Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 59

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Learning how to modify a mana core was a key part of being a mage. The ignition itself was only the first step, and that didn’t really do anything but wake up the core so that the entire thing started producing mana instead of just the terminus point. Depending on how well it was handled, the average mage could expect to see their mana generation increase ten-fold. My technique was a bit more thorough, and I’d managed to double that number.

With Father, he’d been my only student and I’d been able to work closely to guide him, but there had also been outside situations necessitating shortcuts. We’d still managed a respectable sixteen times baseline increase, confirmed once I’d had a few days to get accurate measurements, but I would not have said I was satisfied with it. Given the time to do it right, I was sure he could have managed to do better.

Now I had four students and a dozen other projects all making demands at my time. Freeing Nermet had been my top priority, and with that finished, I’d turned my attention to making more storage crystals, faster. My current models were a little bit better than the one I’d made for myself a year ago, but there was really only so much I could realistically do to improve them. Every one I made was a net gain for the total mana the village produced, especially now that people had a working barrier and were easy to convince to make the effort to learn to use a storage crystal.

I’d ended up scrapping the set Iskara had owned. They were so inefficient that they were barely better than a draw stone. Recycling them to serve as the base units for a new set of storage crystals saved me a bit of time, but not much else. Fortunately, all the mana used in their creation was being supplied by the rest of the village, so time was the deciding factor when I was deciding how to proceed.

My personal mana crystal was also getting close to max capacity, a sight that would have pleased me greatly under other circumstances. Unfortunately, finding the time to work on my own lattice was difficult with all the demands of the village. Shel wanted more glass every day, both for their new construction and to stockpile spares. I was trying to stay on top of this project since I planned on claiming a portion of the new greenhouse, and it was fortunately the least time-consuming of my ongoing projects.

Training the new students took up about half my waking hours. The walk to town to clear out the draw stones and storage crystals, then to the manor to empower the ward stone before returning home cost me another two hours. Storage crystal manufacturing was an ongoing project that I prioritized since it was resulting in good mana returns and it provided a way for the entire village to work on basic mana manipulation, but it would still be weeks before I’d made enough of them that I didn’t need to do daily laps to harvest the mana.

Between all of that and various odd jobs, I only had a few hours a day to work on myself, and those hours were regularly consumed with visits to or from my family. It was only now, finally, with my work on Nermet completed, that I was able to start tapping into all the mana I’d saved up to begin constructing my lattice, which brought me back around to my original thought: learning how to modify a mana core was integral to being a successful mage.

The theory was simple. A mana core was the part of a person that touched on mana, drew it from the Astral Realm, and collected it for use here in the physical world. A normal person’s core only touched the Astral Realm at a single point, but a mage with an ignited core touched the Astral Realm in a much larger space. How much larger was dependent on a few factors, one of which was just the size of the person.

Mana cores grew with age, the same way bones and organs did. All other things being equal, an adult might generate three or four times as much mana as a child just by virtue of being bigger. That was also why certain species of monsters grew to such large proportions, because when it came to mana generation, it was an inarguable fact that bigger was better. There were no downsides to going big if the only concern was sheer amount of mana generated.

For us reasoning, sapient beings who possessed the ability to modify our mana cores, bigger cores were harder to work on. It was more than possible to take a smaller, person-sized core and change it in such a way that it generated mana more rapidly than a giant’s. Of course, it was just as possible for that giant to modify his own core to maintain his superiority, but it was more difficult and it became less and less likely to see monsters with cores beyond stage three or four.

This was why giant, sapient creatures were the apex predators of Manoch. Monsters like dragons with both sheer size and the ability to modify their cores were among the most dangerous beings in existence. There were a few deep-sea leviathans that might rival them in power, but fortunately, their territories rarely had any overlap.

All of that was far beyond what I was trying to achieve in my almost-four-year-old body. Right now, I had a stage one core, fully ignited and touching on mana. What I needed to do in order to advance to stage two was to form my lattice, which was done in a process similar to growing a mana crystal, except I had to do it inside my core. The lattice was visualized somewhat like runes that had been laid down in lines on the inner walls of my core, creating new points of contact with the Astral Realm.

Having bits of crystallized mana floating in my core while I manipulated them was not a comfortable experience, but it would be worth it when I was done. There were a million variations on the patterns used, and the one I’d selected was balanced to give me short-term power without sacrificing long-term flexibility. I wanted to be able to add onto and replace parts of my lattice as I grew and my mana core got bigger.

