Chapter 13 - Mana Accumulator
I just got another idea. What if, instead of only attracting and collecting mana with my [Mana Core], I set up structures made from my mana that act as subsidiary mana cores, but outside of my body. If I place them at many different locations around the world, I could gather many times more mana than I would be able to get otherwise.
The only tricky part about this is the design. Also, I will have to think about where to place them since I need to get back to them later to actually aquire the mana that gets caught inside.
As for the design, I have already decided on the general structure. The main part of the mana collectors, the name I decided to give them, will be a large hollow mana sphere that functions like a one directional membrane. Free mana can get inside of it, but never out as long as it doen't have enough force to break the hull. Which would take a lot of force, by the way.
In the center of the large hollow sphere will be the main attractor, basically just a really dense sphere of mana. Mana that is clumped together tightly and mutated to emulate gravity to attract all of the available free mana in the atmosphere.
Sadly I can't remotely convert the collected free mana into bound mana, because this 'claiming' of the mana requires conscious effort and the presence of my will to take place. So I will have to collect it after letting it accumulate a while. Well, I can't let it sit for too long, I only have 413 days left after all.
Without further ado, I start creating the first mana accumulator. Luckily, since the structure itself is really simple and doesn't require a lot of finesse, building one only took me a couple of minutes. And it's working quite well, I can feel the mana in the atmosphere not just flowing towards my core but also towards the mana accumulator I jsut made. From my observations, although it's range is only of the one I myself have, I think it will be worth it, even in the short run.
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It seems to work as intended. I've observed it for close to an hour now and simply let it accumulate. I need to verify the viability of producing and using the en masse after all. And is it in fact working just like I expected it to work, the claiming of the collected mana also didn't take more than just a few moments.
Having confirmed that, Im now ready to begin my plan. First step: distributing mana collectors to harvest mana. Question now is, how far apart should the be placed? If I place them too close to each other, they won't operate at maximum efficiency, and if I place them too far apart, I would have to travel a lot further to distribute and also harvest them later. The effective range of one mana collector should be around 50 kilometers give or take. It should be fine if I place them about 150 kilometers apart, right?
Well, no better way to find out then to try. If I enhance the wingsuit method I travelled with before with a bit of a speed boost, I should be able to comfortably fly with a speed of a couple times faster then the speed of sound. It definitely shouldn't take me more than 5 minutes to reach the next spot if I maintain top speed. Since I also need at most 5 minutes to set up a mana collector, I should be able to place at least 140 in a single day.
Question now is, how many do I set up? Wait, actually I think I have a better idea. Since they are extremely sturdy in the first place, I should be able to simply shoot them away without destroying them. If instead of only placing a single mana collector in one spot, I also shoot 1 each left and right, I could potentially reduce the time I have to spend travelling by two thirds.
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I worked tirelessly for 2 full days, continuously crafting, placing and throwing mana accumumators. As I got more and more efficient with each mana accumulator I made, I managed to pump out and distribute almost 2000 accumulators. I placed them in somewhat of a square, though it's barely qualifiable as one. I probably covered over 10000 kilometers of pure distance as well.
What stresses me a bit though is that I only found 4 more rifts, which I promptly closed of course. Nevertheless, this is not good at all. As I previously expected, the 8 billion something rifts are really damn far apart.
Damnit, I feel like what I'm doing is nothing more than a drop in an ocean. Although the mana collectors are quite good, they are nowhere close to being even remotely enough. There's no way in hell I'm going to succeed in this stupid quest with just this.