Magic Made Simple

Chapter 21: King's Judgement

Motivation is at an all time high. Inhibitions are at an all time low. There is no time like the present to improve myself, and for the past three days that is exactly what I have been doing. That night that I'd been partying, I had received a number of notifications, and only after it was all over had I bothered to look at them.

You are now level 34

You are now level 35

Advanced Mana Manipulation (Rare) has been upgraded to Superior Mana Manipulation (Epic)

I had managed to upgrade my mana manipulation skill that night without even having really intended to. I'd known I was close to an upgrade, and something about all the new and unique ways I had used my mana must have been enough to kick it over the finish line. I had even gained two levels as opposed to the usual one for a skill upgrade. I'd wager it was probably because the skill upgraded was the most important skill I had and one that was fundamentally linked to every other skill and spell in my arsenal.

Ever since that night, I had been doing some off and on training, taking breaks to mingle with people around the outpost and generally just be more a part of the community. I'd taken a trip to Hassan's camp one night, and had some more of their delicious cooking. I swear it somehow got better every time I went.

During the time I had spent training, I had been working on upgrading my empower skill. It was a slow process, as it didn't actually involve using the skill to learn more about it. What I was doing was more akin to a complete overhaul of the skill, improving every aspect of it by changing it completely.

My eyes had been opened to the wasted potential of the skill when I had seen what the Spear Queen used during our fight. Her skill had given her a massive boost of speed for about a second after activating, and by my best estimate boosted her Body stat by about 25%. That was almost double the effect mine gave me, and I wanted something like that.

And so, all of my training time could be boiled down to meditating and rerouting my mana pathways. It wasn't exactly easy, and it hurt like a hot needle to do, but I knew I was on the right track. Once I had managed to finish rerouting the mana in my arm, I could feel the difference in my grip strength.

Some parts of my body were much easier to change than others. For my hands it had been as simple as splitting up the natural mana pathway and having each new "string" of it reaching a different part of the hand, making sure the energy was distributed as well as possible to every single muscle fiber. The feet were much the same, but when I moved up to my calves and my forearms, things got tricky.

Unlike the hands, the mana pathways didn't just end in the forearms. That meant that after distributing all the mana, the pathways needed to reconverge to go to continue on to my hands. I had no way to do such a thing effectively, which sent me right back to square one.

What I eventually figured out was that I needed to start the splintering of mana right at the center of my chest, the place where all mana pathways converged. Each of these new and splintered pathways would then trace a similar, but slightly offset line from where it originated. That way I wouldn't be messing up the flows of mana, but still distributing it more evenly through my muscles.

The only problem I had with this method was that I needed to remake the enchantment in my arm that allowed me to store things in my aura. I had taken one of the new pathways I'd created to make a copy of the enchantment, but that meant the skill would be slightly less effective for the area I'd taken the pathway from. If making the skill 2% less effective for my left pinky was what it cost to be able to store items in an extradimensional space, then I guess I would just have to take the hit.