Well, today is the day I start experimenting with tectonic sense. I decide to test it on a wall first. I touch the wall and activate the spell at the average cost.
Immediately my brain is flooded with information. So much so, that it's very hard to process. Well, I suppose a child doesn't learn to walk in one go either. From the spell, I could tell one thing, a few feet back from the wall here there is a somewhat small hollow bubble in the rock. I imagine it's much like the one I tunneled into when I was making my chimney.
I scale the size down for my next spellcast down to 5ft radius, and the cost goes down to 3 mana. Quite cheap honestly. I activate it on the same section of wall and I am again flooded with information, but way less than before. I pinpoint the bubble to starting just over 4 ft back from the wall.
At some point I might tunnel back there, but right now, I have no interest in it. The next thing I want to do is go get my separated stones. I go get a bucket of the darkstone from the storage room and return to my room. While there, I make a 1 foot cube of the darkstone, and a smaller 6 inch cube of lightstone.
While holding the darkstone in one hand I activate tectonic sense on it. As I scaled the spell size down, I noticed that the cost never dropped to zero, no matter how small the area, it stayed at a minimum of one mana.
The response I get from tectonic sense is a little different than before. This time it's a much less noisy response in my head from the stone. I have a few guesses as to why.
First, the majority of the rock here is igneous rock and has small pockets of gas distributed, so a ground radar pulse would always return a noisy signal. When I refine the rock, I leave it in a solid form. Second, the material is much more uniform and pure in composition. Which again should reduce signal noise.
I repeat the process with the lightstone cube, and get a similar response. Next, I use stone shaping to fuse the two different stone cubes to each other, and from one side cast tectonic sense.
This time I get a crisp feeling of when the rock changes density, right where I merged the two. Given the potential in front of me, I have an idea. I want to try to train myself to be able to detect small impurities in the rock, and use stone shaping to manipulate them. The bad news is that in order to make training material, I'm going to likely be sacrificing my prior hard work in separating stone, since I'll be using it to introduce impurities that I want to detect.
As it stands currently, in already purified material I only have a rough sense of the impurities with tectonic sense, and only when they are large, but if I can standardize what I'm working with according to size and shape, then I can probably get quite decent at locating different minerals.
This whole process will probably take weeks of practice to get good at, not to mention all the other work I'll have to do to practice as well. One of the first things I'll need is to determine what to use as a standard size. Then I'll need to make practice pieces with known impurities put in of set sizes and label them. Finally, I'll want to make live test pieces from raw compressed stone to see how well I can work with it. Then, maybe expand to uncompressed stone to see if I can still work with it despite the structure of it.
Before I start on this long project though, I do want to try one last thing. Tectonic sense on crystals. I'm honestly not sure what to expect. On one hand, a crystal is really pure, so I'd almost expect a pure image, but these aren't just normal crystals. I dig around to find a good sized crystal, and use tectonic sense while holding it.
Stolen novel; please report.
I get a crisp, but partially empty response. Almost like less of the mana returned to me than I would expect. So I decide to try something a little different this time. I way overcharge the size of the tectonic sense to send through the crystal. I'd normally expect this to give me a lot of echo sensations from the object. Instead I get a few echoes, and I notice that the crystal is noticeably brighter than it was before.
Well, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, these crystals do hold mana after all, I could have guessed that they might absorb some of the mana from the tectonic sense pulse. Honestly, maybe I should train with crystals instead of lightstone as the impurities. As much as I'd like to use lightstone, I just don't have enough to make any reasonable training materials. Although the cave itself is plentiful with crystals, so I don't really need to know where crystals are in the walls, if there even are any, but if it's just for the sake of increasing my skill with tectonic sense, then it should do the job. As tempting as speeding up stone refinement is, the whole task is currently just impractical to speed up using my current skills and tools.
With my mind made up, I go and get some buckets of darkstone from storage, and bring them to my room. I get the two smaller crystal bucket containers, and begin designing the test blocks. I decide on a two foot by two foot cube for the test blocks. While they're big, so big in fact that I have to carry each individually, I also know that my tectonic sense has a much larger range, so I fear starting too small would hinder me too much when it comes to practical uses for tectonic sense. It's also a great use for darkstone, which I currently don't have much of a use for.
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After two days of work I've run out of darkstone, which came as a shock to me. Honestly, with how long I spent refining lightstone and darkstone, I thought I'd have much more. That said, I do have 25 test cubes stacked against a wall. Each has different embedded patterns of crystals and open spaces inside of them. I also etched a number into one corner of each one, and made an answer sheet on a tablet, so I can check how well I did on determining the insides of each. The only real issue is that I can't truly randomize the cubes, since I'm the only one here, but I think if I move them around enough, I'll forget which one is which. The other issue that I have right now though is that all these cubes are really filling a lot of space in the room. In the past, they wouldn't have even fit in here, but that whole time I was refining stone I was cutting away at one wall to get the stone to refine, so I really ended up with a lot more space than when I started here.
I don't really want to make a whole third room though now either, nor do I want them filling up my entire storage space. Especially not just for these training cubes that I'll likely only be using for a little while each day. As much as I can sit and refine stone for long hours every day, I have a feeling overusing tectonic sense would give me a splitting headache until I'm much more used to it. For now I'll limit myself to an hour of practice a day, and then an hour of randomizing the cube order. Then I'll continue expanding my room and refining stone until I'm bored of it.
Honestly, I'm starting to get a little bit of a schedule made for myself. Between taking time every so often to refill crystal grids, training tectonic sense, refining stone, getting new imp meat, and getting wood outside, I've got plenty to do to just pass the time and do different things when I'm bored of one. Speaking of getting new imp meat, it's already only 15 days or so until the goblin comes back to make imps. I'm starting to get pretty confident that he comes back every 45 days or so, given the last few interactions.
I think for the next two weeks or so, I'll just keep to that schedule. Making sure I'm stocked up and ready for when the goblin comes, and just training up tectonic sense. I already stocked up quite a bit on wood in the storage room, but actually, I should consider storing more in there, so that I'm ready to burn the inevitable corpse pile.
For right now, I'll mark my stats down again though.
Level: 11
HP: 260/260
MP: 97/97
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Mighty Imp
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense