Chương 20: The Vigil Ends

New Guide Entry: Mana Storage and Mediums Classification: Crafting Mana storage concerns the retention of unstructured, unbonded mana within physical mediums for later use. This is distinct from enchantment, where mana is permanently structured into patterns with the intent to produce specific effects, and from infusing, where mana is bonded to a material to enhance its properties. Stored mana has no shape, intent, or function until drawn upon by a mage.

Applications: Mana storage serves several practical functions. Power sources for enchantments and formations. Stored mana may provide emergency reserves when personal capacity is depleted. It allows mages to carry mana types beyond their natural conversion limitations. Absorption: Mana absorbs passively into most materials in its natural arcane state, but the majority flows through rather than being retained.

The small fraction that remains is what produces naturally mana-dense materials, flora, and fauna over extended periods of exposure. Active storage requires intervention to increase retention beyond passive equilibrium. Methods: Enchantment schema can be designed to actively draw ambient mana into a medium, trap it within the material's structure, and compress it to increase capacity. The enchantment then serves as a seal rather than creating an effect.

Cultivators can learn to channel mana into objects through direct contact, using a process similar to infusion. However, storage requires minimizing the bonding of mana to the material that naturally occurs during infusing. Bonded mana cannot be extracted. Containment: Regardless of method, most materials will leak excess mana until internal pressure reaches equilibrium with the surrounding environment.

Enchantments designed for containment are necessary to prevent this bleed and maintain stored mana above ambient density. Alternatively, high-level infusion can reinforce edges and faces of materials, creating transfer differentials that mimic enchantment seals. Mediums: All materials can store mana to varying degrees. Arcane mana is preferentially drawn to living hosts above all other mediums.

Typed mana, which is arcane mana converted through intention, demonstrates a preference for materials whose inherent properties share a sympathetic relationship with the mana type in question. Common storage mediums include gemstones, wood, fossils, and bodily fluids. Limitations: Drawing mana from a storage medium is significantly more difficult than absorption, threading, or cultivating.

The process requires actively working against the containment method to extract stored mana, resulting in slower throughput compared to using personal reserves. All extraction requires direct physical contact between the mage and the medium. Mana stored in close physical proximity creates overlapping signatures that interfere with precise extraction. Mages must rely on Mana Sense to differentiate between sources, and Mana Control to draw cleanly from the intended medium without disturbing adjacent stores.

Physical separation between storage mediums is recommended to reduce interference. Risks: Concentrated mana sources attract Eaters. The density of stored mana exceeds ambient levels, creating highly detectable signatures. The more mana a mage carries, the larger and more visible that signature becomes. — Enzo reread the entry, devouring the information like a starving man in an apocalypse. Because he was. And every new entry the Guide offered increased their odds of survival. Then he frowned.

So far the Guide had only offered information after the fact. Killing an Eater. Working on the ring in his workshop. But this time he'd only theorized possible spell forms that he might later convert into enchanting schemas. His eyes widened. Looking down at the design he'd drawn, Enzo raised a hand, formed the third-eye lens, and held it to his forehead. The colors of the world washed away as purple hues took over. And there it was.

Almost too subtle for him to detect, except that he was specifically looking for it. The inked form on the paper was causing the slightest increase in ambient mana flowing into the journal resting in his lap. That made him laugh. His journal had accidentally become a real spellbook. Though, studying it carefully, the journal wasn't retaining the extra mana. The flow was destabilizing.

Releasing Mana Sense, the purple haze over everything vanishing, he raised the journal to his face, angling it to catch the candlelight, and squinted. The ink was breaking down. It was slow, very subtle, but he could see it thinning in areas where his pen strokes were already thin. He leaned back. Even if the enchantment was failing, it had proven the concept was possible. He turned to where the bags rested near the front door, left there after they'd arrived.

