Chronicles of the True Wizard

Felix was finally free from the integration and it’s lack of information and he fully intended on capitalizing on it. It took him about a half hour to fly to the library using the portal spires which wasn’t ideal but it wasn’t too bad. Flying through the night, Felix first realized that the length of the days were exactly the same as back on Trenus and Earth, 24 hours, which was highly suspect. He also got to experience the city at night and it was a wonderous sight.

The night sky was filled with nebula of some kind from the surrounding galaxies as well as comets from the asteroid belt above. It was a huge array of color that made it so no additional lighting was necessary in the city. Felix wasn’t sure if there were lights at all, for the cloudy nights, or if they simply didn’t need them. Either way, it was easy for Felix to see without any supplementary light.

At the library, Felix got a librarian to lead him to a large array of books. First on his list were any books on the important historical events of the multiverse. Second, were any books on spell formation and enchanting. Anything he could find, even if it was repeat information, was welcome. Next he had the librarian lead him to books on classes, professions, races and skills. Even just basic information had a good chance of being entirely new to Felix.

Lastly, Felix had the librarian lead him to a section with bestiaries and encyclopedias on monsters in the multiverse. Any amount of knowledge that would help him know what to expect, could potentially save his life. Even more than that though, Felix was on the hunt for creatures with mana channels, cores and anything that focused on intelligence or it’s mind.

He needed some direction with the mana channels and cores and some inspiration for how to manually enhance his mind. If he could at least get the names of some creatures that looked promising, he figured he could go hunt them down for their corpse at some point.

He had the librarian lead him to the shelves and wait for a few minutes while he scanned everything. At first the librarian looked at him funny but they seemed to realize what he was doing relatively quickly. Just running around and scanning everything took him a few hours which only gave him a few more hours to sift through all the information before dawn.

He dismissed the librarian and walked over to one of the empty tables then meditated. First, he practiced the Dragon’s Dance steps in his soul garden. After that, he got to reading through the books and looking for anything useful with Grim’s help. Overall, he just ended up shoring up his knowledge.

A lot of the information he had scanned was entirely repetitive and seemingly watered down for public consumption. As Sarseyran, the first librarian, had mentioned, any information that was more useful, was likely to be kept secret by large factions or sold. That way they could disseminate it in order to attract recruits or sell it for credits.

They didn’t get through nearly all of the information he had scanned but by the time it was morning, Felix left the library and flew off into the city. Before he returned to the enchanting shop, Felix had somewhere else he wanted to visit that the librarian had helped him find.

Although the Dragon Dance, and specifically it’s mobility half was a good fit for Felix, it also wasn’t the perfect fit. What Felix really needed was a martial art that focused entirely on avoiding damage and moving quickly. Ideally it would allow him to incorporate Force spells so he could move faster as well.

He didn’t need to dodge his way into range of an enemy or keep himself in melee range ever. He needed to stay alive at all costs and the best way of doing that was to keep himself far away from his enemies. In just about any ranged battle, he should be able to win. In melee range, he ran the risk of hitting himself as well as the enemy which would probably result in him being his own biggest threat.

What he was looking for was a way to move that focused itself entirely on avoiding attacks and getting from point A to B quickly. There was mobility for casters, but that focused a lot on keeping yourself stable and ready for the verbal and somatic components of a spell. Felix didn’t need those, in theory, he didn’t even have to look at his enemies. There was mobility for archers and stealth types but that focused on keeping line of sight and being able to eventually draw a bow. Felix didn’t have a bow so he had no need to keep his back straight and body stable so his arrow struck true.

In sorting through the available martial arts and later, parkours, available to learn, Felix stumbled across and entire hobby that some people dedicated their lives to. It was essentially parkour casters. Instead of using their classes to kill monsters, level and become stronger it seemed like a lot of people were more than willing to use their classes for fun and just make money off their professions.

He found a bunch of hobbies and unintended uses for people’s classes like competitive martial arts, archery and fencing. Straying even further from the intended path were casters who used their spell lists to craft items and fighters who used their skills to strike metal instead of striking an enemy. There were also entire tournaments dedicated to what essentially amounted to stealth tag.

