Chronicles of the True Wizard

Over the next 4 months, Felix fell into a strict schedule of working out for 2 hours followed by 2 hours of practicing the Dragon's Dance. Grim had given him new forms and he felt he was getting close to ready for the next step. The remaining 20 hours were split amongst two different activities, the first of which was simple enchanting work. At the start, he spent almost 10 hours a day designing, inscribing and testing enchantments on his armor with the ultimate goal of creating some sort of mage armor like spell.

He had a series of inscribed mana shields of various sizes and shapes all interlocked around his body. He didn't have access to very many shapes or any ways of curving and bending the structures though so the spell was not ideal by any means. It was however, very usable. If he could see an attack coming his way, he could effectively just push mana into that area of his armor to create a mana shield and defend himself.

The other activity that ate up the last 10 hours every day was working on his body. He was already working out, and he noticed himself getting stronger, entirely due to his much greater awareness of his own body. He also had a much greater level of control over his body, even though he wasn't nearly ready to actually redesign anything, he did feel like he could make a simple change. Felix began slowly forcing his cells to grow denser, each one smaller and closer together without making them weaker or less flexible.

His daily workout and Dragon's Dance were a huge help in making sure he could still use all his muscles and making sure nothing got too tight. With the daily stretching, Felix was confident he wasn't causing any permanent harm, but he still proceeded with caution. He spent the most time and effort on his bones and slightly less on his muscles. He was most confident that strengthening his bones would have the least side effects followed by his muscles. At first, he didn't dare touch his brain and only slightly touched his more vital organs.

After the first month or so, Felix was finally satisfied with his armor inscriptions. All of his tests, in his lab and in real combat were finally satisfactory. He had found minor improvements and iterated many times but he had finally gotten to a point he was happy with. With that complete, he had 10 hours a day freed up that he spent on a couple of different things.

Firstly, he drained mana from his tower's mana engine and funneled it into his soul space daily. Over the last four months, he managed to expand it to a sphere just over 240 meters across using 4.3 billion mana. He also spent some time loading up his inventory with mana batteries, just in case. He had initially planned on just using the absurd amount of mana in his soul space as a reserve but found that it was far too difficult to remove the mana for it to be usable in combat. Removing mana resulted in his soul space shrinking a bit, which wasn't comfortable, and the process of removing it was heavily limited by the how big he could make the opening to his soul space. It was much faster for him to push mana in than to pull it out.

Nova had learned to fly at some point and spent most of their time out hunting. They had come back and gotten Felix to teleport them to the main continent at some point, he assumed just for a change of pace. Nova had spent the last third or so of the 4 months there.

As he progressed, Felix was happy with the results of his working out and cell compression. The compression had netted him fewer stats every day completely halting around the hundredth or so day. He had mostly gained endurance, strength and agility with a slight increase to all the other stats, except intelligence. Along with the working out, he was just about at the limit of his restrictive equipment and would have to come up with an alternative soon.

He was sorely disappointed though that he hadn't yet found a way to increase his intelligence. He felt like he had the tools to do so but just didn't know how and was too scared to just try something. All of the other parts of his body were simple in comparison, his bones, skin, muscles and some of his vital organs he could simply compress and grow back to their original size. Effectively, he could just make them denser, push his cells to be more efficient.

Brains were so much more complicated though. He was worried that if he made it denser, added any cells, or even just altered their function even slightly, he would accidentally ruin memories or change his personality. Grim assured him his soul would protect his personality and the harm would be minimal but Felix was still just too worried to try anything, at least for the first three months.

At the start of the fourth month, Felix had decided he wanted to increase his brain's speed. He figured that change should be relatively safe and he was very careful to test it on a tiny portion of his brain that he was pretty sure controlled part of his motor control. It was a success but the difference was negligible. On the other hand, he couldn't find any adverse effects so he slowly spread the effect to the rest of his brain. He limited use of his brain as much as he could over the course of the upgrade, remaining in a meditation for the few days it took to complete. When he was done, he had increased his intelligence by almost a hundred points as well as his dexterity and agility by about half that. The increase was disappointing in quantity but Felix was just happy to have increased his intelligence at all. He was beginning to worry he might have to switch to a melee fighter if he wasn't able to increase his intelligence somehow.

Overall, he was pretty happy with his progress. He knew he wasn't where he could have been had he figured out soul harvesting, but the enchanting work did wonders to increase his profession level allowing him to hit level 191. The manual modifications to his race along with working out every day had resulted in between 100 and 1000 per stat, with intelligence being the lowest and endurance the highest. The majority of the stats came from his manual modifications, even though they were minor modifications and all he did was make everything slightly more dense.

His daily work out had gradually resulted in less stats per day but he figured it was still worth it as the stats were pretty much free. He had also thought about practicing the Dragon Dance in his soul garden for the time dilation, but ultimately decided against it so he could keep growing used to his body. He also didn't feel overly pressed for time. He continued to put all of his free points into intelligence as he hadn't reached the ratio limit of 5 between his highest and lowest stats yet. The only other changes were that his Core Energy Infusion skill had reached Initiate II and the stat increase had risen to 90% and his Dragon Dance skill was now Novice III.