270, 2/2

Erick stood upon a lonely mountain in the southern hemisphere on the Third Sphere, sparse with greenery, under a simple blue sky that was not blue at all. It was colored blue with illusions. The actual color coming down was sunshine-colored; mostly white with a bit of yellow. The actual sun was nowhere to be seen, for the ‘sun’ was somewhere far in the north; too far past the horizon of this shell and too far beyond the bottom of the floor of the shell above to make any sort of appearance in this location.

When Solomon had created the Shells of Veird on the Day of Genesis, he had wrapped the world in adamantium and added a bunch of water and dirt in the general shapes of the continents on the Surface.

The place Erick now stood was in the general shape of Continental Nergal, on the Old Surface below, but it was not really the same shape at all, and the life that existed here was not the same either. The shell above this ‘Third Sphere’ was a similarly bad-translation of this sphere’s ‘continental Nergal’, which ended up looking more like a whole bunch of islands and not at all like the solid land mass that was Nergal. Those islands on the Fourth Sphere were more connected to the ‘bad translation’ of Glaquin to the north, forming a whole different continent, than they were forming anything that truly resembled Continental Nergal.

Veird was now a matryoshka of nested spheres of different continents and oceans leading all the way up to the Silver Surface —now the Silver Forest— of Sphere Eleven. Prior to the creation of that Silver Forest, the Silver Surface was a reflective defensive layer, and the Silver Staging Area of Sphere Ten was the actual final inhabited zone…

Erick would get to all that later.

But the idea of the improperly-copied Surfaces was a good starting point for this Siphon-esque framework.

Perhaps there were multiple reasons why Solomon and Syllea and all the others to come before never really got any use out of ambient mana accretion, aside from Malevolence in the air. Sure, ambient mana was ‘dead’, and one probably needed to use resons to make it ‘live’ again, but also the Script simply prevented certain things even without trying to prevent them.

Like, mana pools were intrinsically tied to the Script, but even when you got ‘out’ of the Script (into Ar’Cosmos, for instance, where accretion and cores determined how much mana a person could hold onto, but not how much they made) the Authority of the Script was still there, still impacting a person’s control over their own mana in certain, inalienable ways. It was very possible that it was impossible to properly gather ambient mana on one’s own when one’s mana wasn’t under one’s own control.

Maybe Erick could fix that.

Also, Solomon was a Creation Wizard, and Syllea wasn’t a Wizard at all, and Solomon’s base mana ‘flavor’ wasn’t the highly-mana-variable Benevolence like Erick’s was. Solomon was Genesis.

Erick was the Paradox Wizard who had already solved the ‘unsolvable’ problem of multiple, untrained people perfectly using their mana together. That solution was [Renew]; which gave rise to the node networks all across Veird, and also Erick’s own Mana Siphon Ability, which was [Renew] with Erick at the drawing center of that ‘node network’.

Mana Siphon was basically [Undertow Star] turned into an Ability.

Mana Siphon did nothing with ambient mana, but Erick could solve the problem of ambient mana collection and unification, too.

Erick began weaving ideas in the air, making spheres of multiphasic transformation and culmination into solid plots. The basic idea of this was to be a corona-like magic of Authority and condensation and then eventually Paradoxing straight into the power of the soul of the one who wielded it. Soon, Erick had a bunch of images holding in the air all around him.

It looked good.

Probably a lot of mistakes there, though.

Erick moved on to the practical ideas of this new spell, and probably Ability. If this worked out, then Erick would gift it to Rozeta and the Script. If this worked, it would likely become a cornerstone of making a personal Script that they could arm warriors with, for fighting against Nothanganathor.

The Script already had a version of what Erick was working on, though. Turning ambient mana into personal mana was exactly what the Script did all the time. One of the cornerstones of a manaminer, after all, was churning intentless, atmospheric mana, into mana that actually did stuff, like automatically defending the land, and, in the Script’s case, gave that mana back to people for them to use.

The manaminers that Erick had worked with were massive, clunky things, though. They brought mana to ‘life’ through massive ‘tubes’ of dead mana ‘running beside’ alive mana, and a general ‘proximity-creates-life’ sort of ‘re-alivening’ of the dead mana. Powerminer Incorporated and the various miners that Erick had played around with used a whole lot more special terms than that, but the idea was there. Proximity creates life in the mana, and so, if you went slow enough with it, and if you drew mana through enough living things, then you’d get a bunch of living mana out the other end that could be used for stuff, like ‘holding up the sky’ and ‘allowing people to cast [Mend] on their broken shoelaces’, and other such things.

