The next days passed rather quickly.

Nia teaching the twins the language was the first and only success without issues. The mage had already learned most of the language, a perfect memory and reliable translations made it easy. The warrior needed a bit more time, but even then she managed it fast, which just showed how adaptable the brain was. Though maybe the increase in her mental attributes did also help.

Sarah and Sera's attempts to teach Nia about the soul-binding aura were also successful in the end, however it took them much longer than they had initially anticipated. The girl not knowing aura, a skill which was apparently regarded as mostly useless, since it wasted too much mana for little gain, was one of the reasons, though it was also an issue that neither of the twins could explain well what they had done.

Sera had just forced her way through the skill creation with her intuition.

Sarah on the other hand could write three books and hold a semester long university-level lecture about the theory behind it. Or at least how she had understood what her sister's skill was about, as apparently her soul orrery skill prevented her from learning anything similar to auras. There were most likely ways around it, like shrinking the mana construct back into her body, but whether it would help wasn't certain. She would have to unbind many more souls and would lose the ability to use her skill to support her larger or not water related spells to test it. Sacrificing a good portion of the functions of her rather useful skill for uncertain gains? She would pass on that option. And even if there wasn't any uncertainty, it seemed like a diminished version of her soul orrery anyway, adjusted to her sister's needs. She could just study the effects of the skill on her party members and not lose the advantages of her own skill.

In conclusion, with the combined efforts of the two girls, they managed to direct Nia through the process of acquiring the skill. Whether it was Sarah's dry, lengthy and for the guide mostly incomprehensible explanations with a decent amount of breaks, whenever the scientist got new ideas, or Sera's example, which contributed the most, was up for debate. However it was certain that without a good amount of talent she wouldn't have succeeded.

Meanwhile Sarah hadn't been lazy and worked on her own projects. Most were unfortunately far less successful than her little side job as a teacher.

She still couldn't fix her soul, or even visualize the issues she had. Her soul related skills also seemed to refuse to level. Though maybe it wasn't that surprising. Her skills had started out on a high level or leveled fast, because she had similar experiences and trained on her old world.

At least her soul recovered naturally with the passage of time, however she could already estimate that it would take years until her soul finished fixing itself. Therefore, she would continue her search for a faster solution.

Sacrificing her enemies during combat worked a bit better, but also only slightly. She would still lose all materials from them, including their soul. Yet even worse was the mana it required. Out of curiosity she sacrificed her mana gathering ring, an item now obsolete thanks to her new skill.

As expected, it took a few points of mana to start the whole process, however the return was much greater. Even sacrificing the souls in her orrery was possible and had a decent return, though not as much as the item.

But that changed once she tried it on their foes.

Her skill seemed to be blocked. Not quite an insurmountable obstacle, but somewhat similar to how two magnet poles of the same polarity rejected each other, she was unable to push her own mana into the body to start the process. After a lot of tries she managed to overcome the issue thanks to her vastly higher mental attributes and by drowning the beast in mana, though by that point, even with the returned mana, she lost mana and had to question, whether it was actually a sacrifice or if she just induced mana poisoning.

Beating them half dead did make it easier, but at that point it was usually better to take the soul and the materials.

In conclusion, she gained some range for the skill thanks to her orrery, however aside from that, it was basically useless against opponents.

How healers dealt with the issue interested her, though without anyone of that occupation around, she could only push it to the back of her mind for the time being.

Unfortunately during those and other experiments she had to notice that her level progress was coming to a crawl. Her affinity was still slowly advancing and a higher level there let her add more and further optimized water spells to her orrery to keep her advancement speed somewhat even, but the same could unfortunately not be said about her class and her own level. Different experiments and tests let her advance the class differently fast, though it was hard to judge how much progress she actually made without experience announcements.

Furthermore, repeating an experiment with only some adjustments either reduced the experience or didn't offer any at all. Yes, it was logical, but why did then a fight against another obsidian golem still help her teammates advance towards the next level? Also they could just fight a higher leveled enemy once they reach higher levels. Something not quite as easy with experiments and the gathering of knowledge.

