Lurona city [southern shores of Fuminao Legacy Kingdom], local time [1793.12.--] [New Year Celebrations]

Instead of throwing the bead or using his Telekinetic arm to slowly move it forward, Zeph did something a little different.

Behind the other end of the ‘pipe’, he prepared a Beam Spell geared with his new Force-Mana-based modules. The modules weren’t producing anything just yet, though, and the Beam structure was kept out of shape to keep it from firing.

Then, he sealed the entrance of the pipe with more of the Stabilized Space construct, making sure that both ends of the ‘pipe’ were tightly sealed. Next, with the use of Willpower, he squeezed the ‘hose’, while keeping the coiled part in one place. With the Force-Mana that was filling the ‘pipe’ and doing the job of liquid in a piston, with an equal force it pushed on the ‘walls’ of the magical construct and the bead at its end. The tightly packed spirals of the Space Spell worked like a string – stopping the ballooning effect and directing the ‘hydraulic’ force to the front, where the bead was.

It shut upwards at an angle, dragging with it the rest of the Mana-L and the Spell construct Stabilized inside of it. As the ‘pipe’ gained in length, it was losing in diameter, while the spiraling coils of the ‘Space Lens’ Spell were revolving slowly along with the change in length.

If anyone ever played with the scissors lift toy, they would roughly understand how it worked. Depending on the number of crisscrossed nodes, the speed of lengthening the whole ‘arm’ escalated more. Additively with the number, but still. By dragging closer the two initial bars, the toy lengthened by the sum of the lengths of all connected ‘sub-arms’ all at once. In other words, by pressing the two handles closer by a centimeter, one was able to elongate the whole toy by meters.

Memories of playing with similar toys filled Zeph’s thoughts when he first tried this new technique. But it was a little different this time. He was using, basically, an elastic and stretchable hose, or a balloon enclosed in a spring. The forces multiplied instead of adding up, as the hydraulic nature of his creation pushed the bead faster and faster as the ‘pipe’ thinned.

But he had to be careful. If the bead broke from the Mana-L Stabilized construct, it would just fly away, releasing the contents of the ‘pipe’.

He also had to consciously manipulate the construct to be more robust, but extensive testing in the preparation room in the laboratory building allowed him to learn to do both quite skillfully. It was a potent application. Very potent, even. He suspected that achieving supersonic speeds with a bullet wasn’t out of the question. But that wasn’t what he needed.

He wanted something that could pierce a dense Veil and deliver the ‘pipe’ of his Mana-L. Preferably, with minimal Mana loss and in a way that he would be able to reuse the ‘pipe’ construct for another attack.

It took him almost one Earth’s hour of testing and training to make it work perfectly.

