(Author’s Note: Like last chapter, there’s a lot of math)

“ARRRRGGHHHH!” I clutched my head at Miss Goddamn Obvious finally poking her head up to laugh at me, all my other thoughtstreams letting out sighs for a moment from their near-mono focus on their duties. “SUNUVABITCH! JUST, JUST-!”

Everyone got back to work as I slumped in total defeat. Just, goddamn. I could be so bloody dense at times, so focused on my bloody thoughtstream specialties I just failed to combine shit and work from the back end.

“TODAY IS A FINE DAY! YOU HAVE CURSED MULTIPLE TIMES!” Flowing Silver Emperor proclaimed, the cheeky old shit of a grandpa. “WHAT GREAT INSIGHT THIS TIME?” He pressed unapologetically.

“I effectively have four Mana Draws,” I sighed to Him as He sat back down, His huge head setting down next to me to listen eagerly. “I have the standard Draw of Magery.” I pulled at the ambient Mana maintained so nicely by the Pyramid close by, swirled up a bundle of raw Mana which began to accumulate very quickly. “I have the power of my Wrath, which draws on the raw energy of Heaven.” The golden fires of Heaven blazed to life above my palm, while the bundle of incoming Mana moved over in front of my forehead. “I have Reserves which draw on the fundamental forces of magic, using a Valence spell as a trigger catalyst.” A winking fractal star of crystalline silver Force magic, as big as my head, materialized in front of me as He watched. It was the easiest magic to Burn into Arcane energy. “And I can simply cast Perpetual Shards from Valence.”

I didn’t even make them Greater Shards, I just popped up the twenty-seven of them, glittering through multiple colors and combinations of colors, and wrapped around with Metas and energies that made them far, far more powerful than merely an XXI Valence they were coming from as Perpetual.

Flowing Silver considered all of this wisely. “THIS INCREASES THE AMOUNT YOU CAN DRAW SIGNIFICANTLY,” He agreed carefully, “IF YOU CAN BREAK THEM DOWN?”

“Yes, but that’s not the key point.” It basically doubled my foundational Draw, sure. “It’s that it is four separate Draw channels. I can have four different operations going on at once.”

Technically five, if I included the reshuffling, but that would exhaust itself eventually.

It took Him a moment to realize the significance of that, as it was so incredible. “YOU... CAN MAKE LOW, TRUE, AND HIGH MANAPOINTS AT THE SAME TIME?” His pale blue eye shifted to the Orbs on my Staff and Rod. “AND STORE THEM ALL UNTIL YOU CAN APPLY THEM...”

Four operations at one time was potentially four times the speed. As long as I could get the Compression part to tenfold speed, a +65 to the default check, I could Compress faster than I could Apply.

Diamond Heart of the Sun gave +1 to a taking 10 check per minute of sustained use of a Skill until reaching a Take Twenty. Lo, this was all Concentration checks to my thoughtstreams, with the occasional Spellcraft check to make sure all the resonances and matrix formations were in order.

I would be able to do that.

Now, the question was how I was going to be able to apply more than two sets at the same time, one inside and one outside my Pool?

I had started off wrong, gotten way ahead of myself, and now had to backtrack. Nine False Stars were fading every six seconds as I ripped the Mana back out of them, currently stripping Alchemy-bound False Stars out energetically.

My Sublime Chord rippled up and through me, wondering how Heartsong could possibly NOT be of use during this whole process? After all, carrying multiple melodies was definitely not that difficult for my Inner Bard.

My Inner Faith piped up that there was no way Heaven couldn’t smooth this process out, either! This was what Heaven did for its servants!

“AHHHH!” So goddamn blind!

Forgetting Caster Level! Forgetting the Sublime Chord! Forgetting the very fact that Heaven was built on harmonization between very different parts and values!

Flowing Silver was chortling again, but I could feel the tremor in His powerful mind as my thoughts went into overdrive.

Stop missing the fucking obvious and do this right!

I was stress relieving for all my supersmart thoughtstreams who were pissed we all weren’t getting stuff done right the first time.

First order of business: I had to make all my False Stars GOOD.

I eyed my twenty-seven Shards, which promptly doubled with Paired, doubled with Admixture, and then waited to double again with Echo. I stripped all the alternate energies out of them except Arcane/Force and Holy power from the Sacred Metas.

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Oh, and then added a Fastcast version, because I could.

They vanished inside, into my Syzygy, and began to go off.

The first worked on the False Stars I was stripping and adding together, so that I stayed ahead of the curve. Then the extra volleys stayed on the 40xMana already made and bombarded them, one Shard per point of Mana, delivering Goodness to every single False Star in convergences of forty Shards at a time. I had over three hundred to work with, so allocating them where they were needed was not difficult, and I never had any waste since I could do individual Mana points if needed.

Splashes of energy right from Heaven splashed across the existing Stars and added Holy energy to them. The Sublime Chord naturally harmonized with and between them even more powerfully once that happened.

I didn’t have that many Stars at 40x, given how recently I’d started on them, and I had constant barrages there to paint them. Once they were done, I immediately started on the 4x False Mana, painting over two hundred with every salvo and cycle, rapidly changing the bias of existing Stars.