“Of course,” Erick said to himself as he began moving his aura around and in the air, “If this is to work at all, it requires mana-systems to work at human-size the same way it works at 10-kilometer size, with its 10,000-kilometer-long multi-dimensional pipes…” He paused. “… Or larger. Hmm. Nothanganathor probably uses a lot of ambient mana. Being sun-sized would allow one to easily incorporate ambient-mana-reclamation systems rather easily.”

… Did Erick need to be in dragon form to work ambient mana properly?

… That’s an experiment for a different day, or perhaps this day—

But first!

Erick formed a ring-tunnel with his aura in front of him, about 5 meters across and a meter thick, and then he split that ring-tunnel into two different sides with his hands. With his right hand, he sent out mana into the space, making it go right in the tunnel and then curve around to the left. White lightning-light flowed into the tunnel, rapidly increasing the level of mana within.

On the left side, Erick held his left hand into the flow, and he tried to open up his soul to let the ambient mana back in—

… He tried to open his soul…

… He tried to open his soul…

… He tried to open his soul…

This was not working.

The tunnel filled with mana and the pressure began to create mana crystals… And Erick pulled his hands back. The ring remained filled with ambient mana… Which was good enough to try and absorb from there, Erick guessed. No need to go for the release+absorb in the same action; not yet, anyway. Soon, the mana soup lost all cohesion with Erick’s basic, living intent and became invisible ambient mana.

Erick stuck a hand into the tunnel of mana soup and let his hand linger in the density.

He turned on his Mana Siphon, just to see if that worked. And nope, of course it didn’t. Erick had made his Mana Siphon specifically to absorb ‘living mana’; the stuff inside of spellwork and other people. Ambient mana was a whole different problem, as Erick had already known way back then.

So.

Couldn’t use Mana Siphon to do this.

… His body was a manifestation that he could recreate at any moment in time since his real body was the crystal form— well. It was a self-recreating system of many varied parts.

Point was, Erick could breathe in potentially-lethal mana vapors and try to bring in the ambient mana that way.

Erick stuck his head into the tunnel of Benevolence-flavored, ambient mana soup.

It was kinda stifling.

He breathed in the stuff, and it turned into crystals in his lungs. They poked. Erick bled. Kinda really painful, actually. But not lethal. Erick breathed in the ambient mana, and wondered why it was crystallizing in his body at all, but then, of course, his body had a bunch of ‘seed manas’ for it to crystallize on. His body was his crystalline self, after all; even his fleshy-display-body was Paradoxically also his crystal body.

The Script kept the crystals from getting too big, though. Even as they formed, they dissipated. Erick stopped breathing and the crystals stopped forming; they only dissipated.

Erick was kinda stumped, in a few different ways.

He could surely use his Authority to make the dead mana his, but that seemed improper. Other people weren’t using Authority to do this at all… Were they? Solomon didn’t seem like he was.

Erick thought about getting a second opinion, and he thought about Yggdrasil. Margleknot had to deal with sorting through and combining all different powers from many different universes all into resons.

“Yggdrasil? Are you there?”

… No response.

Erick smirked at that. Apparently his son wasn’t looking at everything, all the time.

Erick opened a portal to Yggdrasil at Candlepoint and stepped out onto his son’s roots. He looked up at the flaming green canopy overhead, and at the lightning-like branches, and asked, “Got a moment to talk about ambient mana reclamation?”

Yggdrasil stepped onto his own roots in his green orcol form. “Not much time. What’s up?”

“Quick question, then: Do you use Authority to make multiple types of powers into resons, or some sort of Ability, or some sort of… something else?” Erick said, “This whole thing started off as me trying to use Genesis mana with Solomon, and that didn’t work, so I assumed I had to actually experience Genesis mana through taking some in for myself, which led to the ambient mana thing, which I am having trouble with. Specifically the ‘taking into myself’ part.”

Yggdrasil was instantly hesitant when Erick asked about Margleknot, but he at least listened to the whole request before denying, saying, “I can’t tell you exactly what’s happening there because of old agreements with many different people. I can tell you that I use a bunch of different systems, and they’re all basically, eventually, reson-based. Resons are simply easier to use than all other forms of power, and that is especially true for me. Maybe not for you or many other people, but it is true for me.” Yggdrasil asked, “Why not Mana Siphon some Genesis in?” Yggdrasil made a [Ward] of Genesis in the shape of a small orb. “Here.”

Erick almost said that he wanted to do this the ambient-way… But then he poked at the orb with some Mana Siphon. The orb gradually drained, because Mana Siphon was rather weakened inside the Script, and Erick didn’t feel like fighting against the Script right now.

