Ting! Manipulate Mana has met the requirements for a breakthrough and will continue leveling past level 470!
46th Breakthrough: You've managed to turn mana into neutral reserved mana; this will allow you to replenish your reserves at higher rates.
47th Breakthrough: You've managed to liquify spell mana; this will allow you to cast spells of unparalleled power.
Ting! Manipulate Mana has obtained levels 464-475!
These are the easy ones; I just need to practice them and get their levels as high as I can to make the last three easier.
I stand on the beach of the island, where my practice can't hurt anyone. The fiery, pebble-sized orb of liquid spell mana that I just conjured hums with destructive power. I aim at a boulder and launch the orb, which flies easily through the air and hits the target, sinking partially into it before spreading out and melting the boulder into lava.
Within seconds the entire boulder is a puddle, the sands below it liquifying as the mana continues to melt everything it touches. That was only a small amount of liquid mana: what would have happened if I had used a lot more, hundreds of thousands of mana? I think I've found a way to defeat tank-type monsters, something I've been historically weak against.
So, naturally, the next question is: can I do this with Bond spells and skills? I have to try.
I channel a fairy but, instead of making the fairy bigger, I use [Mana Manipulation] to shrink its size even as more and more mana is being added. Soon I have a solid fairy – and this should be enough for a Bond evolution if I activate the skill now – but I want to go one step further, so I continue pouring in mana until the particles start blending into each other, forming one tiny liquid fairy.
Each flap of its wings causes tiny drops of mana to fly through the air, an instability I'll need to fix eventually, but this does show that it is possible.
I order the fairy to attack a beached, wondering Domr before it runs out of mana from its flapping wings, and watch as the liquid mana sinks into the Domr. The Domr shudders for a second before slumping to the ground, dead.
I didn’t use any other skills to augment that one, but I have no doubt they will work. With this, my [Fairy Explosion] should be damn near a mini-nuke in destructive power… I can't afford to test it out yet; I shouldn't get too distracted from my current goal.
I spend the next few hours grinding levels for those breakthroughs and learning more about them. Liquid spells are just a highly concentrated form of spell; they function normally in almost every way. However, they are stronger simply because there's more mana in the same area.
Ting! Manipulate Mana has obtained levels 476-478!
While I am working with liquid mana, I should also try to get mana to become matter. I compress a small amount of mana into liquid, watching intently how the mana behaves; so far, it's normal. I continue to compress the mana, watching the MM and elementary particles randomly move around.
I keep compressing, pressuring the mana more and more until I am straining to keep the pressure up, but even after it has shrunk by almost eighty percent I still see no visible change to its behavior.
Beads of sweat are starting to form as I struggle to compress the mana any more than I already have. Should I try to get the other breakthrough first, try to get more levels to make it easier? Or maybe I should use an item that boosts my manipulative abilities to help me… If it's this difficult, then I definitely will need as much help as I can get to achieve the mastery level.
I press on, and eventually I see a behavior change in the liquid mana; it is starting to form crystalline structures. The MM and elementary particles that are aligned in the same way are being drawn into shared patterns, separating the elements again. It is at this point that the liquid mana is starting to change back into a solid, but clearly a different type of solid mana.
Ting! Manipulate Mana has met the requirements for a breakthrough and will continue leveling past level 480!
48th Breakthrough: You've managed to make super-solid mana; this will allow you to make one of the densest forms of mana possible.
Ting! Manipulate Mana has obtained levels 479-482!
Ting! Sense Magic has met the requirements for a breakthrough and will continue leveling past level 840!
42nd Breakthrough: You have observed super-solid mana; this will allow you to see mana in one of its most extreme conditions.
Ting! Sense Magic has obtained levels 774-775!
Hang on, isn't this a part of [Sense Mana]? This is a surprise... there's no way Kayafe didn't get the breakthrough for this for her [Manipulate Mana]… that means she didn't tell me about it!
I smile: Kayafe probably knew I'd rather discover this myself, but I also don't think she has this breakthrough for her [Sense Mana], because it's a little hard to get normally. She might have known of this breakthrough, but she probably knew very little about it.