In theory it made perfect sense to Felix, the reality was just that he had never even considered it because he really wanted to dedicate himself to getting stronger. He was perfectly happy to throw himself at dangerous enemies and put his life at risk constantly just so he could get stronger and do it against more dangerous enemies again. He did recognize that not everyone wanted to do that though.

Felix thought about it for a bit and realized he didn’t have some great motivation to get stronger like protecting loved ones or freedom or anything like that. He just loved the thrill of fighting and the feeling of getting stronger. Most of all though, he loved problem solving and magic, spells, mana and enchantments were all really scratching that itch for him. Fighting enemies really just gave him problems to solve.

The building he was looking for was a building that looked like a large wooden log cabin made of trees that had been multiple kilometers tall. It was absolutely massive but to Felix, it just looked like someone had made a scale model of a log cabin. The doors were carved into small rectangles on the logs and the one Felix was looking for was the 13th from the left and 2nd from the top.

The signage on the door read Valtrusiar: The School of Competitive Avoidance and Dodging. The entire hobby was created based on a small, pacifist society that originated on a distant planet. They lived amongst savage beasts and high level creatures but they found a way to survive.

Instead of choosing classes that suited them and trying to fight the monsters, they chose caster as their class and used the spells for utility. To go out and gather food, water and other resources, they used their classes and maneuvered their way through certain death. This planet was called Valtrusia and once discovered, the hobby was named after them.

Felix approached the large wooden door that matched the log cabin aesthetic perfectly, and knocked. It took a few moments for the door to open and reveal an entirely bald, dark skinned human who wore nothing more than tight shorts and a stern expression.

“New student?”

Felix nodded, “Interested.”

“Come in.” The man stepped to the side revealing what essentially amounted to a massive obstacle course made of what entirely of what appeared to be a grey sand. There was no clear direction so Felix wasn’t sure it was a course so much as a large field filled with moving traps, platforms and obstacles.

Felix walked forwards into the building then the man that had let him in closed the door behind him. He led Felix into a room off to the side that contained a small office. So far, Felix was really appreciating how direct this man was though his intensity seemed unnecessary to Felix.

The man stared Felix down as if they were mortal enemies, “Casual interest or do you have a specific reason you want to learn?”

“Combat.”

He shook his head once, “This isn’t what you’re looking for then. This is entirely focused on avoiding everything. You will not have openings to attack and if your enemy does open themselves up, you will not be ready to capitalize on it.”

Felix nodded, “I know. I’m okay with all of that.”

“If you’re intent on switching between forms, it’s not a terrible idea just know it won’t be fast. You may be able to choose the mobility for the situation but rarely will you have the opportunity to switch between them in the middle of a situation.”

Felix shook his head, “No intent on switching between forms. This one looks perfect for me.”

He nodded once, “Alright, if you are intent on learning, I will teach you. It costs 100 D an hour to use the course, 500 D an hour for tutelage which includes use of the course. You can show up any time you’d like and if there are already people here, I will simply teach you both. If there are too many people here, the capacity is about 5, then I’ll simply tell you to come back another time.”

Felix nodded, “Perfect. I don’t have time right now, but I’ll come back when I have a few hours to spare.”

Felix did actually have multiple hours to spare, he just wanted to ask one of the enchanters at the shop if he was getting ripped off.

“I will see you then.” The man nodded just as intensely as he spoke. Felix returned the nod and stood up.

“I’m Felix by the way.”

The man just stared at Felix, “I know.”

Felix quickly identified the man and saw his name was ‘Kukhomihto.’

Felix nodded again then made his exit. He didn’t have anything else he really needed to do at the moment so he headed back to Inscripticae, the enchanting shop, to work on some personal projects.

Felix didn’t see anyone in the shop when he got there but he just hopped over the counter and into the workshop. He assumed Fralyna and Edemari had gone home and Aldahn was likely in his office.

Within the storage room, Felix opened the doorway to his Pocket Home and walked inside. He found Nova napping within a small divot at the top of the Demitium chunk. He flew by them and headed straight for the tower. The first thing he wanted to work on was making his Pocket Home less like a pocket dimension and more like a livable place.

