Degriclone makes a small dagger out of mana and stabs through Degritone's hand. Degritone takes a stabilizing breath before readying to plunge the rock into the hole the instant Degriclone removes the dagger. Once it's inside, he holds it there so the healing can't force it out of his body, giving him time to view the process for longer.
With his enhanced vision, his wound seems to very slightly glow dark red and purple as the mana and stamina are converted too far into health to be perceived. He then closes his eyes and delves his mind into the mana and stamina around his wound itself. Inside it, he can feel... something. Something strange, that definitely isn't there inside his pool or the stamina getting used for Haste.
Looking closer, he sees a strange, invisible block of mesh of come kind. The further into this mesh block of void the mana and stamina get, the more converted into health they become. He then immerses himself in his stamina pool and moves his mental body to its edge. Outside of his pool, he sees mana passing through the same void mesh block and converting to stamina.
He looks as closely as he can at the mesh, straining himself, and sees that the lines of mesh themselves aren't quite solid. They're made up of even smaller threads, that may just be a single thread that takes a seemingly random path through an area, though always averaging forward motion and never getting too far from its center, making it look like a solid line from far enough away.
He checks the mesh blocks at the wound, and sees that roughly half of the two are the same. A language, then, maybe? If it translates to something like, "Convert mana/stamina to health," then that could make sense, though maybe it's less syntactic than English and just has "Mana/stamina to health," since it's roughly half, and I would assume that having "convert" would make it more similar than half.
Though, maybe it does include convert, but "verb on object" is condensed to a single character/word/whatever I'm seeing. Also, it doesn't seem to obey conservation of energy whatsoever, because it's using only 5 stamina to multiply my health regen. Also, why is it like this, when RCD uses stamina as a health regen multiplier, rather than a flat regen like Rejuve? Maybe it's more different than I thought.
Maybe it also includes the math of the skill inside it in some way. He taps a beat on the back of his hand with his middle finger as he sits up. "So, there's probably something like aether dictating the conversion, but how it's doing it is confusing. It disobeys conservation of energy entirely, assuming it's converting, though it could also be generating, and that would semi-fix the problem. Not from a physics standpoint, but from a 'how does 3 mana become multiple hundred health' way.
"Also, I'm confused why it would be converting stamina at the wound, rather than all over my body. After all, RCD multiplies regen, not gives flat health. It kinda makes sense for Rejuve, but even then, not really. Maybe what I'm seeing is exclusively the healing process, rather than the conversion process, which now that I think about it, makes a bit of sense, but not enough.
"I would assume health goes straight into that, but maybe regen skills somehow increase... bodily regeneration without loss in efficiency in some way. Maybe it is purely generation, rather than conversion, and contact with the mesh block of... language? somehow causes it... I dunno. I feel like I'm missing a step somewhere, and also that I'm not looking at the right place. What other senses do we have? Soul sight, mana detection..." He checks Mana Detection and finds its sphere of uncertainty is much too large to be useful in this case.
"Guess I'll try Soul Sight, though I doubt I'll see anything," he says as he activates Soul Sight. It's very dim, but he does see the mesh block at the wound. And, he notices a very, very faint glow all over his body, so dim he wouldn't notice it unless he was looking for it, or something close to it. Inspecting these results in finding that they are the same mesh, just much, much less dense.
He blinks in surprise. "Ok, so it is soul. And it's all over the place, so it's not converting at just that location. But, a lot of this is at the skin, so why don't we constantly see a slight red glow at our skin? Even with the excuse that we're covered in armor doesn't help because we still have faces. And my hand's unprotected right now. Maybe it's just happening in such low quantities that it's basically doing nothing at any individual spot.
"And this still doesn't solve the problem about how RCD affects health regen, rather than adds flat health per second. Maybe there's some health construct around our entire body that we can't see because we don't have health sight and it's also interacting with that to affect it that way. Looks like we need another skill, though this one should be easy, like Soul Sight."
He then closes his eyes and imagines that liquid fire from the vitalower appearing around all people, as a sort of a bubble, and attaching to the skin and bones. After a few seconds, he receives a notification.
Congratulations! You have created a skill!
Health Sight lvX
He opens his eyes and activates Health Sight, his body being wreathed in that same flame substance, but now as a gas, rather than a liquid. Additionally, he sees he was somewhat right. The soul constructs do connect his stamina and health, but not his mana and health. That must work more like mana around my stamina pool, then, and converts it directly, rather than interacting with my health pool itself.
"We still haven't figured out natural regeneration yet, but it seems the soul construct connecting my stamina and health must somehow stimulate that process, while mana simply gets converted slash used as a fuel for the generation of health, which is probably different." He finally looks up at his clone and sees that he is absolutely radiating gaseous health, though none of it seems to be directly going toward him, and it dissipates into invisibly small density much shorter than his Revitalizing Aura would make it.
He remakes his clone, and it blinks, looks at him, and nods. "Seems we can't see our own health radiation, but can see the health radiation of others," it speaks up.
"Hm," Degritone replies. "We'll deal with how Revitalizing Aura works later. Maybe. For now, we need what. We already have mana and stamina regen skills. How about a direct healing skill? ...Nah, wouldn't really fit the troll theme, even if we make Revitalizing Aura his sweat. How does gland work? It's costless regeneration. Maybe we can copy it in some way. Wait, we already have the answer, kinda. What happens to the radiation when we're missing health?"