I take a break, feeling a little dizzy from my exertion just now. This means that there are fifty-two possible breakthroughs I can get, although turning mana into matter is a little out of my grasp right now… assuming it’s done by just increasing the density, and there’s not some other trick to it that I’m missing. Kayafe had her Class bonus to help her, which I do not, but I can also just skip that breakthrough for now since I only need fifty.
After my break, I move on to trying to manipulate MM forces, deciding that I need more levels before I try and do more with super-solid mana.
Instead of manipulating the mana, I instead focus on the MM force itself; or rather, I focus on the particles that generate it, and I start trying to bend those to my will individually. It is like trying to force two positive-side magnets together. Each time I think I have a grasp over the MM force, it slips out of my control. It's just as difficult as trying to get the super-solid breakthrough, but in a different way, it's just too slippery!
With a headache beginning to pound and the dizziness returning, I finally manage to get a hold of the MM force and increase it, strengthening it.
Ting! Manipulate Mana has met the requirements for a breakthrough and will continue leveling past level 490!
49th Breakthrough: You have managed to manipulate the MM force; this will allow you to shield yourself from spells.
I don't bother checking my level gains just yet, since I plan on getting my last breakthrough so that the extra levels can make leveling the previous two breakthroughs less headache-inducing. I sit back down, trying to soothe my throbbing head. [Inquisitive Perfection] pokes me, telling me that this hasn't happened before. I haven't used this much effort in a long time… but I have done so before, notably when trying to make solid and liquid mana way back then.
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Why am I having difficulty now? Does it have something to do with the enhancement threshold? I don't know what the cause is, but if I want to cleanse my skill, I have to do this.
I don't know how to make solid vitality, since it doesn't have an MM force, but I suspect it has something to do with the super-solid state of mana. As for liquid vitality, that may be possible, but I have never considered it.
After another break, I focus on my own vitality and draw some out to compress to the liquid state, which turns out to be much harder than I thought. First off, vitality just doesn't want to enter the fused state – particles squashed togeather tightly enough to overwhelm the MM force – vitality particles just want to pass through each other without interacting at all. I never realized just how much the MM force still applies in keeping liquid mana liquid.
I sigh, pick up a small rock and skip it across the water, pondering how it might be possible to liquify vitality.
The problem is that nothing is keeping vitality in a liquid state. Vitality lacks the particles that are responsible for the MM force… but it does have what would for mana be the ‘elemental’ particles, that for vitality are all aligned in the same non-elemental 'direction'. Flipping vitality in the opposite direction does not change its properties... that I know of.
What if I flip the ‘direction’ on just half the vitality particles? Would the opposites attract, like in magnetism?
I do that just to see what happens, and, to my partial surprise, the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ vitality particles attract each other... which is odd, since mana normally doesn't behave that way. Vitality also doesn't repel the same charge like in magnetism, so the actual cause of this phenomenon is different from charge.
I grab a washed-up stick and sit down on an unmelted rock, drawing in the sand while trying to think of a hypothesis to explain the observed behavior of vitality.
Instead of charge, which repels the same and attracts the opposite, what if it's like entropy? For now, I’ll think of it as wind. Wind is created when hot air wants to go to cold air. If everywhere is hot, there is no wind; if half the air is hot, there is wind. Same concept with positive and negative vitality: if all is positive there is no reaction, if half is negative then they want to equalize.
However, I have a new problem now: the vitality pairs up, but they neutralize the imbalance of positive and negative, and now I just have pairs of vitality particles doing nothing, instead of just individual vitality particles doing nothing.
What if one vitality particle is a little ‘stronger’ than the other? Not so much that it will attract two, but rather one and a half, so two positive vitalities are attracted to one negative, but the imbalance is there to attract another negative vitality which in turn attracts another positive and so on?
I reset the vitality to all positive, then flip half to negative, but I give them a little more energy, and that's when it all comes together! With barely any effort, the vitality forms a chain, basically a string of vitality!
Ting! Manipulate Mana has met the requirements for a breakthrough and will continue leveling past level 500!
50th Breakthrough: You have managed to weave vitality; this will allow you to make cloth out of pure vitality!