When the orb was gone, Erick held up a hand and tried to channel Genesis.

He got some weird sparks that crackled, more than chimed.

Yggdrasil raised an eyebrow. “Strange?”

Erick felt a little bit of vindication, as he said, “Mana Siphon is designed to take all other spellwork and turn it into power for myself, which means erasing the original power in that spellwork and turning it into [Renew]-framed power.”

Yggdrasil said, “Ahh… Yeah. That would do it.”

“Anyway.” Erick asked, “Does size make it easier to convert ambient mana to living mana?”

“Yes. Economies of scale always win out over individual works.” Yggdrasil said, “Bigger manaminers do a lot better than smaller manaminers.”

“Yup. Thought so.”

“You could probably reconnect to the Script and get some Genesis mana that way… But yeah. I can see you don’t really want to do that.” Yggdrasil continued, “Alternatively, you could harmonize with it? Benevolence should be able to become Genesis; they’re very closely related.” Yggdrasil asked, “Did harmonization not work?”

Erick shrugged. “Not really.” He held up a hand, and he tried to replicate the singing, chiming power he heard from Solomon’s Genesis, but all he accomplished was a sputtering disharmony of mana with no idea what it was. “I have realized something else, too. Watch.” Erick tried to Alter his mana into Purity, and he only ended up with Light-flavored Ice. “This is an attempt at Elemental Purity, which I saw some in Margleknot and other places, like inside the Black Gate. But this is not Purity at all.”

The Script tried to Silence Erick’s speaking of the word ‘Purity’ as an Element, but he was beyond that type of control, and so was Yggdrasil. Since Erick hadn’t produced any actual Purity, though, it left his mana display untouched.

Yggdrasil frowned a little. He instantly understood the problem. “Benevolence only knows the mana that you’ve experienced through the Script— or rather, ‘personally experienced’ makes more sense. I did not foresee this problem. You used Annihilation on Margleknot, and that’s Banned here.”

Erick raised an eyebrow. He had a think, about his [Shadow Altered] spells he had tried one time, that had acted like Annihilation. “Annihilation is Banned here, then? I suppose my times using it were just flukes that were made to look like other magics.” … Erick ignored that tangent, for now. “I need to fix this Elemental Genesis thing, obviously. I’m not sure I want to fix it with a flex of Wizardry, because then I’d need to do that all the time.”

“Don’t worry about needing to do Wizardry every time you use something outside of currently established Benevolence.” Yggdrasil held up a hand, and channeled a Silence into the air, along with a small prominence of invisibility. “That’s Purity, and I’m doing it with Benevolence.” He channeled Genesis next, making a little silver tangle of half-seen charms float up and away from him, like metal bells that weren’t bells at all. “And that’s Genesis, also done with Benevolence. I am almost 100% certain that what you’re experiencing is some mental block, maybe because you don’t want to encroach on Solomon’s power. Or maybe you’re just not actually exposed to Genesis yet. Could be either, really.”

Erick hadn’t realized that about himself, but… “Maybe. Hmm.”

“Just do some minor Wizardry to make it so you have always experienced Genesis.”

“… That’s one way to do it.” Erick thought. And then he moved on, “Moving on: Does a longer tube-system make turning dead mana into alive mana easier? Does Nothanganathor have a very, very large tube system to eat ambient mana, do you think?”

“Yes and yes,” Yggdrasil said, without reservation. And then he tried to keep his anger in check, as he said, “I’m pretty sure he turned Margleknot’s Fractal Mark into part of his collection magics. Not sure which part, but it’s there.”

“We’ll get it back for you—”

“Not for me, father. For Margleknot. We’re the same but… not.”

Erick simply nodded. “Okay. Thanks for the ambient mana help. I was kinda trying to avoid needing to use resons to make ambient mana my own, but I suppose that is necessary.”

“It always takes resources of some sort to work with ambient mana.” Yggdrasil said, “Time, physical energy, resons; those are the most common. You’re taking something that was dead and making it alive and a part of you again. It’s simple digestion. Sort of like a good, working sewer system, using bacteria to clean up water. Even the largest manaminer systems are these kinds of mana digesters at their base, with people serving as the living systems cleaning up mana in the sewers of a planet, or other sort of protected space.”

“Huh!” Erick chuckled. “Back to the sewers, eh?”

“Living things never really leave the sewers; they simply try to live outside of the really dirty parts.”

Erick laughed. “There’s some philosophy for you.”

Yggdrasil smiled. “I gotta go, father.”

“Me, too. Thanks for talking.” Erick hugged him once, asking, “Want to be there when I finally get Dinnamoth and Adavido to talk to me, at peace talks?”

