Keron
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Chapter 176 - Gather, Contain, Attribute, Distribute
🕑 Added 2025-04-28 17:00:05 +0000 UTC“Okay, you can stop now,” Emily calls out as her eyes snap open, revealing the rolling sea stretching out before her, lit by the midday sun.
She slowly pushes herself off the ground where she was meditating and turns away from the opening, facing the main cavern where Pod is in the middle of clearing space.
“You’re done?” the boy asks, turning to look at her.
She doesn’t respond, reaching out and releasing a dense flood of purple mist in response.
Pod sighs with relief and walks over, holding out the storage pouches for her as she controls her mana. Emily wraps the loose rubble and draws it into the pouches, quickly draining her freshly regenerated mana reserve.
She finishes clearing the large pieces of rubble just before her mana drops below ten thousand points and switches to casting a spell. A strong gust of wind sweeps through the chamber, blowing away the remaining loose stone and dirt, leaving the room bare.
“Magic isn’t fair,” Pod grumbles beside her, his eyes roaming the cavernous space that she has cleared in seconds, comparing it to the small section he cleared with several hours of hard labour.
“We’ll be able to do this with machines soon,” Emily reassures him, reaching into her belt with mana and pulling out a large workbench. “In fact, they should be much better for large-scale excavation. Besides, it’s less a case of less magic is unfair, and more that I am. A normal third circle spatial mage would have collapsed before clearing even a quarter of this space.”
“Wait, really?” Pod questions, frowning with doubt.
“Yep.” Emily nods, setting up more of the machines they made in Liberte, forming a temporary workshop almost as well-equipped as Earnie’s. “The method I’m using to collect items into spatial storages is an incredibly crude solution with raw, attributed mana. I’m simply pouring out spatial mana and manually using it to grab hold of anything I want. I need to track every single item I pick up separately. The volume I’ve just moved would fry most mage’s brains, and it burns through mana to use it outside of my body like that without a spell to control it.”
“Couldn’t you just make a spell to do it for you?”
“Yes, but that takes more time and requires finding the right runes. My spatial affinity isn’t great, and I don’t have many spells or runes related to it, so it’s not worth the effort for a task I can normally afford to burn a little mana for.”
Pod hums in understanding, moving to help Emily connect the cables from the Steam Source to the other tools she’s producing from storage.
“Once you’re done with this,” Emily says, dropping the last drill press from her belt into place and pulling out a sheet of paper and a pen to draw a set of blueprints, “start working on these pieces for me. I’m going to need plenty of duplicates of each, so pick whichever interests you most and get to work.”
After filling both sides of the paper with ink, Emily takes one of the drawstring material pouches and empties it into the others with a wave of mana. She then restocks it from her belt with the metals Pod will need and hands it to him with the blueprints.
“This will keep you busy until I get back,” she says before stepping away from the open entrance that’s letting in the sea breeze, heading towards the far wall of the dark, empty cave.
“Wait, where are you going?” Pod calls before she can step into the shadows.
“We came here for a mana vein, right? Well, I’m going to tap into it. If it goes well, I should be able to speed up the next step of my designs.”
Emily reaches the far, roughly cut wall and crouches down, pressing both hands to the floor.
She pours out earth mana, casting multiple spells and stretching her senses down in a straight chute. She hardens its walls and softens the middle until the stone resembles a thick sludge.
The surface ripples as Emily heats the bottom of the chute, forming a small pocket of hot air that slowly forces up the liquid stone like magma bubbling from a volcano. The stone gathers above the forming hole, so she tears it away in chunks, shaping it into small orbs before dispersing the mana that’s moulding them and letting them solidify again.
Once the chute is clear, she steps into it, sliding down with her boots bracing against the wall to control her fall. As she sinks lower, she can feel the tingling of mana on her skin getting stronger and stronger, and the walls of the last few metres of her chute glow with faint, glowing blue and brown streaks.
Emily sets her flesh palm flat against the wall, shutting her eyes and extending her senses towards the thrumming sea of mana flowing beneath her.
The vein is stable if a little weak… No response to my connection yet, so it doesn’t seem to have formed a consciousness. There’s a mild affinity for earth and water, but that should be fine.
Slowly, she releases a stream of raw mana, pushing it into the glowing veins in the wall and using it to draw in the natural mana flowing past. Her energy mixes with the natural mana, twisting it to her intent.
The vein’s mana resists her control, but Emily doesn’t rush, slowly spreading her influence inch by inch as a few beads of sweat roll down her forehead. It takes a few hours and drains her mana to the point where she has to convert some machina to keep going, but eventually, she has hold of a large volume, matching the chamber far above in dimensions.
Her eyes snap open, staring at the wall now glowing with an intense brown hue.
“Break,” she whispers, pouring out her intent.
The earth shudders, and the image in Emily’s mind becomes a reality as a thin crack spreads horizontally, perfectly cutting her chosen space in half.
“Part.”
The cliff quakes and the earth opens up as the two separated sides move apart ever so slowly. Emily grits her teeth, feeling the rock fighting against her as more machina flows out of her, turning to mana the moment it leaves her skin.
“Compress.”
The forming roof, floor, and walls start to fold in on themselves, darkening in tone as the glowing veins grow thicker, only reinforcing the space further.
“Hold!”
She releases a final pulse before cutting her connection and collapsing to her knees, panting in exhaustion.
A wave of light spreads from her position, rippling over the new chamber’s surfaces and freezing them in place.
“Haha, it worked!” Emily pants, excitement bubbling up for a few moments as she looks around the perfectly smooth room lit by the glow of mana. “It's crude compared to an actual elemental connection, and exhausted my stamina way too fast, but it’s something.”
She stands up after a few seconds and walks into the centre of the room, breathing in and tasting mana in the air.
Gathering, condensing, attributing, and distributing. This chamber can be used for the first two, but attribution needs to be performed at the point of use unless we want to lose all efficiency.
Her foot taps in place as she opens the Spellweave, drawing the start of a massive array.
Hmm, distribution needs to be handled here unless I want every array I connect to to require mana collection runes. I’ll add a few extraction points, but I’ll need to isolate them from outside influence.
The sound of her foot hitting the floor fills the room for hours on end as Emily remains rooted in place, her mind lost in her designs.
After a full day has passed, Emily’s left arm twitches with a flicker of machina and The Clock activates, sending her back to the moment her foot started bouncing. It takes a few more resets before she is finally still.
A small frown creases her brow, but it vanishes a moment later.
This may not work since I still need to account for the vein’s existing affinities, but I don’t have any data to base those adjustments on yet. I’ll just have to try it.
“It shouldn’t take more than a day anyway,” she mutters, reaching into her belt for her array engraving staff before pausing, realising it was one of the items lost with her original utility belt. “Tsk.”
Changing plans, she turns back to the chute connecting to the chamber above, climbing up to rejoin Pod and her tools.
***
With a new staff in hand, Emily slips back into the mana-charged chamber.
The new staff is made from a rich mahogany, just like its forebearer, with a matching silver metal spike attached to the bottom. However, unlike the last, this staff’s handle is adorned with six magic crystals, one from each of the common elements.
She sets to work carving runes into the floor, walls, and ceiling of the chamber, tracing patterns along the glowing, mana-charged streaks and integrating them into the array. It takes several hours just to cover the floor, but the pale blue lines she carves hold strong, releasing a steady glow of mana with no sign of fading yet thanks to the extra power from the added crystals.
As the last line of her artwork is cut into the roof, Emily braces and prepares to activate The Clock like the twitch of a muscle.
The massive array pulses, flooding the room with light as every surface glistens. However, a moment later, the light vanishes as quickly as it came, snuffed out like a candle in a storm.
No large explosion or raging torrent of mana hits her, so Emily relaxes her caution, turning her head and scanning the room to find the point where the array failed.
It failed at… gathering? Why?
Her teeth clack against her metal thumb and she winces, lowering the hand she didn’t even notice she was raising to bite.
“Actually, no, that makes sense,” she mutters to herself, pacing back and forth. “I’m only targeting raw mana, but this chamber itself is saturated with earth and water. The array didn’t have enough strength to draw unattributed mana past the existing elements.”
Emily shuts her eyes and falls back into the Spellweave, tearing apart the array and starting again.
***
After a few resets, Emily finishes the array again. This time, after the bright activation pulse fills her vision, she feels dense, unstable mana threatening to burst from the array.
Emily immediately activates The Clock as the far corner of the room bursts with a violent shudder. A crackling wave of mana erupts from the explosion, moving fast enough to nearly swallow her whole in the fraction of a second it takes for time to grind to a halt.
Unfortunately, her head isn’t facing the explosion, so she doesn’t see the churning mana or the exact point where the array failed.
“Tsk,” Emily clicks her tongue as she arrives in the past, looking down at the staff in her hands and the bare, glowing floor below her. “At least I know which direction to look in for the problem.”
She once again carves the same gathering array across the walls, finishing in the same place but turned a hundred and eighty degrees so she can watch it fail.
The expected build-up of mana comes, and she activates The Clock, timing it just right so the world stops around her just as the explosion happens. Ignoring the bright light still glaring back at her, Emily’s able to see the dense cluster of runes that deform, melting together into a distorted puddle on the floor that releases a visible mass of mana.
It’s a beautiful sight, a twisted pale blue mist filled with swirling shards of stone and water, but the chill it sends down Emily’s spine warns her against messing with it.
Those runes were for condensing…
She blinks and arrives in the past again, immediately starting to pace as her body is released from the hold of time.
“I fixed the gathering stage to draw in both elemental and raw mana… then stored them without any differentiation,” Emily rolls her eyes at her mistake. “I can’t compress conflicting mana types without control. Earth and water should balance each other out well though, so maybe I don’t have to waste energy stripping back the attributes if I work out the correct mixing ratio.”
***
Finally, after five more resets and two more explosive failed tests, the array activates without detonating.
The initial overwhelming glow dims, and the room hums with energy as Emily checks for any weaknesses in her work.
“Holding stable,” she mutters, waiting for a few moments as nothing else happens. “Now for the first option of distribution.”
She walks to the centre of the room and crouches, placing a hand to the cluster of runes waiting there with The Clock only a thought away. A quick injection of mana activates the runes at her feet along with six similar clusters spaced evenly around the walls.
They twist in a frighteningly familiar manner, blending together into six glowing circles of mana, four of them the warm blue of raw mana, one brown, and one deep blue, representing earth and water respectively. Unlike the last time the runes shifted, the mist of mana that leaks from the walls doesn’t come with an explosion.
Instead, it diffuses to slowly fill the space, saturating the air with energy that flows into Emily’s lungs and seeps through her skin, boosting her Technomancer’s Breath.
“Better than The Dome by miles,” she whispers with momentary glee, reaching out with her metal hand and swiping it through the stable mist, watching it slip between her fingers as it continues to grow denser.
Comments
Rosy Bramble
So close to circle 4 now, i can't wait.