Ting! Manipulate Mana has obtained levels 483-488!
Yet another breakthrough Kayafe didn't tell me about. She must have known I had to get this in order to get solid and liquid vitality, but again, she knows that I like discovering this stuff on my own.
To be honest, I should have had this breakthrough a long time ago, and if I were in a place where I wasn't so preoccupied with so many other things, I may have eventually discovered this on my own.
I look at [Manipulate Mana] in my mana signature; it burns brightly, indicating it's almost at the enhancement threshold. I just need to cap the breakthroughs now… however, that will have to wait until tomorrow, since it's getting late.
I have my other minds occupied with studying inscriptions during the Lojyo and the night, drawing hundreds of different forms of inscriptions to see which draws in mana best, and, while I have made good progress on that front, it is still far from done.
In the morning, I meet with Tusile and Guklaro and the new probational elder, Venly.
Venly is in the late end of middle-aged and keeps her long hair in a bun. Her ears are pierced with many earrings, more than average but in a stylistic fashion. Her presence here – most likely because the other two are still training her – is very convenient for me.
"Alysara! Good to see you," Tusile says, welcoming me into the office with a warm smile.
The desk is filled with blueprints of airship designs, as well as orders for materials. More airships are being built with wood from the Dungeon, now that the material is available. Many villages are still being restored in the aftermath of the cursed being, so normal building materials are still hard to come by, which was the cause for the delay in more airships being built.
But now, with access to the Dungeon again, a large influx of materials is helping with the restoration of the villages… and that thought reminds me that I should check on my Star Tree, so I send a portion of my perception over to take a look at it.
The Star Tree shows almost no growth, except for tiny roots slowly growing from the seed. It's going to be a slow-growing tree, and will require me feeding it a ton of mana to speed up its growth.
"Are you done with training the priestesses now, Tusile?" I ask.
"For now," she replies. "I really should have let the others take over a while ago, since we were short on elders already, and I placed too many burdens on Guklaro."
Guklaro looks a lot less stressed lately, now that she no longer has to hold up the responsibilities of the village by herself.
"I am sorry for how I acted before, Alysara," Guklaro apologizes. "I chastised and patronized you for your mental health without realizing how badly my own was overburdened."
"I accept your apology, Guklaro," I answer with a nod and a smile. I can't imagine what it's like to run this growing village all by myself... actually, I can, probably something similar to dealing with Lunaleyan politics, and I was done after just a few days of that while Guklaro was at it for months.
"So, what brings you here today?" Tusile asks.
"I found a way to improve our Kyhosa, with a high chance of turning them into magic items... maybe? Either way, there's a powerful ritual that we can do in a month's time..."
I explain everything I learned from Kayafe and Safyr; thankfully, the elders keep their questions until I am finished.
"So, this hinges on everyone believing that this will work, and we have about a month to prepare..." Guklaro says, thinking.
"What prompted you to ask the Guardian about rituals?" Tusile asks. "It's not something we have a history for, or not surviving history, anyway."
"It's to cure my cursed skills," I say, watching the elders’ jaws drop.
"Cure? But from what you said about rituals, I can't think of how the two are correlated," Venly says.
"The ritual itself is not what will cure my cursed skills," I correct Elder Venly. "It is needed to empower my Kyhosa, which will hopefully become powerful enough to complete Kayafe's trial, the Analysha, which will give me a legendary point that I can then use to cure a cursed skill. I have many more things to prepare for this ritual, relating to making my Kyhosa as powerful as it can get."
I continue to discuss the specifics with the elders, and we eventually get to the design of the ritual site. There are still many things to change, but the foundation and the bathing area can be built.
The elders like the idea of the ritual. Another social gathering where all the villages get together will be useful in encouraging inter-village relations, and they even seem to want to make the bathing part of the ritual a yearly event, even though it's mostly superficial and not actually a ritual. The presence of the special bathing oil will still preserve the strength of the ritual, so long as that isn't made yearly.
I make sure to stress the importance of rarity to the elders, since that is a part of why the ritual will be powerful, and they agree to consider a once-in-a-decade meeting, if only to keep knowledge of the ritual for future generations.