Yggdrasil squeezed Erick and let go. “No, but I will be there because I need to be there.”

Erick smiled at that. “Understandable. It probably won’t happen for a while, anyway.”

Yggdrasil nodded, then departed.

Erick went back to the mountain of Not-Nergal, in the Not-Splinter Mountains of the Third Sphere, and experimented with magics.

Ten minutes in, and Erick realized he had a new, big concern.

“Lead.” Erick said to himself, “Lead unaspects all intent from mana, thus fully making it dead, thus making it able to be brought into the Script easier?”

Thoughts swirled.

“What’s the opposite of lead?”

More thoughts.

“… No fucking clue.” Erick gazed up at a massive structure of mana pumps and gravity wells and tubes of aurawork that was actually getting a little difficult to mentally maintain, because the structure was around a kilometer wide and filled with stuff. Except there was no lead. “And lead doesn’t work outside of the Script, anyway.”

And all of that was a tangent he didn’t need to think about right now.

Erick dispelled all of the structures he had created.

He went simple.

Erick held up his aura in a ball, about a meter across, and spoke to himself, “Sounds like Elemental Genesis mana in there, yeah?”

And the inside of that part of his aura transformed into a tangle of almost illusionary, silver charms, ringed in white sparks and chiming like Genesis.

Erick was surprised that worked, but it worked!

Erick hadn’t accreted in a long time, but he did that, wrapping the silver, chiming mana into his body, and because it was already his own, he had no trouble at all joining it with himself… Mostly. His aura flexed into his body, the silver part of it shimmering as it touched his skin, turning his skin briefly silver and revealing something almost crystal-like beneath the very surface of his flesh.

And then the Genesis faded.

Erick held up a hand and Altered some Benevolence into a prominence of silver, charming, chiming mana.

“So I cheated to get Genesis. This is fine.”

With a flex and a twist, Erick Shaped that Genesis into a Bolt.

A bullet shot from his aura and struck a rock up ahead, cracking off of that rock, the bullet deforming in the impact and then flying upward and away. Erick caught the bullet, and yeah. It was a bullet.

Erick held the semi-squished metal in his hand, feeling some weird sort of way.

He had made a bullet.

“A motherfucking bullet.”

Erick was kinda blown away by that.

What kind of metal was it, anyway? Erick gripped the metal and used his Class Ability of Metal Sense, that he had made himself, and discovered that the real fucking bullet was made of mostly iron with some aluminum, gold, silver, nickel, and osmium. It was pretty soft for a metal.

Erick fired off another Genesis Bolt at the rock ahead, but he slowed this one down with his aura, leaving it undamaged. It was shaped exactly like a bullet; a dome-cone on the front and a cylindrical body.

Erick laughed suddenly and loudly. Bullets! Here on Veird! How fucking crazy was that!

“And they stick around, too!” Erick said to himself, as he held the very real bullet in his hand. Erick smiled. “Good job on crashing the metals economy, Solomon— Oh! This one is even more silver than before.”

Erick turned his aura into an absolute machine gun, churning out thousands of bullets a minute, tweaking his Shaping and Altering in hundreds of different ways, mostly through harmonizing his Particle Magic with Elemental Genesis. Bullets made of sodium shot out alongside bullets made of carbon. There went pure gold bullets and then Erick did some pushing to get uranium bullets.

Hydrogen bullets were a laugh.

Erick rapidly discovered that his [Genesis Bolt] —which he had not made into a real spell, yet— was not very good at actually homing in on the target. Which was to say that it was absolute shit at homing. Worse than shit, really. Erick had to actually aim with the bullets and oftentimes the bullet was affected by air and gravity and all that stuff that Bolt spells shouldn’t be affected by.

He fixed that problem by Shaping and casting the spell inside a long tube of aura. That tube was more trouble to maintain than it was worth when Erick could just fire more bullets at the problem.

Erick focused on platinum bullets, because those seemed the most practical; heavy, kinda solid. He added a copper-nickel jacket to it, which made the whole thing a bit harder to Alter and Shape for, but the resulting bullet was a lot stronger than the original, plain-platinum version; solid and heavy. The copper-platinum bullets had some real power to them…

Or as much power as the basic Bolt spell had, when its payload was real metal; so maybe 10 times the power of a normal Bolt? This version would probably blow a pumpkin up at 200 meters, and drive a centimeter or two into rock, but not much more than that. Still pretty good…

… Erick almost moved on to using Genesis to make rocket-propelled grenades and other completely inappropriate things to have on Veird, which is when he realized he didn’t want bullets and rockets and stuff like that here. Nope nope!

