Chapter 137: Scouting
"Hey Kiii~r, look what I can do!"
Stella’s voice was not a welcome intrusion into Kir’s daily meditation.
He’d been trying to do what Amarena instructed, creating a form for his wrath by incorporating it into what they’d both discovered to be normal mana compression. Yet somehow it was much harder than he’d expected. Like trying to fill a mold from the bottom up with water, and expecting it to stick, only to lose it all to gravity.
Gravity - in this case, the natural attraction of his mana to itself - kept pulling his efforts out of the mental construct he’d come up with, and it required constant attention for him to shift his mana into the ’mold’ in the first place. As soon as he thought of this, it occurred to him that magnetism was a better concept. Mana was like working with magnetic fluid... or something.
His self-delving had grown more precise in an attempt to cope with the disparity between his body and mana, some things became obvious to him.
One was that there was something... different... inside him. A formation that implied great depth, and only after careful analysis did he determine that it was a sense of his own reserves, which came with a corresponding feeling somewhere in the middle of his chest. It also came with a sense that part of him was displaced. Submerged in the reservoir while the rest of him was outside it.
The other was a sense of flow, one that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. It was constant and unending, and when he tried to affect it with his mind he got only the sense that he could pull it slightly faster or push it away.
And then there were his arcane tattoos. If the bigger formation was a reservoir, then they were small pools with channels carved to each of them, radiating out from that reserve. In his mind, he’d tried blocking one only to immediately eject one of his featherbone knives from his wrist storage.
Testing proved that the rate of ejection was rather constant, so once he figured out the trick he would eject both knives and catch them in the air, saving some mana as he cut off the channels.
But those discoveries still didn’t help him, at least not yet, when it came to what he was supposed to do.
Amarena’s preferred metaphor didn’t help either.