It was starting to get colder by a few degrees every time he visited. It was also still completely dark and there was no gravity whatsoever. Now that Felix had access to all kinds of nodes, he had a lot more freedom to design them however he liked. He started with light and heat because he figured it was going to be the simplest.

Reading through the list of enchantment nodes in the index Aldahn had given him in the interview, Felix had gotten an idea for what he wanted to do. The light nodes were organized and tagged based on their output spectrum and efficiency curves based on how much input mana they got. He found one of them that was very inefficient at low input mana but very efficient at high input mana with an output spectrum that covered just about all light.

He was hoping it’s output would allow him to replicate the feeling of the sun. Obviously a real star would be way hotter and brighter, but Felix could tune his to fit the area. It should even be possible for him to grow plants or grass around the tower at some point, though he wasn’t completely decided on whether or not that was a good idea.

Having it simulate a sun though, he figured would make his pocket home feel more home like to him. He already had the mana engine whirring away in the basement he had created now all he had to do was wire it up to the rest of the tower. He spent a few hours running inlay material he had lying around from the tutorial dungeons all the way up the walls of his tower. He had multiple channels spread out across the walls each with different flow rates. That way, if he ever needed mana he could simply tap into a channel on a specific floor.

The idea was similar to Martin’s workshop though Felix was pretty sure he would have done this regardless of if he had seen Martin’s workshop at all. It just made too much sense to him. Even earlier when he was looking around the Inscripticae workshop, he had felt mana coursing through channels to different areas of the floor. He assumed those were for the same purpose.

As he moved upwards through the tower, he also inscribed small light spells, using a smaller and more efficient node, throughout his tower so he didn’t have to light it up himself with a spell. At the top, he got to work on his pseudo sun.

The basic idea was simple, a large floating ball of light with a touch of heat, just to replace what was lost in the pocket universe. The inscribed spell for the light was simple and realistically, nothing other than the light node was new to him. He used other new nodes that were functionally equivalent to ones he had already known back in the integration, but just slightly more elegant or efficient. Realistically though, he could have functionally replicated the spell or gotten very close to it before.

What was almost entirely new to Felix, was the heat portion of the spell he added. Instead of just providing a small amount of constant heat, Felix made the spell variable in it’s output. He didn’t want the temperature to slowly rise over time so he had the spell measure the temperature, then calculate how much heat it had to output.

It was constantly remeasuring and adjusting itself which came at the cost of more mana, but for something like this the cost was negligible. In an enchantment on armor or a vehicle, the mana cost would matter much more, here he had a mana engine and the overall cost went up by a fraction of a percent so he didn’t worry about it.

He spent a few minutes flying down to the ground and tuning the intensity of the light then came to the realization that his light shouldn’t be constant. Instead, he redid the lighting portion of the inscribed spell and used timing nodes along with multiple colors and mana rate limiters. When he was done, he set the time on the spell and let it go.

Now, in theory, his Light spell would slowly alter it’s color and brightness, just slightly, to mirror the current time in Telviras. Over time he would adjust the timing nodes to make sure they were accurate and not drifting, but he was happy with it for now.

Once he was done, he looked around as he thought about the gravity spell he was going to create but stopped himself short when he looked off into the distance. He wasn’t sure what to expect as he looked into the edge of a pocket universe, when he had done so before it was simply black.

Now, with much more light coming from behind him, he saw the edges of the pocket dimension swirled and twisted with a wide array of colors. It was all very dull and though the colors varied wildly, they were all very close to black. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at but he figured he would check the library at a later time to figure it out.

He refocused himself on his gravity spell and started testing. What he ended up settling on was differentiating objects by their overall mass. Instead of pulling on everything equally, like gravity did, which would take an absurd amount of mana for heavier objects, Felix simply didn’t pull on anything above a certain mass. Currently, that only excluded the tower itself and the Demitium chunk but in the future it may exclude other things he brought into the Pocket Home.

He also, mostly because he was already measuring mass, had the spell only pull a certain amount based on an objects weight. That meant that just about everything that was affected by the pseduo-gravity spell would weigh the same amount. The hardest part was targeting different objects differently.

