Foundation Establishment

There was one more item on Isaac's agenda for today, so at around 8:30 p.m., he found himself seated across from Riveria, in her study. During dinner he had asked the motherly elf whether she would have the time to have a short talk later this evening and she had agreed to meet him here. Because she had already finished the majority of the organizational work related to the expedition and only some last minute changes had to be taken into account now, Riveria had a lot more free time than before - almost an hour per day. Yeah, it really wasn't a lot. But compared to the many sleepless nights she had grown accustomed to, it felt like a relaxing vacation to her. This and the fact that she was quite interested in what Isaac wanted to talk to her about were the reasons why she so readily agreed.

But now that he was here, Isaac had a concerned and conflicted expression on his face, which surprised the High Elf and made her wonder about what kind of problem he might have encountered. Surely, it had to be something perilous. Otherwise, he would most likely not ask for her help.

"Tiona has repeatedly lost control of herself after watching my battles and tried to push me down on the spot. I highly suspect that she also has some kind of romantic interest in me. The problem is that I won't be able to reciprocate her feelings. I'm not sure if I should tell her that, though. What would you recommend me to do?"

An exasperated sigh escaped the beautiful elf's lips when Isaac's explanation arrived at this point. Interpersonal relationship advice wasn't what she had expected this discussion to be about. Still, it wouldn't be the first time she had given others advice on how to handle their love lives. While Riveria herself never had any relationships of that sort, she had seen enough of the world to understand them deeply. It was always easier to have a neutral perspective on a topic if one hadn't made personal experiences related to it. Of course, that wouldn't prepare someone for the moment one experienced those things oneself. Still, it was enough to help others.

"Just talk to her about this. If you make clear that you aren't interested in her, she will most likely back off and control herself better. Now that she still feels like she has a chance, she doesn't see a need to rein in her instincts at all. But if you have an honest conversation with her, I'm sure she will understand."

Riveria's reply caused a relieved smile to flash across Isaac's face. Of course, he had already expected for this to be the wisest course of action. After all, he also preferred to talk things through with people whenever he had the chance. But because he honestly didn't have too much knowledge about Tiona and her mentality from the DanMachi novels and the time he had spent here, he couldn't be entirely sure if she would lash out at him if he rejected her. Sure, he thought it was very unlikely, but it was still a better idea to ask the woman who had practically raised the unruly Amazoness from a relatively young age. After all, her perspective on the matter would surely be better informed than his flawed one. Now that he had the confirmation, however, there was nothing he needed to fear.

Before Isaac could thank the wise elf for her council and retreat for the night, Riveria momentarily stopped him in his tracks.

"Please don't have that kind of talk while we're on our expedition. Although I'm sure Tiona wouldn't be too affected by it, even a moment of distraction can be fatal within the dungeon. Either tell her before or after the expedition, alright?"

Only after he repeatedly promised the stern elf that he wouldn't compromise the expedition did she allow him to leave. A relieved sigh escaped Isaac's lips. Riveria was nothing if not thorough - this was also most likely the cause for her many sleepless nights. Still, Isaac could relate to her mentality. As he was somewhat of a perfectionist himself, he got quite aggrieved whenever he actually forgot about a small detail.

At about 9 p.m., when Isaac had just returned to his room, he suddenly noticed a major change. Without further ado, he sat down on his bed in a meditative pose and closed his eyes, fully focusing on his mental layer, where the cause for all of this lay.

As he had been circulating ever increasing amounts of mana drops during the day, he had already arrived at the 999th drop. This one, however, was a lot harder to deal with than the previous ones. It felt like the channels he was using for his circulation of mana drops were almost filled to the brim. As they weren't visible, he felt hard-pressed to find an opening he could use to insert the drop into the flow. Still, after some perseverance, he managed to circulate the 999th drop.

Yet another change arrived: a throbbing headache, caused by what felt like the swelling of the channels on the mental layer. They were stretched thin and felt like they were about to burst at any moment. Because of this, Isaac held off on adding a 1000th drop for a bit, to see whether the channels would grow used to the burden after a while, whether they would be subjected to some kind of 'stretching'. Still, even after half an hour of enduring the headache, nothing had changed.

What perplexed Isaac about the whole situation was that he, for an unknown reason, felt like he 'had' to circulate another drop. It just felt 'right'. This kind of compulsion honestly wasn't something he had ever felt before nor knew how to explain. After a few moments of confusion, he redirected his focus to his surroundings and could vaguely feel the laws of the world at work, which made him breathe out a sigh of relief. Apparently, his feelings had been induced by them and he wasn't going insane… or rather, irrational.

