Bloody Mary and the Magical Revolution

Magic to Stock Your Library

For what felt like the next several hours, but what was in reality most of the aspiring mages' remaining day, Mary, with a degree of reluctance, spent the majority of her time in what she had come to consider active meditation. Unlike what Alexander might have believed of such a term, it does not involve sitting in a particular cross-legged way, nor are her eyes closed.

Rather, it was in the end a quick-hand term that Mary had begun to internally use in order to describe the process of quickly replenishing her mana reserves via her latest and greatest ambient mana absorbing spell.

As proof of that activity, during her meditation sessions, when she had completely filled her mana reserves and was ready to form her next rune, she would switch her focus to the task of rune creation and intensely scrutinise the rune she had just created.

The longer the process dragged on, the more time Mary had to consider the nature of her current task.

Since the day of her rebirth, Mary had, on numerous occasions, updated several of her most important runes, but there was one rune in particular that she had endeavoured to squeeze out as much efficiency as possible. That rune was, of course, her [Ambient Mana] rune, which she was at this very moment using to increase the speed of her mana regeneration.

She had pushed herself to her very limits; this applied to both the level of the [Ambient Mana] rune, which showed how much she understood about ambient mana, and the strength that the rune could provide, which was affected by her growing power reserves.

As such, due to having created dozens of runes over her short life, she had acquired what eventually revealed itself to be an unfortunate misunderstanding that the rune creation process was more trivial than it truly was.

It was, Mary bitterly reflected, not as trivial as she had tricked herself into believing. She had allowed herself to become complacent because creating [Ambient Mana] runes had become easy for her, and that particular rune, for reasons she still did not understand, had turned out to be one of the easiest to create.

It was because of this misunderstanding that she could not properly enjoy the process of creating her newest runes, and even more specifically, what turned out to be the amusing reactions of Sylvia every time that Mary had successfully created a much higher-level rune than the maid thought was reasonably possible.

When the princess's latest bout of rune formation had started, things had gone well enough. Mary had at first set out to create her latest and greatest version of the [Mind] rune; she was, after all, going to use it not only for the soon-to-be-existent book scan spell that she was aiming to create, but she would also use it for both the second mind and mental library spells that were already vital to her future progress.

This original process of rune creation had, to a degree, been an experiment for her, as up until now, for reasons of mana efficiency, she had previously restrained herself from pushing into the [Least] power tier for what would quickly become her most important and second most used rune.

Beat only by the [Ambient Mana] rune which was an exception to the rule of mana efficiency; after all, the more power that rune had, the greater the mana flow towards it.

Nonetheless, her reasons for doing so had been sound to her.

Certainly, the second mind spell could be improved, perhaps even significantly, with the inclusion of a more powerful mind rune. However, this would raise the mana flow required for permanent activation, complicating her use of the second mind to maintain vital infrastructure within her soul.

Hopefully, this issue will soon become significantly less problematic; now that the second mind is active and has access to a place for storing their spell lore, they can finally begin creating their own magical language for use in spell formulas, preferably based on Alexander’s knowledge of programming, as they are both familiar with such languages.

Furthermore, the princess's current experience suggests that there appears to be, in many ways, a lot of overlap between the requirements of computer logic and magic logic.

If this turns out to be true, and Mary truly hopes that it does, then it would be a fortunate coincidence that Alexander had so much experience with computer logic and programming.

From what Mary had learnt about spell creation, it was relatively clear that having explicitly detailed and consistent logic that describes how a spell is supposed to function should greatly increase its efficiency.

That was her hope at least.

Soon enough, Mary found herself staring at the latest iteration of one of her most important runes; its creation had gone thankfully well.

In fact, the princess regarded it with a degree of relief, as there was nothing unexpected about it.

Mary had been given the chance to smirk at Sylvia's look of abject, and possibly performative, bafflement; apparently, the maid had not completely believed the princess and her second mind when they had told the maid what level her mind rune was.

Mary had, after thinking about it during the creation process, dismissed the notion of replacing her older [Mind] runes in the second mind and library spells for now. That was something that she would experiment with later, perhaps after the second mind had created their first edition spell language.

