Chronicles of the True Wizard

Felix had been exploring Puzzle Dungeon B for a few days now. He had decided on the first day that he didn't intend on exploring the entire thing, though he still thought he might change his mind as the layout of this dungeon appeared different from the rest. The rooms were much bigger and the sheer number of corridors was much lower. Navigating this dungeon was a breeze in comparison to the previous puzzle dungeons.

In contrast though, the rooms were much more complex. They were much bigger in general as well as containing much more complex challenges within them. Instead of the same challenges involving the same tasks being drilled into their victim, these rooms were more like creative challenges that were intended to be thought provoking. At least that was Felix's interpretation of them.

In the first room Felix encountered he was tasked with breaking into a series of rooms that were protected with wards. He had never even heard of wards before so it took him longer than he would have liked, but his mana sense and control helped a lot. The wards tended to be hidden on the inside of the room he was trying to get into, to minimize tampering or sometimes even embedded into the wall with a metal being used to guide the mana. In the first case, he could just shatter the ward, in the second he had to stop the flow and hold it while he passed through. He couldn't exactly shatter the metal and when he let go, the mana would simply resume course and reconnect the ward.

The functions of most of the wards he encountered were simply alarm wards with sounds and lights being created when triggered. In some of the later rooms though, the wards functions were more complicated. Some of them were configured as traps and others maintained mana barriers to prevent access. The hardest one to deal with, for Felix, was a ward that projected a force barrier from a distance. That meant that he could only minimally interfere with the mana flow and instead had to fight the force barrier with his own force spell, making it a battle of mana capacity.

In general Felix was getting the sense that wards were somewhere between enchantments and spell forms. They consisted mostly of triggered or channeled spells that were kept alive by being drawn or inlaid rather than having a caster shape mana. They also didn't have to be used to guard something, as the name might imply, Felix found that they were also useful in magical item engineering.

Felix had come across kitchens where the oven and stove functioned through a combination of wards and enchantments. The enchantments held the heat in and the ward was enabled to funnel mana from a battery and convert it to heat. Though Felix wasn't sure if that would be considered a ward or an enchantment.

He had to create multiple different household machines or tools, including but not limited to a kettle, a door lock, and a mop. His kettle was pretty sad as it had no way of sensing the temperature of the water and stopping itself. The door lock was simply a force spell that he triggered with his own mana through the wall to push a deadbolt into a hole. The mop, he was most proud of as he had managed to make it heat up or cool down with a simple switch and even managed to make it vibrate. Not all of which was useful, but it was a fun project.

From the rooms, Felix was mostly rewarded with ward diagrams and materials for magical item engineering, which was fairly boring overall. He did manage to net himself a whopping 14 levels in his profession, which was more than he had ever gotten at once. That boost in levels had finally bumped his intelligence above 1000, a personal milestone he had been anticipating with excitement. There did not appear to be any specific milestone or achievement for getting there though.

Felix lay in his bed in the rest room. He realized it hadn't been washed for a while so he put washing machine or spell on the todo list before he pulled out Mind, Body, Mana and began reading the next part.

In part 2 of this book, we will look at the different natural uses of mana as well as interactions between creatures, organic cell and mana.

Our first series of case studies will look at the natural uses of mana in certain beasts. These interactions do not include any creatures with mana channels or cores as those will be explored in depth in part 3. Some would be surprised to know that some creatures, without channels, infuse their bodies with mana, similarly to how most sentient creatures naturally consume and infuse energy.

There exists a race of beast, name redacted to preserve tier and rarity of book, that has been found to infuse their muscles and organs with mana as they move in order increase their natural performance. The benefits, when compared to energy are perplexing. Some of the creatures that have been found to do this do not appear to obtain any benefit from doing so. Others, are able to increase the performance of their organs to a much higher level than is traditionally possible with energy.

The book went on to detail specific case studies with the general idea being that using mana to infuse organs resulted in completely different effects for each and every creature.

When attempts were made to replicate this phenomena in humans and other sentients, the results were disturbing. In some cases, the mana resulted in the test subject's muscles replicating and growing like a cancer whereas in others, it had no effect whatsoever. This variance is likely due to the application of the mana as well as other properties and environmental circumstances along with variances in the test subjects themselves. Unfortunately, as with the last part, we can only theorize on the cause of the specific outcomes as there is simply not enough data.

The case studies were as advertised, disturbing. In one of them, the one with the muscles growing like a cancer, the test subject was tied down and injected with multiple tubes that supplied refined liquid mana from a plant mixed with other natural ingredients that remained unnamed. The subject went insane and killed all of the researchers.

In another, the subjects body was carefully flooded with mana uniformly. The intention was to let the subject's body naturally process and utilize the mana. The results were negligible if any and inconclusive from a research standpoint.

The really crazy case studies were the ones where an organ from a creature that uses mana for bodily functions was transplanted into a sentient test subject. Some were successful, some disastrous but overall, the effect never matched the intention.

Separate from the body, is the mind. If you found the effects on the body disturbing, you might want to skip this section. There are creatures, once again without channels, that infuse their minds with mana as well as some whose mind consume it to function. These creatures are mostly ones where their mind is the majority of their body. Though their names and descriptions are redacted, hopefully you can picture some such creature that fits the vague description.

Felix thought of a popular monster from role playing games that was essentially a floating head with tentacle like appendages, though he wasn't sure if they did or even could exist in the multiverse.

These creatures tend to be natural casters and will often suffuse their bodies with mana in some way. While the exact function of mana with respect to their minds is unclear, it is known that they use mana in some way.

I was not able to find significant experimentation on these creatures, however there has been plenty of documented case studies of humans attempting to replicate said feat.

While the last case studies were horrific in a body horror kind of way, these were more psychological. Some had no effect, others were accidentally stuck in a permanent dream or nightmare with no way out. The majority of these experiments were conducted in an odd manner though. In order to deliver mana into the brain of a subject, the more horrific results were achieved by administering the mana through parasites. These were parasites that were found to seek out the brain of their host and were surgically modified to secrete mana by transplanting unique organs. The host was then kept alive by healing them repeatedly.

The next case studies that we will talk about were separated due to the low quality of observation. They mostly involve the consumption of mana based organs over a long period of time. The effects are reported as wild and extravagant but the research is overall of low quality and, in my humble opinion, likely completely unrelated to the subject's diet. These low quality case studies are included mostly for future research purposes as well as to provoke thought.

Felix skimmed through these case studies and had to agree with the author, the accounts mostly consisted of multiple year long trials where someone was offered a race that was slightly different than normal. All of the effects could easily have been accounted for by a slew of other causes, such as the acquisition of mana organs by slaying magical beasts for years.

While the case studies in this section might have been disappointing with no clear results, I genuinely believe there is something achievable with more modern tools and different applications of mana. These beasts typically have an organ within their bodies that can process and store mana for distribution, effectively circumventing the mana control issue. As with many things, were we sentient beings to have more and/or finer control over mana, many of these experiments would be much less gruesome, more scientifically sound and potentially have positive results. The reason I believe this, is due to the case studies in part 3.

With mana existing in all things and some amount of manipulation found in all sentient beings, everything with consciousness appears to have some control over mana. Mana control varies greatly but seems to be limited in all things. The highest known mana control of any creature is defined simply by the feat of completing a [B - Epic] Mana Control Box. As is widely known, the difficulty of Man Control boxes are almost entirely dictated by the rarity with the tier affecting almost solely the quantity of mana involved as well as contents of the box. No known Mana Control boxes of a higher rarity of any tier have ever been solved.

"Huh. Is Arcane lesser than Epic? Where does it fit?" Felix said aloud.

The rest of part 2 of the book was simply a list of odd case studies and interactions that didn't fit well into the rest of the section but seemed to have interesting results, intentions or methodologies. To Felix, they were mostly just odd, involving experiments on plants, consumption of mana dense rocks and other random oddities.

Felix was tempted to continue reading as he only had one part left, and it was the one he was the most excited for, but he decided to call it a night and continue next time he slept.

Felix ran from room to room completing challenges for about 40 hours or so and managed to complete 27 rooms in that time. Felix was starting to suspect there were more than one blue room in this dungeon as multiple of the rooms had stood out in reward quality and puzzle difficulty. He was receiving some more complex ward components as well as more valuable components for engineering tools. He now had multiple bags of precious metals for enchantment and ward inlaying as well as many small mana batteries. Too small for him to use in anything other than magical item engineering though.

Overall, he gained 10 profession levels over the two days.

He also found an [E - Epic] Skill Test Cube: Mana Control, which he opened with relative ease. Inside he found another book.

[E - Epic] Manaverse

This book explores Mana as one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Where and how it appears as well as the known properties of mana and some theories as well.

Ok, finish the other book tonight, then I can start on this one. Then I can look at the D tier book. As much as I want to start with that, I think these two will provide some useful background information. . . . . .