What he ended up with was honestly, a mess of a ritual that worked in a similar way to the mana battery preparing spell. It essentially measured things in a circle one by one and decided how to affect them. He had it cycle fast enough that it wasn’t noticeable and ultimately, he was pretty happy with the result even if the execution was lacking.

Ultimately, he knew it was crude and he knew he would improve it as he learned, but from what he currently knew, it was already a big step up from what he would have done in the integration. He also planned on asking Aldahn or the other enchanters if they had any tips for targeting things like he was doing but he didn’t want to do so at the moment.

Instead, he ascended the tower up to the bedroom where the podium was and he started moving things around a little in the tower itself. The first thing he did was add windows without any glass in them. There was nothing in here he was worried about and it would let him enter and exit more freely. It would also allow him to grow a tree in the lobby if he wanted to, something he had talked about with Amelia and the interior designer, George.

He wasn’t hard set on the idea, but it resurfaced itself in his mind when he had added the windows anyways. If he managed to find some delicious fruit or super rare tree he would look into it, but until then the lobby would remain spacious.

Lastly, he sat down on the ground around the tower, that he realized he was going to have to terraform at some point so it wasn’t slanted from the mountain side he had ripped it off of. He pulled the bottles of poisons he had bought in the auction and began drinking them one by one.

He started with just a drop then progressively more until he downed the whole bottle. His ultimate goal was to build techniques and potentially even organs within his body that would help deal with them. If his cells themselves managed to build a natural resistance, even better, but he wasn’t counting on that.

It was hard work and as a result of the poisons various effects, he started to sweat all over. Some of them forced his cells into overdrive, working far faster than they should for no reason. He worked on reigning in the individual cells to listen to him above all else. This allowed him to build a greater level of control over them.

Other poisons tried to make his cells go to sleep collectively, causing entire organs to fail, he once again manually reigned them in and forced them to ignore the chemicals. Most poisons were more boring and they simply attacked his organs, cells, muscles or even brain. Those he simply fought back with some manual attention.

It took him a few hours to get through all the poisons he had bought and in the end, he was really happy he had. He could already feel himself getting better at dealing with the poisons when he swallowed the last few. He resolved himself to buy more poisons at some point in the future, though he was going to have to head back to the library to find a store.

Felix quickly rerolled his flask to something that almost seemed like vinegar, but less harsh and settled on it simply because he needed something to cleanse his palate. All the poisons had had weird effects on his mouth not to mention their awful tastes. A lot of them were tasteless, but some of them were absolutely vile. He rolled it again, after downing a large quantity of the vinegar like liquid, to something that tasted like vegetable juice. It wasn’t his favorite but he wasn’t sure he could stomach something fruity at the moment so the much calmer vegetable juice felt right.

He had done everything he wanted to for the moment so Felix exited the Pocket Home and the store room. Standing in the workshop, working at one of the tables, Felix saw someone new. As soon as he exited the store room, the tall man covered in reflective light green scales looked in his direction. He had gills on his neck that was slightly longer than a normal humans, webbed fingers and a face that looked like a humans was morphed until it resembled a fish. Its face was still mostly human, but definitely gave Felix the vibe of a fish’s face.

“You the new hire?”

“Felix.”

“Ezaldor. Nice to meet you.”

The fish man lowered his goggles then turned back to whatever he was working on. Felix had notes on the oven he wanted to review with Ezaldor but he didn’t bring that up now because he really wanted to bathe. He felt disgusting after all the excretions his body had produced when he fought back all the poisons.

He quickly exited the shop and referred to his map. It took him a few minutes to sort through the thousands of results he got back from searching for a bath but eventually, he found one that suited him. He made sure to ignore all the large open baths that were more about socializing than anything else and also sorted them by price because all he wanted was clean water. As it turned out, people needed to bathe so there were multiple bath houses on every block.

Felix chose the nearest one that fit his criteria then cleaned himself off. He ended up using the provided soaps which all had a musky scent that he had never smelled before then dried himself off with a spell and headed to his next destination. He got a very basic haircut and shave, because he didn’t overly care as long as his hair didn’t interfere then finally headed back to Inscripticae.