Eventually, when I was an adult, my lattice would be three-dimensional and resemble a sort of spider web of interconnected runes that filled the inside of my core. For now, that wasn’t really possible without constant, weekly maintenance. If I tried it as I currently was, the anchor points would separate from the walls and the whole thing would collapse. Using stronger anchors would inhibit the growth of my mana core, so the only realistic option was to create something modular that didn’t attempt to bridge the interior of my core, but instead crawled all over the walls like creeping ivy.

Or at least, that was what I would do if I could find the time to work on it. It had been four days since I’d sent Nermet on his way, and it seemed like Shel had made it her mission to make it impossible for me to get more than half an hour of uninterrupted time.

I didn’t even need to check to know it was her knocking on my door twenty minutes after I’d settled in place on my bed to turn my attention to my mana core. She had this irritating habit of knocking in a pattern, two beats, pause, three beats, repeat.

Annoyed, I cracked open one eye and glared at the door. As tempting as it was to just ignore her, the problem with being on house arrest was that she knew I was there. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a guard standing outside the door. They were getting real sick of that too, especially since it turned out that a new construction with multiple rooms wasn’t in the plan after all.

With great reluctance, I stood up and crossed the hut to open the door. “Hello, Shel,” I said.

“Gravin. Hi. The next council meeting is in an hour. Time to go.”

I would have liked a little bit more warning than that. She’d seen me a few hours ago for our regular class. Showing up at my door and dragging me there unexpectedly made it feel more like I was being summoned to appear before the council rather than meeting them on my terms. There was a time when I would have summoned the entire council at my convenience, sometimes literally pulling them from wherever they were to attend to me.

Admittedly, I hadn’t done it much in the last few centuries of my life. At that point, I was old and too tired to be bothered. I had spent most of my time alone, uninterested in the world or its problems. In a way, it was nice to become involved again on such a limited scale. There weren’t so many players that it became hard to keep track of them, and none of them were so powerful that I had to worry about them suborning any of the other ones.

It was easy and safe. I was the only one with any magic at all, even. On the other hand, I lacked the significant advantages I normally had, so I suppose it evened out somewhat. Otherwise I never would have been summoned to a council meeting with no notice like this.

I followed along at a moderate pace, slightly faster than a walk but not quite a jog. It was nothing new when walking with an adult, and even though I was extremely aware of how silly I must look, I’d grown accustomed to it. It wasn’t worth the horrendous mana expense something more dignified would run me.

“What’s tonight’s meeting for?” I asked as we cut out through the southeast side of the forest to travel directly to the manor.

“General reports and coordination with a bit of time set aside for you to update us on everything you’re responsible for. I told them you wanted to talk specifically about our upcoming ignitions as well.”

“Everyone going to be there?”

“Melmir sends someone else half the time. Solidaire usually shows up but is always late,” Shel said. “Karad is there the whole time but he’s so distracted with other things that he’s not paying close attention.”

“It doesn’t sound very productive,” I said.

Shel shrugged. “It’s not. Such is the price of bureaucracy.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Alkerist didn’t even have two hundred people. They knew nothing of the burdens of a functional bureaucracy, where progress through the system was measured in weeks or months, not hours. Just getting a request seen could be an ordeal in and of itself, and a project that should have taken two weeks from front to finish could easily drag on for an entire season, only to end up cancelled barely half way done.

When considered from an efficiency standpoint, there was something to be said for an iron-fisted tyrant’s rule. Of course, benevolent tyrants were a rarity and they’d eventually be replaced by someone who wanted all of the power, but lacked any sort of empathy for the citizens they ruled over.

We were a long way away from that, though perhaps not so far from a petty tyrant in the form of someone like Noctra. If his cabal did what I expected, they’d be sending people soon to retake control of the village, only this time they’d have to do it by force if they wanted to return to the output Noctra had gotten from them. Nobody was going to believe lies like his again.

I made a mental note to discuss what preparations they’d made on that front in addition to the business of igniting a few cores in the near future as we entered the manor. Somebody had taken the time to clean up the meeting hall on the west side of the building, even though the meetings were still closed to the council members only.

I settled into a chair near Shel, traded a nod with Karad, and waited for everyone else to arrive.

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