The Arcade Series

A week went by quickly, though it was a well spent one. Learning to use all my new found abilities and the additional ones from the new artifact has left me with barely any free time after hours, though that's not a bad thing. Experimenting with magic could never be boring for me, I even find it hard to not experiment while people are around during the day.

Some discoveries were made during the week, mostly mundane stuff like confirming what elements respond to different colors of mana, but there were some more fun and interesting things that I did too like figuring out that in the mindscape I can see other peoples minds and even get a glimpse of their more projected thoughts just by letting a part of my mind be in the mindscape. Oh, speaking of putting a part of my mind in the mindscape, I figured out how to basically split my mind into several different parts that can all do different things at the same time through the dungeon core.

It was actually a very interesting thing to discover, I just kind of did it while my mind was controlling the dungeon core and I didn't even realize what I was doing for a solid minute. It was almost unnaturally natural for me to do it while I was controlling the core, but almost impossible to do without the core.

It was a weird ability that the core gave me, and I will describe how it worked. So I just needed to concentrate on multiple things while in the dungeon core control mode and my thoughts just kind of came alive and separated into their own unique thought processes.

They were all still me however, so there was no kind of inner war going on between them, it was very close to what I thought being a hive mind would feel like. There were limitations of course, I couldn't seem to make more than three fully functionable thought processes, and when I tried to make more they all just kind of degraded. Like they just frayed away to become something lesser and my entire mind was limited by a lot. It was a terrible thing to feel and I barely got up the wit to combine all the thoughts into one again.

Then there was unaided mind splitting, without the core. It was hard. Very, very hard. Remember how I said it was almost impossible without the core? Well, I was not exaggerating. It took me a full four hours just to try to grasp how I thought it should be done, then another three hours just to try to actually do it and after all that, I barely managed to make another thought process. Also I should mention that it lasted a few seconds before merging again and it took the same amount of time to just try to repeat the process. It was just not viable yet.

I did get a new ability for it though, called mental partitions, but it didn't really change anything, just kind of told me that I split my mind and that I can do it after a few hours right now. So, I just kept the core on me pretty much all the time just for efficiency's sake for when I was working and testing, just to expedite the process a little.

As for how the core helped me around the arcade, well it was proving indispensable mostly through the ability to manipulate matter with my mind from across the room at will and a little mana. As for what exactly I mean by manipulate matter, I refer you to the ability description which states it can ‘shape physical materials with an expenditure of mana’ which is exactly what it does. It lets me change the shape of things in the arcade. And by things I mean anything. Except for organic materials like food apparently.

To manipulate the shape of things is actually really simple, with the dungeon core of course as I found it's impossible to do it right now without the dungeon core like the mind partitioning, and I just need to concentrate on pictureing what I want the thing to be shaped like and the dungeon basically just sends mana from throughout its domain and makes it change the way it's shaped and that's it! It makes cleaning up the arcade a little easier and it lets me change the design of things in the store which is really cool.

Then there are the new things the dungeon core can let me do while experimenting with mana and the mind scape. Aside from being able to run three different experiments at the same time, there are two other abilities that have proved absolutely incredible. Firstly, there is the dungeons' enhanced senses through the domain in combination with dungeon mind.

This ability is actually more impressive and useful then I first thought as I can control how much I can see through the domain. Now this might not seem like much, but by how much I can see I mean from being able to be practically omnipresent with the vision of the human eye, to being able to see things less than a millimeter big as if they were the size of a movie poster and with dungeon mind I am looking at every inch of it at the same time no problem. It was incredible. I have mostly used this ability to study artifacts to see if I can figure out how they work, which I am going to address in a bit.

For the second ability, it is much more subtle. It is the mana control ability that the dungeon has, along with my version of it. Now, when I first got the ability I was excited at the new power I had when I made a ball of light, but now I realize that this is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. I may not have seen magic being used in my tiny arcade after Terance, but with the two mana control abilities my control over mana has skyrocketed. Dungeon control is much more powerful at large scale things like shaping things with a thought, but my mana control seems to be actually quite different in practice with the actual effects being much more powerful and efficient.

