of days and I certainly didn’t let myself get very much sleep last night.
Maybe I should take a day off. It just feels so early though, it’s literally my third day as a Guilder. The pay for my first quest came in though, I tried to give half to Max but he insisted I keep it to help pay for my phone, so that leaves me with a whole 4 gold to my name, or 400 silver. That’s more than enough for me to get something nice, maybe upgrade a part for my PC? Or a new game, even though there are a few I still haven’t even touched yet.
Perhaps the best thing that I can get with it would be a more interesting weapon, something really weird with a few moving parts. Not even for fighting, I doubt it would be good for that. I just think it would be fun to get really good with some obscure and absurd weapon. Tactically speaking, it would be a real curveball if I ever come to face a more intelligent monster. I mean, I hope I don’t, it would probably feel pretty bad to kill something that may or may not be as much of a person as a human, regardless of how murderous it could be.
Hmm…
I'm sure I’ll figure out something fun to do with today.
-----------
Anehlia Spark knew that she saw something. What it was she doesn’t know, no-one does, but it was there. Someone else saw it too, that Nathan kid from the other day was talking about it. She’s glad to see that he made friends with someone already, maybe even formed a party, even though it was with another newbie.
It’s not just that she saw it though. She felt it. After she mentioned that feeling to the first person, that burning feeling as though she had held her breath for too long, and they thought there was something wrong with her she opted not to mention it again. If Nathan comes to talk to her she’ll mention it to him, if she were a betting woman she would bet that he felt it too.
Not now though. No, she’s got some investigating to do. People don’t tend to realise, but a lot of her Skills are actually mental-focused. That’s the main reason that she hasn’t gotten to as high a level as other people who’ve been Guilders for as long as her, as good as she is in a fight she has better things to do.
Due to her exceptional mental ability, she actually has something of an official position in the Guild, beyond just the usual Guilder thing that is. In fact, she even occasionally has correspondence with the Guild Master herself. That woman really likes her privacy, almost no-one ever sees her so that her name doesn’t get out, which makes sense given the Skill she’s said to have. Apparently she has someway of giving people Skills, some sort of quest system. The same one that inspired the Guild as well. How that works, it’s hard to say. Perhaps the Skill is just hereditary.
Regardless, her position lets her request access to certain things when she needs them. In this case, she asked to be able to see the ley lines. She said earlier that anyone with half a brain could figure out that the ley lines were responsible for the Mana surge, and she meant it, but there isn’t really much else that people can figure out without more information. For exactly that reason Aiden, the receptionist, practically jumped at the chance to give her access.
She wasn’t as confident in her ability to find anything as she’d have liked to be however. Up until then she’d never gotten the chance to see a ley line in person, and wasn’t even certain that her attunement to mana was refined enough to sense them at all. Of course, anyone with an interest in magic would jump at the chance to at least try, no matter how low the chances. There simply isn’t any technology that even comes close to replicating it’s effects, an by extension no way of expressing them digitally the same way you could with a purely physical effect.
Mana sensing is a very ethereal discipline, and any attempts to make technology sense it in the same way as we do has failed. A layperson might point out the many enchantments that claim to sense mana, but in an academic sense they merely sense the presence of mana, a subtle change but one that makes all the difference in scientific study.
And so, when she finally made it the bottom of the spiralling staircase that led to the ley line, she was pleased to note that she could in fact see the familiar blue light of mana. This wasn’t the same blue that was typically seen in enchantments or some spells, this was the pure and undiluted colour that makes up the very system itself.
The system itself isn’t a physical construct, but rather exists primarily in the same form as the ley lines, using mana to interact with people. The screens that it shows are extensions of itself that are made out of pure mana, only visible by being tied to the soul of whomever is intended to see them. Actually, it is using this connection to the system that people can develop their mana sense, using it to improve the sensitivity of their soul without hampering their defence.
The system itself is of course inscrutable. The moment it first appeared was recorded, but was so long ago that it’s impossible to say when exactly it happened, or why. Anehlia is personally of the opinion that it’s related to the Perception of Mana, a theory which states that the effects of mana and spells are subject to the thoughts and beliefs of those that perceive it.