For a moment, Mary considered moving on to the other required rune that she was familiar with, the [Ambient Mana] rune. But even as she considered the possibility of doing so, her second mind had interrupted her thoughts with what in hindsight were a series of blindingly obvious observations.

{Each rune that we create increases our understanding of how mana works. After you create each of those runes, make sure to properly observe how the ambient mana flows and interacts with them. We still need to get as much efficiency as possible from the [Ambient Mana] rune. As such, you should create it last.}

Unfortunately for Mary, that accurate observation from her second mind had made her task of rune creation far more complicated and stretched the time necessary to complete all her tasks. Mary would estimate later, after having seen the new power and efficiency of her [Ambient Mana] rune that the immediate task was increased by nearly two additional hours.

Although, of course, while the depth of her mana reserves would only increase marginally during the following trial, her knowledge of mana would increase notably due to her intense scrutiny of several new mana flows. And so, a proper estimate of how useful it would have been to create an updated [Ambient Mana] rune before her trial began is incredibly difficult to make.

But she would try, for completeness’ sake, if nothing else.

Ultimately, for the second mind, the additional time taken by her physical body was beneficial, as it allowed her more time to develop her new spell logic; however, for Mary, the physical version of her, this was a frustrating ordeal.

But ultimately, the physical princess had agreed with the second mind's assessment, and so instead of dismissing her newest [Mind] rune, she had begun to stare at it carefully, thoroughly observing not only its physical shape and differences with previous variants but also the feel of the mana interacting and flowing around it.

In something of a first for this lifetime, the princess began to genuinely multitask; even as she was held in Sylvia's soft lap, she was carefully analysing how what she came to understand was mind-aspected mana flowed around the [Mind] rune.

During that observation, the princess was also settling in to meditate and recover her almost completely spent reserves.

What followed took the better part of an hour, in part due to the multitasking that she was now undertaking, but also due to her still-growing power reserves, whose growth, though comparatively marginal, was still increasing due to the spiritual exercise she was currently undertaking.

It took time, but eventually the princess had completely refilled her mana reservoir and, subsequently, with what would become a frequent weary sigh, she dismissed the [Mind] rune from further consideration.

To go along with her physical sigh, Mary sighed internally, fully aware that she was going to be repeating this tedious and time-consuming exercise three more times today, and no doubt many times in the future as her ambitions grow.

It would be worth it in the end, but she would still complain internally about it while she was working.

Perhaps worse, at this moment Mary was genuinely uncertain whether the next three runes being completely new to her, and therefore at least novel when compared to the already familiar [Ambient Mana] rune was a merit or a detriment.

The newness of the runes would make them more interesting at least and would provide greater insight into the nature of mana, but it would also mean having to change her thoughts and frame of mind multiple times to form the different runic concepts.

Another hour passed, leaving Mary staring blankly at the second rune of the day.

The [Book] rune had been as easy to create as all of her previous runes, and by this point Mary was relatively certain that forming basic, non-modified runes would probably rarely if ever lead to failure.

Certainly, she had never failed to form a rune when she set out to make one, and by this point she had experienced the process dozens of times.

Nonetheless, the increasingly exhausted princess stared at the [Book] rune and found herself ultimately unsurprised that its level was only at the level of [Core]. In many ways this rune, much like the [Library] rune before it, represented something that Alexander had not interacted with much during his lifetime.

He had never visited a genuine physical library, nor had he held actual physical paper books; in fact, the former was a concept that had almost died completely due to the internet with its vast data repositories.

As for the latter, due to the existence of e-books, paperbacks had become something for a particular type of pretentious rich person. These are the types of people who have large amounts of spare room in their houses, a situation that has become increasingly rare on the overpopulated Earth.

‘Still three more to go.’

Mary sighed to herself, settling into the grind of another observation and meditation session.

The next two runes passed in a manner similar to the previous two. What was different, the thing that made Mary tiredly smirk at what had become a deathly silent maid, was the [Advanced] level of both runes. It had been validating in a way to be shown that Alexander’s knowledge in something that he had massive, genuine experience in could breach into the seventh tier.

