Ting! Manipulate Mana has met the requirements for a breakthrough and will continue leveling past level 470!

46th Breakthrough: You've managed to turn mana back into the neutral reserved mana; this will allow you to replenish your reserves at higher rates.

47th Breakthrough: You've managed to liquify spell mana; this will allow you cast spells of unparalleled power.

Ting! Manipulate Mana has obtained levels 464-475!

These are the easy ones; I just need to practice them and get their levels as high as I can to make the last three easier.

I stand on the beach of the island, so my practice can't hurt anyone. The firey pebble-sized orb of liquid spell mana that I had just conjured hums with destructive power. I aim at a boulder and launch the orb, which flys easily through the air and hits the target, sinking partially into it before spreading out and melting the boulder into lava.

Within seconds the entire boulder is a puddle, and the sands below it liquifying as the mana continue to melt everything it touches. That had been a small amount of liquid mana; what would have happened if I had used a lot more, hundreds of thousands of mana? I think I've found a way to defeat tank-type monsters, something I've been historically weak against.

So naturally, the next question is, can I do this with Bond spells and Skills? I had to try.

I channel a fairy, but instead of making the fairy bigger, I use [Mana Manipulation] to shrink its size even as more and more mana is being added. Soon I have a solid fairy, and this should be enough for a Bond Evolution if I continue to use this, but I want to go one step ahead for now and continue pouring in mana until the mana starts blending into each other forming one liquid, and tiny Fairy.

Each flap of its wings causes tiny drops of mana to fly in the air, and instability I'll need to fix eventually, but this has shown that it is possible.

I order the fairy to attack a beach, wondering Domr before it runs out of mana from its flapping wings, and watch as the liquid mana sinks into the Domr. The Domr shudders for a second before slumping to the ground, dead.

I had not used any other skills to augment it, but I have no doubt they will work. With this, my [Fairy Explosion] should be damn near a mini-nuke in destructive power. I can't afford to test it out yet; I shouldn't get too distracted from my current goal.

I spend the next few hours grinding levels for those breakthroughs and learning more about them. Liquid spells are just a highly concentrated form of spell; they function normally. However, they are stronger simply because there's more mana in the same area.

Ting! Manipulate Mana has obtained levels 476-478!

While I am working with Liquid mana, I should now try to get mana to matter. I compress a small amount of mana into liquid, watching intently how the mana behaves; so far, it's normal. I continue to compress the mana watching the MM and encouragement particles randomly move around.

I keep compressing, pressuring the mana more and more until I am even straining to keep the pressure up, and even as it has shrunk almost by eighty percent, I still see no visible change to its behavior.

Beads of sweat are starting to form as I struggle to compress the mana any more than I already have. Should I try to get the other breakthrough first, try to get more level to make it easier? Maybe I should use an item that boosts my manipulative abilities to help me. If it's this difficult, then I definitely will need as much help as I can get to achieve the mastery level.

I press on, and eventually, I start seeing a behavior change in the liquid mana; it is starting to form crystalline structures. The MM and encouragement particles that are aligned in the same way are being drawn to the same alignment, separating the elements again. It is at this point that the liquid mana is starting to form back into solid, but clearly a different type of solid mana.

Ting! Manipulate Mana has met the requirements for a breakthrough and will continue leveling past level 480!

48th Breakthrough: You've managed to make super-solid mana; this will allow you to make one of the densest forms of mana possible

Ting! Manipulate Mana has obtained levels 479-482!

Ting! Sense Magic has met the requirements for a breakthrough and will continue leveling past level 840!

42nd Breakthrough: You have observed super-solid mana; this will allow you to see mana at one of its most extreme conditions.

Ting! Sense Magic has obtained levels 774-775!

Hang on, isn't this a part of [Sense Mana]? This is a surprise... hang on... there's no way Kayafe didn't get the breakthrough for this for her [Manipulate Mana], that means she didn't tell me about it!