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He and his clone remove the armor over their stomachs at the same time, and stab themselves at the same time, but Degritone notices his clone's actions and stops himself early, then works on restoring his armor as he watches his clone's health radiation disappear as he regenerates his stab. "Ok, so we can't just have a skill that stops our radiation to increase health regen, as it wouldn't work after we're damaged.
"Back to the gland, then. Backup plan is to have a soul construct that takes in health and spits out more health, that way we have a regen skill from all three resources. We also maybe need a source of mana regen, but I think we're fine on that front. Anyway," he looks at the pulsing cartoon heart on his finger with Health Sight and Soul Sight active and sees the same thing he saw in his pools: Seemingly spontaneous creation of the energy.
He looks as close as he can and still sees nothing marking a soul construct inside it, just spontaneously created health that gets pumped out into his health pool as a whole. "HmmmmmmMMMM," he frustratedly hms, and finally deactivates Rapid Cell Division. "So, we'd need to learn this soul script stuff first, I guess. We could always try to make, say, Rejuve more efficient first. I guess we'll also need some way to manipulate it..."
"Well, maybe we don't even need to actively do it ourselves. The system seems generous with how it gives skills as long as you have a good idea of how it works, see Flash and the sights. And a lot more examples, but those are beside the point. So, let's just see if it'll allow us to, say, convert mana into electricity first." He pushes mana to the palm of his left hand and imagines it running through a mesh block of soul, becoming electricity on the other side.
Congratulations! You have created a skill!
Mana Conversion (Electric) lv1
"Ok, so that works," he says, feeling the tingle in his palm from the single electric mana in it. He leaves it there. "We don't need to know the specific runes or words or whatever we'll call them, but we just had to know they existed. We could probably do the same with mana to health, but it would just be an active Rejuve without the stamina component, for now. Or maybe make health mana. Ooo, there's a thought. Mix the energies together anjd see what we get, but later.
"Right now, we're working on another regen skill, so, let's see if we can't get health to multiply itself. Or if we can't get a percent max HP regen skill. Then we'd have reason to put points into Endurance and health multiplier. Well, really just the latter... ANYWAY," he slaps his legs aggressively, pulling his gland back into his body and placing it next to his heart as it was when he first got it, "health regen skill that costs health time."
First, he tries imagining health passing through a mesh and more coming out the other side, in the same way that mana passing through a mana to health converter mesh causes much, much more health to come out than mana put in. After a minute of that not working, he tries imagining the spontaneous generation of health speeding up, which also fails.
Then he tries imagining his health pool near empty and the spontaneous generation of health speeding up the more empty space there is, the vacuum effectively causing more energy to be pulled from wherever it's pulled from to make resources suddenly appear. When that doesn't work, he crosses his arms. "Hmmm..."
"What if you try making a health to mana converter, then connect that to a copy of Rejuve's mana to health converter? Even if the health to mana converter is inefficient, as long as it makes more than a third of a percent of its health content into mana, it'll still be a net positive. And maybe it'll radiate out slightly to give slight mana regen, since some mana around the head would surely find its way into the mana pool."
It only takes a second for that suggestion to bear fruit.
Congratulations! You have created a skill!
Sanguine Restoration lv1
"Well, it's really inefficient, but it works. And, at infinite skill level, it would only give 110 health per second... well, 10 net positive, and around 3 mana per second, but that can be fixed through better wiring, probably." He squints. "Really, this is absolutely useless until higher level, and even then, not really. The bonuses it provide are too tiny. We really need to learn the soul language to rewire this into something much better. I was hoping your suggestion would send a percent of health as mana to Rejuve, but the system disagrees.
"In fact, I say let's try to do that right now. We might not learn too much, as we don't have anyone to ask, but should be able to better copy Rejuve than the system was willing to let us with its assistance. Gotta learn some form of soul energy manipulation, though, though maybe Soul Grasp is enough? If we were to take the principle behind it being mana that becomes soul mana to touch actual soul energy, we should be able to just needle it around as we need."
"Though, that does leave us with the question of where we get more soul energy when what we're given doesn't properly cover the amount we need, so it's probably better to get a soul manipulation skill first. Shouldn't be hard, considering anything that can be manipulated is usually easy to get a skill for, as Cibbyboi and Mana Manipulation taught us," Degriclone says.
Degritone nods his head to the right slowly before saying, "Yeah, you're right." He first tries to slowly drag a small portion of his own soul out, and it works, silently granting him Soul Manipulation. He draws it out into a long, thin string, activates his Soul Sight and Sanguine Restoration and gets to work copying what appears to be the input side that makes mana.
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After a little under an hour of careful, delicate manipulation, he finally gets something that converts health into mana, though it seems to be working at lower efficiency than Sanguine Restoration, as, even with no semi-Rejuvenation for part of its output to go into, it's outputting less mana than Sanguine Restoration puts into his mana pool.
Another hour and a half of careful, if experimental, tweaking, and he finally gets a 5 health to 1 mana ratio. Suddenly, it feels like something clicks and manipulation of the construct becomes much harder.
Congratulations! You have created a skill!
Health Conversion (Mana) lv1
He releases his breath that he hadn't realized he was holding for an unknown amount of that time and turns off Sanguine Restoration. Endurance sure is nice. One more level or bonus to its per level gains and I get to 60 to negate all normal needs. "So, that got us a conversion skill, which is a little over 21% health to mana conversion. Now I just need to take it and stitch Rejuvenation to the end and we'll basically have infinite health, assuming I can get it anywhere near as efficient as Rejuve."
Sighing at the amount of mental work he's going to have to do again, he starts working on copying Rejuvenate.