Ezaldor was still exactly where he had left him so Felix walked right up to his table. Ezaldor seemed to be inspecting a ring that floated in front of him. He wore goggles and switched between a variety of tools that looked like magnifying glasses but square, probes, flimsy sheets and fabrics. Felix watched with confusion and realized he really did need to learn how all the tools worked at some point, even if it was just to satisfy his curiosity.

Eventually, Ezaldor seemed to be done whatever he was doing and he looked up at Felix, “I’m done for now. What do you need?”

“I was told to look over the… oven? you made. You have time to go over some notes?”

He nodded once, “Yes.”

Felix gestured to the ring with his head, “What does the ring do by the way?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see.”

Together they walked up to the office room and Felix walked him through his thought process and the questions he had come up with. Ezaldor, though his answers were short, was actually incredibly insightful. He often answered Felix’s questions with drawings on the boards but had explanations for everything. Felix’s feeling, just from their short discussion, was that Ezaldor was one of the most knowledgeable enchanters he had ever spoken to.

A lot of Felix’s questions were about why he chose one pattern over another and Ezaldor seemed to know the interactions between everything perfectly. He knew that using a specific pattern with a another specific pattern resulted in mild interference which would ultimately hurt the precision of the end result. He had answers that were so in depth and complicated, often taking into consideration the entire enchantment as a whole, that Felix’s mind was blown.

Felix didn’t have any suggestions or concerns for him after he answered all of Felix’s questions so Felix wrote his name on the board and approved the piece. Ezaldor seemed to enjoy talking through the enchantments so Felix felt less bad about questioning his every decision and taking up multiple hours of his time. When they were done, Ezaldor headed back to his desk and continued inspecting his ring.

The last person he was looking for to talk about the vehicle was someone named Krinitor. He hadn’t seen anyone new though so he decided to focus himself on other things once he checked in with Aldahn. He knocked on Aldahn’s door and opened the door after he was invited in.

Aldahn looked up from his desk, “You done going over all the items yet?”

“No, still haven’t met Krinitor.”

Aldahn sighed, “Oh right, I forgot he made the vehicle. He might be out for a while, how about we just go over it together?”

“Sure.”

They walked up to the design room, as Felix had just learned it was called, and Felix went through his questions with Aldahn. If Ezaldor was knowledgeable, Aldahn was a genius. Though he hadn’t created the item, Felix asked him questions and he immediately caught on to what the intent was.

Aldahn gave complex explanations with simple answers, something only someone who really understood their craft could offer. Not only did he consider the interactions between the enchantments, but he had insight from an obviously vast pool of experience so could determine when it was relevant or not.

Ezaldor seemed like the kind of enchanter that tuned everything to perfection whereas Aldahn, could do that, but instead he knew when it was necessary and when it wasn’t. He would juggle and balance all the different aspects of an enchantment so they were balanced and functional. He knew when power was more desirable over precision or when efficiency was more important than anything else, down to specific patterns and nodes.

By the end of their design review, Felix approved the item even though Aldahn himself had a few criticisms of his own.

Felix looked back at Aldahn after writing his name on the board and approving the item, “Are you gonna bring those up to Krinitor?”

Aldahn shook his head and shrugged a little, “Nah, they don’t matter enough. I might write them out or show him, but it’s not worth redoing the whole thing.”

Felix frowned, “Really? You had a lot of suggestions, I thought they would make a big difference especially all together?”

“Nah, kid you’ll see as you gain more experience enchanting but tiny flaws, or rather imperfections, don’t matter in the D grade. The higher the grade, the more it matters. A grade enchantments for example, these would be catastrophic errors. This is just a D grade vehicle though so they won’t really make a difference.”

Felix tilted his head, “Why is that?”

“Mostly the amount of mana or power, precision and complexity. A grade enchantments, and just higher grade enchantments, usually deal with one or more of those three. Think of them as levers sort of, if you raise all three to the max, you have a Divine level enchantment. If you just raise one to the max, it’s probably C grade.”

“Divine?”

“Higher than S.”

“I didn’t know that was a thing.”