That’s not what this was about though, this was about the mana surge. With how closely the system is tied to pure mana, and how the ley line is obviously able to interact with it given the training boost the guild was able to draw out of it, it seems plausible for that flash of a notification she saw to be more than a mere hallucination. As it was however, she couldn’t see any indication of it.
First she looked around the room itself, not that there was much to see. The walls were made out of a grey stone brick, and there were simple arches leading from the corners of the room to the centre, where the nexus, or the centre, of the ley line lay. The ley line itself was in a slight depression in the ground, a few steps having been added circling around it.
It was… hard to describe. It was like looking into a yawning chasm that stretched infinitely in the distance, but being able to reach all the way to the bottom. A sort of delirium where distance holds little meaning. And yet, in the end, it was just the same, completely even blue light. A part of her wanted to reach out and touch it, as dangerous as it may be.
As she circled the room she saw something different however, something different at the nexus. She latched onto that something mentally, hoping her rather subpar mana manipulation skills would be enough to draw it out. As she ever so slowly unravelled it from the nexus, she was able to examine it properly, it was some form of orange light.
Her eyes widened. Nothing like this had ever been seen before, and as with anything new in magic it’s best to just leave it where it lays until you can study it safely. Unfortunately that wouldn’t be possible, and even with her now pushing back against it, it came out on it’s own. It suddenly expanded, a sphere of orange that swiftly spread out to invisibility. For a second she saw a notification, coloured a familiar orange.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
*Feat Accomplished!*
Su-
But it disappeared before she could read it. Perhaps more importantly, she felt the same burning in her chest as during the Mana surge. The first of many, she fears
-----------
I tried doing a few different things to relax, from playing games, to reading, even a puzzle that I found hidden away somewhere in the room. I stopped doing each of those things pretty early however. Every time, without fail, just as I would start to get properly relaxed a font of nervous energy would bubble out of me, and I’d have to just get up and pace my room. I didn’t know where that anxiety was coming from, but it just felt like I wasn’t doing enough. How am I supposed to prove anything if I’m just sitting around?
I know it’s stupid, I need to have a life after all, but for the moment I don’t know if I can. That Mana surge from last night didn’t help either. It was almost like a fraction of the unpleasant warmth it brought up in me has hung around, clinging to the inside of my chest and making me just a little bit uncomfortable no matter what I did.
2 pm was the final straw.
I was once more laying on my back in bed, a book open over my face, reading the same paragraph over and over. With a frustrated grunt I sat up and threw it into the mattress, watching as it bounced once and fell off to thud against the ground. Just as I was heading over to my computer to begin the cycle anew, out of the corner of my eye I saw a glow from my bracelet. At first I thought it was some emergency alert of some description. At least, until the faint warmth in my chest that I wasn’t even certain existed expanded for a moment, filling me with a flash of what I thought was heat. The surge faded, leaving me with an uncomfortable heat greater than what I’d been experiencing up until that point.
I slipped my hand under my shirt, onto my chest, expecting it to feel like I was burning. When I felt the same cool skin as always I relaxed slightly, though not by much. I paced around my room whilst I thought.
So, obviously this was another Mana surge, which was clearly related to the feeling of heat. So my first thought was that this was mana, but to my knowledge it felt nothing like this. More like a sort of sense of movement that suffuses your limbs, which is why a lot of Mages will be seen constantly tapping things and moving their arms about.
Maybe it’s just different for everyone then? I didn’t expect to be able to do actual magic for a while really, developing enough to cast a spell usually takes quite a while, but the Mana surge could easily have sped up that timetable, if the name is any indication.
So what’s the first thing that I’m supposed to learn? They taught this in high school of course, even though most people would only become a mage much later. Actually, I’ve heard of people, usually magical engineers, who only get the ability to cast spells years or even decades into their magical career. Not that it’s common of course, it just isn’t absurd.
The first technique is a simple unstructured manipulation one, one which doesn’t make use of any arrays. It doesn’t even require any precision either, it’s just designed to get the mana out. Usually, this results in a small burst of mana which pushes things away and disrupts spells, though it isn’t strong enough to disrupt Magitech.
I hold out a hand and try to get a mental grasp on the warmth in my chest. It takes a few attempts but, with a couple of nudges from Proficiency I’m able to shakily pull it out. I expected to have to pull it all the way through my arm in order to push it out my hand, like the technique requires, but the mana seemed to travel directly from it’s origin to anywhere I led it, without moving at all.
