Capítulo 14: Chapter 24: R&D: The New Magic
Let organized this into several project. This was our record on mana research now that someone other than me could see the detail.
Not that this would make us a living god or anything.
But I am happy to say this week gave us a rousing success.
...
Project 1: Experimenting with Vision detection --Sixth Sense
Hypothesis: Mana help improved dodging ability.
We set the shooting ranged with automatic ball-launcher that materialize from wherever Scathach's hid her training (read torture) device.
"Fire." I ordered.
The ball hit a foam barrier at another end of the wall.
"What did you see?" I asked the observers with Mana Art activated. I also partook in the experiment and detect a ripple in mana prior to the ball was shot.
"A mana traced from Scathach to the ball the a ripple." Cy answered.
"Some kind of ripple." Said Lux
"A very slow moving ball." Said the Badger.
Great observation guys. You would make my physics teacher a Nobel laureate with that descriptions.
"Okay let test how it affect the dodging ability," I said stepping on to the ring while shaking in my boot. "Fire at me with..."
Before anyone press the button, my mana detected ripple at my stomach and warned me about the incoming shot as well as intent and power behind that attack. This allowed I to dodge the surprise fastball right on time.
"Good dodging," Scathach commented.
"Okay, with that..." I detected and dodged another fast ball. "...We determine..." Oops, that one nearly hit my head. "That mana can be used..." I caught two incoming balls and threw it away. "To detect incoming..." And here came another fast ball that simply too...
Pak!
The ball hit me in the crotch and I fell.
"So it can act as an intention detector but it did not increased the user reflex," Cy noted like a true researcher. "Some kind of precognition technique."
"Let call it Action Sensor." Lux said much to Cy's chagrin.
"Lux, my dear, that was terrible name," Scathach said. "Let stick with Sixth Sense."
Result: Hypnosis proven true. Sixth Sense became a thing and little Rem needed recovery time.
Note: On repeated testing, Cytortia could dodged every ball by the skin with her hair breath but reacted too slow to caught any of them. On the other end of the scale, Lux caught all 97 balls fired at her and juggled all of them.
...
Project 2: Spell Crafting Replacement Research--Mana Engineering (ME)
Hypothesis: Spell-crafting is a waste of time and resource. Better method must be develop.
We began working on a basic lightning spell. Scathach named this the easiest to master and thus the best we could take apart and modified. We also had a perfect guinea pig, namely Lux, on hand to test the result. But when we started to prod at the spell. It dawn on me how much I didn't know about spell-crafting.
"The basic [Lightning Bolt] spell created using 2 layer circle. The first layer basically converted mana into electricity, the connective line gathered it and the secondary circle focus and directed the bolt." Cy explained.
" I never liked this spell," Scathach demonstrated by creating a glowing magical circle in mid-air with few Latin phrases written on its. "It was designed so that anyone could use it. A spell to easy to use but lack the niche or power. To be fair, it provide a mage with lightning magic a quick way out because they could skip the conversion circle but any mage would find learning this spell and training with it a waste of time."
"What about the efficiency?" I asked.
Meanwhile, Lux was noting everything down. This was her first chance at formal magical education so she was taking all of its in.
"Depends if you had a lightning magic or not. The best spell can get up to 68% for lightning mage, 50% for fire or wind mage and anything else is at whopping 30%"
"You also need to consider the code," Scathach said. "The code, the wording inside the circle, directly command the spell. You can see how I create the circle right. Most mages need a lot of time to process the code. The more powerful the magic, the more code is required, and that directly affected the cast time."
"Why did most mage used code? And how did this linked with Scathach's lecture on spell-crafting medium." Lux said. Wow, if only the folk I knew work this hard we wouldn't have economic meltdown.
"The code is used too control and force the energy movement," Cy answered. "It gave us a good control interface for the spell. The Ancient rune or Hieroglyph used by Scathach and the Aesir could even directly converted mana into another form of energy and manipulated a phenomenon using the runes. It was a highest form of spell-crafting there is. The reason we used a spell-casting medium was to aid the synergy of our mind to the code and make controlling high amount of codes possible."
Now I get how spell-crafting work. The user employed the median to created and manipulated circle and code which in turned controlled, built and shaped their spell. The circle was powered by burning mana or using the user's own magic. To put its simply, the user was the programmer, the medium was the computer, code was a command and circle was the software that result in spell as the output while mana was burnt as an input.
The ancient rune used by Scathach's function differently, the rune converted the mana, in this case the coal, directly into explosive and then launch lobbed its to the poor sod on the receiving end with another set of rune. It's simpler and more efficient that code but also amazingly crude.
I had to do better than that. Mana was more like an energy career not a fuel. Which meant that 2 new concepts had to be invented from the ground up: the way to extract energy from Mana and the way to utilized that energy.
That was how I, Scathach and Cy was working on a new model for magic while Lux distributed the water. In the end, I basically refined my new branch of magic. I had many idea at at a time. May be using mana like an electron in the circuit. Or maybe using its as construction material.
Nah, that view was still too limiting. I am falling into the line of how mages who didn't know what was mana think. Mana was an energy career but it was a living carrier with a will and life of its own. Thinking it as simple unit of energy was not going to represent its best ability for what it is. If there was only a model, I could build my design on. A model that represent how small lifeforms cooperate and coexist to the collective result.
Where that I might find that miracle model? What Architect would be smart enough to design it? Yet again when I explained this dilemma, someone among us actually managed to surprise me.
"Excellent idea Rem," Cy said pulling a bunch of books from the trunk I never knew she had. "We already had that model!"