“It’s mostly just Gods.”

“Mostly?”

“You don’t have to become a God when you get there, it’s a choice.”

I need to ask about gods at the library.

Felix nodded slowly, “I see. Slightly unrelated question, how complicated would it be to have an enchantment that targeted every object in an area differently?”

“Simultaneously? A standard enchantment, close to impossible without making an incredibly complex B grade enchantment, and that’s assuming it wasn’t a fixed set of targets. You could either cycle through them which is crude or the much better solution, arguably the correct solution, build a small mana computer.”

Felix’s head craned forwards, “A what?”

Felix quickly addressed Grim mentally, Isn’t that what you think The System is?

Yup.

Aldahn nodded and looked at Felix with a frown, “I’m not sure what that’s being translated to but ‘computer’, you have those in the integration or had them on your planet?”

“Sorry, yeah we do just surprised to hear that word is all. Last time I heard it someone was theorizing The System was a massive mana computer.”

Aldahn nodded, “Not an unpopular theory, it has issues though. The System has sort of degraded in a weird way over time and it doesn’t exactly fit how a mana computer is known to work.”

Felix frowned, “Wait… what do you mean?”

“By what?”

“Did you say it’s degraded?”

Aldahn crossed his arms, “Degrading, slowly. Basically in the past some things were allowed and other’s were not. Over time, those rules have loosened and changed. For example, integrations used to allow Gods in from the start but apparently but that had issues. It’s been inconsistent and changed prompts or the rules to dungeons without telling people. Then there was an era where people thought they were just clever enough to find loop holes and they peddled these as secret techniques but, over time people realized that some things they weren’t allowed to do, suddenly they could.”

“Oh so it’s just… changing it’s mind and evolving over time… kind of?”

Aldahn shrugged, “Sure if that makes you more comfortable. Not to make you worry but it’s done some weird shit over the years too. It’s been inconsistent, illogical at times and sometimes makes nonsense decisions. They are very rare but it happens and when they do, people typically panic for a few epochs then calm down again.”

That’s not ominous at all. What if it just made a random decision to kill me.

I don’t think it would do that…

“What do you mean illogical and weird? Would it ever decide to just randomly kill someone?”

Aldahn shook his head, “Not directly. The one I remember was an integration that was shut down entirely but that could have been for any reason. I’ve heard that in the past, The System has saved people when there was no skill or spell involved. It’s also set up fights between someone and a monster way out of their league when the scenario was supposed to scale.”

Felix shrugged, “Those aren’t as bad as I expected.”

Aldahn chuckled a little, “Those are the ones I’ve heard about, I’m not that old. I’ve heard rumors that there have been much worse but you’d have to ask someone from the early integrations.”

“So you were saying people thought they were clever with loopholes, but they weren’t? The System was just changing?”

Aldahn tiled his head back and forth a little, “Some of them were. Basically, a number of integrations ago, people played a game where they tried to abuse The System as much as possible, bending it’s rules right to the limit.”

“They don’t do that anymore?”

“People slowly realized that what The System was best at, was just automating the minutiae, collecting information and marginally increasing your own capabilities. Not sure what skills you have but it’s pretty common knowledge that if you want to reach the very top, you need to avoid skills where The System is doing things you can’t do. What you want are skills you can do yourself but The System just automates.”

Felix frowned, “Why?”

“There are issues with skills The System grants you. Basically there’s a hard cap on your understanding of the skill. That means your proficiency can never get higher than say Adept or so on those specific skills. That means you’ll be limited when you try to upgrade or combine them and they’ll ultimately just fall behind. Then there’s supposedly a limit to the skills themselves.”

“Limit? What do you mean?”

“Somewhere between high B grade to low S grade depending on the skill, it just will not progress and start behaving weirdly. Let’s say you had a skill that made a supposedly impenetrable shield, at certain point it might just fail against some attacks that it should be able to block. Supposedly, there’s a hard ceiling and no real way to push through it with those kinds of skills. The System has gotten better about wording over time but it was an issue for a bit where skill descriptions would just lie to you. It’s never really rebuilt that trust though.”

“So I should only have skills that I could do myself?”