Using those facts, if she further assumed it would take her one day to level up at level 100 and each higher level required ten percent more experience, both were likely to not be the case, but she preferred to start out with very good starting conditions when working with exponential growth, she would need over 13 cycles or over 52 years to level up at level 200. At level 500 the time required for a level up would be longer than her old universe had existed. By magnitudes.

Sure, such a time span was theoretically possible, as immortality did exist in the Realms, but the Fountain of Youth, the easiest way to regain one's youth, was a dangerous dungeon and had to be cleared alone. Furthermore she couldn't even rely on past experiences or the information of those who went there before her, as apparently those who returned couldn't remember anything about the dungeon.

Maybe it was different with her memory, but it had already failed her once...

Also she was greedy and didn't want to wait for things she had chances of acquiring earlier.

Sarah could only hope to find better ways to level up until then.

Contemplating over the issue in the back of her mind during the last days hadn't helped much in the end, though it had inspired her for a new experiment.

Had the scale of them any influence on the gained experience?

Since a higher level allowed one to wield more power to slay stronger enemies, using more power in experiments could also mean more level progress. It wasn't quite logical, but so were the repeated fights against the same enemies and without knowing how exactly her class calculated level advancements, she had to at least try it once.

Figuring out which spell was the best to upscale as a test took again a bit of time, but then she started her preparations and the search for defensive measures. The latter likely necessary, since she doubted that people would let her simply cast such magic. How much her defenses would help was questionable, as they could face enemies up to level 110, but she preferred being prepared in some way over not being prepared at all, even when those preparations could turn out to be useless wastes of time.

It did cross the mages mind that they could try to stay hidden for a while longer, though the merits started to outweigh the demerits.

Reduce the amount of affinity training, mana recovery and large scale experiments just to keep a low profile? Strictly speaking, keeping a low profile would be more important, but her greed for knowledge forced her to ignore the uncertain risks.

Besides, it was unlikely that she was the only one mage experimenting on such a scale.

Back in the present, the three girls were deconstructing their camp on the tenth floor. They had moved it down, at first to the fifth and later to the current floor, to reduce the backtracking for the two fighters in their team. Also the weaker enemies on the higher floors did get boring for Sera.

Five floors were remaining. Though the two fighters had already mapped out those parts and would just rush to the boss once they had finished their tasks around the camp.

Leaving the metal behind which was used to block the entrances to the room did hurt a bit, so many lost resources, but she could just recreate it later and neither of them could carry it.

So throwing one last look over her status, not that she actually needed it, as she could remember every notification, the party left the floor.

[Sarah Goldschmidt

Age: 3

Species: Human Lv 6 -> 10

Classes:

Searcher of ##### Lv 20 -> 29

##### Lv 1 Ex

Affinity:

Water Lv 11 -> 21

#####

Condition: Mindmelted

Titles:

Genius of Mind

Progenitor of a new Age

The first Mage

Nemesis of Gods

Breaker of Reality

World Invader

Witness of the Unthinkable

Dungeon Destroyer

Skill Creator (new)

Attributes:

Hlth 99/100

Stmn 98/100

Snty 37/640

Mana 710/710

Vit 8 -> 10

End 8 -> 10

Str 9 -> 11

Agi 10 -> 12

Dex 12 -> 14

Wil 56 -> 64

Sol 63 -> 71

Int 39 -> 46

Prc 38 -> 50

Mnd 38 -> 46

Skills:

Body Enhancement 1 (new)

Chrysopoeia 1 -> 2

Mana Efficiency 4 -> 6

Mana Harvesting 9 -> 10

Mana Sense 5 -> 6

Micro Magic 10

Overmind 1 -> 2

Perfect Memory -

Sacrifice 1 -> 2

Spell Carving 10

Spell Casting 10

Spell Creation 6 -> 7

Spell Hacking 3 -> 4

Soul Orrery 1 -> 2 (new; evolved from ???)

Soul Sense 1 -> 2

Soulbond 1

]