“Magic is much cooler than guns,” Erick said to himself, as he surveyed the vast, vast amounts of metal he had sprayed all over the mountainside. He grinned, despite himself. “This is pretty nifty, though!” Softer, he said, “Solomon did some great work.”

Erick could probably make… Hmm. A lot…

Erick paused.

“Solomon can make the breakthroughs.” Erick said to himself, “I’ll stick to making physical stuff when I need it, and without needing to use resons.”

And now, back to the problem of ambient mana collection, which was probably connected to the problem of Genesis, but not in a direct way at all.

Erick opened up his aura, and wondered if his problem was that he had purposefully closed himself off to outside influence except along the avenues which he had chosen to leave open. He had shut out his vulnerability, because to be vulnerable to soul attack was to die. This was kind of a large emotional problem, but it was also a magical problem, it seemed.

Adding to this, Erick had accreted perfectly for years upon years, and Rozeta’s Accretion even helped him accrete perfectly. In his ascension to True Wizard, Erick had purposefully solidified that part of himself, so that he would never accidentally accrete with ambient mana, if he ever needed to do such a thing ever again.

But to take in ambient mana, Erick needed to accrete poorly.

He already kinda knew how he would need to do it, too.

Erick held out a hand, and then opened his aura and his reson channels at the same time. The part of himself that he had re-carved into himself out of his old, defunct mana channels, was now used by resons, and his [Reson Wallet]. But he could turn those tunnels of golden resons into ambient mana ‘enliveners’… probably?

Erick adjusted his Status first to have 20% reson production; going up from 9%.

Invisible flickers began flexing inside his reson channels, alongside his veins, in a shadowy system of not-blood vessels, inundating his body as his mana turned into Banned power, the Script keeping those things from his sight.

Erick opened up a tiny, tiny tunnel of his aura, from his palm to where his core used to be, and began purposefully accreting through that flow of resons, which was almost like accreting normally, but not at all—

Sudden, completely surprising pain ripped across Erick’s palm. A centimeter of flesh dissolved away, like crystal melting. Erick shook out his hand and paused as his flesh came back, restored. His Status had briefly flickered down a few hundred points of Health out of billions, so there wasn’t any danger of dying, but it was not a good feeling.

Erick would need to find another way…

And now his skin was making reson crystals like so much broken glass poking out of him, so he turned that 20% allocation back to 9%.

With normalcy mostly restored, Erick tried creating his aura into a very, very long tunnel, curved in on itself a lot, kilometers-long and about the width of a human hair, and then he held that tunnel in his hand, with one end in the open air and the other leading into his actual body. Next, he extended some resons into that space. The resons were lost at first, as an invisible flex in the air that dissipated like so many Mind Mage tendrils, but then Erick started pulling in the ambient mana through that tunnel, and the resons came in first…

Not painful.

Mana was going inside of him, yes.

And not crystallizing along the way, but instead turning to tiny flickers of white lightning that then went inside of his body.

Erick kept an eye on his Status. His reson production briefly decreased because he was venting some of it, but then it came back as he drew those resons back into his body, along with all the mana in the air. He was ‘accreting’ with resons, so this got around the mental block of taking in ambient mana…

And it seemed to be working.

With those resons came the ambient mana they touched, and Erick barely noticed a drain on his resources. There was a draw, though. A certain sort of tiredness. Perhaps it was as strenuous as lifting a finger, or taking a step; nothing more serious than that.

Checking on his Mana production, Erick watched as it went from 1,505 per second to 1,508 per second, though he was taking some sort of damage from the draw, at around 38 damage per second to his Mana. Considering that, it seemed he was actually taking in 41 mana per second, which seemed to jive with how much mana was actually flowing through his reson-imbued-tube area. The overall change was a positive change, and that was what mattered.

He stopped the funnel.

His mana production went back down to 1,505 per second, and the damage stopped.

Erick smiled.

“Proof of concept proven!” Erick said, “Now to make sure I didn’t fuck myself up.”

Erick dove into his soul.

It took a minute to frameshift past the Script’s interference, but Erick eventually saw his Dark Mark as the black headwaters of a great river of iridescent white light. There, among that river, lay his Lightning Path Status, like crystal boulders, with the river rushing all around those solid buttons of power. It was a bit of an odd way to see it all, but it worked well enough. Everything looked normal enough.

He lifted halfway back into the present, made the reson tube again, and then began accreting resons and adjacent ambient mana into his soul once again. Erick looked inward—

He lost control of the structure. It took him a few tries to adjust the tube to be less complicated, and to hold onto it in that liminal space between consciousness and soul searching, but he got it.

