Prologue: Joanna (Part 4)

She started to direct the exotic particles, combining them through minute collisions to form short chains. These started to resonate with each other somewhat in unison. The kaleidoscope slowly gaining a faint red hue. She realised that the small chains were beginning to come together, like tiny magnets pulling each other. However, they were still too energetic to form larger chains. As they pulled on and collided with each other, they tended to destroy each other.

Panicking, she frantically tried to repair the broken chains, by reforming whole chains from the pieces. She quickly fell into a cycle of chasing tails.

A jolt from the link with Gilgamesh, a sudden and overbearing mental pressure, brought her back to her senses as she fought to resist it. A cold bead of sweat rolled down her forehead as she realised she'd almost lost control. "Hehehehe," she felt, rather than heard, the demon snigger.

"Don't tunnel vision Joanna, you already have the threshold for a centimetre scale crystal; let's instead, try to improve the quality." She counselled herself.

She took the existing small chains and started to join them together, causing them to incident and drawing out enough energy to make them join into larger chains, twice the size of small chains. After she determined that she was at the 70% threshold, she started to join the double-length chains, to form triple-length and quadruple-length. These were heavier and slower and had a stronger resonance with each other than the smaller single and double-length chains.

At this point, the process was at its midpoint, entering a temporary equilibrium phase as the larger chains soaked in the ambient energy and caused the smaller chains to slow down and have a higher fusion success rate. The colour kaleidoscope moved from a mostly red hue to orange, to yellow, and the yellow started to get more intense.

She felt a moment of inspiration, and started to form octuple and sextuple chains; borrowing more soul intent from the demon to increase her success rate, and achieved the 50% threshold of octuple chains. She noticed a green hue in the kaleidoscope and noticed that the frequent flashes had significantly reduced. She sensed that she was on the right path, and started to form 14- and 16- and even 18-length chains. She watched the kaleidoscope jumped straight to mid-range blue.

The reaction started to suffer from reduced energy within the system, most of it lost as heat and light. She started to raise the heat, trying to keep up the previous rate of reaction, and trying to slow down the apparent rate of the process as it entered the third and final stage: crystallization. She could feel her manna reserve plummet rapidly. She felt pushed into a corner under the pressure.

She grabbed at her last resort, drawing on the demon's manna pool. The manna felt scalding hot, causing her to cough blood and lose concentration for a moment.

At that moment the flame went out, and the crystallization continued independent if her agency. She watched in discomfort as the reaction took its course, she saw something she hadn't been seeing with her spiritual eyes, the horned snake monster core had completely vanished. In its place, a beautiful red and orange crystal was forming. She knew that the crystal chains were now coalescing, out of their own resonance, into the largest stable structure they could with the energy left in the system.

Even though it had felt like several hours to her, in truth, only two minutes had passed since the crystallization process had begun, and within 5 minutes the entire process left behind a beautiful red crystal. She took it out and saw orange veins, and a dark amorphous mist swims within the crystal.

A wand-quality magic crystal!