Agnisotra: Origin Tails

I was staring at the ceiling. I had finished the immune system in no time because it involved some simple adjustments to the skill [Regenerate]. The nervous system also seemed easy. I needed some thin vines of a plant with a complicated name. and these need to be continuously zapped until they become conductive. Then I infuse the modified [Regeneration] in it and both the spirit immune system and the nervous system are done. It will be connected with the mana repair system when that is done.

I was staring at the ceiling because everything was going so well. I must have messed up somewhere, right? I am already in possession of the vines I need. I had decided to have a batch be zapped with lightning leylines and another by lightning. Rignef was explicit in stating that lightning brought forth by magic is ineffective.

Raishin creates real lightning and I will use Dragonvein lightning.

“Not everything has to always go wrong, you seem to have been very careful, precise and meticulous. This is a good thing that everything is going so well!” Jyno advised.

I would normally agree but things always go wrong sooner or later with me. I just hope it will go wrong with these easy parts.

“Where is your usual confidence?”

It needed a holiday.

I got up. I will just deal with problems when they arise.

Let’s go visit Raishin!

Jyno and I headed over to Raishin. My vision got blurry and I fell out of the tree.

“Oh, shit not again!” He said that but he was taking his time catching me because there was no rush.

Ugh. This gets old fast.

“It seems quite odd. If you were a puppet, it would look similar as if you had your strings cut. Are you unable to control your body when that happens?”

Yeah. I’m fine now.

I saw Raishin, Greg and Elliana run over.

Dizziness again? I wish I could do something about it…

Are you resting enough?

“Make sure to also drink enough!”

Yes yes, I appreciate the concern but there is nothing I can do about it. Raishin, I need you to continuously zap this with lightning. Not lightning magic, just how you usually do things.

I handed an enormous spool of vines to Raishin.

What color?

Uhhh that is a very good question, Rignef wasn’t specific so let’s just go with red.

Elliana and Jyno looked at me as if I was crazy.

Calm down you two, this is normal, these guys are extremely skilled in lightning, just ignore any common sense around them.

“Won’t those vines get vaporized?”

Good point Elliana! Purple will do Raishin!

Aye sir!

How is the training going Elliana? And where is Inna?

“Inna is preparing for the hunting event next week. I think I have the basics down. I’m just struggling a bit with the intermediate skills.”

Just take your time.

“Will you be watching the hunting event? Raishin and I are joining.”

I want to but I am a bit on a time limit.

“Ah right. I hope you manage to finish it before it gets too difficult…”

Agnis, can you tell me what exactly I have to research or prepare for the alchemical parts?

I need to find a method to put everything together without having it diminish the functions of the individual components but also allow for some customization. It needs to be compatible with magic.

Hmm I think I have something for that.

I am also recording anything I do. I would prefer if you do the same. This will be a big collaboration of Azu’s, Rignef’s, your and my work.

Greg nodded. I’m sorry Elliana, I have some important issues to attend to.

“That’s fine. I will come and help you after I finished training with Raishin.”

Greg went home and Jyno and I did the same.

I started [Tail Dynamo] when I got home and fed purple lightning into the vines.

“What other parts do you need to still make before you’re done?”

Digestive tract, bones and blood. The latter 2 are the hardest. After that the ‘Body’ is finished. I will have to do a lot of messing around with magic circles and mana runes for the magic part and then we have to bring them all together with Alchemy and Greg is taking care of those details.

“Spirits don’t need to eat right?”

That doesn’t stop them from eating bread.

“Fair point. So how long is this going to take?”

I showed the vines to Jyno. It’s already done.

“Oh wow! I will check on Raishin and see if he’s done too.” Jyno got up and left.

I infused the modified [Regenerate] into the vines. Rignef’s magic circle of [Regenerate] was so sloppy, I couldn’t help but alter it. I hope this wouldn’t get any strange effects.

Jyno returned with Raishin’s version and I also infused this.