Gazing upon the river…

Erick watched as nothing happened at the headwaters, near his Status.

Erick gradually moved away from his Status, toward the ocean of Mana, Health, and Psyche further and further away from everything important, but still in the river of his Lightning Path.

Finally, there at the very edges, Erick saw something different.

The iridescent white river flowed, but here and there clumps of color and browns and harsh crystals and silvers and other not-Benevolence things simply appeared in the deluge and then vanished with the tide, melding with what was already there. The ocean at that point was a bit more colorful-white than it had been before, and soon all was simple iridescence.

Erick was ‘polluting’ his various resources, but those ‘pollutants’ were becoming a part of him easily enough.

Erick felt a lot of different ways about that.

Mostly happy, because yes, everything could exist just fine within Benevolence, because Benevolence could meld with anything else just fine, too. That was the entire basis of [Renew] architecture and Mana Siphon, after all. Erick was a part of the world; not apart from the world.

The mana was the mana, and Erick was Erick, and where they met they communicated and shared, and thus truth flowed and the world changed.

Erick breathed deep, once again simply standing there on a mountain under a false sky, where the wind was cold and the land littered with bullets.

He was 100% sure that he had figured out ambient mana collection.

He could do this gathering without damaging himself.

And so, Erick opened his aura and flooded that aura with invisible resons. If he were outside of the Script perhaps he would have appeared like his [Lodestar]-empowered self, in his sunform, but here he was simply enmeshed in a mirage, like there was a certain thickness in the air. Into that thickness Erick carved paths, long and winding, like the paths that the Day of Clouds had created throughout all of Veird, like veins going inward. These veins went deep into the infinite capacity of Erick’s true self.

And then he asked the mana, “Would you like to join me?”

The cold wind turned warm as it trickled down through countless fractal-esque tunnels, through Erick’s contained and recycled resons, like a different sort of thickness in the air. That flow became a rush that brightened as it got deeper in the tunnels, closer to Erick’s true self. It had not yet contacted his skin, but it was about—

The crash of endless mana types became a rush of iridescent white light right before it touched Erick’s skin. All of the combined colors of the manasphere flowed into him, joining his Status. It was tiring to keep it all going, to pull in the resons as he pulled in the mana, but as moments of draw turned to minutes, Erick molded the shift of the world around him into something easier to do, and feel.

And then he made it into a button he could press.

Words appeared, floating free of any blue box.

Endless Aura, 1 second start + concentration, medium range, 100/10 mana/resons base reservation

Turn a portion of your power into a conductor of ambient mana to gather that ambient mana and enliven it to new possibilities within yourself. This is a fragile system and should not be used in combat. This is a tiring system and will stop when it is not concentrated upon. Disruption of this system incurs the loss of the reserved mana and resons.

10 ambient resources gathered per base reservation, per second.

You can have as many instances of this spell active as you can handle.

Beware if there is something truly toxic in the air, for that toxin will become a part of you.

Erick smiled at his new spell.

All around him was a shell of power with… looked like 15,987 starting points around the edge, like tiny holes drilled into a luminous barrier; the beginnings of threads. Where the threads started they were only visible as holes, but closer to Erick’s body, those tubes of ambient mana turned into quiet, iridescent light, that flowed into his body, joining his Status. It was sort of like his Mana Siphon Ability, but a lot more complicated, since ambient mana was dead and needed to be worked over to join with him, and even when it did join it wasn’t a full-joining right away. That took time.

It was sort of like…

Soulvore monsters, like banshees, mostly survived by eating living things. Like all monsters, they loved to accrete ambient mana, but only by eating the mana of people could they maintain their power as they knew it. If they tried to eat ambient mana they usually mutated into other things. So they tended to eat a little bit of the living things around them, as they attempted to conduct the mana around them into new life, to thus consume that new life.

Erick was similarly ‘waking up’ the mana all around him in order to draw it inside.

Erick’s thoughts multiplied as he looked all around him at the flow of mana coming to him, like he was the center of a planet. Like he was a manaminer core, actually.

“Lotta stuff here simply makes sense, now that I actually did it.”

Glancing at his Status, Erick watched his 1,505 mana per second gains turn into a lot more than that, shooting all the way up to 51,064 per second.

His other resources were similarly buffed.

Each of those threads coming down from that aura out there was 1 instance of Endless Aura, and while each of those 15,987 starting points had cost him 100 mana and 10 resons to start and maintain, each one was giving him 10 mana per second. He was gaining 159,870 extra resources per second, and each of those was becoming part of his Mana, Health, and Psyche, and even his reson cache, too.