I smile, Kayafe knew I'd rather discover this myself, but I also don't think she has this breakthrough for her [Sense Mana]; it's a little hard to get normally. She might have known of this breakthrough, but she probably knew very little about it.

I take a break, feeling a little dizzy from my exertion just now. This means that there are fifty-two possible breakthroughs I can get but turning mana into matter is a little out of my grasp right now. Kayafe had her Class bonus to help her; I do not, but I can also just skip that breakthrough for now since I only need fifty.

After my break, I move on to trying to manipulate MM forces; I need more levels before I try and do more with super-solid mana.

Instead of manipulating the mana, I instead focus on the MM force itself, or, rather, I focus on the particle that generates it, and I start trying to bend it to my will. It is like trying to force two positive side magnets together. Each time I think I have a grasp over the MM force, it slips out of my control. It's just as difficult as trying to get the super-solid breakthrough, but in a different way, it's just too slippery!

With a headache beginning to pound and the dizziness returning, I finally managed to get a hold of the MM force and increase it, strengthening its force.

Ting! Manipulate Mana has met the requirements for a breakthrough and will continue leveling past level 490!

49th Breakthrough: You have managed to manipulate the MM force of mana; this will allow you to shield yourself from spells

I don't bother checking my level gains just yet since I plan on getting my last breakthrough for more levels to make leveling them easier. I sit back down, trying to soothe my throbbing head. [Inquisitive Perfection] pokes me, telling me that this hasn't happened before. I haven't used this much effort in a long time, but I have done so before, notably when trying to make solid and liquid mana back then.

Why am I having difficulty now? Does it have something to do with the enhancement threshold? I don't know what the cause is, but if I want to cleanse my Skill, I have to do this.

I don't know how to make solid vitality since it doesn't have an MM force, but I suspect it has something to do with the super-solid state of mana. As for liquid Vitality, that may be possible; I had never considered it.

After another break, I focus on my own vitality and draw some out to compress to the liquid state, which turns out to be much harder than I thought. First off, vitality just doesn't want to enter the fused state – liquid mana small enough that it can't overwhelm the MM force – Vitality just wants to pass through each other; I never realized just how much the MM force still applies in keeping liquid mana liquid.

I sigh, pick up a small rock and skip it across the water, pondering how it might be possible to liquify vitality.

The problem is that nothing is keeping vitality in a liquid state. Vitality lacks any particles that are responsible for the MM force, but it does have the elemental particles that are all aligned in the same non-elemental 'direction'. Flipping vitality in the opposite direction does not change its properties... that I know of.

What if I flip the vitality direction on just half the vitality? Would the opposites attract like in magnetism?

I do that just to see what happens, and to my partial surprise, the positive and negative vitality attracts each other... which is odd since mana normally doesn't behave that way. Vitality also doesn't repel the same charge like in magnetism, so the actual cause of this phenomenon is different from charge.

I grand a washed-up stick and sit down on an unmelted rock, drawing in the sand while trying to think of a hypothesis to explain the observed behavior of vitality.

Instead of charge, which repels the same and attracts their opposite, what if it's like entropy? Let's think of it as wind. Wind is created when hot air wants to go to cold air. If everywhere is hot, there is no wind; if half the air is hot, there is wind. Same with concept with positive and negative vitality, all is positive, no reaction, half is negative then they want to equalize.

However, I have a new problem the vitality pairs up, but they neutralize the imbalance of positive and negative, and now I just have pairs of vitality that don't interact with each other instead of just individual vitality.

What if one vitality is a little stronger than the other? Not so much that it will attract two but rather one and a half, so two positive vitalities are attracted to one negative, but the imbalance is there to attract another negative vitality which in turn attracts another positive and so on?

I reset the vitality to all positive, then flip half to negative, but I give them a little more energy, and that's when it all comes together! With barely any effort, the vitality forms a chain, basically a string of vitality!

Ting! Manipulate Mana has met the requirements for a breakthrough and will continue leveling past level 500!

50th Breakthrough: You have managed to weave vitality; this will allow you to make cloth out of pure vitality!

Ting! Manipulate Mana has obtained levels 483-488!

