Chronicles of the True Wizard

Felix wasn't ready to connect the outputs yet as he wanted to make sure everything else was stable first. He had to speed up both cores significantly past what he had wanted them to be so that they would pull from his pools efficiently. Once he tuned the shapes of the input tubes and speed of the cores he started to fill the cores as much as he could. He depleted both his energy and mana pools then began drawing in ambient mana until his mana core was close to 80% of it's capacity. Finally he was ready to connect his cores, he wished his energy pool was more full, but he didn't have a fast way of regenerating energy at the moment.

He slowly moved the start of the output tubes below the surface of the cores so that their natural spin pushed mana through them and suddenly had his stomach flooded with mana. He quickly held the mana manually and thinned the output tubes until they only let a manageable amount into his stomach. He moved the output tubes into position right next to the center of his cores so that he was getting the densest resources he could.

He had to further adjust things as he went but overall, it was looking like a great success. He found his energy core continued to fill up and he couldn't figure out where the energy was coming from at first, until he realized his mana was being consumed. When he had previously tested mixing energy and mana before infusing his cells, he hadn't even considered that maybe mana could become energy. When he was observing the effects, he didn't notice it because he was looking for something completely different. To supplement this consumption he helped manually fill his mana core until both cores were filled to the brim.

Ding You have manually modified your race and gained the Racial Trait: [Mana Core (Uncommon) A centralized location within the body containing mana. Cores can have many different sizes, shapes, and effects. Your core will spin drawing mana from your mana pool and compressing it into a liquid. Your core has the following effects: +90 x Intelligence Mana, +100% Passive Mana Regeneration Rate]

Ding You have manually modified your race and gained the Racial Trait: [Energy Core (Rare) A centralized location within the body containing energy. Cores can have many different sizes, shapes, and effects. Your core will spin drawing energy from your body, mixing it with mana and compressing it. Your core has the following effects: +30 x Endurance Energy, +1000% Passive Energy Regeneration at the cost of mana]

Woah, that's a lot. Huh, no Racial Trait for Mana Channels though? I guess I am kind of piggy backing off of my circulatory system.

Felix also found that he didn't need to do anything manually with his cores at all anymore as The System seemed to be managing them for him. It kept them spinning at speed and made sure the inputs and outputs were maintained. He also found that he didn't even notice the mana depletion from his Energy Core Trait, especially not after his mana regeneration was doubled.

He started testing the effectiveness of his makeshift channels, first with energy. He had previously refused an energy buffing skill because he was pretty sure he could find a better one with a little work. Now he didn't have energy cycles at all, instead energy traveled using his blood as a medium to all of his limbs. He found that if he consciously pulled the energy into his muscles or organs, it would simply be drawn out of his blood naturally. It was much more efficient and cleaner than what he was doing before. He spent a little bit of time tuning it so that his intelligence, dexterity, agility and perception were buffed as much as he could at all times.

He practiced a few times with buffing his strength to jump and run and immediately noticed his buff was now around a 75% increase instead of just 50%. He compared his stats before and after his buff to confirm.

Name: Felix Kade FREE 0

Innate: Ascendant Prodigy: Mana (Wizard) STR 672

Class: [E - Common] Caster (Lvl 82) DEX 672

Race: [E - Common] Human (Lvl 87) AGI 672

Profession: [E - Special] Arcane Engineer (Lvl 92) PER 672

Health: 13324/13440 VIT 672

Mana: 134400/134400 INT 1344

Energy: 26880/26880 END 672

Name: Felix Kade FREE 0

Innate: Ascendant Prodigy: Mana (Wizard) STR 1176

Class: [E - Common] Caster (Lvl 82) DEX 1176

Race: [E - Common] Human (Lvl 87) AGI 1176

Profession: [E - Special] Arcane Engineer (Lvl 92) PER 1176

Health: 23513/23520 VIT 1176

Mana: 235200/235200 INT 2352

Energy: 47040/47040 END 1176

I guess it doesn't matter if I buff my dexterity or agility or perception since the buff applies before the amulet it seems. I guess the buff is like directly increasing my bodies performance while the amulet is going from the state of my body? Maybe. I'll have to ask someone but who the hell would know this kind of thing other than The System. If it wanted to answer me it would have since it can definitely listen to my thoughts.

Ding You have demonstrated sufficient proficiency to unlock the General Skill: [Core Energy Infusion (Rare) By infusing different parts of your body with energy, you are able to train your body to be more efficient as well as increase it's performance. By restricting the flow of energy to your bodily functions, your body is becoming gradually more efficient. By increasing the flow of energy to specific bodily functions, you can increase their performance. By increasing the flow of energy to entire systems, you can increase your stats for as long as you have energy. This energy is supplied by your core and it's density increases this skills efficiency. This skill can be upgraded. The amount of performance and stats you gain are dependent on your core density and bodily efficiency. You may alter the current state of the buff at any time through intent. (Current maximum stat increase: 75%)]

Yes please, thank you. Now The System should manage the whole thing and make it all seamless. I wonder if in future I could drop the skill and just do it manually. That would be a lot of multitasking but maybe I can split my brain to handle multiple processes later on.

Felix checked what day it was and saw that he still had a day or so until he had to go see Henry and a few days until the holiday. His first order of business was to bathe then he wanted to start creating spells in preparation for the world bosses. Before he did any of that though, he walked over to Grim and wrote, "Hey Grim, open up." He then pulled out the rest of his mana batteries and fed them all to Grim.

"Success I take it?" Grim asked.

"Huge success."

"Congratulations."