Crafting the shield ring had shown that different materials had different mana flow rates and different densities of absorption, though perhaps both were akin to resistance and electrical current, given how technology was failing. Silver conducted mana well. Ink on paper apparently worked too, even if it was already dissolving under the strain.

Similarly, the ring had failed in combat after a single use, and while he hadn't yet had time to examine if the failure was in the silver, the titanium, or the enchantment itself, a pattern was forming. Enchanting was more complicated than it first appeared. The medium carrying the enchantment mattered. Perhaps the interaction between the conducive material and the substrate the enchantment was layered on mattered as well. The absorption enchantment needed to be tested properly.

He hadn't received a schema completion notice, which meant that even though the design functioned, the Guide didn't appear to consider it a valid creation. Fair enough. He didn't either. The question was how. There were gemstones in his backpack. His mother even had crystals on the mantelpiece, if he were willing to dare tempt her wrath. But unlike the ring, with its carved tapered channels with silver wire set into it, the same couldn't be done to a gemstone.

Cutting channels across faceted surfaces would create serious structural imperfections. Not to mention the idea of defacing a stone like that irked his craftsman's pride. Magic or not, professional artistry sets masters apart from laymen. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. Which meant relying on other techniques. Bezel setting. Wire wrapping. Foil pressing. All fell within his skill set. But bezel setting required soldering, so it was out.

And foil pressing would require considerable adaptation to set an enchantment into the metal sheets. Which left wire wrapping. The art of winding patterns and using smart contact points to create tension that locked it against the jewelry. Simple, in practice. In this case, though, it wouldn't be. But he loved a challenge. Enzo eased himself up and out of the armchair, crossing to the front door, and keeping his weight off his bad leg.

He bent down, unzipped the backpack, and pulled his tool roll free, along with a tray of loose gemstones and spools of silver and gold wire. Returning to the armchair, he spread his materials across the side table. His mother would have objected to him using it as a workbench, but what she didn't know wouldn't hurt him. He selected a smoky quartz cabochon, roughly half an inch long. Large enough to work with comfortably, but small enough that wrapping it wouldn't take too long.

The cabochon had a flat base and a domed top, which gave it a natural primary face for the enchantment. Enzo cut a length of fine silver wire and began shaping the absorption form against the flat base. He worked the wire with his fingers and the tip of a graver, bending precise angles and ensuring the contact between wire and stone was firm across the entire form. Even in dim candlelight, muscle memory guided the work.

Once the physical layer of the enchantment was done, he cut additional lengths of silver and began wrapping the rest of the stone. The new elements formed a cage of evenly spaced wires running from base to dome, crossing over the top, and encasing the cabochon in a silver lattice. It took fifteen minutes and was rough by his standards, but he wasn't planning to sell it. Functionality was the goal. He held the finished piece in his hand and closed his eyes.

Drawing mana from his reserves, he shaped a thread and began layering it over and into the silver the same way he had with the ring. Mana flowed into the silver and ran everywhere. The problem was immediately obvious. Instead of settling into the pattern and activating the enchantment, the mana dispersed along every wire in the cage indiscriminately. Silver to silver, it couldn't distinguish between which silver he intended to be enchantment and which was the structural wrap. To the mana, it was all one network.

Obvious in hindsight. A rookie mistake. And definitely Kenzo's fault for keeping him up so late. What he needed were two different materials. A higher conductive wire for the enchantment, and a less conductive one for the structural cage. He had both. Silver for the enchantment. Gold for the cage. Enzo grabbed the flush cutters and began snipping the silver cage away, working carefully around the enchantment. Silver pieces fell into his lap, leaving only the original enchantment's form behind.

Cutting a length of gold wire, he began wrapping again. The gold was softer than silver, easier to mold, and it seated against the curved surfaces without complaint. He wound it into the same pattern, base to dome, crossing at the top, with even spaces. Then he wound a few additional passes around the base, pressing the gold gently over the edges of the silver enchantment's form, locking it into place. He raised the finished piece up and examined it under the candlelight. Two metals, one stone.