My Soul Essence False Stars got the treatment first, while one volley kept the reassigning into my Channeling Nodes inside the Arcane Pool current.

I had to clear out two and a half million False Stars. I couldn’t move their power source out of the Arcane Pool until I did so, and I couldn’t rebalance my Arcane Pool and restart my Syzygy until I removed everything out of balance and brought it back in accordingly.

I was easily staying ahead of the curve on repainting it all to Good. Okay, step one underway.

I noted something else, which was going to slow down my conversion of False Stars to Good. When I yoinked out the Mana in them, the aura of Holiness in the False Star lingered for a moment.

I promptly zapped it again, delivering Holiness via internal Sharding, and the empty point lit up with the profound Aura of Good.

Which meant when I reapplied Good Mana to them, it would be with Harmonization and Resonance active! They were chiming along with the multiple melodies of the Sublime Chord, which Inner Bard was playing furiously and trying to find the optimal Notes to apply.

I would be able to Apply to multiple Energy-types simultaneously without risking feedback and dissonance! I just had to find the right combination of Chords to do so, and if everything was Good, Heaven would just lead the way!

And I was right. The Good 4xMana agglomerated into 36xMana and Compressed far more readily than untreated Mana. The joining to the 4x Slot in the Channeling False Star took only twelve seconds, half the time!

However, my Soul Essence was using non-Good Mana incoming, and so was at the normal twenty-four seconds speed, six seconds per point to integrate. I had to spend forty Shards to treat them after the fact, or have Good Mana ahead of time.

My Wrath became the fuel source for my Soul Essence. It was automatically Holy, there were two blasts at 20d6 each, which was forty Levels worth of fuel and so more than was needed. Ignite it normally, and it was fine, but it Burned, Compressed, and Applied at twice normal speed with the Sublime Chord speeding things along.

That meant my total Syzygy was growing by 36 Mana every twelve seconds, which was triple the speed it had been before.

I had two and a half million False Stars to empty, at the rate of currently nine 4xMana at a time, every six seconds. 129,600 4xMana/Stars depleted a day. In twenty days, I should be done and could start on the next phase. By that time my Bomb False Star nodes would all be at 40x, and I could start on the 360x.

46 Bomb nodes, 2401 False Stars per node. 110,446 Stars. I was processing them currently at 1/12 seconds with Chord Harmonics, or 300 an hour, 7200 a day. It was going to take me a bit over 15 days to complete my Bomb Nodes through 40x.

That would deplete like a million of the two and half million False Stars I needed to drain down. Channeling and Ki should both be taken care of, leaving just the hundreds of Spell Pool Nodes to clear up, which outnumbered all the other types combined.

I’d be doing ninety at a time, instead of nine, but my Applying speed would be slower. Truepoint Mana meant integrating 40x Mana, normally 240 seconds, one per six seconds, with an easy base check of 78. Sublime Chord Harmonics would cut that to 120 seconds, meaning two minutes to process 360x Mana.

That effectively meant I’d be processing at the same speed. The main difference is that I would run out of shuffling Mana before I finished my Channeling Truepoints, and the rest of my Arcane Pool would be empty.

Empty, but with a Syzygy full of False Starry Heavens and their False Stars all gleaming with Good energies, each with their own specific Notes and Song needed to speed things along!

Normally, such a thing meant nothing special. I’d been going through the whole 4xMana thing with all the Stars simply because all of them had to be at 4x before I could move on to 40x inside my Arcane Pool.

But with Heavenly Harmonics courtesy of the Sublime Chord, that was no longer the case! I could work on each energy type completely separately! After all, if I had Truepoint Mana and added in an energy type to my Arcane pool, that would naturally start at 1x and have to be built up. The pool would tolerate it as I built up the lower energy to match the higher energy.

Well, with the Sublime Chord, I could do that among multiple energy types, adding them in one by one. As long as it started at nothing, I could add it directly into the greater melody of the Syzygy, creating a long and layered cascade of different Nodes building up in layers, all of them heading towards higher quality at different rates depending on their quantity.

Once I got all five energy types humming along, then the next step would be enchanting the Orbs I had to accelerate Applying Mana through enhanced harmonization, prepping the Mana stored in them so it could be applied at an incredibly quick rate. Dropping the time needed for the forty-minute merger of a Truepoint Mana, or the nearly seven hours of a Highpoint Mana, would go a long, long way towards giving me some peace of mind.

That’s what I’d be doing with the Orbs. Highpoint Mana took a longarse time to Draw and Compress, but making it ahead of time should help regardless of when I started Applying it to the multiple Nodes.

Enchanting the Orbs to do that would help immensely at that time. Even if I got them down another half, that would be an immense time savings, but if it was down to a fixed time like a minute it would just be awesome, meaning that I’d be expanding my capacity FASTER with Highmana, instead of slower...

Thirty-six Mana every twelve seconds was three Mana a second, or 259,200 Mana a day. Eighteen times faster than the one Mana per six seconds I was using previously... and it was only going to go up!