Felix had noticed the rest of the bedroom furniture had arrived and heading down the tower he immediately noticed the rest of the rooms had also been filled with furniture. It was mostly as he had imagined, wood chairs, shelves, tables and random rugs. It looked decent enough, but honestly, Felix didn't overly care about most of it. He did care a lot about the lab floor though which was exactly as he had hoped it would be, tables everywhere with shelves and bins for tons of storage.

He left it for now and ran straight through the city heading south to the river. He arrived in just under 20 minutes and bathed as best he could in the river. He could have gone to a bathhouse, which he recently learned existed, but it was a pretty easy jog down to the river and he didn't feel like talking to people. When he was done he headed back up to the city and towards the builders guild hub.

He found Amelia relatively easily at the guild hub and paid her 150k credits for the rest of the furniture. Afterwards, he headed straight back to the tower and headed up to the lab floor. Grim floated over to rest on the table in front of him.

"So what's your next project?"

"Now I'm gonna work on improving my spells. I plan on taking on a world boss solo soon and The System recommends 250 or so level 50s to take it on. I also need to increase my diversity. Right now, I just fall pretty heavily on Fire Bolts."

I hope Grim doesn't count as a party member and steal my experience points. Maybe I should bond to him to be sure, then he'd be more like a familiar.

"Seems reasonable to me. Do you have any spells in specific you're gonna try to create?"

"I can already make javelins but I want something more blade like. I fought a tree in a swamp a few weeks ago and had to just blast through it with raw fire power, literally. It mostly used vines for attacking and defending so some sort of blade spell would have been ideal. I'd also like to figure out lightning but that's a lower priority. Oh also mana or mage armor and shield if I get to it."

"You aren't worried about your defense fighting world bosses? Seems like you should prioritize that, shouldn't you?"

"I figure no matter how good I get it in the next few days, any of the world bosses will rip right through it anyways."

"Maybe, it's also possible it saves your life."

"Yeah but so could killing it faster."

"Yeah, I guess."

The first task Felix took on was to perfect both his standard Fire Bolts and Pocket-Star Fire-Bolts. With his standard Fire Bolts, he had already upped the heat and density of the fire as well as added some inward force to keep them stable and spun them. He was already pretty happy with the spell but spent a few hours experimenting further with different rings and multiple nodes instead of a single fire node. His last experiment was with not using nodes at all, now that he could change the attunement of the mana directly, he theoretically didn't need them.

In reality though, the nodes were still much faster. It took Felix a few seconds to change the energy level and attunement of enough mana for the spell, which was much too long for use in combat. He spent a few hours though tuning the exact parameters of the spell until it was as fast and efficient as he could make it. The efficiency was less important with a standard Fire Bolt but having the efficiency scale up when he oversized them was important.

With the Pocket-Star Fire-Bolts he first fiddled with his Pocket Star, which was much easier to cast now that he had such a massive mana pool. He increased the spin on the ball and also experimented with casting a shell around it so it cooled off slower. Unfortunately, it sucked in so much air to keep itself burning that the insulation provided by the shell was negligible at best. He did however figure out how best to hold it, fuel it and siphon from it. He had it spinning just in front of him with threads of fire being siphoned off into Fire Bolts. He could manage to hold the star together and create four Fire Bolts at the same time.

Next he started trying to figure out how to make some kind of blade spell. Ultimately he found that he had to manually shape blades from mana which was inefficient as hell. What he really wanted was shaping nodes for blades. Unfortunately he didn't know any and didn't have anywhere to look for them. It was possible Grim knew some but he didn't offer any and Felix didn't bother asking. He figured if he did know any, he would probably offer them himself. He could however move the blades very easily with his mana control alone. He debated creating the blades ahead of time then storing them in his inventory but didn't end up doing it just yet. He was still holding out hope for a better option.

By the time he had finished experimenting with blade spells it was about time to go and see Henry. Felix headed out of the tower and straight to Henry's forge where he knocked on the large steel door. Felix was still getting used to his strength that came from the amulet after buffing his intelligence so he knocked a little harder than intended. Henry opened the door after just a few moments, "Oi, it is you. You are the only one who knocks that hard."

Henry stepped inside and Felix followed, closing the door behind him. Henry led Felix to a table off to the side from the forges where a beautiful suit of plate armor lay. It was made of v shaped interlocking plates over the joints and flexible areas. The whole thing was made of some metal a few shades darker than steel with white trim on the edges of the interlocking plates.

[E - Uncommon] Carbon Steel Plate Armor

A suit of plate armor designed to be as flexible as possible while still offering complete protection.

"This one is kind of a gamble on my part. I know high carbon steel is rather brittle so it don't make for the best armor but I was hoping you might be able to enchant it to fix that. As it is, I can't break Uncommon with the material."

"I'll see what I can do. Do you have a few sample plates or pieces of high carbon steel I can experiment on?"

"I have a few scrap plates I was gonna melt down over there." Henry gestured with a nod.

"How permanent do you want the enchantment?"

"Very?"

"Most basic enchantments last for a few years or longer depending on the material and it's wear. I can also do a permanent enchantment but that requires inlaying metal into the armor."

"Oh a few years should be fine. I doubt anyone will be wearing this that long and if they do, they can come back for a touch-up or maintenance."

"Perfect. Anything else you want on this specifically?"

"Make it stronger, lighter. Anything else to make it better armor. The client is a bit of a show-boat too so, if it doesn't disrupt the other enchantments, you can add some cosmetic nonsense. Oh almost forgot, they are getting the Tri-Peak logo painted on the breastplate too. I'll go grab the painter when you are done. If you can, try to avoid disturbing the circle in the middle of the armor."

"Who is this guy anyways?"

"A rather wealthy builder who wants to start adventuring now." . . . . .