Stellar Echo: Heart of the Myst

With a calm step, Erik approached the circle and made a few modifications to it with the special chalk—changes necessary to convert his "neutral" mana into elemental light mana. At that point, he placed his hand on the ground and began sending his mana into the magical circle, which quickly started to illuminate. But unlike when Liliana had done it, this time the magical circle barely began forming the mana construction before it went out completely without emitting any colored light.

"Well, that's another failure, and this time there wasn't even any progress..."

Erik commented with an ironic smile on his face; after all, that was precisely the reason he had become stalled. Although Erik could create a mana construction of any element if he was willing to spend a good amount of mana on it and had the necessary spell, the same did not apply to his "Manafexio" project—the name he had given his project to create magical artifacts through mana constructions.

The inspiration to start the Manafexio project was actually something very simple. The artifacts had millions of years of tireless development by Artificers throughout the galaxy, which had made them very efficient and reliable for creating elemental mana from mana crystals or the user's mana. And although this had a limit, they were more efficient than any spell, so they were still very useful and widely used in the galaxy, especially when it came to light constructions.

The problem was that the rune arrangements of the artifacts work in tandem with the intrinsic properties of the materials on which they were carved to produce their effects. So, they did not work well with spells cast using the technique of mana formation. For that reason, over time, they had diverged into two almost completely different branches within the Aegis system.

But due to his extensive research on mana constructions—something necessary to improve his Myst constructions, his only efficient means of ranged combat—Erik discovered that the potential of these was infinite, since, in theory, mana constructions could come to imitate any physical property with a relatively low-energy expenditure.

From that point on, Erik only had to add two plus two to arrive at a rather strange idea, born mainly out of his particular need: Would it be possible to use mana constructions to imitate specific materials and make them work with the rune arrangements of magical artifacts? And if it were possible, would this be more efficient than the traditional method or runic-geometric refinement?

With that idea in mind, Erik began his Manafexio project. Standing on the shoulders of giants—the mountains of literature that both the development of magical artifacts and the exploration of the possibilities of mana constructions represented—after many failed prototypes, he succeeded in creating a Myst construction capable of imitating the physical properties necessary to activate the fire conversion runes.

The success of the prototype filled Erik with great excitement, not only because his idea was feasible, but because the prototype allowed him to break through the 45% improved efficiency barrier offered by runic-geometric refinement alone, reaching an efficiency close to 55%—a significant breakthrough. But his joy did not last long, and he soon discovered a problem.

Due to his previous experience with the rune circle—his project to unify the three magical systems of humanity, which had remained completely stalled—Erik decided not to develop further on his own. He first focused on making it useful and accessible to the public in an attempt to get "free" researchers to "help" him improve his project. Their research to apply the Manafexio project to their needs would create a solid mountain of literature on which he could later work.

But that's where his problems began. After all, the functional prototype depended entirely on Erik's solidified Myst constructions, and as far as anyone knew, no one but him could control solidified Myst at will. So the real problem was that when Erik tried to adapt his spell to work based on light mana constructions—which were the closest to his Myst constructions—the spell didn't even activate.