Hmm. About that…

Erick was inside a bubble of his own resons, turning the air thick with Banned and hidden power, but he wasn’t absolutely crystallizing the air with his resons? Seemed like he should have been, since his reson creation number jumped up from 436.93 mana dedicated to it —which meant 48.54 reson-production per second— to 14,388 mana per second, which meant 1598 resons per second.

Erick looked at himself—

Erick made the mistake of moving more than just his head and his lips. He moved an arm, and that broke the entire spell. He had been forming something of a crystal shell around himself, but now that ephemeral shell broke, sending cracks throughout the entire mana/reson structure of the entire [Endless Aura]. The whole thing evaporated in every direction at once in a crackling, tinkling crash.

“Ah?”

… Erick cast [Endless Aura] just once.

A very thin white shell of mana reappeared around him, at around 3 meters out. A single thread of empty space extended out from that shell, right in front of Erick, forming a thread that twirled inside a cloying mirage of resons, before that thread touched the center of Erick’s chest. Mana flowed through that tube, becoming a soft white glow of many colors, before it touched Erick’s body and became one with his Status.

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Erick smiled at that.

He stepped to the right and the whole shell broke again, but there was no crashing of crystallized resons this time; he hadn’t put enough into the working to cause that. Just a simple tinkling in the air that broke like cotton candy. He used the spell a few more times, just to see how he could improve the spell, perhaps. But then again, maybe he didn’t need to—

Rozeta stepped to Erick’s side. She purposefully kept her voice soft and even, as she said, “Hello, Erick. Can we discuss that spell you made?”

“Yup!” Erick produced a copy of [Endless Aura], and then held it in the air between them. Rozeta’s eyes went wide, and then she looked relieved. Erick asked, “I imagine it works better than whatever the Script does?”

Rozeta plucked the spell from the air, sighing in happiness. “The Script’s system is a lot more complicated than that. What this might do is simplify a great deal of the lead and other anti-magic systems that we use to scrub the mana of intent, to allow the ambient mana to more easily be used by others. I might be able to enable a part of the Script I never got working, either.” She smiled. “The part that allowed people to use true ambient mana to accrete.”

Erick laughed. “Was that ever an option?”

“Oh sure.” Rozeta said, “In the Old Cosmology that’s how people got power for themselves, usually. They picked out an Element and then accreted that Element, becoming that sort of person. That’s how magic schools were founded.” She added, “The Wizard made the mana, and the underlings accreted it, making themselves of the same school of magic as the Wizard. A lot of people even had multiple parts of their souls to draw in different elements for use in different spellworks, since Altering could only ever get most people so far. That was dangerous, though; impure, people would call it.”

Erick nodded. “Most people stuck to singular sources.”

“Yes. True ambient mana gathering is highly dangerous, but everyone used to get magic and power by taking in and separating specific manas, for use in specific spells.” Rozeta said, “The problem with that was that high-purity Elemental sources were highly guarded. Most people only had access to dangerous, multi-Elemental environments. Anyone who accreted in those areas would go insane through monsterization, so most people did not do magic at all.” Rozeta added, “This [Endless Aura] you made will bring power to everyone equally, though, and accomplish one of the major purposes of the Script; the empowerment of the masses…” She smiled softly, “I had a great big speech on the benefits of giving me a copy of your magic, but you made all of that superfluous.”

Erick grinned. “This should solve some of the problems of an individual not having enough resources to sustain a Personal Script, too.”

“Already working on that, and yes, you’re correct. It’ll be more complicated than that…” Rozeta looked a little too excited, as she said, “But maybe not for much longer! Solomon is working on the other half of this, though I don’t believe he knows it yet. He’s maybe an hour away from an enormous creation. Melemizargo has fully cordoned off the area against all possible influence.”

Erick breathed deep. “Oh?”

– – – –

Solomon drew diagrams on ten different chalkboards at once in a hidden room of his Black Castle. He was working on something he had tried before, but which had not worked at all.

Infinite Mana.

He was a Creation Wizard, right?

Right!

So he should be able to make infinite mana. And yet, the only times he had been able to make infinite mana had been when he had been in the throes of power with that damnable Lifeblood Heart, when he was ‘cultivating’ with a small slice of an infinity of Other Ericks.

Oh how that failure to contain that artifact had marked him. Destiny tried to tell him it wasn’t his fault, and she truly believed that, but Solomon still blamed himself. In the aftermath of Erick’s return, and the Day of Clouds, Destiny had gleefully delighted in saying ‘I told you it wasn’t your fault!’ in tens of different ways, and Solomon loved her for that. It had made the sting of it all feel distant. Better.

