Bloody Mary and the Magical Revolution

Incremental Upgrade (Mana 6)

Upon waking up, Mary lets out a frustrated groan. Mary finds after having her nightmare several times that she is no longer startled awake by the horrific visions her mind seems intent on showing her.

Instead of focusing on the constant attempts by her subconscious to frighten her, Mary tries to forget about the endless fear she has about what the future holds.

Mary, however, makes herself concentrate on the new information she has gained about mana from yesterday's reading of the first of her mother's books by Sylvia.

Even though they had barely gotten through two thick chapters before Mary had to go to sleep, those chapters had covered the fundamentals of magical energy's usual flow through the world and the elemental natures' usual locations and behaviours.

She could not help but be captivated by the material, although she had anticipated part of it based on Alexander's hobby in magical fantasy.

Mary smugly smiled; she had also confirmed that maintaining a passive magic spell to expand her magical reserves was at least somewhat feasible. While mana-rich foods have thus far proven to have a much greater impact on increasing her reserves overall, even a slight increase in speed is tremendously helpful given her perilous situation.

Mary frowned in wonder; she was relatively certain that Sylvia had mentioned that her mana-rich milk would only help to increase her reserves for so long, which heavily implied that there was some sort of practical limit to mana reserve growth.

That would be inconvenient, as Sylvia's milk was currently proving to be the best way to grow Mary’s mana reserves.

While there might be a limit to the benefits of Sylvia's mana-rich milk, was that due to some sort of unspoken mana cap that couldn’t be easily overcome?

Sylvia had said that she was a powerful B-ranked adventurer; even if the overall strength and quality of her mana had not been a focus of hers, she should still be tremendously more powerful than Mary will be for years to come.

Did that mean that her milk did not match her overall prowess? Or was there something else at play?

Mary would have to ask Sylvia more about mana-rich foods and how significant the benefits were supposed to be. Perhaps a skilled cook would improve the gains from eating their food? That was a relatively frequent fantasy trope.

Mary shakes her head, attempting to remove the persistent thoughts of Sylvia's amazing breasts, shifting her focus back to her thoughts on magic.

‘From what I have learnt, a mana rune's power is dictated by the reserves of the rune creator and how much of those reserves are used in the rune definition process. If I want to create more powerful runes, then I need more mana.’

Mary confirms her priority once again and then frowns in thought.

‘The amount of mana in a rune might dictate its power, but the level is decided by the knowledge the creator has of the rune in question.’

Mary allows her frown to deepen further, thinking back to her first rune creations. Could it really be that simple, or was she missing something? Due to her previous life, Mary should know more than enough about the physical attributes of fire to create something better than merely a basic rune, right?

‘I made a fire rune, but it was a basic one…’ Mary thinks to herself, replaying her memories of the previous days, 'No, if I remember correctly, I told the mana to become a basic rune. Sylvia had mentioned the keywords, and I had instinctively tried to use one. If I tried, could I create a much higher-level rune for fire?’

That made sense to Mary; thanks to the knowledge inherited from Alexander, she has a comparatively high-level understanding of basic physics and chemistry. She should be perfectly capable of creating extremely sophisticated fire runes.

Mary hums in thought, considering the matter further.

It was entirely possible that Mary knew more about the physical processes involved in the creation of fire and some of its derivatives than most of the fire-specialised mages on Terra.

Mary sharply pauses her thought process, slightly chiding herself for the arrogant thought, and ultimately concedes.

Her knowledge of certain aspects of the physical world may very well exceed that of all but the most educated mages, except for those mages who have inherited a great deal of otherworldly knowledge or have had great success in investigating their speciality.

‘Of course, they currently have an advantage in purely magical knowledge. And magical fire no doubt has some differences to regular fires, if only because it can use mana as a fuel instead of the usual sources.’

But then, could her newly acquired and confirmed information on the nature of magical energy allow her to create a more sophisticated ambient mana rune?

Mary adopts a look of interest at the thought of already being able to create a better ambient mana rune.

‘Most of what I learned in that book was new to me; only a small amount of it actually confirmed the guesses and superstitions that I had, and those were largely based on Alexander’s fantasy hobby.’

‘Does the basic level of the ambient mana rune mean that most of those guesses are wrong, or is there something else that dictates when knowledge impacts rune creation?’

Mary chews on her cheeks in thought before shaking her head dismissively.

‘The introduction to runes book might tell me, but it'll take weeks before I finish that. Better to just try a rune creation to see.’

Mary nods as she closes her eyes to meditate.

In moments a clump of neutral mana is before her, ready to take the form of a new ambient mana rune.

‘Let this work.’

Mary sighs in what would become temporary disappointment as she looks at the seemingly identical ambient mana rune.

‘It’s the same then. As expected, I need to…’

Mary feels her thoughts trail off as she stares at the ambient mana rune floating in front of her.

‘No wait, is it different from the last one?’

Mary thinks with a frown.