But that was merely a technical problem in contrast to what he managed to achieve back in that room.

~~~Several hours earlier, 3rd floor of laboratory building, preparation room~~~

The Heat Magicules… their behavior was strange.

Zeph was sure that the Magicules were causing their effects directly – by interacting with the matter and without any intermediaries like electromagnetic radiation. According to the kinetic theory – his preferred choice when the thermodynamics were involved – that meant the Magicules influenced either the speed of molecules (rotational and translational) or every movement within the molecule’s degrees of freedom. This distinction was very important because the velocity in itself wasn’t really quantizable – the spatial movement and spinning speed didn’t care about the energy delivered. Meanwhile, the other kinds of energy-storing movements were much more difficult to interact with.

Well, according to the equipartition theorem, every degree of freedom should absorb the same amount of the kinetic energy delivered to the molecule, by average. But with how the Magicules seemed to work, Zeph wasn’t sure if he could safely apply it. Not to mention, the theorem was limited, requiring certain temperatures to provide appropriate results. He was not going to risk it, thus he worked on the assumption that the Magicules could influence even a singular type of atomic movement.

Either way, one of the reasons Zeph liked to use the kinetic theory, was the ease of imagining what was happening. In this case, treating the atoms like solid objects was crucial. Instead of using wave functions and thermodynamic equations, he could just treat atoms like solid spheres, and molecules like atoms linked together by springs, while still being able to calculate the stochastically proper values of temperature and energy transfer that should be happening.

He could use hard statistics and physical models, instead of abstract mathematical constructs like entropy. Because, despite all the cultural connotations and popular science articles, scientific terms like entropy, enthalpy, and thermodynamic potential were just names for mathematical constructs that described a collection of properties of matter. Or rather, the whole set of processes ruling over the matter, not just one, physically observable phenomenon or object.

In the spirit of kinetic theory, increasing the velocity and rotation speed of atoms or molecules to increase the overall temperature was quite easy to understand. The faster they moved, or the faster an asymmetrical molecule rotated in the air, the higher was the temperature; no restrictions. Also, it was an easy explanation for how the Magicules influenced matter, but… that would be possible only in gaseous mediums. Maybe in some liquids too, depending on the molecule composition, but solids stayed composed over such methods.

By definition, solid matter couldn’t be heated that way – the atoms couldn’t move. Especially in crystalline-like structures. And yet, the Heat-Magicules worked on solids, too. Even the efficiency, as far as he could tell, wasn’t that far off from heating a gaseous medium.

That complicated things a lot. Not because he couldn’t guess what was happening, but because there were just too many ways the Magicules and matter could interact with each other, while he didn’t have the tools necessary to study the phenomenon and limit the possibilities.

Take, for example, Lava-Magicules. They were, obviously, especially efficient at heating solid matter. But, going by what Ghrughah had said about Soul contaminations, they also had properties that tried to ‘liquify’ matter. Or rather, to force atoms into an amorphous state, just like in glass. How much did that property influence a Lava-Magicule’s ability to heat up solid matter? If he was able to copy the Magicule’s nanostructure, would it bear any similarity to a Heat-Magicule? How many nanostructures of that kind did exist, and how did they achieve the effect? Or maybe, a Magicule could cause similar effects as a whole, while being distinctly different in structure? But why would Soul contamination be linked to Heat- and Glass-Magicules, then?

The questions and doubts were multiplying because of the issues he had with the simplest of Magicules. If even Heat-Magicule was interacting with matter in such complicated ways, how was he going to analyze anything more complex? He wasn’t even able to check how many pure Mana particles the different Magicules were made of.

As so, Zeph had no choice but to limit himself in his self-study and research the basic interactions first and foremost. There was no way around it. Thankfully, the simple models produced simple results, for the most part. The temperature of solid objects could be increased by only two phenomena, and both translated to one fundamental effect.

Vibrations. Or rather, the linear frequency of vibrations between ‘spring-connected’ atoms, and the frequency of connections stretching if there were more than two atoms connected. In the Kinetic theory, as it was treating the atoms like solid objects, all those movements were just oscillations. A molecule consisting of two atoms? Two balls linked by a spring, going back and forth as they vibrated. A non-linear molecule made from three atoms, like water? It was just a triangle, meaning that the atoms could vibrate linearly along their ‘springs’, bend in the plane of the triangle (making the triangle thinner or wider), and stretch in relation to the central atom (walking, like a figurine made from acorns). Those were their degrees of freedom. Those were the movements that could store energy and, effectively, increase the temperature.

Going further with the water molecule example – besides the three degrees of freedom from moving in space and three degrees of freedom from rotating in space, it possessed three degrees of freedom from vibrating. And while all of those could store energy, only the last three were obviously quantized.

