Proficiency-based prep

Beyern was pointing his index finger up, a ball of mana, 2 cm in diameter above. He move his hand right, and the ball followed automatically, with little imput on Beyern's part.

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Congatulations, Beyern, due to your quick adaption and usage of the esoteric, though fundemental, act of 'Anchoring', 'Mana manipulation' has gained 5-star mastery.

===

He smiled slightly once again, and wagged his finger, the ball of mana following it's beck and call.

What caused this effect was called 'Anchoring', the act of connecting the physical to the ethereal, normally it's confusing and takes a lot of time to get the hang of it.

Though for Beyern, who had a skill that was fundementally linked to anchoring, and could not work without it, he had the knowledge as part of the package.

So, you can see that it was a bit easier for him than for most.

So, the next step he could think of was; 'Anchoring to an object.' He had to do it on the corpse, so it was best to get used to doing it on random objects too.

He quickly found a stick just laying on the ground, probably having fallen off a tree in some storm or something, not that it mattered.

The stick was short, while also fitting neatly in his grasp. For some reason he felt an innate sense of satisfaction in holding it in his hands, though he just dismissed it as the lack of sleep getting to him.

He brought the end of the stick to his hand, and started to once again prepare his mental forces, another invasion planned to occur soon.

While Beyern did that, he dislodged his ball of mana from his index finger, but still held it in place, with the stick pointing at it. While also pulling a bit of mana out of the circuit, putting it inbetween the stick and ball of mana

He took his time, calm breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, sounded out over around 14~ seconds.

His mental power forced itself on the new piece of mana, making it connect both the stick and ball of mana like a chain, and then here came where most of the mental energy was put in; The chain-like mana 'Transformed', it's state of existence transforming into something more spiritual in nature, though it was more of a mix between the two states that it ended up as.

Though it was invisible, if you could sense the mana, whether you hadn't severed the connection with your mana yet, or something else that allowed one to sense mana, you could either, like he did with his connection, dislodging it. Or you could use a bit of mana to break the connection too.

With a single swing of the stick, the ball followed for a bit of time, but then the 'Link' snapped in half, rapidly turning into nothing but mana in the open air, with Beyern lacking any control over it.

But he still retained his ball of mana, and quickly pulled it back into his hand, where it would quickly transfer back into a slithering line, and return to orbiting his heart as a ring.

Now, one might wonder; 'Why did the link break?'

Easy; 'There wasn't enough mana/power!'

Such an obvious answer was not lost on Beyern, so he let his mental energy regen, and then he just repeated what he had done previously, but put more mana into the link.

And, as expected, it worked again.

Now, some might be all antsy to go and make a corpse puppet after this, but you have to know something, which will be reprisented by our resident necromancer;

Beyern nodded to himself while waving the stick around, seeing the ball of mana following along.

But then was the second phase, moving the stick by manipulating the mana that was anchored to it.

But, no matter how much he focused on it, no matter how much mental energy put into it, the stick did not move. Though when the 'Mental tide', as Beyern had begun to call it, the link morphed, the posistion of the mana ball changing seperate of the stick.

That was... Dissapointing. But that wouldn't keep Beyern from departing apon his necromantic path.

'How do I make this work?' He thought, looking at the failed experiment 'Do I enhance the link? Let's see...' He took some more mana out of his circuit, and put it along with the current link, making sure to it connected properly, and then also turned it into 'Link stuff'.

Then he tried again, no dice, except that moving the mana was harder than before.

'So the link lacking power is not the reason? Is there some sort of... Priority between physical objects and mana?' As his first foray into magic, he wasn't exactly sure about mana yet, but that wouldn't stop him from trying random shit 'Maybe there's too little mana? It is only a small ball of the stuff. Or is the stick to big?'

Being unsure if either conclusion was right, he once again reappropriated the mana and put it into a ring form around his heart, after which he did something revolutionary; He double-tasked.

He made a second ring, one that took 12-minutes to make, and he tried to find a rock of applicable size.

He found it quickly, somewhere around the river where he had obtained the body. Though there was no way he knew off to open up the circuit or something, so there was no way to speed up making that ring..

So he thought of how he would wire the corpse in the meanwhile.

After he got the second ring set up, he mixed it with the first ring above the pebble, and then achored it to said pebble. Then, he tried to move the mana, and the same thing happened as before.

'Hmm... Let's look at <Necromancy>.' Since this wasn't working, he decided to conclude that he hadn't noticed something, something small he might've overlooked, however small the chance might be.

After refrencing a mental image he made based on the information given, he saw a few differences between what he made, and what he was supposed to make.

The mana was apperantly supposed to be 'Compressed', the link's make-up was a bit different too.

