CHAPTER 114 A SMALL TASTE

The rest of the class practically flew by. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so thoroughly entertained by a lecture in my life.

I guess the subject did have a bearing on whether or not I cared about learning. Kind of like I had suggested that multiple times to people before.

Strange how that works.

I let out a slight huff as I walked back to my room. The teacher… instructor? Professor? Instructor sounds better.

The instructor had given us homework on the first day of class, not that I particularly minded. The objective was to find five key differences between skills and techniques and to also label some pros and cons for both.

It was a relatively simple assignment to start things off with. Until you realized that the instructor wanted five pages written. By Wednesday. Today was Monday.

I guess I was going to be sitting out of skill-grinding for the foreseeable future if this is how my classes were all looking to take shape. Especially considering that I might get comparable levels of homework from the other two classes I was scheduled to take on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Thankfully I got Saturdays and Sundays off, but there was no guarantee that the instructor wouldn’t give us even larger assignments to complete over the weekend. Surprisingly, I wasn’t all that upset.

The class had been extremely interesting. I’d learned a lot from the class that I hadn’t been able to figure out on my own, I also learned that the people in this world had taken things a lot further than I had expected them to.

They had basically developed the scientific formula for testing theories and hypotheses. Thanks to that, they had figured out the answers to things like can a closed mana system exchange energy with its surroundings?

This is also known as the first law of thermodynamics. The major key difference here is that in this world, more than just heat can make it across the system boundary. Which has… incredible implications.

Two closed systems near each other, generate mana, which then feeds into the other closed system which does the exact same thing which creates a feedback loop creating something extremely close to a perpetually generating mana system.

Until it overloads and causes an explosion that kills 534 people. Casualties in the name of science. The idea was fundamentally sound, the problem they just hadn’t accounted for was the fact that they needed somewhere to store that energy. It’s like trying to constantly generate more and more electricity within a system but not increasing the allowance for amps by increasing… was it ohms?

I wasn’t fully up to date on my physics anymore and a lot of my knowledge on this is half-baked wiki diving.

Anyways the runes and hardware could withstand so much mana being pumped through that they essentially created an improvised explosive of… prodigious caliber.

And not even just one, there were two systems in the feedback loop. Both of them detonated, and the resulting explosion was around three miles in diameter. The shockwave was felt for nearly one hundred miles out.

Thankfully the research facility wasn’t within a city, and instead located out in the middle of nowhere. Still sad that everyone died though.

What made me nervous was whether or not they planned to take that knowledge and try to develop anything with it. That explosion wasn’t bigger than what we had come up with on Earth, but you also had to consider the fact that it wasn’t designed to be a bomb.

The Tsar Bomba had a fireball five miles wide and a shockwave that reached nearly a mile away as well. The resulting mushroom cloud was some forty miles high. That was one of the pinnacles of human engineering on Earth.

This world had made something comparable by accident.

If that wasn’t a frightening concept…

It didn’t take long for me to make it back to the room, from there I plopped down at the desk and let out a long groan as I stretched. Adrian wasn’t here, probably still at his classes or in the cafeteria getting something to eat. I should consider eating something soon myself.

As entertaining as the class was, it was still exhausting to sit there for four hours in rapt attention, even if I did have enhanced fortitude and multiple minds.

I gave a once over my stats, but everything was maxed out. So it wasn’t like I was getting hit with a drain attack or anything like that. I was just tired. Not unusual I guess. I still needed to sleep and take care of myself.

Looking out the window, I was able to see the sun in the sky. The window itself faced east, so we got a good view of dawn. Gauging where the sun was in the sky I got a good idea of what time it was. It was still fairly early in the day, the class started at seven in the morning. With it lasting four hours, that left a lot of time in the day to accomplish other tasks.

Or the immense level of homework we had been left with. If I could though, I wanted to try and knock out two birds with one stone. Maybe get some training in while I did the work, the problem is the room wasn’t exactly a comfortable place to be practicing any of my skills in.

Normally, I’d prefer to just use [OWN] and do everything remotely, but I was fairly certain my usual practice spot was well out of my range. So I couldn’t sit there and still be able to see my room.

Which left me in quite a pickle. Wait… I was thinking about this way too hard.

I slapped a hand to my face and slowly dragged it down. There has to be something affecting me right now if I’m being this near-sighted about something so simple.

I picked up the book and some paper, along with my wretched writing utensil. I could just make a desk out there and write while I was training. Occam’s Razor. I had been trying to be way too creative with this instead of just taking the simplest solution to the problem.

I began the long, arduous journey to the outside training fields. I really needed to see what it would take to use one of the inside ones. There were always more than a couple of them not being utilized which seemed like a bit of a waste of space. I just wasn’t sure what it took to be allowed to use them.

I would think that more people would want to use them rather than being outside, but maybe I was wrong.

It didn’t take me long to make it to the spot I usually trained at and from there I got to work. I spun up all of my minds to begin handling a bunch of the things I wanted done. One of them got started on making a ‘desk’ to set all of my stuff on while the rest handled their usual tasks.

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I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to write, but I was sure I’d figure something out. Maybe make another prosthetic-like arm for the thinnel to sit on and from there use the arm to write? That might honestly just be the easiest way to do it, even if it was a bit awkward.

I really needed to find a way to start gaining some levels as well. After the constant progress in leveling I’d made while in Alixia, it felt strange to not have moved levels, or even had a chance to do so, in several days.

I just wasn’t sure that there was actually an easy way to do so.

Well, it was definitely something to consider at another point in time, right now I had training and homework to do. No time to waste.