Mary reaches within her memory and, with a small application of magical energy, brings forth her previous ambient mana rune. With both runes side by side, it becomes instantly obvious that there are some minor differences between the two runes.

‘The lines are slightly thicker.’

Mary considers the irregularity.

Blinking in confusion, she focuses instead on the mana streams flowing toward the two runes, intent on comparing them as best she can.

‘The flow is exactly the same.’

She notes, dispersing the runes for now, ‘So should I assume that mana draw is handled by the power of a rune, then?’

Mary nods at the conclusion. An ambient mana rune's purpose seems to be drawing the ambient mana towards it. It is logical to conclude that the power of a rune determines the amount of mana drawn to it, which could be referred to as the rune's mana throughput.

‘If that’s the case, then the level would be the efficiency with which the mana is used. So, what is this change in the runes' thickness?’

The most obvious answer would be that Mary did not learn enough about mana to create a higher level of rune, but there are unseen levels even within the overall system.

Perhaps there was even a way to observe runes at a more granular level? If there were internal benchmarks that separated the observable surface level, then it would make it much more worth it to keep up-to-date runes as a mage gains power and knowledge.

It would also explain some of the things that Sylvia has mentioned; if mages must continually update their rune catalogue, then, of course, they would have to dedicate potentially years of effort into rune creation. Such an effort would make runes created by powerful and knowledgeable arch-mages even more valuable as well.

Mary frowns for a moment, wondering why her teacher's maid had not told her about this part of rune creation before reaching a tentative conclusion that doesn’t involve foul play from the maid, whom she has little choice but to trust.

‘For all that Sylvia knows magic, she is not a mage. Didn't she even say that she’d never bothered with rune creation before? It stands to reason she wouldn’t really know about this, but will it be mentioned in one of the introductory tomes that she retrieved from Mother's library?’

Intent on confirming her theory before anything else, Mary closes her eyes to meditate once more.

Previously, when creating a rune, Mary had focused wholly on mana efficiency by using the smallest clump of mana she could control.

Briefly, Mary reflects that if this experiment ends up working, then the decision to use as little mana as possible for rune creation will have been a mistake, but Mary comforts herself knowing that it has only been a few days since she had reincarnated into this life.

This time, she instead grabs as much of her mana as she can and immediately finds that, for this first effort, the best she can manage is perhaps a third of what should be her comparatively tiny mana reserves.

Mary allows herself to frown briefly, making a note of this new deficiency for later.

‘I need to work on my control as well; even if this doesn’t work out, I want to be able to progress to higher power runes as soon as possible.’

She clenches her jaw, forcing her will onto the comparatively massive amount of mana that she is attempting to corral; slowly and with meticulous care, she removes the Mary-flavoured nature from the mana before pulling it out of herself.

Mary opens her eyes and stares at the large mass of neutral mana floating in her metaphorical hands before she orders it to take the shape of an ambient mana rune.

Instantly the shapeless blob of mana twists and forms into a new ambient mana rune, and the first of the differences between this rune and previous ones become obvious.

Her newest rune is physically larger than her previous runes, no doubt due to the increase in mana used in their inception.

With a degree of anticipation, Mary intentionally observes the runes' characteristics.

Mary allows herself a breathless sigh. While she was not truly surprised that she hadn’t managed to control enough mana to get to the next power level, it is nonetheless disappointing.

Swallowing her disappointment, Mary instead focuses on the visibly increased mana flow of this new rune.

She is eager to see for herself just how significant the increase in mana flow is, so she brings up the previous visibly smaller rune again and places them beside each other.

And she smiles at her success.

‘Is this about double the power of the previous rune?’

Mary questions in wonder.

‘How close am I to hitting the benchmark for the next power level? For it to be double the power of my last attempt, am I close to the rune being the next power level, or does this mean that each acknowledged akashic rune level is a magnitude greater than the last?’

That seemed like it could be possible. Hadn't Sylvia mentioned that the highest levels of magic could erase entire cities? For magic to escalate to that degree, surely the strongest runes would have vast amounts of magical energy backing them.

Comparatively, the mana flow of Mary's newest ambient mana rune was paltry; she could even see mana flows in her bedroom that had greater throughput than even this newer version that she had created.

If a simple third of Mary's current magical energy reserves could double the throughput of her original ambient mana rune, then did that mean that her current reserves could create a rune that had quadruple the throughput of her original rune?

If that was the case, then what should she focus on?

Should she immediately summon Sylvia to continue reading to her after her breakfast and cleaning, of course, or should she quickly try to push the limits of her ambient mana rune?

Mary made a complicated face as she felt the mess she had made during the night.

‘No… I’m going to have to get Sylvia to clean this mess up first anyway.’

Mary frowns in thought.

‘Actually, Sylvia did show me those cleaning runes… but they were very high level. Do I even have enough mana to use those?’

Mary sighs, shaking her head.

‘No, I probably don’t. Call Sylvia, get cleaned up, and have breakfast. But do I pursue knowledge first, or do I death march a better ambient rune?’