Silver beneath, gold above. It looked like jewelry. Rough, improvised jewelry made in the middle of the night by a man working from a side table by hand, but jewelry nonetheless. Enzo closed his eyes and fed mana into the silver again. This time the mana did what it was meant to. It flowed and began to settle as he held the idea of both absorption and seal within his mind. The thread drew on more of his reserves as it thickened, then suddenly broke as the enchantment completed. He activated Mana Sense again.

Already the cabochon was changing as ambient mana drifted toward it in thin, lazy streams, drawn in by the silver form. Inside the stone, the faintest purple glow was building. On the faces wrapped in gold wire, mana leaked from the stone. But interestingly, a small portion found purchase in the gold wire, which was then redirected along the cage toward the silver form, feeding back into the gemstone in an unintentional feedback loop. It was working, even if it wasn't efficient or fully sealed.

The stone's internal mana density was increasing steadily, the purple glow deepening by fractions too small to measure moment to moment. He could feel the notification nagging at the edge of his awareness, but there was one other thing to test first. Releasing Mana Sense, he closed his eyes and attempted to absorb mana without seeing it. The Guide had provided a single tutorial when it was activated, revealing the principles of basic mana absorption and manipulation.

It explained how to sense and store, and how to control and or cultivate it using the odd poses. He'd completed the initial processes in seconds where it should have taken hours. At the hospital, and in discussion with Sumi, he'd come to realize his level of control over arcane mana was abnormal. Equally so was his inability to convert it to any other type, though he hadn't given up yet. The concept of earth had responded, even if it was barely a tremor.

Enzo focused and tried drawing in the mana without sensing or seeing it. It was difficult, but the mana responded. Slower than when using the proper technique and pose, but it worked. Except it wasn't coming from the stone alone. He was drawing mana from every direction, instead of targeting the source he wanted. He reactivated Mana Sense. The familiar purple haze surrounded him, showing the outline of the world by the way the ambient mana flowed and settled. And in his hand was a denser, brighter source of mana.

Not by much, but still noticeable. Then he slowly cracked his eyelids open. Mana Sense wavered as the change occurred, then settled. He saw the world now as it was, but with a second impression of ambient mana layered over it. The gem actually glowed. Faint and still purple, but visible to the naked eye. He reached out and attempted to absorb the stored mana and instead stole the gathering mana away from it. Enzo frowned. He stared intensely at the stone and tried again.

This time, a wisp of leakage drifted toward him, tugging more along with it from inside the stone, before streaming toward his head, passing through flesh and blood and bone, and finally settling inside the reservoir in his brain. Success. A slow, mentally intense success that demanded way more focus than he could afford to give in combat. But it worked, and the difficulty was likely just a matter of inexperience.

It hadn't been anywhere near as difficult as described by the Guide, and he had also exploited the imperfections of his own design. Reminiscent in a way of pulling on a loose stitch in a sweater. He tested the process again, immediately threading the mana into the spell form of a shield. It snapped into place a second later, the barrier floating above his open hand.

In combat, the time it took to draw ambient mana from a storage medium into his reserve, followed by manifesting it into a thread, and finally shaping it into a spell… would be fatal. Even a single second might very well mean the difference between life and death. That would make it impractical unless it could be improved, but at least the mana in the gem was denser than the ambient mana, which meant refilling his reserves would be faster if nothing else. Enzo took a breath and released the mana.

He could feel the tension in his shoulders where he'd been physically straining himself, as if that might help with the strange psychic demands of manipulating mana. The notifications could wait. Leaning back in the armchair, he was rolling the cabochon between his fingers when a faint light caught his attention. He turned to the sofa where Kenzo lay exactly as he had for hours, breathing steady. But beneath closed eyelids, two points of soft purple light pulsed in time with his friend's breathing. Enzo froze.