I woke up in the morning after I did all of my questions about magic in the Astral plane. I’m fully recharged on SP and I even feel pretty rested sleep wise. If I had to guess I must be getting at least the equivalent of a half sleep while astral projecting.

Today is finally a weekend and I should probably take the weekend and try some magic in the material plane, or the real world. Whatever.

I tell my wife that I’m planning on taking most of the day to myself and I’ll do all of my regular chores tomorrow. I don’t want to lie to her so I don’t specify what I’m doing, but I don’t know if I’m ready to share everything that I’ve learned yet. Not without proof and being able to show her stuff. Right now all of my magic has been a sort of magic eight ball now that I think about it. I don’t even think I’d be able to get her to astral project because it took a very specific mindset and I don’t have the ability to force her to astral project. I think I need to gain a certain level of proficiency before I bring anyone else into this. I trust my wife implicitly so she'll be the first person I tell. Besides that I also have some friends that I think could be trusted and I’ll probably tell them next.

I head out of the house, grabbing a soda and water bottle as well as a granola bar for a snack later. I’m heading for out of town aways and plan on doing most of my work in as secluded a place as I can. I drive until I find an abandoned farm house. It’s surrounded by tall weeds and there’s a few trees that look pretty overgrown and rough. As I pull up towards it I notice that there’s a gravel path that leads around behind the farmhouse. Most of the windows are either boarded up or broken with glass on the ground around them. There’s two doors, one is boarded and locked, the other one is blocked by junk behind the door. After pushing on it pretty hard it releases and swings open. The inside is dusty, and filthy with debris all over the ground. It is private though which is what I need for now. If i’m going to continue to come back here though it might be worth looking into who owns this property and also cleaning up a bit.

I start by checking my SP, I have around 1 still, slightly less for having checked it using SP. I’m going to be trying to create effects in the material plane now. I’m in a rickety shack of a place, so maybe wind or fire aren’t a good idea. I’ll try to create water I guess.

Create water

There’s a rush of my power. I can’t see it, but I could feel it leaving my soul. Suddenly there’s gallons of water that appear on the surface of my skin. It’s inches thick and as gravity asserts itself on the newly created matter it falls and drenches myself and everything on the ground around me.

It seems that creating something without any other guidance will create it as close as possible. I’m super glad that I didn’t try that with fire suddenly. Because I’m soaking wet I won’t get back in my car, and I don’t really want to sit on the ground here because it’s gross. I go outside and sit in the grass just outside.

I think I’m going to call astral projecting just to gather SP a power nap.

So after my minute power nap plus a couple minutes to calm myself and enter my meditative state, I go back into the farmhouse. This time I tried creating the water away from myself.

Create water 10 feet in front of where I’m looking.

An orb of water materializes before my eyes in a fraction of a second. There’s no popping sound when it happens so I’m guessing that it’s not moving the air too much or pushing it away. It just appears in the gaps of the air molecules maybe. The water once again quickly crashes to the ground and it rushes past my shoes.

I should figure out how to use magic to clean things and how to dry myself off next. I don’t want to keep dealing with being soaking wet and gross.

After another power nap I try just using my SP directly to clean a small patch of the floor in the house. I don’t know exactly what it’ll consider dirty or clean or anything like that though so I try a bit of magic that I probably should have done before.

Using my SP I want to build a way for my SP to do what I implicitly mean. I want it to do what I’m thinking and expect without having to specify every detail.

That itself drains me of my magic entirely again. I can tell that it fails because I don’t have enough capacity to do it all in one go. It feels like I never get much done because I don’t have the capacity to really get anything done in one go. I need to build up my capacity and my recovery rate to start getting anything actually done.

Once I’m at my soul I think about what I want to happen. I decide I’ll use my will to create a structure which will exist in the Astral. It will later be attached to my soul, but I want it attached to something because I work better with physical things. This structure will have a couple of SP techniques that I can turn off and on and will be used to help me grow. The creation of the structure takes me multiple full charges. Luckily because it’s “physical” I can add to it with consecutive techniques. After dumping 10 SP into it’s a fraction of the size of my soul. Either my soul is huge, or creating anything here takes a ton of energy.

Before I do my technique I want to do a test. I know that when I use SP, it will increase my capacity for SP by about 1/10,000th, or about 0.0001%. So If I got to the point that I had ten thousand SP and I used it all, my soul would hold about 1 SP more. That’s just when I spend SP, what happens if I use my SP directly to increase my capacity for SP though.