“This is only really applicable to those who want to reach the peak. I don’t care anymore, most people don’t care at all. Having an unbreakable shield or skill that can bring you back once an epoch, is more valuable to most people than the prospect of potential, even if it only works up to the A grade. Most people don’t even get close to that anyways. It’s not necessary for everything either. I have a few skills that I can’t do without The System like translation skills, inspection skills, identification skills, some mobility skills which I would recommend no matter what.”

Felix nodded, “I see, I guess that makes sense, thanks. That reminds me, how do I get a skill or item so my identify doesn’t give me garbage names.”

Aldahn laughed out loud, “Hah! I forgot that was a thing. This is one of those degradations or bending-of-the-rules I was talking about. Many integrations ago, I would have pointed you to an item or skill, now there’s a way around either of those.”

“What’s that?”

Aldahn smiled, “Just read a bestiary.”

Felix frowned at the crude solution, “Just memorize all the creatures that exist?”

Aldahn shook his head, “No, I didn’t say memorize it, just read it. You don’t have to remember any of it. Someone figured out at some point, that as long as you had seen the name, basic description or even part of a creature’s etymology, you would identify it correctly.”

Felix’s face contorted in disbelief, “It’s that easy?”

“Yeah. I just read a few at the library and I haven’t seen a weird name since… I can’t even remember.”

I already scanned a bunch, think that’s enough?

Grim offered a mental shrug, Sounds like it’s probably enough given how lenient he makes it seem.

So I already solved the issue unintentionally?

Seems like it.

Felix mentally shared his confusion with Grim, That’s kind of weird isn’t it? The rules changing over time and loop holes?

Sort of. I kind of expect it if The System is alive and growing.

I thought you thought it was a mana computer. Now it’s alive?

Grim chuckled a little, Those aren’t mutually exclusive.

Felix threw his hands up, “Alright well that’s convenient, that was one of the first things I did.”

Aldahn nodded, “Perfect. We got side tracked but back to mana computers, It doesn’t have to be complicated. I’m not sure how complicated your normal computers were where you come from but you can make them very simple. In this case, all it would have to do is sense the objects in an area, then apply a different level of a spell to each.”

Felix nodded, “How do I go about making one? Or just learning the basics?”

Aldahn gestured towards the corner of the workshop with this chin, “Check the store room, we need to make them every once in a while for complicated projects. If you’re interested, try making a calculator first. That was the first one I ever made.”

“That sounds like a great idea. Thanks.”

Aldahn nodded and started walking back towards his office, “Sure. Oh there’s gonna be a design meeting later today by the way, just be here in about 10 hours if you want to sit in.”

“Alright, I’ll be there. Thanks Aldahn.”

“Sure.”

Aldahn headed back to his office and Felix headed into the back store room. He found a few dusty tomes about mana computers among the piles of books and various failed enchantments. The entire room was a mess but luckily all Felix had to do was stand still while his skill scanned the books around him. He ended up sifting through the mess a little bit to maker sure he got everything because he wasn’t sure how his skill worked on books he couldn’t see.

It was something he wasn’t sure about because up until now, he had entirely scanned books intentionally. He had always walked down library isles or stored books in his inventory to scan them. He was suspecting no considering the twinned diary hidden in the wall of Erolan’s apprentice but that book was special so he wasn’t certain. He didn’t find any books in the mess that he hadn’t scanned so he wasn’t sure if his skill was scanning through the mess, the walls or neither. He planned some tests for the future in the library then exited the storeroom.

He headed up to the design room and chose a chair then sat down and entered his soul garden. He had Grim retrieve the books for him then started reading. The basic concept was simple, it was a computer and seemed to work similarly to how computers worked on earth. They used mana instead of transistors and they weren’t generally as advanced as computers on earth, but their functions were similar. As far as Felix could tell, unless the books he was reading were very old, mana computers were mostly used to store information and compute numbers.

He couldn’t find any mention of smart phones, video games or anything even close to that complicated. There weren’t even screens as far as he could tell. They were almost exclusively used to automate basic tasks in enchanting and the real world. It seemed like the registration office of Telviras for example would use a mana computer to store and sort the registration records. It wasn’t anything complicated like a spread sheet that required a functional user interface though, it was more like a massive calculator that just sorted and retrieved records. More similar to an automated physical database with robot arms.