I gather the mana in the palm of my hand and, taking care to aim it upwards so I don’t hit anything with it, I release it.
At this point what should happen would be that the mana exits my hand and, upon leaving the confines the stabilising area created by my soul, immediately takes on the form it is most naturally inclined towards. In this case, that would be force and meta magic. That isn’t to say that that is all mana can be used for of course, whilst those two types of magic tend to be strongest it is unilaterally better to choose whichever field magic you are most talented in, or enjoy the most. Unless your skill in force is just barely below something else, like divination, I guess.
Instead, what happened here is that a burst of fire surged out of my palm for a brief moment, leaving a stain of soot on the ceiling.
My first instinct is to check my hand for burns and, surprisingly, they are completely untouched. Typically spells have less of an effect on the person that cast them, so whilst this is logical it doesn’t change the fact that there shouldn’t have been fire there at all. It’s like turning on a tap and a bunch of rocks flowing out, it’s just absurd.
It doesn’t change the facts of the matter, though, and that’s all I can think to say. I just can’t understand how the fundamental nature of mana could have changed like this.
In an effort to understand it better I look back to the warmth in my chest, unsurprised to find it diminished somewhat. Nothing else jumps out at me except the obvious though. This doesn’t feel like mana, nor does it act like mana. I would assume that if I could see mana it wouldn’t look like it either. The reason why is shockingly simple.
This isn’t mana.
I… think my first step is to seek out Anehlia.
I’m already dressed so I leave my room and, making sure to lock the door behind me, decide to go ask Aiden if he knows where I might find her. I’ve never been more thankful that the guild housing is so close to the lobby, not that I’ve had much time to appreciate it anyway. I stop in front of the receptionists desk.
“Anehlia Spark, you said? She’s investigating something for the guild, she should be ba-.” Aiden’s monotone voice get’s interrupted by the sound of a door slamming coming from the staircase I just came down. Not from the top of it however, but rather the staff only door at the bottom. The next door get’s slammed open, letting Anehlia into the lobby.
She looks… either really worried or really excited. I can’t really tell. Either way it makes it unlikely for her to be willing to talk with me right at this moment. I decided to try anyway.
“Anehlia? Do you think I could talk with you for a moment?” I ask. She takes a moment to think before answering.
“If it’s ‘bout the Mana surge then yes, but I’m a li’l busy.”
Perfect. Rather than saying anything I decide to demonstrate, dragging mana from my chest out the palm of my hand and creating a small blast of flame, purposefully smaller than the one from before. I get a notification from the system when I do so, but put it out of mind for the moment, I know what it would say anyway. She looks confused at first, at my fairly standard display of magic. Only at first however.
“Wait. That ain’t the mana drawing manipulation technique is it?”
“It is. I think I’ve had a little bit of mana since the first Mana surge, but I was certain after the second one. It feels different though, like an uncomfortable heat right in the centre of my chest. I didn’t think anything of it until this.” I punctuate my statement by making another puff of flame, the same size as the previous one. I can see Aiden watching with slightly widened eyes, although of the few other people in the lobby no-one else is paying attention, probably because they didn’t hear us.
“Could you hold the mana still above your hand? As long as you can, though I get that yer pretty new to mana manipulation.”
I nod and drag a small amount of the mana to my hand, pooling it at the edge of my skin whilst I try to figure out how to hold it in place. Even before I send it out Anehlia has already noticed something. I decide to just wing it, by trying to keep a grasp on the mana whilst I slowly push it out. It takes surprisingly little direction from Proficiency for me to hold it in place, albeit shakily. I can only tell where it is by the feedback from my manipulation though, without any skill in mana sensing. I’m sure I’ll be able to do it soon, but I’ll need to actually take the time to practice it. Even without it I can tell that some of it is leaking out of my grasp though.
“Hmm. This ain’t mana. Least, not the mana that we use, I can still sense the stuff with mana sense. It’s actin’ different, and more glarin’ly, it’s orange an not blue.”
She looks at the mana that I was straining to hold in place for another moment before seeming to remember the effort I had to put in to hold it in place. She swiftly took a small metallic vial, without a stopper, out of her pocket and scooped my mana up in it. I watched as a blue line around the rim of the vial lit up, and a faintly visible barrier snapped into place across where the lid would be. It seems reminiscent of a bubble to me.
