[NR] Breaking It Down - Chapter 611 (Patreon)

The free pattern for an immovable rod had the most basic set of materials, but depending on so many different conditions what was needed could change. Either drastically with entire new materials being added and occasionally replacing others or as minor as needing to reduce the amount of one ingredient by less than a percent. Worse, with each technique used it added an extra layer of changes that needed to be made and so many steps had alternate techniques you could use.

Just the spell alone caused Jason many headaches to figure out. Because, of course, such a simple spell would have innumerable variants. At the most basic level, the rod required a force-based levitation spell. Not air or magnetism. Force. Then you get into what exactly the spell is capable of and the farther it is from just lifting something a meter off the ground that can be pushed and pulled around, the more changes you’ll have to make to everything that came before and would come after.

Jason cheated on this part as well. Or rather, people got fed up with this variable since technically there could be infinite variations of it and had already simplified the step. They made a variant of the levitation spell that was specifically tuned to be used in making an immovable rod. What Jason added to the mix was actually including the entirety of said spell into the pattern. Which, if the pattern was laid out in a book, would increase the final size by 25%.

An increase in page count, that when you consider a normal spell tends to take up between one and ten pages, is an astounding amount. The reason it took so much space was how specific it had to be. While most spells called “levitate” will generally fit on two pages of a normal spellbook, learning it that way will introduce variance. Maybe the spell ends up lifting things to 999 centimeters or instead of one flat plane of force the caster ends up with a slightly concave plane of force. Whatever the case, those small variances that don’t matter for normal casting, could change the requirements enough that the creation of the rod fails. So page after page is used to force the person learning the spell to get it exactly right.

And all of this? Beyond anything Jason had ever wanted to bother with. The problem was that there wasn’t a specific point where levitation turned into a spatial lock. Well, technically, there is a point where the rod can be locked into place, but everything until that point was still needed. It was like a test in school where you needed 100 points to pass. Even if one question granted 50 points, you still needed other questions to get over the line.

But now Jason had it all laid out. Was it accurate? Maybe. He wasn’t a crafter and didn’t know magic, so there were likely some errors in there. Most of the information, even after he looked into the smallest of details, was still way outside of his understanding and likely always would be. However, the important part? That he could follow.

While techniques and magic itself aren’t his forte, the transformations of power were at least in his wheelhouse. More important to Jason, Mana’s force attribute translates to Qi and Energy force on a one-to-one basis. Which was weird, but Jason wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

So with the pattern fully figured out and every freely known avenue for creating an immovable rod documented in NeoRealm, which had taken quite a bit of time all by itself. Jason had to buy ten gold worth of paper to write it all down. He transferred the entire thing into his private VR space and began tracing out each path.

It was like someone had drawn up tens or maybe even hundreds of potential wiring diagrams for a mansion and overlaid them on top of one another. The power could floor here, but then you need this and the previous bits need another thing and so on and so forth. Worse, Jason realized he had underestimated what would need to be done.

Technically, the pattern was as complete as a crafter might want. If they could get the correct materials. However, Jason couldn’t do that as he wanted to apply the effect in a non-physical manner. So instead of using the wings of a lodestone butterfly, he would need to introduce energy modulated to copy what affects the wings would have had. Or more importantly, figure out what the base change you are actually looking for is and isolate that instead of forcing unnecessary changes on it as well.

It’s like trying to make a specific shade of color, but every addition or subtraction to one primary color also adds or subtracts from another or maybe even both. Worse, this isn’t some simple three color system he was dealing with. Magic had a seemingly infinite number of potential elements and each material and technique shifted things in strange ways.

Jason could only do his best and analyze the various techniques and materials once again. This was beyond him in more ways than just knowledge, but he kludged along. Wings of a lodestone butterfly? Magnetism warping force so that they would rise or fall depending on their orientation to the main body. The technique used to process them instead makes them connect with the body of the rod itself and the power intensifies at the core of the rod. Whereupon in the next step, that power is filtered through an air material which removes the earth-based magnetism. And so on and so forth.

It took Jason over a week of work in his private VR room to finally reduce everything down from specific materials into approximations of elements and how they interact. He could have admittedly done it faster if he had focused entirely on it, but he kept a schedule of being in NeoRealm at least half the time.