***

Unsurprisingly, when you could dedicate over 10x the brainpower you had been able to before, things got a whole lot easier to handle.

I’d been expected to write five pages of five key differences between magic skills and techniques as they were defined in the textbook and then write the pros and cons of them.

Well, the first major difference was that skills were guided by the system, this meant that you didn’t necessarily need to ‘remember’ the process of casting. The system handled it for you. There were a bunch of different things that needed to be accounted for whenever you cast a skill or technique.

Thankfully the system handled all of that for skills so you just had to think of whichever skill you wanted to cast. Much easier to deal with that way.

The second is that the system could handle selecting targets for you. If something was designed to target allies, it would only target allies. The system was more than sophisticated enough to determine who you actually wanted to be targeted and who you wouldn’t want to be targeted. How it determined that though, I had no idea.

The third difference is that you were limited in the number of skills you could have while you weren’t limited in the number of techniques you could learn. More than likely, if the system was an intelligent creation, this was an intentional balancing point for people using the system.

One of the pros and cons I went on to later list dealt with this major difference right here. A major con of skills was how limited you were in the number of skills you could have active at any given time. Whereas, on the flip side, you could have as many techniques as you could feasibly keep track of.

You were far more likely to be limited by your own creativity or dedication in learning techniques than you were to be limited by the number you could reasonably keep track of.

The fourth difference is that the magic techniques you learned weren’t limited to your class types. It was significantly easier to learn something within your class types, sure. But that didn’t mean you had to learn something within that specification. I could technically learn [Fire Manipulation] with a lot of effort and start putting together some different fire techniques.

The skills would never be as strong as my lightning-based ones, or my swordplay. But I could do it if I wanted to.

The fifth, and final, difference is that techniques did not scale with your level. Every skill had a list of changes that would happen every time you leveled the class it was a part of, this created a scaling level of strength to your skills. Techniques didn’t have that.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, however. This just meant that the system wasn’t going to figure out how to be more proficient in your skills for you, this also meant you could make changes to the technique outside the scope of what the system might normally try to do.

You could increase the range, damage, efficiency, etc. While the system may only handle one or two of those. Granted you had to be the one to figure out how to actually make those changes, but a dedicated person could take their techniques far, giving them a serious advantage over other people in terms of pure combat potential. Granted, you could always take the avenue of turning a technique into a skill and gain insight into how the system might make changes and see how it feels, and then use that knowledge to further your own understanding of the technique to take it farther.

That was a pretty common practice people did in order to increase their capabilities.

Although this individual point in itself I had also listed as both a pro and a con. A pro in the fact that it wasn’t limited to your level to accrue strength. That allowed it to scale farther, faster, limited only by your intellect.

The con is that it sounds a lot easier than it is. It’s fairly difficult to redesign a skill to be more efficient in its casting processes. And not a lot of people have a knack for being able to figure out the nuance behind designing new techniques to be able to reformat them in a way that actually functions well enough to be used.

This also leads to a major problem with techniques over normal skills. They’re extremely hard to cast in comparison. There’s a lot the system takes care of for you, you’ve got to calculate range, mana, direction, velocity, and a whole slew of other variables. There was also more than a little mathematics involved in the whole process.

So it seems like my [Mathematic Calculation] skill was going to be getting some pretty hefty use in the coming months.

Over the years there has been a lot of proof of concept techniques that have been thought up, either to supplement an invention or that could only be cast by a dedicated machine system that someone had created.

Those machines had ended up being extremely convoluted mechanisms of enchanting and smithing design that, while they had functioned, they were not even remotely considered applicable in the real world. For good reason.

The big issue is how these machines work in the first place. I say ‘machine’, but that’s not quite what they are. They’re these oversized pieces of metal that have been enchanted with various properties and then have runes carved on them to… basically run an executable and then transmit the results of that process over to another ‘machine’ that’s connected in the system. It then runs through the whole process and arrives at the result creating the finalized product, or in this case, casting a technique.

So you’d start off with essentially a mana battery, and isn’t it a bummer that someone came up with that idea already, then you’d create your metal plates designed to have as much surface area as possible, you’d weld them or magic them together and make sure they’d fit with the next piece of your ‘machine’ so that the results will properly feed into the next sequence.

You’d do that until you have everything properly aligned in the manner that you want the processes to feed into each other. That results in your system. You then have to kickstart the process, which usually involves feeding a small amount of mana into what is essentially the ‘on’ switch.

This usually then activates a form of mana-vampirism that sucks mana specifically from the mana battery. Can’t have it draining everyone in the vicinity after all.

Then, once it hits a threshold, it starts feeding the mana into the next processes, which activate and then ‘hold’ the end result of the executable until all the runic processes have the mana they need, as the mana overflows from one process to the next.

Like stacked cups being filled with water and trickling down to the next layer until all the cups are full.

Once that happens it then feeds a small portion of mana into a rune that ‘finishes’ the casting process and then… casts the technique.

A very, very interesting process.

By the way, all of this is in the later portions of a beginner's magical application. That seems pretty advanced for what a beginner should know about.

Maybe this is the difference between what’s considered a beginner on a collegiate level versus an amateur level.

Not that I was complaining, this is the exact kind of knowledge I’d been hoping for. This is the kind of knowledge I needed and it would be the kind of stuff that would spring me into new heights.

How many experiments existed that utilized the exact types of magic that I could already use? How many of them could I start applying to my life right now if I just knew about them?

I knew there was a library around here filled with books on all sorts of things. I’d have to see about going down there and checking them out.

Now that I’d gotten a small taste of knowledge, I only wanted more.