“Thanks, Nathan, this’ll help my research a lot,” she nods me and moves to walk past me. Before she does though she pats me on the shoulder, “And hey, ye’ve levelled nicely since I last saw ye. Yer doing well.”
And then she left, just like that. I guess I didn’t learn as much as I’d hoped for, but at the very least I doubted that it would be dangerous for me to use it, she would have said so. I know what that means it’s time for.
“That was… interesting. So let me guess, you’re going to go experiment with that weird mana now?” I was surprised by Aiden speaking up. Embarrassingly, I’d actually managed to completely forget that he was there. I nod at him.
“Yeah. I’ve already got a Skill for it, right?” I half-heartedly joke back at him. It doesn’t land, but that’s fine. I head to the training room.
On the way there I try to feel my mana to determine what rate it’s recovering at. It had already fully recovered in the time it took me to get to Anehlia, which is a fairly standard recovery rate to my knowledge. I’m not able to get any more information out of it, though I do get another level to Proficiency.
Proficiency Lv 17 --> Lv 18
Current bonus: Lv 4 --> Lv 5
Which makes me remember the other level I got to it earlier. That’s two levels in only a few minutes, does doing magic make it level faster? Or is there something else that I’m doing without realising? Speaking of not realising things, I notice something about my level.
Nathan Golding Lv 6
No Achievements
Of course I knew that combat wasn’t the only way to level, but I’d actually sort of forgotten, what with all the levels from fighting I got. It’s good to know that I’m still making progress even when I’m not doing anything in particular.
I don’t bother with a training dummy once I get into the training room. In general, mages don’t really need training dummies in the same way as, for example, a warrior. I’ll want to get one later to help with my generalist sort of build, but for the moment it’s important that I get a grip on this weird new form of mana.
I need to be careful about the amount of mana I use. Though I could do my regular physical training whilst my mana recovers, in my experience it’s more effective to practice continuously if I want to get any form of muscle memory, and I doubt it’s any different with magic.
So, I start with another of the manipulation exercises. In this case I choose to do the same thing that I did earlier, which is make a ball of mana above my hand, which I can also use to train mana sense. I felt a bit self conscious about doing this in the training hall because of the other people that were there, mostly because they wouldn’t know that I had good reason to do my magic exercises in there.
Fortunately for me anyone that questioned the veracity of my claim to the room understood on my first failure.
With normal mana it’s a simple matter to hold it in place. With it’s force aspect it constantly wants to be moving in a set direction but, with a little bit of effort, it’s possible to make a perfect sphere of mana by pressing in on it equally from all sides. This actually has some utility in it’s own right, as the forces involved make it act like a solid object, and forms the basis of a lot of magical arrays.
Unlike the consistent output that I expected, I found that this mana constantly oscillated, moving around in seemingly random directions with no rhyme or reason that I could determine. There was a small silver lining in that it was easily susceptible to my mana control, likely related to the meta magic aspects to the other mana. After a few minutes of failing to maintain a ball of mana I add my second hand in, holding my hands nearby as though I were holding a large ball between them.
After ten minutes I start to notice something. Not a pattern, but rather a similarity. Firstly, the way it flickers is always away from the centroid of whatever shape I’ve managed to put it in, which is rarely a sphere, is similar to the way that mana always pushes away from the centre. Second, well, it sort of reminds me of fire. I can’t properly sense it so I just dismissed the idea, but I’m fairly certain that flame-like tongues of mana are flickering outwards, before fading and ending up back at the centroid somehow, though some is certainly lost in the exchange.
When I try to force it inwards more, like what the exercise teaches to do ordinarily, it doesn’t stabilise like it’s supposed to, but instead becomes wilder, strengthening in any weak points in my control. I wouldn’t say that it does this with any intelligence however, but rather is more similar to the way that water pools in divots in the ground.
The first time I managed to succeed for more than a few seconds, something interesting happened. A spark appeared with a pop near the centre. It startled me out of my control, causing me to jerk my hands away, so I tried again. After a few attempts I managed it once more, making sparks appear between my hands. I changed my fingers into a sort of claw-like stance, hoping to spread out my control more evenly rather than only effecting it from the bottom up. I was indeed more successful that way but still wasn’t able to start the sparks for more than 15 seconds before failing. I took note of the fact that the sparks started to appear faster the more compressed it became before trying something else.