“So how do we test this?”

I don’t think we can test this. We’re done. Now for the last easy part. The digestive system. I have planned to have a stomach and guts. The waste will be expelled normally and the nutrients will go to the fruits the spirit guardian likes to grow, which will be growing in her hair.

“And how are you going to do that?”

Making the digestive tract is easy. Having it send the nutrients to the fruit… I have no fucking clue. This is an original idea so I will have to find something myself for this.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long.”

It didn’t take long to make the stomach and digestive tract. I started to cheat more and more. Rignef had a complicated mixture to make it act like stomach acid and replenish stomach acid. I just wrote magic runes in the lining to do this. It saved time and effort.

I was currently creating a magic circle to create a skill that would act similarly to [Absorb] and have it follow a certain part and make it connect to the hair, which is part of the skin component. I will have to write another magic circle to have it use those nutrients. The spirit guardians spirit energy will actively grow the fruits so I just have to write a magic circle that aids it in dumping the nutrients in those fruits.

Do I use [Redirect] or [Transfer]? Or do I make use of [Teleport] and have the nutrients be teleported?

“How would I know?!”

[Teleport] will get blocked because there are some areas where it automatically gets blocked and I’m not willing to bet that my alteration will slip through. I cracked open the runic structure of [Transfer]. It normally is used to transfer mana or things that normally can’t get passed over. I suspect Azu had used a modified version of [Transfer] to teach us those magic skills by just touching us back in Boshi town.

An origin and a destination should be found somewhere in this runic structure. I got rid of inefficiencies and redundancies while looking for the runes I needed. I found the origin which was ‘self’ but the destination was unclear.

Who made this skill? I dug through the runic structure for the whole day but I couldn’t find a destination.

Is it connected to ‘touch’? I looked for links with sensory input and I found a convoluted system that indeed linked it to touch.

Why do I feel like whoever made this magic circle is a moron?

“What did you find?”

I am not sure how to explain is but I will keep it simple. I theorized that when someone uses [Transfer] it will have a part in the runic code that codes for the origin and the destination, makes sense right?

“Yeah.”

Well, that’s not the case, there is an origin but the destination is vague. In simple terms what this skill does is move things to nearby objects, no specific target. Not even proximity based. It is just wired such that it will try to transfer it to everything but the failure rate is set quite high for distant objects so it is more likely that close objects get it. They could have made it proximity based but they didn’t…

“Can you fix it?”

It is actually easier to make a new skill from scratch than to fix this…

“You can make new skills?!” Jyno got up.

I am limited because I don’t have the device in Azu’s lab but yeah, I can. I am glad I had stored mana to create mana runes. My habit of throwing anything I see into my dimensional pocket has saved me so many times.

I created an illusion of Azu’s setup. I don’t fully understand it so I could only replicate the parts I could understand.

It was so simple. That magic skill had so much junk in it. I made a template of magic runes and had it create a magic circle. I then started adding runes that aided basic functions of magic circles. Sort of scaffolding for the important magic runes and some sort of auto correct.

I then placed runes which aided magic flow through the circles. Most circles have mana rushing through the whole circle as fast as possible but Azu’s research had concluded that most magic circles get many times more efficient if certain parts get mana first. It will cause the mana to cascade and flow faster to other parts which then will cause it to speed up until it is completed.

The initial startup might be slow but the total completion time of the magic circle is many times more faster than a normal magic circle. It’s only weakness is people like me who can spot and interrupt magic circles in the very early phases. The whole circle will fall apart when it gets interrupted, while a normal circle will just fill out the rest from other sides of the circle.

But because the amount of people with Elgards eyes and knowledge of magic circles like this equals to 1, this is a non-existent problem. Which means that despite me being relatively weak, I’m the only one who has a decent chance at stopping Azu if she somehow went to the evil side. I am genuinely more afraid of her than any god.