And being quantized meant, the physicality was putting restrictions on how to interact with them.

And, once again, the kinetic theory was doing an impressive job explaining why that was. Of course, it wasn’t an entirely correct parallel, but it was much easier to understand (physically) than diving into wave functions! Just like any oscillator – one can’t just ‘push’ it at random intervals to increase the amplitude. One can’t just randomly attack a swing from all sides and hope it will start to… well, swing higher. Resonance was necessary to influence those oscillations, those vibrations. And in the case of molecules’ internal vibrations, it additionally had to be delivered in quite strict batches of energy.

It was the very reason the infrared light was heating objects with such efficiency in the room temperatures. Of course, infrared light was a spectrum, not just laser-like, singular frequency of light, but it was still a perfect example of resonation. It was also very intuitive – the objects that produced that light had similar temperature to the objects receiving them, so the resonance frequency of the medium, the light, was assured.

Moreover, the spectrum of infrared light was the result of each molecule possessing its own temperature. Or rather, radiating light from different excitement states of electrons, but Zeph wasn’t going to unnecessarily complicate the model if it worked. As so, the second-best property of kinetic theory made its entrance. Simple statistics. Slightly different from the wave equations, in calculation it employed a more intuitive part of statistical mathematics, operating on a simple distribution of wavelengths. And still, it worked; no matter how much the model strayed from reality by ignoring the true nature of photons.

What Zeph planned to do, was to imitate known methods of cooling molecules, but using Magicules as a medium. The first idea was to use laser cooling or, more specifically, Doppler cooling to decrease the translational momentum of molecules – slowing down their movement speed. The second idea was to expand on the method, and also decrease the rotational momentum of molecules. Finally, he wanted to use anti-Stokes cooling, which decreased the vibration energy.

The problem was, both methods used photon absorption and emission to achieve those results. It was more about how to excite electrons to make them emit a photon with more energy than was delivered, thus forcing the atom to cool down. Zeph doubted Mana worked that way. Not only was Mana light-conducting to some extent, but transforming Magicules into light – like his Mana Highlight did – was tantamount to releasing their energy. Which meant their structure wasn’t interacting with photons much otherwise. Maybe there existed a group of Magicules closely related to light, but, logically speaking, normally Magicules were molded by molecular environment, and pure Mana was rather neutral for light.

Moreover, some effects the Mana had on matter were very… mechanical in nature. At least going by his observations. Liquifying metal, for example, worked only as long as Magicules lasted – they were modifying the interaction between atoms while disintegrating, giving away their energy. Zeph imagined the Magicules as a mold – made from nano-Mana-currents – that would naturally fit in between atoms of the physical medium that created them. If the medium changed – the mold was forcing the new atoms into positions similar to its parental environment, thus changing their behavior. Or maybe it was the other way around and Magicules were forming local forcefields that mimicked absent molecular bonds, electromagnetic fields, etc. thus making the molecules behave like their distant cousins composed of different atoms and possessing different numbers of chemical bonds… Either way, Zeph imagined that Magicules were working much more… kinetically than electrons or photons. Which posed a challenge.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

The fact that Mana wasn’t decaying matter at all, was a strong argument supporting that way of thinking, too. True, one or two of the iron isotopes in his old armor became radionuclides thanks to the Mana-rich environment, but it was a different phenomenon. If Mana’s energy could be absorbed by atoms just by resonance, like in case of photons, the world would be on fire.

Well, maybe not on fire; but molecules, especially the big ones, like proteins, would break quite quickly, or go full radical.

One thing was for sure. Nothing indicated that the second law of thermodynamics didn’t work in Corora. So he couldn’t just ‘push against a swing’ to decrease the atom’s speed. If forces generated by Force-Magicules weren’t omnidirectional, maybe that wouldn’t be the case, but he wouldn’t know either way without some really advanced research. As of now, he understood that the kinetic energy of atoms had to be transferred somewhere, it wasn’t impossible to simply decrease it. Emitting photons was actually one of the best methods to do so.

In the end, Zeph decided to apply kinetic theory to Mana and Mangicules to simplify the whole issue while thinking about possible solutions. The rules of the quantum world still limited what Mana could and couldn’t do, and the inner workings could be studied at a later date.

So, he ended up with two solutions for cooling. Either transfer the energy somewhere else or transform it into something else, like light.

While waiting for Aisha in that room on the third floor of the laboratory building, he conducted a series of experiments on Heat-Magicules, using Gru’s ‘arms’ filled with Phleya as an improvised thermometer. The duo’s thermal sensitivity was quite high after receiving immunological upgrades.