Even better, the adorable, shocked squeak that escaped from Sylvia, which Mary had consciously chosen to believe was genuine and not faked for her benefit, had amused her intensely; even the princess's increasingly exhausted second mind had taken a moment away from creating her magic formula to verbally chuckle at the shockingly cute reaction.

“I wonder which concepts, if any, we could immediately form at level eight?”

Mary remarked to her second mind.

{Not anything biological sadly.}

The second mind replied with a disappointing negative.

"You're probably right.”

Mary answered with a depressed sigh.

{To be realistic, if concepts as widely used and general as [Copy] and [Scan] aren’t of the eighth level, then we’re unlikely to find anything that is.}

Mary nods in agreement, and in the corner of her eye, she sees something that might be relief on the face of her still extremely silent maid.

Mary turns towards the maid, pouting in outrage.

“Does my not being capable of creating eighth-level runes relieve you, Sylvia?”

Sylvia blinks in surprise at the question, her formerly blank face taking on a vaguely guilty look.

"Sorry, princess, but yes. If anyone found out you created a seventh level, let alone an eighth, then there would be trouble. Specifically, extreme political trouble.”

Mary frowns at the answer; she was already in extreme political trouble. What could possibly be worse than her current situation?

Sylvia sighed, but upon seeing the questioning frown, she reluctantly moved to answer her princess with what would soon become another bitter truth of the world.

“Level eight runes are the sort of thing that wars are fought over.”

The maid revealed.

“A strategic asset that can change the face of the world; kingdoms and guilds covet these assets fiercely and are willing to destroy them to prevent their enemies from possessing them as well.”

At this answer, Mary joined the maid’s grim expression with one of her own.

“Normally, the people who are capable of creating an eighth-level rune are powerful archmagi, the sort of person who could tell a kingdom and its army to take a hike.”

“But I can’t. Not for many years yet anyway.”

Mary finished the explanation for the maid, having immediately understood where it was going.

“Exactly. If anyone sees you using high-level runes, or if some mage even suspects that you have a rune of the seventh level or beyond, then it won’t end well. Not just for you, but the Midgard kingdom in general will feel the consequences.”

{Then before we allow anyone to see us use magic, we will need some way of masking our magic.}

Mary's second mind opted in with the obvious conclusion, causing the maid to smile wryly.

“I know for a fact that Elizabeth was capable of hiding the runes in her magic circles!”

Sylvia stated confidently.

“I would teach you myself; all of the magic I inherited from my ancestor hides their runic cores; it was to make them harder to copy or steal. But I only know how to use the magic, not how to teach its constituent parts.”

Mary nodded, having somewhat expected that Sylvia was a magic user rather than a crafter.

“Then, could you go and start retrieving some of Mother's books? Bring the three from before; we should have finished up creating the scanner spell within the hour.”

Sylvia turned towards her princess and smiled happily.

“I’ll be back soon then!”

As she stood up, the maid frowned with what the princess took to be genuine sadness.

“I guess this means we won’t be reading together anymore.”

Mary blinked in surprise at the statement.

“Actually, I’d prefer we continue reading them together. This is just so my second mind has a permanent copy as reference.”

The maid paused, turning towards her princess, and smiled in utmost delight.

“Then I’ll hurry back with all the books you need! Back soon.”

Sylvia exclaimed cheerfully before literally vanishing from Mary’s sight.

Mary blinked at the empty space where her maid had previously stood.

{Apparently people can become fast enough to actually do the disappearing act from anime.}

The second mind remarked in a disbelieving deadpan.

“Did she jump out of the window?”

Mary asked, bewilderedly looking around the room.

The door remained closed, and the curtains were also undisturbed.

“No… surely not teleportation?”

The princess asked herself, stunned at the possibility.

{We’ll have to ask her when she gets back; there’s no point in trying to figure it out without any clues to work with. You should start to work on finishing our latest [Ambient Mana] rune; I finished preparing my part of the scanner spell hours ago.}

Mary frowned at the boasting and immediately turned her attention to the second mind, realising that the structure for what they would eventually call intermediate spell logic had been completed hours earlier; the second mind had spent the remaining time preparing to enhance both herself and the library spell with the new magical formula.