I added functional runes. Element: none. It needed specific runes to dictate the mana cost, time of transfer, cast time, activation time, specific conditions to set it on or off and more. I then had to set the origin as the stomach and intestine lining because the nutrients will gather there. And then set the destination to another magic skill I will make shortly after.

It will just be a nutrient container and will nourish the hair and the fruits the spirit will grow. This was extremely easy to create. After finishing both I added some dummy runes to fake complexity. They were good at imitating functionality and I then scrambled it so nobody can mess with it without cracking it first.

I had put my tails on a duty to create an extremely hard scramble to crack so nothing should be able to interfere with these functions, besides Azu and me. But if this spirit messes with either me or Azu she has a lot of other problems of which this is the least of its worries.

I just needed to test this. I don’t believe I messed up but the origin and destination are probably the parts that are going to be the most problematic. 6 digestive tracts were made prior. They looked quite gross. I also had some squares of the skin, also quite gross.

“This doesn’t look appetizing…” Jyno tried to contain his stomach contents.

You can grow fruits, right? Let a plant grow that create fruits I will target it with this new [Transfer].

“What kind of nutrients are you going to send to it?”

Dunno this is not my field of expertise, what would make it obvious that it worked?

“How about salt?”

Would make for disgusting fruits but at least we’ll know it works yeh.

So, I dumped salt in a digestive tract and the salt destroyed it.

Hmm, I should have seen this coming but… Fuck!

I had 5 left now. I crushed some fish, ate some and dumped the rest in the stomach.

“You’re not supposed to eat your testing sample…”

It is going to take forever to digest anyways…

We sat and waited. And waited.

Hey how long does it take for someone to normally digest something?

“I have no idea. A day perhaps?”

We waited for a day and tried one of the fruits Jyno had grown but they weren’t salty.

We waited another day and still no salty fruit.

Also, no salty fruit on day 3.

I think I messed up; I’m going to alter the magic circles a bit.

I messed around and made the [Transfer] a bit more specific and also improved the nourishment container.

We tested again. And again. I had started to test all 5 digestive tracts at the same time all with slightly different [Transfers].

Ok attempt 161 till 165! This will surely work!

“32 days… are you even going to finish in time?”

I only got the dizzy spell 21 times I will be fine!

I felt a dizzy spell but it was lighter than I had in months.

Oh, that wasn’t so bad I think I’m getting better.

Jyno was staring at me and pointing at the floor. I looked down and saw myself laying on the floor.

Huh what?

“Your spirit separated from its body… this is bad! Go back in!

” I looked at myself with my Elgards eyes. I couldn’t because I had normal eyes now.

Jyno got me a mirror. I looked like I normally do although a bit transparent. I tried to dive back into my body but my body didn’t let me in.

Let me iiin!

“This is bad… I need to report this but I can’t leave you alone. How do you feel?”

I feel light.

“I can imagine, anything else?”

Uhh, I feel fine but I can see why this is so ba…

I felt a tug and got pulled back into my body.

…d. Oh that was weird.

I got up and rubbed my head.

That was a strange experience.

“Please come with me. I don’t feel comfortable leaving you behind now.” I followed Jyno and we went into the big tree.

Jyno explained what happened. The elves freaked out of course. The biggest problem was that I haven’t started on the harder components yet. I didn’t expect the easier parts to be so time consuming.

“There is unfortunately nothing we can do to alleviate this. If you need any materials, please tell us, we can’t let you leave the village like this.”

I will need all the information you have on spirits, everything. I need it for the hardest step to complete the body.

“Ok, we will arrange for that. Will you be done after that?”

No, I will need to work on the magic part and then bring it together with alchemy. Please also give Greg everything he needs. I need him for the last step.

“We will do our utmost best.”

We left and continued testing.

We waited 2 days and tasted the fruit.

“Ugh this is disgusting! So salty!”

It finally worked. I’m so exhausted.

“I didn’t do much but I also feel exhausted.” We both cleaned up and went to sleep