It didn’t bring exciting results. No matter what he tried, the Magicules from the two modified Heat Spells didn’t want to interfere with each other. Level of similarity, Mana density difference, direction of air movement… nothing except the relative Magicule density in the air had an effect. That meant the phase of resonating energy transfer (however it was happening) was irrelevant, just like in the case of photon absorption. Using the previous metaphor – the swing would speed up no matter when he pushed, he only had to push with the same frequency.

It also seemed that multiple Magicules of a similar type could influence one atom all at the same time, and the effect would be the same as using them one after the other. For the most part, at least. He didn’t have the tools necessary to look for more subtle discrepancies.

According to his model, that meant the Magicules were either adapting to the frequency of an atom’s vibrations, or an energy-transferring intermediary indeed existed. But even if the latter was the case, Zeph didn’t have a method of interacting with said intermediary.

The second series of experiments returned mixed results. Heat and magnetic field from Magnetic scan Spell were able to change temperature’s propagation but, sadly, Magnetic scan didn’t have the power necessary to influence states of electrons, so it ended up as an upgraded Heat manipulation technique. He didn’t have many hopes from the beginning, but the lack of System notification was especially irritating at that time.

The third series of experiments finally gave some results. Seeing how hard it was to excite electrons and make the air produce light, he just gave up on the idea for the time being. Instead, he tried to transfer the kinetic energy of molecules.

It was a real pain to modify the Scrubbing cantrip, mostly because the structure of the Spell was very rigid. Even minimal changes made the Spell useless. If not for the ‘Lesser Force weave’ Spell, he probably would have never found another working configuration. He noticed one big difference between the Spell and cantrip. Namely, the Force-Magicule-producing module had a different number of coils in the main spiral of the construct. In the world of proteins, such change was much more significant than a simple mutation, as the whole conformation of the molecule would normally change. Because of that, and the fact that the modules were almost identical otherwise, it took him a while to spot the difference.

It seemed that using a purely biotechnological approach in Spell modification had its limits, too.

But what surprised him the most, were the effects. The Spell had a spiral with two coils less, as compared to the 16 in the cantrip, and yet the Magicules just… stopped producing constant force all around. When he constructed the modified cantrip, it was no longer a Scrubbing Spell – the Magicules just floated freely, reacting only to contact with physical matter and random wind currents, shaking the air a little.

That was a big breakthrough. It seemed that the Magicules stopped spontaneously releasing their energy because of the air pressure. That meant he could easily modulate how they would react to different kinds of kinetic energy! If Zeph was not mistaken, that the overall momentum, timeframe, and size of an event or object necessary for Magicule disintegration were changing. And it was so stupidly easy to do, too. The only reason he didn’t find it before, was that the way the cantrip worked resembled more an electrical circuit than protein – the main spiral working like a transformer’s coil. But everything had limits. He could only add or detract three coils from the spiral before the Spell failed miserably.

However, after discovering the Spell’s relation to an electrical circuit, he was quick to modify the rest to accommodate a longer spiral. He wasn’t a specialist, but it was merely a Tier 0 Spell – one meant to learn from.

He changed the main spiral to be smaller and denser, then started adding coil after coil to it while stretching the rest in such a way as to keep the relative positions of all elements constant. The produced Magicules he would gather in Space-Mana encasement. By opening a small hole at the top, he could use his Veil technique to spot even small changes in their behavior when in direct contact with the air.

At 25 coils, the resulting Magicules started reacting to low sounds, and weren’t excited by the random wind currents anymore.

At 35 coils, they started reacting to ultrasounds and ignored contact with solid matter.

At 45 coils, they just fluctuated aggressively, throwing around the dust that found its way inside.

At 55 coils, they stopped reacting to the sounds altogether and the frequency of energy releases became too high to perceive. A single hair that he put on the ‘surface’ was wiggling randomly, suspended in the air, and slowly drifting in random directions.

After that, the ‘pool’ of Force-Magicules stilled to all his senses, but he already noticed the pattern. He continued, blindly but stubbornly.

At 70 coils, he noticed wisps of mist forming over the ‘surface’ in the encasement’s opening.

At 75 coils, he had to stop. The efficiency of the Spell dropped almost to nothing. Other spirals, and the whole Spell construct, were stretched too much. To compensate, he started enlarging those other spirals – something he would never try with another Spell because it was the quickest way to disable them in normal circumstances. This one behaved more like an electrical circuit, though, so Zeph had a frame of reference good enough to believe that it should work.

For another hour, he tested different configurations, trying to restart Magicule production. After having enough, he started manually modifying the speed of Mana flow beyond the Spell’s construct purview – just at the ends of the controlled flow and near the point of Magicules’ molding site – to imitate how Mana behaved in earlier renditions. To do that, he used his Will alongside stray Will-Magicules that flowed through the construct. And when he did, the Spell churned, his Will dropped drastically, and then, that happened.