"Where?" Lux said. "You knew a design engineer who could produce that?"
"When in doubt turn toward mother nature!" She flipped the book and showed me.
How could I be so stupid?
"Great job Cy," I looked at the diagram on the book explaining how living cell work.
Human, plant and living things in general was made out of cells. The smallest unit of lifeforms. The group cells form tissue which controlled the biological function of the organ. And the organ made up the living things. Then using this model and the fact that mana could act as a carrier of the energy meant the ground for a new branch of magic can be born.
It took several days because I never did this before but I had an alchemist who also knew how plant and medicine work. In the end, we got the working prototype for the spell. I had no idea how to explained this hardship. Simply, describing every emergency dispel from Scathach would already be too hard breaking. This weeks saw Cy cried herself to sleep each night when the prototype fail. We had to lean on Lux who selflessly devote herself to carrying drink and cheering up development team over blown up prototype. Even I did not escape this cycle of pain, staying up all night pondering over and over on how to make this work and noting down enough idea to fill several pages worth of A4 papers only for it to flop next morning. In the end after countless trailed and error we managed to build this prototype.
Now test time...ready the test subject.
"Okay, Lux launch the [Lightning Bolt]."
Lux created a glowing magic circle using a ring Scathach lend her and the resulting blast charred the target.
"Now, the prototype," I said.
"You meant the one you spent five minutes explaining to me and the one that baffled Scathach even when she formulated the concept into my head."
Funny, how teaching people skill work. The easiest way was to download the concept, in this case the code and the spell structure, into the mind. Some of the simple spell like [Magic Bullet] and [Lightning Bolt] work perfectly fine. However, this method hit a snag with our new creation because Lux had to learn the basic component of this creation and understand it function not simply recited a formula.
Lux started assembling the spell.
Firstly, was the Dynamo ring. It was design from my [Photon Ring], its job was to act as a pump for the Lux magic, basically the construct's heart. Flowing through it was a stream of high energy mana that acted as a blood cell carrying her magic. The stream flow into a specialized mana component acting emission pieces that collected energy from the stream, concentrated it then into a projection point. Meanwhile, the exhausted mana stream flowed back into the Dynamo ring.
Each piece required me, Cy and Lux to tweak and redesigned from scratch. We spent wo days dissecting my [Photon Ring]. The mana stream was easy enough. Meanwhile, the part like the emission piece required many sleepless night trying to find a way to tweak the mana energy output mechanism. Even when that was created, we still needed to rework it so that the energy was compressed instead of flying every where--that was a nightmare. In the end, Cy develop the mana cyclone that locked the magic discharged into a singular beam. I had never seen her looked that proud before.
This is the moment we knew if this was the dawn or the fall. Cy looked like she was about to cry. Even Scathach, who was the design adviser and the person holding the dubious honor of a safety cut button in formed of a fully charged dispelled rune primed and ready to fire, gulped from the tension.
Yet Lux remained calm and created a circle intricately connected to rapidly swirling structure via a strand of light then fired the spell.
Golden beam of electricity a size of a thin tree trunk blasted into the target and annihilated the it into pieces. The beam of our success penetrated the trees and the rock behind it, leaving only crackled of lightning and trail of molten rock on a cliff's surface Lux cut off the stream
Scathach's dispelled rune dissipated in stunned but I need to ask.
"How do you grade that prototype?"
Scathach in her badger form dropped the spell still flabbergasted. Next to me Lux was clenching her fist like she was a number away from winning a national lottery.
"Given that Lux learned magic for barely a month and have no prior concept of spell-casting?" Scathach looked at us flabbergasted. "Compare 'that' to the spell someone at your level supposed to cast was like comparing a RPG to a rock. That of course depend on how much power did she used."
"Lux, how much did you..."
Lux craned her neck toward us slowly. She barely believed what she just do.
"The initial set-up with Dynamo ring used 70% less mana than I burned in [Lightning Bolt]," Lux said with a troubled smile. "Then emission point use even less, then I simply have to pour the left over energy pass the circuit."
"So for the same energy of basic spell," I looked at the charred path. "She unleash a super laser."
"YES!" Cy burst with happiness and began running around excitedly to vent her ecasty. "WE DID IT! WE DID IT! WE DID IT! TAKE THAT CHUANG! LET SEE HOW LONG YOU CAN SIT SMUGLY ON THAT UGLY THRONE OF YOUR TIE HUA! WHO IS LAUGHING NOW? HA HA HA!"
"Guys," Lux picked up a glowing Status ID. "The ID requested I named this skill. What should I do?"
"[Thunder Cell: Electron Blaster]," I and Cy repeated we already discussed earlier.
"[Thunder Cell]?" Scathach asked, completly surprise. "You sound like you are about to create a series of spell under this Archetype."
We beamed at Scathach.
The badger fell on her knee as she realized the ambition of the mad science fist.
"God forgive me," she muttered. "I just help these maniacs broke magic."
Result: Succeed beautifully in the early staged of development. With the success of Thunder Cell we received the morale boost we desperately needed. A following breakthrough by carefully adjusting and modifying force pulse generate from [Photon Ring] into a standing force field allowed us to created the [Photon] series by creating [Photon Sheild]. Cy, Lux and me already implemented the new [Photon] collection and newly minted [Thunder Cell: Lightning Field]. We already try to experiment with standing force concept to create a prototype mana construct with physical presence.
The future of Mana Engineering was truly bright. Scathach, in the other hand, had to drink away her pain.
Estado de energía semanal
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