I had a major breakthrough with my current project today. I figured out how this plant is actually producing mana. Actually no, I didn’t, Tiddol did. She cut a sample of the stuff in half, something I never would have thought to do, and discovered that it was incredibly porous. Which is something I already knew, it’s hardly something worth mentioning.

What I didn’t know is what was going on inside all of those pores. It is rapidly creating and destroying some substance. This substance is easily destroyed by mana and as a result is what is causing the vast majority of the mana production of this plant. Of course, this means that if all the mana from it is every removed its production of mana will drop down to levels closer to the average plant until it builds up again.

So, naturally, I spent all day seeing how I can improve on that directly, with dramatic results. It is much easier to improve something when you know exactly what can be improved, even if you don’t know how.

The first thing I did was try and make all of the pores bigger. It can form more of the substance, which I discovered is some kind of brittle stone, if there is more space for it. This backfired, the larger chunks of the stone were destroyed slower. This reminded me of the whole nuclear waste cleanup thing, that stuff was destroyed faster when it was a fine powder so this probably works the same. And it does.

When I made the pores smaller the stone was destroyed faster, significantly so. Unfortunately, this also decreased the amount of mana it was producing. I quickly figured out that I needed to actually increase the number of pores in order to improve the plant. So I made the pores as small as I could without interfering with their ability to produce the stone and then spent the rest of the day trying to figure out the best way to cram as many pores as close together as possible through trial and error.

All of that increased the mana production several times over and made me curious. How would introducing Solar Energy to the system change it? I know some of its production comes from solar energy cast off from the suns, but I know first hand how little that actually is. This will literally blow up in my face a couple times, but I believe I have enough experience with Solar energy to try and make it work.

I can’t imagine a scenario where I could possibly need to generate this much mana, but this project has already gone well beyond the realm of practicality. At this point, it is more about the challenge than actual results.

Other than that I spent my downtime hanging out with Tiddol, though not in her lab this time. I took her to see the sights in my forest, places that would be difficult to reach without being able to teleport. There is one mountain that has a massive lake on it instead of a peak, and the lake is warm enough to bathe in too. We spent some time swimming around in there before moving onto a city I recently surrounded with my forest, one that has massive stone buildings that rival the walls of pearlhold in their splendor.

It was fun, though not the type of thing I really enjoy doing on my own.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.