An example of this difference is when I had one mind use the dungeon to control mana to create a flame ball with the red mana and another to use my personal control to do the same thing with the same amount of mana. The results were that the dungeon control made a fireball about five inches in diameter, while the personal mana fireball was about three times the size, but the dungeon made fireball lasted half an hour on the mana I gave it while the other one lasted about a minute. I would like to add that I gave both fireballs the exact same intent and commands.

It was interesting, but I really couldn't find out why they were so different.

Now, experimenting with mana was not the only thing I did during this time. No, I also had two other little experiments going during the week. First, I was seeing what I could do with the mind scape and the weird energies in there, but I wasn't really getting anywhere with that to the point it was just really annoying how many things I tried that did not do a single thing. But the real experiment and project were artifacts.

I was trying to figure out what exactly makes artifacts artifacts, how they did what they did and if I could make them myself instead of using the random artifact generators the system gave me. This was actually going surprisingly well, mostly because of the dungeon's abilities.

Artifacts as it turns out seem to be just objects with mana patterns that have been basically infused into the object somehow. It is really interesting to see everything going on in artifacts and I have spent a few days just racking up a few rank one artifacts for study. My studying process is basically just me looking at the artifacts with the dungeon senses tuned to its maximum sensitivity aimed at the artifacts and seeing what is going on with the mana I can clearly see running through the artifacts.

After a few seconds of watching how mana runs through artifacts, I came to a conclusion. Artifacts are the magic equivalent to electronics. Mana moves through designated channels, that somehow got there, and they move through mana modules, which I have no idea how they work, and those modules create different effects depending on what the shape of those modules are. Like how electricity moves through circuits and into the little things that turn the electricity into light or things.

It's really interesting to see, but also a bit maddening at the same time.

While I mentioned it was like mana running through circuits, I should specify the differences to give a clear picture. In the three tier one artifacts I got the patterns were hard to follow, but they were very simple and there were not many different mana pathways. But in the dungeon core… Well, it's not that simple. The dungeon core was practically made of mana structures, they ran through every millimeter of the core, each pathway less than a nanometer wide and the mana inside them are somehow even smaller to the point that I couldn't even see them when I first looked.

I don't even know how it is possible mana can be shrunk or broken down to that size and still be able to do things as incredible as the dungeon core can, and as far as my experiments have shown me it shouldn't be possible, but it doesn't care and keeps doing it anyway.

As for the artifact generators themselves… let's just say even compared to the dungeon core they are a good thousand times more complicated. I doubt I could understand how it really works if I studied it for a thousand years like I am now. But speaking of how it works, I got a few glimpses on how artifacts might be created from peaking inside the generator when it created the tier one artifacts. As far as I could tell, the mana that was pulled inside the generator was used in a way actually pretty similar to how matter manipulation uses mana, but it creates an object instead of taking what is already there.

Then it… well, I haven't figured out how exactly, but it sent several beads of mana the size of the mana pathways and made it carve out a mana pathway then it shaped out the modules and put them in places along that pathway and then it just somehow works.

In other words, it materialized matter, inscribed mana pathways in it, then it made weird mana patterns that did things to the mana that went through them. Seems mostly simple, right? No. No it is not. I have tried for hours on end to just try to create matter from just mana and nothing happened. Then when I tried to inscribe pathways onto an already existing object, nothing happened. The mana just went through like the object didn't exist as usual. And I have no clue where to start with the modules.

It seems artifact creation will be beyond me for a long time.

But that was all good. It's not like I really need to afterall. Life was nice in the arcade. Watching people play and chat with friends and family is always nice. Well, until my customers stopped coming and from what little did come, the adults seemed… well the only good way to put it is scared and frightened. Always talking like… something was coming. Something terrible. The kids of course didn't really notice a thing except for a few of the older ones. I don't know what to think at this point, but I think something might be happening. Hopefully it's not too bad…