'If it's more dense, how did they do it? With what process?' This was a problem, since it just had one line of 'Compress the mana before using it.'

With a mental shrug he just decided to try and press the mana into a smaller form 'Who knows, magic is magic.'

He once again freed his sweet, sweet ball of mana, and took it back inside of himself. Again, for some reason it's easier to influence mana within oneself, so he would do anything new within himself.

The ball sat infront of Beyern's heart, holding a total of 22 minutes of circuit channeling's worth of mana. Then, he decided to just go all out, a total of 20 seconds of mental build-up.

Then, like a siege, his mental power surrounded the ball, and just pushed, telling it to be small but not lose it's mana.

For a moment, it did shrink slightly, but then it bounced back with a vengence 'Alright, it seems it's possible, but not with my current mastery of {Mana-manipulation}. Let's see if I can do the link properly, and if it works then.'

And so, he started to pick apart the knowledge granted to him, really putting an eye over how to make said link, him finding a new part of knowledge not previous given to him. Discovered by asking the knowledge about 'The weird link that I don't know about' instead of 'How to connect mana to physical things'.

The process he needed to do to make the new link was called 'Drenching', it was... A hard to describe process. You had to use one's spirit, no mental energy to speak of, to... make the link favor the spiritual and the physical to an equal level, this new anchor varient was called a 'Linkage'.

He brought the ball of mana back out of his hand, and then put it close to the rock, doing the motions of making a link between the two- 'Well, actually, since there's a 'Linkage', 'Link' would get confusing, let's call it something else... Connection? No, too long. Rope? No, that's not really suitable. Coupling? That's it!'

With a legendary 30 second prep, it quickly turned into a linkage, quite easy to do actually. Now, the ball of mana and small rock was coupled by a linkage instead of an anchor.

Now, he tried to push the mana a bit- though it just shuddered a bit, so did the rock. Though he could technically move the rock, the maintainance of the linkage was higher than the anchor, if you include the 22 minutes of circut channeling-

'I should probably make that a little cleaner with a unit, 1 minute of channeling mana is one unit of mana!' Beyern thought, being annoyed at thinking 'Minute of channeling' over and over again.

-If you include the 22 units of mana, his spirit was pretty much completely occupied. And since the mana ball was also harder too move too... He took a look at the knowledge box labed 'Necromancy' again.

He yawned slightly, feeling a vague and mild burden on his spirit, after a few seconds of pause at this feeling, Beyern got suspicious 'I just did magic, and I feel a burden? I will investigate this! -Later.'

He was looking for one thing; What made it possible for a spell to not take constant, endless, maintainence. He was sure it existed, one of the novice light mages from seven years ago casting a spell, Beyern failing to recall it's name, it's effect was to create a floating light that lasted for an hour.

Though due to the inexperience of said novice light mage, it only lasted for a few minutes.

After a few seconds of scouring, Beyern felt the trace of something he felt was related, and instantly hooked onto mentally, revealing the entire piece of information 'To prime a magical construct to become a spell, one must use the spirit it temper it's existence, stabilising it. Okay, I can do that, though it'll be a bit annoying.'

Beyern looked at the rock and ball connected to eachother, he resolved to make this a spell- To support his necromancy experiment later. Well, mostly to get {Spell-craft}.

He took a deep breath, and slowly exhaled. And then his spirit used the connection between it and the stuff created out of his mana, to do some process that Beyern didn't really understand.

But understanding a process, and being able to do it were completely seperate matters.

And he was a great example of that, as he was able to do it with some good ol' elbow grease. Though it took a bit of time to get it right, maybe 5 minutes of fumbling? But that didn't matter.

And then the final part, one that he had also taken from <Necromancy>, he gathered mental energy, using the respite of a single second that the tempered construct could be sustained without any support to blast it with both mental energy and spirit, to catalyse it into becoming a spell.

He felt his connection to the mana falter, weakening by a good bit, though not dissapearing entirely. Though he could do stuff with it, the difficulty of doing so had gone up by a few orders of magnitude.

And at the same time, he no longer needed to put in mental energy at all times, though he did feel that burden from a few lines ago become worse.

But it was slowly decreasing in intensity, from what he could tell from the two things that caused that burden, it came from directly using the spirit to change mana or something like that.

Beyern would take note of that, but there was something that caused a respite in his actions.

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Congratulations, Beyern, for making a make-shift, temporary, spell attached to a physical object, that unintentionally acts as a light source, you have gained the mastery {Spell-craft}

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Beyern was proud of this achievement, but quickly snuffed out that pride, it wasn't the time for pride, it was the time to make a puppet out of a corpse.