Congratulations...

He reeled back from the strain on his Will and a sudden headache. The Spell collapsed moments later.

Unknown [Tier 2] [Spell] detected!

[Will] dependency detected!

[Spell] [Rebounding] effect detected!

Cascading amplification effect detected! Source: Magicules from [Planaria Ferrium Fullerene CON8795-XA65] group!

Calculating…

[Spell] deemed [Safe] for [User]…

Willforce in his body reacted almost automatically, sucking resources from other places to speed up his recovery. His mind and Will suffered, but the rest of his body and the Soul were in a… relatively good condition. He tried to assist his full-body upgrade where he could to speed the process up.

For a moment, back then, he felt as if his brain was being melted. Sensation overload was an understatement, but instead of feedback from senses, it was an avalanche of abstract information.

[Spell] evaluated as [Death hazard] when in use outside of [User] parameters.

Calculating…

[Spell] classified as [Mostly impossible] to replicate with normal methods.

Calculating circumstances…

[Spell] re-classified as [Unique].

[Spell] working name set as [Kinetic Medium] in [Force] group in [Tier 2].

New [####] [####] added!

[Rewards] [Deferred] until conditions met!

Please visit [System Shrine] at your convenience.

Useless, he thought after glancing at the notifications. He rolled into a ball on his seat and massaged his temples to alleviate the ever-increasing headache. So, 75 coils was the Spell’s limit…

It took him a few minutes to recover fully. Enough time to figure out what he had done wrong.

A backlash from Tier 2 Spell… which means, the Magicules somehow connected to my Will, which then resonated with Fullerene Magicules and started sending information through my implants directly to my brain… Jesus, was that all information from a few Magicules at a micrometer scale? Well… a few million, more probably… At least I hope it was all that happened …

Gru tried to comfort him until Zeph sent him back his true feelings on the topic. His companion started pouting instead.

A new discovery! Was all he could think of. He started grinning. Forcing the information to go somewhere else should be possible, right? We are talking about Will here… he thought, getting ready to construct the Spell once more.

After quite an intense – if short – testing session, he learned that he could dampen the flood of information by sharing it between all his Fullerene equipment. His armor was quite indifferent towards the flood of information, as was Zeph’s cardiovascular system. He just wanted to shield his brain from the abuse, but he quickly learned that his mind had to be connected to some degree for the Magicules to work. Normally, he would try to redirect the stream of information to his Soul, just as it normally happened when getting information from his Mana, but with that amount… he worried it could cause permanent damage to his Soul memory.

Slowly, but stubbornly, he worked his way up the coils, folding the next one in real time instead of preparing testing pools of Magicules at each step. He constantly re-adjusted his mental shielding – Willforce Morphon helping a lot with the exercise – and optimized the Spell’s structure slightly when he noticed a drop in efficiency.

Finally, right before reaching a sustainable mental limit, he achieved his goal – 110 coils.

At 25 coils, the Magicules reacted to sounds with a wavelength of around 10 centimeters. At 35, with a wavelength of around 2 centimeters. At 45, it moved larger dust particles. At 55, it easily wiggled a hair that should have a width of around 0.1 millimeters. Every 10 coils, he was attuning the Magicules to react to objects and movements an order of magnitude smaller, colloquially speaking. Scrubbing, at 16 coils, was reacting to pressure itself, which was a little counter-intuitive, as that should correspond to 1-meter gaseous objects or events, but he had a feeling that the lower number of coils stopped being a linear function in this model and added other properties, as 14 coils in Force weave added something entirely new to the Magicules’ usage.

Keeping the Spell up was straining, very much so, but he was able to keep at it for almost a minute and managed to fill a—much smaller this time—Space-Mana encasement with newly modulated Force-Magicules. The ‘pool’ was as still as ever, but if his guess was correct, those should react to objects the size of molecules – somewhere between 1 angstrom and 1 nanometer. Well, to gaseous molecules at room temperature and normal pressure, at least.

With a mix of dread and wonder, he very shortly dipped his finger in the ‘pool’…

~~~Current time~~~

As the Stabilized Telekinesis arm neared the Zombies, Zeph stopped squeezing, allowing the construct to finish the movement by itself.

Just as the bead at the arm’s end pierced the Mana-L Veil produced by the horde—or rather the pack—Zeph braced himself and added his Will to the Force modules’ active centers. Almost immediately, they started to form and eject modulated Magicules.

The bead touched a Zombie, and Zeph slotted the last fold of Beam spell into place.

As his Veil deflated, a stream of Force Magicules rushed through his Mana-L that was stabilizing the telekinetic arm.

Moments later, the battlefield paused.

A high-pitched cracking sound of congregating and snapping ice was drowning out all other sounds. A jet of a perfect thermal conductor in the shape of his newly discovered Magicules flooded the Zombies. As the temperature of the air was around minus 20 Celcius, the heat immediately vacated their slightly warm bodies after making contact with the Magicules, flowing freely to places with lower temperatures as per the laws of thermodynamics.

In mere seconds, a flower of petrified and breaking-apart bodies formed around the center of his telekinetic arm as the temperature of all objects in the zone started to level out…