Destiny made everything better…

Solomon returned to his work.

His first attempt at infinite mana had been, of course, to try and make infinite mana out of [Duplicate] and [Cleanse]. Take a bit of filth, and then copy it, and then evaporate it away into the manasphere. Everyone had told him how this could not be done, and their words had proven true.

The mana used to make a real thing was returned in exactly the same amounts of mana that had been used to make it. This was basic conservation of mass, but extended to energy and mana.

“Gods,” Solomon muttered to himself, as he sketched out ideas in chalk, erased other ideas with a swipe of his aura, and considered how complicated this thing actually was. “Is this even going to work? It should, theoretically. Infinite mana is the hallmark of all Creation Wizards, and I can only do that temporarily, and only borrowing from other side realities…”

Solomon fell silent as he worked, thinking about all the lives he touched that were not his own, briefly linking hands with himself, and granting each other mana and power, in that singular moment when he was briefly ‘Ascended’ with the Lifeblood Heart. He hadn’t been able to replicate that action at all since then. Oh, sure, he was definitely a Wizard. That part wasn’t in question. Rozeta didn’t treat him like Erick at all —more like a pale imitation and that still stung all these years later— but she was at least cordial enough to tell him that his mana regeneration was indicative that he was a Wizard.

Destiny had been wonderful there, too, telling him that of course he wasn’t Erick, and that was fine.

Solomon smiled a bit at that memory, pausing as he worked.

And then he got back to work.

After his initial failures of using [Cleanse] and Genesis together to make infinite mana, Solomon had put that whole idea on the backburner. He had Forever War shit to deal with, and Black Gate politics and—

Solomon cut that thought short. Leave the politics aside for a time. Now was the time for magic.

When [Cleanse] was revealed as a major problem and source of Nothor Beasts, along with many of the other spells inside of a person, Solomon had tried a [Cleanse]+[Duplicate] thing again, using pure Elemental Destruction and Genesis together to make a source of infinite mana; a spell that just made mana. Didn’t work. Using that spell just vented mana into the open air. Once again, conservation of mana proved itself to be true.

He even used the new [Cleanse] that Rozeta had handed out in replacement of the old [Cleanse]. That one didn’t work that well at all, and somehow the rate of exchange was actually not 1-1 with that spell. Solomon used it and a 10 kilogram pile of shit turned into 10 mana, but 10 mana only made 9 kilograms of shit. So that was a dead end, too.

Solomon had no idea where Rozeta had gotten such a bad version of [Cleanse], but Solomon used it to clean water and that was about it. Everyone was taking baths these days, which was a worldwide change from how it used to be, but it was okay. Bath times with Destiny had been a wonderful—

Solomon focused.

He focused, because the answer was right here. Somewhere around here.

Somewhere…

Somewhere…

Solomon had heard about the Awakening Machine, as had everyone else. He had gotten hold of some of the research coming out of the research center, too. He had also spoken with Erick about resons and he knew how to avoid using resons now, at the very least. And he would do that.

This working of infinite mana was a creation of mana. Not of Fractal infinity.

“And I can almost see it!” Solomon said, shaking his chalk-covered hands at diagrams of ideas that had somehow escaped him all this time. It was messy and half-formed, but… Okay. This idea here could go onto the paperwork. Solomon pulled a paper out of the air, turning Genesis into paper and ink and exactly what he was looking at, and then he put it onto the stacks of paper he was gathering in the center of the work room. “Almost got it. Just need to figure out…”

Solomon went to a different chalkboard on the other side of the room and started writing.

He liked using chalk these days instead of just lightpainting everything. Years ago, Debby had suggested he find himself through distancing himself from Erick, and writing with chalk on real boards worked out well. He loved making physical things, and this was just another way to make physical things. As he held his chalk in his hands, Solomon briefly thought about Debby, and about the small words that Fairy Moon had shared with him the other day, about Sundering and Erasing and all of that…

Those words were still jangling around in his mind.

‘Instead of investigating the incident itself, could you corroborate the conclusions all around the unknowing, unknown answer, and arrive with more known knowledge?’

Those words hadn’t made the most sense, but there was something there.

Perhaps Solomon had been staring too hard at the sun, at the failure of the Lifeblood Heart, at the failure of Fenrir, at the failure of himself, in all those other worlds… Solomon glanced at his left wrist, where Debby’s black knot of a Shackle of Memory had indelibly been stamped into his very soul; her final gift, to keep him safe from the Red Sparks, to keep him here and protected. Solomon loved the black tattoo that was a bracelet. It kept him focused on what he needed; on what he had lost.

But he had been staring so hard that he had been blind.