Now, without anything to hold him back further, Isaac simply disregarded his worries and decided to follow the laws' advice - he forcefully crammed the 1000th drop into the channels and, through excruciating effort, managed to have all of the drops finish a whole circulation.

The moment he did so, the headache and the pressure on the channels disappeared as if it had been an illusion from the very beginning. A pleasant feeling of relief spread all the way through Isaac's body, making him sigh in comfort. Only after a minute or so of being lost in this emotional state did Isaac notice that a system notification had appeared.

[ The Development Ability 'Mana Cultivation - Foundation Establishment (I)' has been obtained. ]

[ Mana Cultivation - Foundation Establishment (I): Enables one to interact with their surroundings by using mana. Reduction in mana expenditure: 1% ]

A bright and genuine smile lit up Isaac's face as he read through the notification. Even that small number at the end didn't discourage him one bit - after all, it was just a small bonus. What was truly important and groundbreaking was the fact that he should now be able to utilize his mana. Up until now, he had only been able to circulate it and besides that, it had been useless. And although that small decrease in how much mana he would have to spend to achieve a desired effect didn't seem like much right now, Isaac was sure that this number would only grow in the future.

Of course, before the joyful Isaac could try to make use of his new ability, he made sure to inspect his mental layer again, as he had vaguely noticed a fundamental change there during the time he had been distracted. Ever since the breakthrough, for some reason, he didn't have to circulate his mana drops anymore. Exactly one thousand of them were in a constant and unabated flow, which lessened his mental exhaustion simply by virtue of its existence. He also didn't have to allocate some of his focus on keeping the circulation going anymore. It felt like a second heart had just started beating, alleviating some of his burdens.

What he hadn't noticed before, however, was that the number of drops he could circulate didn't increase at all, no matter how long he observed the whole process. Upon further testing, it seemed like he had to manually increase the drops he could circulate, otherwise, there would be no changes. And as expected, after he added a handful more drops to the flow, the number of circulating drops stayed at that new total.

Because he couldn't discern any other changes in his mental layer, Isaac focused on his surroundings instead. And of course, at first, he didn't feel like anything had changed. Nothing at all. Of course, he didn't get discouraged by this, as it would have been weird for him to instantly notice something.

After a couple of minutes of failing to discern any difference to before, Isaac changed his approach. Upon repeated inspection of the Development Ability's description, he tried to compel some of the drops of mana in his mental layer to appear in his surroundings. Thankfully, this time, he was on the right track and immediately after he had started trying, a very small amount of mana gathered on the palm of his right hand - two drops worth.

Isaac only had a few moments to observe the invisible energy, however, as just a couple of seconds after the mana had appeared, it had fully disintegrated and become a part of the world again.

At this point, as the number of drops in Isaac's channels had dropped, two more drops were extracted from his lake of mana and integrated into the flow automatically. It did take a couple of seconds for this to take place, however.

With undisguised interest sparkling in his eyes, Isaac unceasingly continued his experiments. A couple tens of drops later, he figured out that he could 'will' the mana to stay within his palm for about a minute, until it finally succumbed and disintegrated. This was the impetus for Isaac to focus on the effect of his 'will' on the mana.

Many hundred drops and almost half an hour later, Isaac managed to let the mana interact with the air above his palm and generated a gentle, small gust of wind, which abated relatively quickly. Upon trying to cause the same phenomenon again, however, Isaac decided to continue to feed more mana into it as it went on, which went swimmingly - he was able to maintain the gust of wind above his palm for a minute or two before he failed to provide enough mana in time due to a slight miscalculation.

When this happened, Isaac took a step back from his excitement and stopped playing around. While the previous half an hour hadn't been wasted, as he discovered many interesting things about mana and how to use it, he hadn't really spared any thoughts on what he should focus on mastering first. If he continued to dabble in this without a goal, he would be treating his new ability like a toy.

Now that his mind was calm again, Isaac decided to try to create some kinds of footholds within the air first. This was mostly just to give him more maneuverability in combat - if he didn't have to rely on the environment too much, he could vastly improve his courses of action and be even more efficient. Also, any sentient opponents could be easily caught off guard. These were just a few of the nigh endless benefits he could think of.

The method Isaac determined as the most likely to succeed was this one: He would increase the density of the air in a circular and very thin area, creating discs of some sort, which he would then make use of by stepping on or pushing himself off of them. While it sounded like a simple idea, reality, as always, proved to be quite a bit more complicated.

The first problem was that increasing the density of even just a very small amount of air consumed enormous amounts of mana. While Isaac didn't have a problem with micromanaging and delegating exactly which molecules and even smaller particles should be affected, introducing the changes he wanted somehow seemed to interfere with the 'natural order' the laws of this world were responsible for. This very fact was why maintaining the effect he wanted was so very costly. Even just sustaining a disc the size of his palm for about twenty seconds cost him more than a hundred drops of mana.

The second problem was that with the increase in density, the effect of gravity on the disc also increased. So just a fraction of a second after Isaac had created the disc, it would start falling towards the ground. Of course, when he applied force to the top of the disc, it accelerated even faster.

Although both of these problems were admittedly quite annoying, they weren't impossible to deal with. First of all, Isaac decided to abandon the thought of maintaining such discs of air for a prolonged period of time. After all, he only needed them the very moment he made contact with them anyway, so anything more than that was a waste. Of course, this meant that he couldn't just create a disc of air and sit on it for a couple of minutes while observing his surroundings. While that sounded tempting, it wasn't something he was capable of. Yet. Isaac was sure he would find a solution to this if he thought about it more in the future.

This simple change already brought some more problems with it. Isaac had to get better at almost instantaneously creating the discs if he wanted to be able to use them. Thankfully, however, he was a fast learner. Although he failed a couple tens of times, he soon got the hang of it and was able to create a stable disc of air in a fraction of a second. It took a lot of his focus, but it was possible. Surely, it would get easier with more practice.

With the first problem alleviated for now, it was time to attend to the second one. After a couple of minutes of thought, Isaac decided to try to counteract gravity and the force his weight would apply to the disc by using the wind. It was quite a simple concept, actually. He only had to create an airflow underneath the disc whose force would push it upwards. If he created enough force to counteract gravity and his own weight, the disc would stay perfectly stable.

As always, however, what sounded easy in theory was extremely difficult to put into practice. To finetune his calculations, Isaac had stood up from his bed, raised his right leg and created a small disc of air just a small distance beneath his foot. Counteracting gravity with a bit of wind was easy and didn't affect his environment much at all. But when he gently placed his foot on the disc, even though he tried his best, the disc still fell to the ground almost instantly. What was even worse was that the airflow he had made use of to lift it up spread all the way through the room, causing Jakk, who had just come back from his daily training in the dungeon at about 11:30 p.m. to be battered by gusts of wind when he opened the door.

After welcoming his roommate back, Isaac continued with his research unabated, simply ignoring Jakk's questioning look when he tried to make sense of the weird pose Isaac's leg was in, for seemingly no reason.

Very quickly, though, the bunny boy understood that it would be smarter to get far away, as every couple of seconds, a gust of wind that became progressively stronger swept over him. Hastily, Jakk put away all of his notes and anything else that could easily be brought into disorder if this got any worse and observed Isaac from a distance, warily.

In the meantime, Isaac actually made progress. While the disc just instantly dropped to the floor before, he got it to wobbledy support him for a moment, before it lost its balance. To be fair, to be able to maintain a disc of dense air and lift it from the ground with wind was already a ridiculous feat of multitasking… but for Isaac, it wasn't enough. He wouldn't rest until he perfected this first step!

Almost twenty minutes later, after Jakk had already gone to bed and used his blanket to hide from the raging storm, Isaac could finally stand upon the disc of air for a short moment. He had repeatedly fallen and even hit his head, but it was all worth it. Everything was perfectly balanced. Of course, he quickly stopped exerting his influence on the disc, as it cost him a lot of mana to maintain it, and dispersed the airflow at the same time, returning everything to tranquility.

[ The Magic 'Anemoi Steps' has been obtained. ]

[ Anemoi Steps: Creates footholds of dense air at target locations which are held in place by the power of the wind. Will require 50% less focus if activated via the chant.

Chant: "O blessing of wind, I will scale the heavens!" ]

Isaac's celebratory mood was instantly dashed when he finished reading the system notifications. He looked like he had just swallowed a fly, while his eyebrows were scrunched up in displeasure. The cause for all of this was the mention of a chant… and that it would be vastly more efficient to use it.

Even when he had first come across characters shouting the names of their attacks or chanting their spells back in stories from the world he came from, Isaac had only ever had one thought about the whole thing: It was lame. Incredibly lame.

Having to do this only proved one's inadequacy. If one was proficient in the usage of magic or certain attacks, one didn't have to rely on such toddler-level support wheels. And even more than that: It was incredibly lame.

So now that his system had analyzed that the very laws of this world would alleviate some of his burden if he fell in line and also chanted his new Magic, he felt extremely unpleasant.

A minute or two later, Isaac's expression finally relaxed and a heavy sigh escaped his lips. He had made a decision.

'System, please lock this chant. I don't want to be tempted to use it.'

[ The Chant of the 'Anemoi Steps' Magic has been locked. All related effects can't be accessed until the lock has been disabled.

Cost of disabling the lock has been determined: 25.000 AP ]

A wry smile played across Isaac's lips when he saw this ridiculous price. He wasn't surprised about it in the least, however, as he had already expected himself to put such measures in place. If he had made locking and unlocking abilities incredibly easy, something that could be done without consequences, Isaac might still bank on his locked abilities in a pinch. Needless to say, that would take a lot of the tension out of any perilous situation… which would make it boring. And boredom was something Isaac wanted to avoid.

How did Isaac know that he could lock some of his abilities? He didn't, it had just been an educated guess. After all, including such a feature made sense.

As for the decision he had made just moments prior, it was this: He would follow this world's path to greater heights, as far as he needed to go… and then change the specific law of the world that supported chant-based magic. In Isaac's eyes, it was nothing more than a plight upon this world and now that he had stumbled across it himself, he wanted to see it gone. It would take a bit of time to arrive at a point where he could enact such change, but it wasn't too bad of a short-term goal.

After playing around with his self-created magic a little more, gaining further proficiency in it, Isaac noticed that, while he still had drops circulating through the channels of his mental layer, the lake of mana was entirely dried up. Also, he had started to feel mentally exhausted.

Previously, Lefiya had told him a lot about the magic of this world, which was where he learned that mages didn't know about the existence of mana at all. Rather, they called the resource they used to cast their spells 'Mind'. If one got too mentally exhausted by casting spells and fainted, a.k.a. if the resource was depleted, that was called a 'Mind Down'.

Well, it seemed like this world's mages were victims of a severe misunderstanding. Its cause was understandable, though.

Mind was simply mental strength. Everyone had different amounts of it. With the increase in the Magic stat, one would basically get an upgrade to their nervous system and brain, which would lead to an increase in mental strength. When casting spells, one had to mentally strain oneself to do so. The higher the Magic stat, the more spells one could cast. Therefore, it was only logical to conclude that Mind, mental strength, was what powered spells.

This, however, was incorrect. Mana was the resource that powered spells, while one's mental strength simply instructed the invisible energy. Both mana and Mind would get an increase if one's Magic stat rose, so they could easily be seen as the same thing. Still, they weren't. Every individual had a different amount of mental strength, therefore they had a different amount of Mind even without factoring in any stats. One's mental strength could also rise and fall irrespective of one's stats. If one had the same amount of Magic stat points, however, one would always have the same amount of mana.

In any case, for Isaac, this whole situation highlighted a potential problem. To combat their inability to cast spells, mages of this world drank Magic Potions that would help them to restore their Mind, to recover from mental fatigue. Sadly, those didn't help with recovering their mana at all. Still, as most mages would never be able to use all of their mana even in very prolonged encounters, no matter how many Mind-restoring Magic Potions they consumed, they would never notice this problem. The cause for this was that a person's mental strength was usually very weak. For Isaac, however, if he followed in these people's footsteps, he would most likely run out of mana before he entered a 'Mind Down' state. This meant that he would have to research his own way to recover mana and couldn't take a shortcut by following someone else's path. As for other people, if their mental strength reached a certain level and they were in a prolonged engagement, they would simply run out of mana, while being completely unaware of it. They would think they were still able to cast spells, as they had just taken a Mind-restoring potion… but they would be caught off guard and die. Quite a tragic fate.

As he had no need to hurry and to artificially recover from his mental exhaustion right now, Isaac lay down in bed to let his nightly rest do so the natural way. Before he fell asleep, however, he paid attention to his dried up lake of mana. His Magic stat hadn't fallen, so, as he expected, just seconds after he started paying attention to it, he noticed some spontaneously appearing, fresh drops of mana. The lake was filling itself up again on its own. As he had been busy with his research before, he hadn't noticed it, but now he knew that there was some kind of passive regeneration at play here.

Once the feeling of relief over having nothing to worry about had passed, Isaac thought about where those drops of mana could possibly be coming from. They couldn't just appear out of nowhere, after all. The problem was that he couldn't detect anything, no matter how hard he tried. Therefore, right before falling asleep, he ventured a guess that he would try to verify in the future: The Magic stat assigned to someone via their Falna - or whatever equivalent they made use of - told the laws of this world exactly how much mana they had to supply to every individual. Because expended mana disintegrated into the world itself, the freshly supplied mana was most likely simply drawn off the world itself. It was the lifeblood which connected every being and the world itself tightly together.