First Subject

First things first, Isaiah took off his jacket, putting it aside, then rolled up his sleeves. He approached the sink at the corner of the room and washed his hands. While doing so, a thought crept into his mind, "How does this sink even work?". His gaze fell on the equipment on the table.

He quickly started taking off the sink and looked into its inner workings. There were a few tubes, which was not out of the ordinary. What was out of the ordinary was that the tubes connected to a shiny blue gem, not unlike the ones present in the mine but darker in color. "Wow! Does this create the water using this gem?". This was probably an extremely normal concept for the inhabitants of this planet, but it completely blew Isaiah's mind. An event he believed only gods in the stories could do in his previous life was happening right in front of him.

This caused more questions to appear in his mind, for example, was there such a thing as the law of conservation of mana? What were the limits of this? Could you, other than transform mana to create matter, alter already existing matter?

For a few minutes, Isaiah just looked blankly at the gem, his mind going through various thoughts. The sink in his house used regular plumbing, so he had never gotten to see a mana gem-powered machine before, other than the vehicle he arrived here with, but there, mana just powered the machine. Here, it created water out of mana.

He took out a notebook he had brought here and noted all the features of the sink's working mechanism inside it. There were many parts that were still a mystery to him, but it would still come in handy for the future.

After he finished taking his notes, he closed back the sink and got to work. He opened the cage and chose a test subject at random. He carried the body on top of the surgical table, he took a pen and drew the guidelines for the procedure.

The "Mana Boost Method" required him to pierce the subject with mana gems so the subject would be overloaded with mana. The second part of the procedure was up to the subject, as they had to be able to sense the mana before they died from it and manage to control it, then extract the mana from their body, which would make them a Rank 1. It was a method used by those who had really poor talent in mana. While it worked, it was very rough around the edges and lethal. It had a reputation for leaving most who went through with it cold dead.

He took a mana shard and slowly pierced the patient's flesh with it. He had already cut open the skin of the patient's lower arm and prepared the area to be pierced. The sharp mana shard easily went through the flesh of the subject's arm. Isaiah could see the mana trying to travel through and inside the patient's flesh. The subject's flesh soon turned a cold blue, which prompted Isaiah to remove the shard from his flesh.

He gave both the mana's traveling capacity and the damage it did an arbitrary rating so he could compare different areas with each other. He then moved on to the subject's upper arm and did the same. The way mana reacted was much better, which led a guess to appear in Isaiah's mind, and he proceeded to open the patient's chest. He pulled the patient's skin aside, removed his ribcage, and opened the pericardium, gaining access to the patient's heart.

This time, rather than a single shard, he took a device. It was an object he had created. Its purpose was simple: to hold the shard and position them in accordance with where they had to pierce the heart. It was a metal piece that held the shard in a specific place. He didn't make it himself, though; he simply asked one of the guards outside the mines to create it, which was easy due to their access to magic.

He lined up the device, the shards lined up with the veins on the heart. He had created this device to fit his current subject perfectly for increased effect. With one swift movement, the shards went into the heart, directly piercing it. It didn't take long for the patient to die, but Isaiah didn't fret, as he had predicted that much would happen already.

He instead started taking notes of his observations of the heart injection. Just like he had predicted, the mana traveled far better, reaching even the brain. The patient could only hold on for 15 seconds, which was actually longer than he had predicted. He also noticed that when mana interacted with itself, rather than becoming more violent, it instead calmed down, just like two drops of water merging to create a larger drop.

He cleaned his tools and proceeded to the second part of the experiment. He obviously couldn't let such a fresh corpse go to waste, so it was time to do an autopsy. He skinned the subject fully. This obviously led to a lot of blood leaking onto the ground, which he offset by putting down a white sheet present in the tent.

Having taken the skin off, he could observe the body's biology much better. There were a lot of differences from humans in his past life, which he promptly noted. Then he started taking apart various organs and examining them. He drew the bone structure, veins, and anything that he thought could be relevant in the future. He strongly believed that you could never know enough.

After he was done, a skeleton with a few barely attached flesh tissues lay on the table, and all the organs were set on another table in an orderly manner. Most of the organs had deep cuts on them or were cut entirely into multiple pieces. The most violated organ was the brain, cut according to its various segments, in more than a dozen pieces.

Isaiah washed his hands and took some extra notes. His notebook had drops of dried blood on it, which he thought was a shame.

As he was busy taking notes, the tent's door opened, and in walked his uncle, Louie. "Dammit, what the fuck is this smell?". He held his nose while looking at the bloodied room. The white sheet Isaiah had spread had long turned blood red, coupled with the organs and the skeleton with barely any flesh attached; it gave the room a very grim feel.