Spend 1% of my SP to increase my capacity for SP.

I can feel the energy being spent, but I can feel a stretching like feeling. After looking at the numbers it looks like it increased the rate of my capacity gain from 1/10,000th to 1/100th. That seems pretty good to me. Just to be thorough I’ll try using 10%, 50%, then 100% of my SP with the same technique. The results are the same, with the stretching feeling being a little bit more intense at 10%, a lot more intense at 50% usage, and painful at 100% usage.

If I’m going to have this be an automatic process I’ll want to keep it relatively small so that I’m not constantly out of SP. I know also though that the more times I do this technique the more SP will be wasted. I’ll be spending energy just to check my SP level and I need to make sure it doesn’t outpace how much I gain naturally.

I know that I gain 0.02 SP/hour, and it takes about 0.009 SP to check my current amount. I think I’ll have it check my SP level every 10 hours. Which should be around 0.2 SP. Which is 20% of my current capacity. I’ll say if I’m at 80% or higher, then it’ll spend 20% of my SP to increase my capacity. It won’t work perfectly because there’ll be a little bit of waste from checking the amount of SP I have and a little to do the automatic technique.

Every 10 hours of relative time, if I’m at 80% SP or higher, I want to spend 20% of my maximum SP to increase my capacity of SP.

That should keep me growing even if I can’t focus on it. Next I want to focus on my rate of SP gain. I know that this will likely mess up my previous technique and I’ll probably have to redo it right away.

I want to spend 1% of my SP to increase the rate that my soul converts Potential into SP.

I feel my soul thrum and it seems to be doing something. I can’t really tell exactly, but it’s something. I try the same at 10, 50, and 100% again. I have similar feelings. 1% is noticeable, but small, 10% is also noticeable but also not upsetting, 50% is a little uncomfortable and 100% makes me feel like I want to puke and jump and run and just pretty uncomfortable in general.

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Modify my previous technique to spend 10% of my SP to increase my capacity, and 10% of my SP on the rate of my Potential to SP gain.

That should do it now. I do one last thing as a sort of safety measure just in case.

Create a toggle on this structure that will turn off the techniques attached to it. This toggle should not require SP to operate.

I can feel about 0.8 SP going into creating a new part on my structure that will act as a toggle. I test it out a bit and can see that it’s turning on and off the structure. Because of the way that I phrased my technique it will restart its 10 hour countdown when I turn it off and on. I think I’m going to call the magic I’ve been doing techniques which I’d already decided. I’m also going to call the structure that I made a technique-node, or tech-node for short.

I want to create the phrase technique and technique-node and tech-node for myself.

It takes some energy to create those phrases and I get myself back up to full. I do a check on my SP capacity when I’m full. I’m sitting around 2 SP at max capacity now.

I want to create a connection between my tech-node and soul.

I see a tendril of SP, which looks like really bright potential, reach out and connect to my tech-node. It pulls the tech-node closer and stops when it’s held just off the surface of my soul. I think I want to check a few more things while I’m here.

Unless I specify, I want my techniques to only use 1 SP of energy.

That should prevent me from using huge amounts of energy on accident, and allow me to test more frequently.

Unless I specify, I want to keep 20% of my SP in reserve which won’t be spent.

That should leave me with a base level of SP just in case. I of course don’t have much experience, but that might help me keep a backup of SP to reverse anything I do on accident. I also imagine that in the future I’ll have techniques that will run constantly or semi constantly and I’ll want to make sure they have the power to do so and I don’t accidentally screw myself over in the future. I’ll probably have to change that in the future, but it’ll work for now.

I attach these last 2 techniques to my tech-node, refill my SP and then leave my meditation. I head back into the farmhouse and try my most ambitious technique yet.

Create a 1 kilogram orb of water and give it a velocity of 100 m/s forward. Start the water orb 1 meter in front of me and aim where I’m looking. Tell me how much SP it takes to do this, I can use my reserve. I can use more than 1 SP.

The ball of water about the size of my hand appears in front of me and shoots off into the wall in front of me. It punches clean through the thin wooden wall and shoots into the weeds outside. It took 1.415 SP.

That’s pretty good for a basic attack technique for now. I bet that would knock someone over and hurt them pretty bad if they aren’t wearing padding or armor. But it won’t work very far away because it slows down pretty quick. I’m not having to attack anything though, so it’s probably fine for now.

Save the technique I just did as a Water Orb level 1.

I do a quick power nap and after that I decide I finally need to get dry and clean. It’s only been like 20 minutes but it feels like forever.