You see, there was something that I kept coming back to whenever I tried to imagine what the mana looked like. It wasn’t fire, the obvious idea based on it’s effects. No, I imagined something more specific, the Sun. I can’t quite explain why, it was just a number of tiny little things that mean that I couldn’t help but draw connections between the two.
I obviously can’t just copy the sun, stars aren’t self-sustaining they just have a lot of energy. The thing that I got caught on was the solar flares, strands of energy which leap out of the sun but then just get pulled right back. Then I also considered the constant motion it must be in, in conjunction with that. The conclusion that I came to was that I couldn’t just try to make it consistent and clean like in the exercise. Which I guess should have been obvious, given that this stuff is clearly different.
I start by releasing a cloud of mana which I hold in place between my two hands. I condense it into a vaguely spherical shape, but don’t compress it any further after it starts to fight against me. Instead, I attempted to hold it in that shape whilst I grabbed a section of it and tried to stir it into motion. I started to become dis-enthused when, after a few attempts, I was unable to split my control like I needed to.
On my sixth attempt, I was successful. The section I controlled started to spin, with no indication of the orb destabilising. I grinned and prepared to continue, but before I can grab another section I noticed the mana starting to spin on it’s own, the initial section having a knock-on effect on the rest of it. Soon I was holding a swirling orb of mana between my hands, which I imagine would have looked quite cool if I could see it.
That wasn’t the end however, as I shortly after noticed the air between me and the orb starting to heat up. I couldn’t move my hands closer for fear of ruining the progress I’d made, so I leaned my face close to it. It became abundantly obvious that it was starting to generate heat around it. If I were to practice this more in the future, it could be a neat little cantrip that can heat me up in the cold, or dry my clothes maybe.
I could feel the orb start to destabilise however, as mana slowly seeped out of it and somehow finding itself back in the centre, destabilising the shape. Unexpectedly, just finding a way to make a perfect sphere wasn’t enough to make this easier to maintain, as my control continued to slip as a result.
I try the first thing that comes to mind, drawing a line of mana from the centre of the orb, past the surface, and looping back into the centre. Miraculously, I can immediately feel an improvement. It seems like instead of filling up the centre, the line is acting as additional storage. The mana then slowly mingles with the rest of the orb, refilling it without causing any issues. So if I…
I drew a few more lines, which I now realise I copied from solar flares, of varying sizes until I realised that the orb has fully stabilised. Now, the amount of effort I have to put into maintaining it should be drastically lower, though still far from zero. Making constructs like this is vital for enchanters because, whilst people can readjust their control to keep something stable, enchantments cannot. It isn’t typically generally used for everyday things unless someone has a Skill that makes it easier however, as inevitably people will lose focus without a lot of practice. It might be more useful for me, because I effectively have Skills for stuff like concentrating, parallel thoughts, as well as whatever the name of the focus-reduction Skill is.
More importantly however, it lets you push more mana into it relatively safely. With a standard orb it becomes more drastically difficult to control with higher amounts of mana, but I’d bet that this sun-like design for the new mana is somewhat self-regulatory.
To test my theory, I push a trickle of mana into the orb. Whilst it becomes more difficult to control, it is as I expected in that the increase in effort is basically negligible. I notice that the feel of the flares becomes larger, as though they are growing slightly as I push mana into them. The orb itself also feels denser.
I increase the rate at which I add mana, continuing to add mana until I’ve exhausted almost half of my mana pool. I open my eyes, not even realising that I’d at some point closed them, and attempt to take in my creation as though it would be visible without mana sight, and almost destabilise it in shock.
Before me was not the emptiness that I saw before I put mana in, but instead a whirling ball of fire, with pulsating strands of orange energy looping in and out of it. I realised with a start that a few of the people that were training had stopped to stare at me. I imagine that my low level, combined with my lack of an achievement, made it quite the strange sight.
I ignore them for now though, taking in the majesty of what I’ve created. Looking into it doesn’t hurt my eyes like with fire, it is my own spell after all, nor does the heat coming off it make me uncomfortable. I slowly realise that I was right earlier, in my assessment of this mana.
It looks like the Sun.