[Tainted Lands] 9 – Magic Experiments

Two more days passed, and I'd done some work around the house then. I'd expanded the rabbit coop, allowing the rabbits more room to move around and feed on grass. I'd been feeding them wild vegetables and plants I found while checking out my traps every morning and caught a few more rabbits to add to the pen. My Golems were proving excellent laborers, as I had them hauling logs, sticks, and whatever else I didn't bother carrying myself. I even had them doing odd jobs, such as cleaning, feeding the rabbits, and refilling their water bowl. I had gotten a lot of what I wanted done.

I had plenty of food and water, and with the Golems and my makeshift alarms around my house, I was more than safe and protected for the time being, but I was growing bored. So, I decided to do something reckless... Taking a few hours, I chopped down a decently large tree, chopped the trunk into three different logs, and proceeded to drag it all back home where I spent even longer carving away at the wood until I had some grooves in the longest log which I planted into the dirt in my backyard making a rather large log pole.

I then carved away at the other two logs until I had 'arms' and inserted them into the grooves of the log, making a makeshift target dummy for myself that I planned on using for practice with magic and whatever else I wanted to practice with. Maybe I might try throwing knives? I remember having a few around somewhere I got when I was younger because I thought they were 'cool.'

The main things I wanted to test and practice with were [Mana Bolt], [Mana Infusion], and [Sprint]. While simultaneously leveling up Meditation as much as possible alongside my other passives, mainly [Mana Manipulation].

For example, [Mana Infusion] allowed me to infuse Mana into an object. What exactly did this mean? I did not know. It improved the stats of the Golems I created, making them more durable and changing the name of the material they were made of, but I was wondering if that was all it could do. What would happen if I oversaturated a knife with mana? Would it be sharper? More durable? Possibly both?

So, I first grabbed a butter knife from my kitchen, as I had many of them and did not want to risk breaking one of my kitchen knives. This butter knife was one I used a lot, so its edge was chipped in certain areas, and overall, it was a terrible knife. I would have eventually thrown away one, so I wasn't afraid of potentially breaking it.

Holding it by its grip, I grabbed the bladed end with my other hand and sat on the lawn chair.

Closing my eyes, I called out the mana from my body and sent it through my body, down my arm, and through the palm of my hand directly into the knife. Wanting to improve my control, I did this at an excruciatingly slow pace, my mana infusing the blade through a small stream, no wider than a plastic straw. I carefully infused as much mana as possible into the knife, filling every inch of the blade with mana as I had done with my Golems.

When I was done, both Mana Manipulation and Infusion had leveled up.

[Mana Manipulation 17 -> 18]

[Mana Infusion 5 -> 6]

However, the more mana I put into the knife, the hotter it began to feel in the palms of my hands. So, eventually, I stopped. When I made my first Arcane Oak Golem, I remembered the warning that it may be descrutive to poor to much mana into it. However, my curiosity got the better of me, and I continued pouring more mana into the blade.

By the time it was scalding hot, I had poured 25 points of mana into the blade. Putting on some gloves, I grabbed the knife again and walked over to some of the wood I had lying in a pile by the house. I grabbed a stick that I had peeled the bark off of and moved to sit back down.

With the stick in one hand and the knife in the other, I began to see into the stick with the blade's edge. At first, I didn't notice anything different, but it was doing better than I thought. It was far from good, but the longer I sawed at the stick, making a bunch of tiny bits of wood as I went down the stick, sawing away more and more bits off, I noticed that the knife was becoming cool to the touch, and it was losing its effectiveness.

It seemed like the mana had 'leaked' out of the blade. Perhaps it had been used to improve the blade and was slowly losing its 'charge' as time passed or as I used the knife, but there was no telling. Wanting to do more tests to find out, I did the same as before, infusing the knife with mana slowly, filling the blade with mana little by little.

...

A few hours later, with the sun lowering at the sky's edge, I made a few discoveries. [Mana Infusion] did improve the 'quality' of the knife, letting it do more than it should and making it slightly more durable, but this seemed to have a downside. The knife couldn't hold or 'absorb' all of the mana I poured into it, so it would leak out of the blade as I used it or as time passed. 

This was not that bad, all things considered, but the cost to infuse the blade was a bit annoying. If I could somehow trap the mana inside or direct it to improve a specific aspect of the knife, I'd be able to make a tool or weapon that was supernaturally better than it should be.

Imagine this: if I could infuse the blade of the axe I used to chop down trees but direct the mana to make the blade sharper, I'd be able to chop down a lot of trees for less work, at the cost of less durability, or vice versa. It was like enchanting in those games I played back when I was a kid, but temporary.

The two skills had leveled up even more, with [Mana Infusion] reaching level 10 and [Mana Manipulation] level 19. I was nearing empty when it came to my mana, so I'd meditate tonight before I went to bed. For now, I headed back into the house and started looking for the throwing knives, which I eventually found sitting in a toolbox in the closet next to the washing machine and dryer.

I spent around an hour practicing throwing these knives before going to bed, and upon the following day, I went right back to infusing mana into the butter knife, practicing throwing, and meditating. 

I kept myself busy for the entire day, finding it strangely peaceful as I practiced and trained my newfound abilities that I was granted, and it did not take long for me to get a new skill for my efforts.

[Throwing Profieciency - Level 1 - Mastery - With practice and expeirence, you become more proficient with throwing weapons, becoming more accurate with each level]