Spend as much SP as it takes, and use my reserve if needed. Dry my skin and clothing to a normal amount based on what they’re usually like when dry. Do not heat up the moisture to do this, just remove the water. Do not remove anything but the water.

The technique quickly dries me off. It's a bizarre feeling to get dry like this because there’s no associated wind or heat. I next try to clean a portion of the floor because I don’t want to test it on my clothes first.

Clean a square inch of floor. Remove any debris to the side, remove any bacteria, dirt or matter that isn’t part of the original material.

It takes a lot more SP than I think it should for such a small space, but it ends up perfectly clean. It almost completely drains my SP just doing that small area. I spend the next 30 minutes between power naps, and testing new wording and defining and specifying the technique more. I end up with a technique that I call Clean level 1. The latest iteration is much more efficient and I finally use it to clean myself and my clothes. It works without any issue after all of my testing.

It’s around noon and I figure that I should take this time to clean up my workspace here more. I go on a cleaning spree for the next hour and remove all of the dirt and debris from the room by the door that I entered. This includes the walls and door.

I figure that I’ve made decent progress. I have a way to automatically make myself better with magic, and manually doing it as well of course. I have a basic way to attack if someone attacks me, besides just punching them or doing something that I could do before magic. I have also worked out a better system of using SP to create techniques that will do what I need.

Because I’ve been working on making my magic better, I wonder if I could make my physical self better. I have asthma, glasses, and am generally not in the best shape. I bet my Soul Power could make my body better in any number of ways. I of course need to be careful though. The worst case is that I kill myself and that’s obviously the worst case scenario. Maybe making myself a crazy psychopath might also be a worst case.

I spend the next 2 hours creating techniques that let me “see” things at the size of a cell. I chose the pad of my index finger of my right hand. I can use the techniques to see the cell, and adjacent things, “zoom” in on the inside of the cell, and even see all of the chemical reactions that are going on inside of a single cell. I also match this up with research that I do on my phone. We live in a pretty crazy time that I have most of the entirety of human knowledge available in such a convenient package. I match up what I find online with what I’m seeing, trying to cement the knowledge in my mind.

Once I feel like I have a good understanding of what’s happening in this single cell, I want to make it better. I don’t really know how to start though so I guess I’ll just do some basic stuff.

Make the cell that I’m observing better.

I use a very open ended magic. I know that because I have my previous restrictions in place it won’t spend more than 1SP to do that. I use about another 1SP to watch what the magic is doing to this cell. I see the cell lose all of the waste material that’s in it. I see the reserves of chemical energy become completely topped off. There are tiny imperfections in the cell that I could observe and they all disappear. This all happens incredibly quickly, almost instantly. Then the magic begins to make changes to the cell. It increases in complexity, it develops defenses against viruses, bateria, radiation, chemicals, heat and cold, pressure and vacuum. It increases the efficiency that it does its job in ways that are difficult to describe. It was just a skin cell. Now, it’s still a skin cell, but it’s like it’s been engineered to be better in every single way. The magic dissipates after all of the changes that it made. I could tell that it started trying to create a miniature consciousness for the cell but didn’t have enough energy to finish so it removed it before the magic ran out and made the cell “worse”.

It’s incredible. The things that I could understand seemed to have been changed the most and most efficiently.

How much SP would it take to convert a single skin cell into a cell like this.

I get back an answer that it’d take about .005 SP. That means that I could do 200 for a single SP. That’s an incredibly high amount of magic. It’d take me forever to get just all of my skin done. Not even thinking about everything inside of me.

I really want to try it though. I take more time and finally create a technique that covers just my skin cells.

I end up spending the time to convert all of the skin cells on my right hand into the better version. I have to take a dozen power naps and the result is a finger with new looking skin. I take a safety pin from my car and try poking my finger. It’s incredibly sensitive and I can feel the poke, but the actual pain portion is really toned down. I have to push hard enough that I feel like I should be stabbing all the way through my finger before I even get a drop of blood. And it closes up behind the tip of the safety pin within seconds. Incredible.

I set up a new tech-node with the skin improvement technique. It’ll take 50% of my SP and spend it to improve skin cells that haven’t been improved. Doing some quick math on my phone I see that it’ll take longer than a normal person lives before it’s done, but it’s a start. It might actually take less time than I’m thinking because my rate of improvement seems insane right now.

I head back for the evening and settle in with my wife and have a great night. I continue to think about how to broach this topic though.