Though many of our mornings of research resulted in breakthroughs, even more yielded only roadblocks and frustration. Our study of enchanting was almost entirely fruitless, despite the cumulative week of work we spent on it. We were able to activate the enchantment stored within the onyx greatsword after a few hours of trial and error, but the secret behind its creation and mechanics remained a mystery. The enchantment over the heavy gauntlets was baffling in its own right; while it was second nature to activate the enhanced force ability stored within the gloves, I could neither replicate the ability on my own nor find any hint of how the magic was built into the metal.
My equipment from Alderea added a further element of confusion into the mix. As opposed to the King’s Primes that radiated an obvious glow from their stored mana, my cloak, coin purse, and underclothes lacked any magical aura under our Detection, even as they continued to carry out their clearly magical purposes. It was a concept I had failed to question until our investigation brought it into the spotlight, where it immediately became the greatest mystery on our noteboard and remained as such despite our many attempts to solve it.
Progress on expanding our Detection capabilities was similarly difficult. The concept of suffusing mana into the air around us was frustratingly simple, but in practice, the task felt impossible to perform. After failing to achieve my goal on a large scale for the greater part of a morning, I focused on the smallest proof of concept I could think of: Holding my pointer fingers together, I ran a continuous loop of mana from one hand to the other while slowly pulling them apart until the physical connection broke. The flow of mana immediately stopped, and no matter how hard I pushed, it refused to bridge the centimeter-wide gap of space between my fingertips.
While I failed in my tasks, Lia faced hardships of her own. In an effort to discover a way to pick up sounds through Detection, she chose to pursue sound magic under the assumption that if she could figure out how to create sound, it would be easy enough to reverse engineer a way to hear sound as well. Unfortunately for her, the first half of her plan never materialized; after hours of planning and writing notes, she worked through a long list of potential invocations to activate the spell, all of which failed. By the time she had finished for the day, she had resorted to speaking in prayer to the Wind Primeval, but the pleas went unanswered.
At the end of my third consecutive day of ineffective meditation, I let out a frustrated yell and fell back onto the deck. “This shouldn’t be so damn hard! It’s just moving mana from one place to another.” Rubbing my eyes angrily, I rolled onto my side and looked up at Lia as she prepared to fetch Marin for her training. “I’ve been working with mana for a hundred years now. Why is this the thing that’s so difficult to figure out?”
“I know how you feel,” she said, stretching the stiffness from her legs, “but you shouldn’t let it bother you so much. Just think of all the things we’ve learned over the past few weeks!” To illustrate her point, she held up her hand and murmured a word under her breath, which caused her palm to glow with a radiant white light. She waved it back and forth, laughing giddily as the light shone between her fingers. “Isn’t this cool?”
A grin curled the corner of my lips as I rested my head back against the floor. “You’re right. I just feel like I’m...missing something, you know?” I bounced my head lightly off the wooden boards in a dull rhythm. “Like, if I found the one piece of information eluding us, it would open all of these doors blocking our way.”
Lia shrugged. “Maybe. Or, maybe it just doesn’t work; it could be one of the rules of magic that mana has to suffuse through something, and you’re trying to force it to go through nothing.”
“It’s not like there’s actually nothing, though,” I complained. “I’m trying to force it to go through the air.”
“Well, sure, but air isn’t a thing,” she laughed. “You can’t hold it in your hands like a rock. Mana probably has to exist within something, otherwise it just...I don’t know, fades away?” She knelt down beside me and tousled my hair. “Don’t think about it too much while I’m gone, okay? I expect you to be working on something by the time I get back!” A self-satisfied cackle escaped her lips as she left me lying on the deck and made her way into the forest to fetch her pupil.
“Right,” I muttered, far too late for her to hear me. Contrary to her order, my mind had instantly fixated on the problem with a renewed vigor. She’s wrong. Regardless of whether you can hold it or not, air has physical properties like any other matter. It’s just in a different state. I bolted upright and took a centering breath.
Channeling mana through solid objects is easy because the structure is uniform and unchanging. Based on our tests, you can even divide it into categories: gemstones can transfer and hold mana far more efficiently than wood and stone. That’s not a fluke. I found the answer I had been searching for in the earliest memories of my first life. It’s the molecular structure. That diamond orb is made of a pure, uninterrupted lattice of carbon. Of course the energy could transfer through that more efficiently than a rock full of impurities or a messy, complicated tree branch.
My brow