Felix had no idea why they didn’t get more complicated until he got closer to the end of the first book he read and it explained why. Apparently, as the computers got bigger and more complicated, the common notion was to shrink it, unfortunately, mana was generally not stable enough to shrink very far. Instead, mana computers were limited to a specific size. Apparently normal computers had existed at some point but had lost popularity because people got smarter with levels and computers were incredibly fragile.

Not even just physically but general interference from mana, spells, skills and the daily lives of powerful entities resulted in constant data corruption and miscalculations. Shielding them became nearly impossible if anyone ever intended on interacting with the machine because any connection would carry corruption back to the system. Even then, ambient mana alone tended to cause huge issues for traditional computers.

Eventually the mana computer was invented but it had issues and therefore never really progressed past a certain point. There are some active experiments being conducted that the book mentioned where researchers were trying different forms of mana along with biological byproducts but as of the publishing date, none had bore fruit.

The next couple of books Felix read through detailed the basic mechanics of a mana computer, how they were commonly made and how they could be used. A basic mana computer was just a large array of nodes that could compute an output from given inputs. The calculator Aldahn had mentioned, simply added two numbers. The biggest difference between mana computers and normal computers, other than just complexity, was that mana computers were analog computers rather than digital computers.

Instead of 0s and 1s, the computers functioned on a huge range of values that were entirely determined by how it was made. The range could be from a single point of mana to a hundred points or from a fraction of a point up to a single point if it was precise enough. The smaller they got though, the more unstable they were and more likely for values to be completely incorrect.

The calculator would just add the mana values of two inputs then output a number based on how it was tuned to read it’s inputs. The basic version the book described used the calculator to calculate the amount of mana in points, the most easily verifiable quantity. It was actually a trivial enchantment but Felix followed along nonetheless.

The second version it described was more complicated and would allow him to multiply two numbers. Instead of actually multiplying the numbers though, the way it worked was that it altered the way it measured one of it’s inputs so that the result was the multiplication of the two numbers.

From there, it didn’t detail out entire projects but just detailed some basic theory on how higher level computers would work. For Felix’s project of his gravity spell, he needed a very complicated mana computer. He started working on a basic design and adjusted it as he read through the books.

He was still missing a lot of components but it’s basic form was there, it would cycle through a given set of inputs and output some calculations for each. What he needed was to have the calculations be the amount of force based on mass along with the direction and distance to the object.

Eventually he finished reading the books and headed back over to Aldahn’s office with his mana computer prototype.

Aldahn looked up and frowned, “Kid, do you think I just sit around here and have infinite time so I can just answer whatever question pops into your head?”

“If you’re busy I can come back.”

He sighed and shook his head, “No, never mind. I was just trying to mess with you. Unless I’m at a work table I’m usually not busy. What’s up?”

“Mind going over this mana computer design with me?”

“Sure… That was a lot faster than… right, perceptual time dilation.”

Felix just nodded then they headed to the design room where Felix drew out the basic plans for the mana computer he had come up with on the board. Aldahn immediately had a bunch of notes and over the next few hours, Felix felt like the books he had read were meant for babies compared to what Aldahn knew.

Not only did he help Felix completely rework the computer to be more efficient, but he found and dealt with problems before Felix had even realized they existed. All the components Felix was missing, Aldahn simply drew out nodes, patterns and channels filling in all the blanks Felix had.

After a few hours, Ezaldor walked up into the design room and joined in. He offered a few suggestions and Aldahn mostly agreed but occasionally, it seemed like Ezaldor was learning as much as Felix was from Aldahn

A lot of their differences ended up just being preferential with Ezaldor focused on precision above all else and Aldahn offered different options depending on what Felix wanted. Felix most often went with efficiency because he didn’t see power or precision being a concern, neither of them really mattered to him at all.

A half hour or so after Ezaldor had joined them, they cut their conversation short because Fralyna, Edemari and Inorim had arrived and the design meeting was set to start soon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .