Chapter 6 - W-what is that?

There, in the grass, under the bright sun, my big bro’ had a wooden sword in his hands. A glowing sword.

W-what is that?

...I have no idea.

R-run a scan, quick!

I can’t, not a fast one at least. Not enough mana, you remember?

Then run a slow scan, use the Rimorremmes series, I’m sure to have it somewhere in my mind!

Copy. Starting analysis…

As usual, I felt mana starting to move through my Conduit. The tiny flux was slowly building the frame of the spell as per Psaï instruction, a collaboration of my own nervous system and the CC (computing crystal) provided by the Control Tower.

As the target is an unknown phenomenon, the chance of success and the time required for analysis are both totally unknown.

Ok, thanks for the heads up.

“Well well, aren’t you interested in your brother’s training?” Mom was looking at me, commenting over the fact that my eyes were anchored to my sibling.

Without taking my eyes from him, I answered with a “Gah!” of excitement that made her smile wider.

Why was I excited? Because this, what my brother was doing… it was definitely not magic.

My magical senses, even as my soul was in a weakened juvenile state, were still extremely sharp, remnants of my training to avoid magical assassinations.

Noa was not using magic. In fact, I wasn’t even sure he could use magic at all, since I did not feel any Conduit in his soul. That was peculiar in its own right, but since nobody around me seemed to have a Conduit, I felt that it was a bigger question than what I could fathom at the time, and thus didn’t try to solve it as I hadn’t the right tools at hands. Yet.

So, without Conduit, and without any spells or even the slightest trace of mana, my brother was making his wooden sword glow green, as if it was covered by solid green glass.

“Good, you can let go.” That was dad’s voice, commanding but soft.

“S-so?” My brother had his eyes fixed on dad, full of anticipation.

“It was very good, both in control and quantity of Shi.”

Shi? Is this an Alfar word?

Seems so, but I don’t have it in my dictionary.

Could just be because of how secretive they are with their language.

No way~. Look at you, you’ve learned plenty of Alfar words.

Stop fucking with me, you know I only learned insults, and that because of Gaïdal and Radiance.

True. That’s the only bad influence they had on you. It’s so sad to see such a refined mind as yours bitching around all the time.

HA! You can talk, did you hear yourself lately?

That’s beside the point, we’re talking about you.

Dad and Noa had used the time I took talking with Psaï to start a new round of training.

I watched with fascination my big brother creating a green glass-like sphere over his palm, then making it float from one hand to another.

If his ragged breath and sweating forehead were good indicators, it was not easy to do.

The whole thing kept going for another good thirty minutes before mom took me back in.

I actually fell asleep in between and, when I woke up, I found mom fidgeting all around the room, fixing things, cleaning here and there.

“Gah?” I tried to sit in my cradle to take a look at her but failed miserably.

Damn those muscles!

Hearing me, mom turned her head in my direction.

“Oh, did I wake you up?” She had a worried frown on her face.

Cute. Younger people are always so cute mufufu~.

“Gah!” I, with great difficulty, nodded negatively.

“Sometimes it really seems as you’re understanding me.” She whispered while taking me in her strong arms.

“Ha, darn it.” She looked at me and put a kiss on my forehead.

“Mommy can’t stand it anymore, so you’ll follow me in my workshop, okay?” And, without waiting for my answer, she took some blankets along and started walking toward a room of the house I hadn’t been shown yet.

She opened a door and what greeted me was tens of strange different fragrance.

“Welcome to my workshop. If you’re like your sister, you’ll spend quite some time watching me work, so why not starting today. Besides, I really can’t stand to rest anymore.” The last sentence had been whispered, said more for herself than for me.

I took a good look around.

The room was spacious. Three big spaced tables were taking its centre, each with its own specialised set of tools. From what I could see, one of them was for grinding, the next for sap extraction and the third for mixing.

Then, two of the four walls were made out of shelves full of containers. Some had liquids on them, some with herbs or flowers floating. Other had powders or dried monster parts or plants.

The third wall was one big working station with alembics, furnaces, filters and some beautiful glasswork, the kind I never saw around here. The glass quality for all the houses I’ve seen so far was mediocre at best, but those beakers and vials were quite good in comparison.

Finally, the fourth wall had a window with a correct glass panel to let light in and, all around, shelves full of pots and vials containing, if I had to guess, finished products.

Mom looked around and, after thinking a second, made room on the mixing table. She then used the bundles of clothes she had with her to make me a tiny improvised cradle, quite cosy, and far away as possible from both her tools and the edges of the table.

Putting me there, she even took some books that she placed all around me, to secure me further.

“There. Be a good girl and behave as mommy works, okay?” She said while kissing my tiny nose.

As I couldn’t look around, all I could do was listen to mom working, moving in her workshop, crushing or mixing things, lighting fires, boiling, evaporating and overall moving things around.

Rocked by those sounds and a couple of kisses and cuddle from mom, I fell asleep quickly.

I think that it was the first time I slept so well in ages.

***

Over the next two months I got to sleep in her workshop nearly every day. Sounds of medicines in the making became my daily lullabies. It had a strange kind of warmth born from mom’s passionated potion-making, and I found it extremely soothing and reassuring.

From time to time, this routine was broken by Meredith’s visits to check on me, but soon enough even that became a habit, and I would just sleep through her tests.

Oh, I reassure, you, I didn’t twiddle my thumbs for sixty days straight. It is true that, as a newborn baby, I slept a lot, I mean like, a lot, but I still got to experiment with some things.

First, of course, magic.

The average mana density was at .02, which was 50 times smaller than it used to be in my time. What it meant? That it was 50 times more difficult to gather mana than back in my days. Pain in the ass. Not for me, though. I could work with mana density up to .001, even if that was a true pain in the ass for me. Speaking from experience, since the enemy started deploying magic-purging fields in the middle of the war, around the time I started to be active on battlefields and doing spec ops.

No, .02 was a pain in the ass because most of my creation couldn’t work at this density.

Even the most optimised ones had mana reactors with up to 0.2 density tolerance, which was already a miracle, and often unneeded. After all, tools are specialised, and my creation using mana reactors were just not meant to be used in low mana density zone.

A bit like you didn’t build a battleship to be able to cruise shallow water. What’s the use? And it’s hella difficult.

Guess I’ll have to design a whole new fucking mana reactor. The mana reactor was often the most complicated part of the mess, as they were engraved spells meant to extract mana without the support of a Soul Conduit.

But that was a concern for another time, if ever.

Besides the average mana density, my own Conduit was quite tiny for now.

I didn’t know if it was an after-effect of not dying when I should have and being in this body instead, or if it was just that newborns had weaker souls, but the effect was that I couldn’t draw as much mana as I could before.

As a sorcerer, you had two factors to keep in mind: Your Conduit, and the resilience of your soul.

The Conduit would set the limit of how much mana you could use at any given time. If a tiny conduit would let you use 1 mana each second, a bigger one could let you use 5 mana each second.

That would change the number of spells you could keep going at the same time, as well as the speed to set a spell up, at least the mana injection part.

The Soul Resilience was how much mana your soul was able to channel before it needed to rest.

For example, you could channel 1000 mana before needing to take a substantial rest, or 5000.

Both factors had their own sets of limits and utilities. Better resilience was good for prolonged battles. A better conduit was good for burst and multitasking, or quick-casting.

Of course, the best was to have a good conduit and good resilience, but for most people that was too much asked.

So for now, both my Resilience and Conduit were weak. Weak compared to my former self at least.

Ha. there was technically a third factor, but let’s not bother about that now.

And so, during those two months, I tested my limits, which spells I could cast, which I couldn’t, the most efficient to use, etc.

The classics were, as always, quite easy to use. A good fireball may be a bit unsophisticated, but it could still swiftly settle arguments. Same for all the other elemental magics.

Levitation and telekinesis were a bit more complicated. Couldn’t use the spells I was most fond of, as I lacked the third factor, aka computational power.

The levitation spell I liked to use was very efficient and highly precise, but I would need more than one CC to use it.

That’s what happens when you’re connected around the clock to quantum computing unit through entangled soul particle. You stop thinking about computing power as a limit.

Maybe I should try to create a set of ultra-optimised spells, in case I lose CP again in the future.

Could be useful.

So all more or less in order on this side. At least I knew I wasn’t totally powerless in case of something happening.

In those two months I did my best to train this body a bit. Now, at least, I could do things like sitting and looking around without my neck snapping.

I know, pretty good for a two-months-old toddler, right?

Around the 40th day I started looking at mom working. I must say, it was as soothing as listening to her, and I found myself falling asleep more than once even if I tried to focus on her work.

The way she worked with her ingredients and tools, one could see the passion she was putting into it, and it was lovely.

Even more lovely were the times when Vi would come in the workshop too, looking at mom working. She even helped sometimes. So cute~.

I wanted to grow just to be able to help them too.

Well, not only for that. I also wanted to grow because… because?

BECAUSE OF SHI!