Yet another breakthrough Kayafe didn't tell me about. She knew I had to get this in order to get solid and liquid vitality, but again, she knows that I like discovering this stuff on my own.

To be honest, I should have had this breakthrough a long time ago, and maybe in a place where I wasn't so preoccupied with so many other things, I may have eventually discovered this on my own.

I look at [Manipulate Mana] in my mana signature; it burns brightly, indicating it's almost at the enhancement threshold. I just need to cap the breakthroughs now; however, that will have to wait until tomorrow since it's getting late.

I have my other minds occupied with studying inscriptions during the Lojyo and the night, drawing hundreds of different forms of inscriptions to see which draws in mana best, and while I have made good progress on that front, it is still far from done.

In the morning, I meet with Tusile and Guklaro and the new probational elder, Venly.

Venly is in her late middle ages and keeps her long hair in a bun. Her ears are pierced with many earrings, more than average but in a stylistic fashion.

The elders are currently training Venly, which is the most likely reason why all three are here now, which is very convenient for me.

"Alysara! Good to see you," Tusile says, welcoming me into the office with a warm smile.

The desk s filled with blueprints of airship designs as well as orders for materials. More airships are being built with wood from the dungeon now that material is available. Many villages are still being restored from the cursed being aftermath, so normal building materials are still hard to come by, which was the cause for the delay in more airships being built.

But now, with access to the dungeon again, a large influx of materials is helping with the restoration of the villages, which reminds me that I should check on my star tree, and I sent a portion of my perception over to take a look at it.

The star tree shows almost no growth except for tiny roots slowly growing from the seed. It's going to be a slow-growing tree and will require me feeding it a ton of mana to speed up its growth.

"Are you done with training the priestesses now, Tusile?" I ask.

"For now," She replies. "I should have let the others take over since we were shorthanded on elders already, and I placed too many burdens on Guklaro."

Guklaro looks a lot less stressed lately now that she no longer has to hold up the responsibilities of the village by herself.

"I am sorry for how I acted before, Alysara," Guklaro apologizes. "I chastised and patronized you for your mental health without realizing my own was overburdened."

"I accept your apology, Guklaro," I say. I can't imagine what it's like to run this growing village all by myself... actually, I can, probably something similar to dealing with Lunaleyan politics, and I was done after just a few days of it while Guklaro was at it for months.

"So, what brings you here today?" Tusile asks.

"I found a way to improve our Kyhosas with a high chance of turning them into magic items... maybe? Either way, there's a powerful ritual that we can do in a month's time..."

I explain everything I learned from Kayafe and Safyr; thankfully, the elders keep their questions until I am finished.

"So, this hinges on everyone believing that this will work, and we have about a month to prepare..." Guklaro says, thinking.

"What prompted you to ask the Guardian about rituals?" Tusile asks. "It's not something we have a history for, not surviving history, anyway."

"it's to cure my cursed Skills," I say, watching the elder's jaw drop.

"Cure? But from what you said about rituals, I can't think of how the two are correlated," Venly says.

"The ritual is not what will cure my cursed Skills," I correct Elder Venly. "It is needed to empower my Kyhosa, which will hopefully become powerful enough to complete Kayafe's trial, the Analysha, which will give me a legendary action that I can then use to cure a cursed Skill. I have many more things to prepare for this ritual relating to making my Kyhosa as powerful as it can get."

I continue to discuss the specifics with the elders, and we eventually get to the design of the ritual site. There are still many things to change, but the foundation and the bathing area can be built.

The Elders like the idea of the ritual. Another social gathering where all the villages get together will be useful in encouraging inter-village relations, and they even seem to want to make the bathing part of the ritual a yearly event, but it's mostly superficial and not actually a ritual. The presence of the special bathing oil will still preserve the strength of the ritual so long as that isn't made yearly.

I stressed the importance of rarity to the elders since that is a part of why the ritual will be powerful, and they agree to consider a once-in-a-decade meeting if only to keep knowledge of the ritual for future generations.