Prologue: Joanna (Part 7)

At long last, a black cat came through, she vaguely determined its power to be strong enough, and had no issues pacting with it. But now she was only halfway done. Her vision started to blur as illusions started to invade her mind, pulling her in different directions at once, and she struggled to maintain control as she drew a new magic circle on the floor. It was an almost identical copy of the crystal condensation circle she used in her lab. Almost, because she tried to adjust the time feature to extend her time as much as possible, and vaguely add-in a psychomantic spell to try to help her stabilise her mind while controlling the procedure.

She used a spell to draw some vials of monster blood from the lab, placing them in their own purification circles. It took the last of her physical strength to fall within the magic circle. She felt her astral soul pull out of her body, and she could more clearly see the chaotic and monster energies running rampant in her body. She activated the flames in the magic circles holding the monster blood. She knew that using such large volumes, and so many different types, of monster blood was dangerous. But she figured she might as well take advantage of the opportunity and condense as powerful a core as she could.

The Crystal Condensating magic circle took effect, and she felt her mind drawn into the circle as everything outside blurred and froze in time. Thin strands of manna, qi, and exotic particles, formed in the air between her body and the different blood samples. She'd tried to add a purification and distillation step, but she could still see impurities as black spots in the strands. She watched the strands form for several days, her time dilation spell made an hour into a year, a fact that really vexed her now that she was more lucid. Yet she'd not had time to adjust it under the immense stress.

Finally, after a fortnight of nerve-testing patience, the strands had built a steady stream of particles and she could get to work. She started to modulate the process, forming chain strands 10 units long, something she'd never had the ability to do before. She had all the time in the world and no distractions, and eventually, she managed to parse the billions of units to form chains. She started to combine the chains into double length chains. The kaleidoscope instantly jumped to yellow. After a few weeks of painstaking work, she'd achieve near 100% conversion, then combined the doubles, then the quadruples until she found herself in Indigo several months later when she had 100% conversion into octuples.

She felt that she'd hit a special threshold: successfully achieving critical mass to condense a usable crystal. She wasn't content with that, she'd paid a steep price to get to where she was now, and damned if she wouldn't try for the best she could get. She started to condense longer chains, but the chains grew radically unstable. Collapsing and destroying nearby chains. She stopped altogether and took a few weeks pondering over the problem until she realised the problem: she was at the threshold of forming an earth-grade crystal. She needed to build internal conduits within the crystal to form a manna flow architecture.

She didn't have any other ideas, so she built a summoning spell structure using the chains, forming as complex a magical structure as she could muster. She found herself referencing the structures from The Book, and from her Chronomancy and Alchemy textbooks, It rapidly grew in complexity until she was out of her depth, but she boggered on on her magnum opus. The structure started to resonate with the surrounding chains, and they started to mimic and rearrange into replicas of the structure she was building. She watched as the structures resonated with each other and replicated until the forming crystal had a uniform silvern shine, with gentle sparks.

The virtual space trembled, she'd been here for too long and had almost lost sight of her predicament! Her physical body was being destroyed by the energy. She couldn't stretch time forever and needed to let the crystal condense. She let go of the process and pulled herself back to reality.

The pain as the crystal condensed was too intense, that she passed out.