[D'sP] A Look At One Interesting Person - Chapter 324 (Patreon)

It takes a little bit of planning, but Ace does figure things out. He had originally planned to take it slowly, induct new people as they marry in or are born to the inner circle. This was mostly so it would be easy to turn away others, but admittedly, they had already broken that when the wolfkin showed up and they inducted the Selas.

Though most people accepted the necessity of that. After all, about one in twenty people within the local area were now wolfkin. More to the point, after a few more xenophobic settlements kicked them out, places that fully accepted them like Wolf’s Rest tended more towards one in ten.

Now, Ace was opening the floodgates by allowing regular humans to join the inner circle. He wasn’t even limiting it so only healers or similar were being allowed to join. In fact, Ace was targeting a number of specific things when it came to those he was allowing to join. There was the obvious selection of the loyal and the healers. However, he also went for a few potentials who could use the quick resource regeneration to advance even faster.

In particular, there was a person who had been working with Ruby on a certain matter. Roslyn was interested in magic, but wasn’t satisfied with how it worked, or rather, how the Mana pool worked. After all, unless you’re using pure magic for a spell, you’ll need a step where you align it. As an example, Ruby’s fire ribbons aren’t something she can use instantly. Rather, there is a brief delay while she turns the Mana into Fire Mana. If Ruby instead has a lump of Fire Mana at the ready, she can fire off the ribbons like a machine gun.

Roslyn wanted to change that and so, with Ruby’s help, looked into just what the Mana pool was. Oh, and for this she ignored the other powers and alternate casting methods. After all, if you prepare spells ahead of time and store them within yourself, the Mana pool only matters insofar as a smaller one would limit some spells you could use.

Anyway, there wasn’t a proper answer to what a Mana pool is. Even Ally, down in the dungeon couldn’t give Doyle an answer when he asked about it, so Roslyn and Ruby certainly weren’t going to find some one size fits all answer. There are some more common answers, but the various resource pools can be stored anywhere and contain as much or as little power as you might want.

In fact, there were people in town who didn’t start out with Mana that managed to form their own pools. Of those few, most tended towards the pool being in the brain as much as a non-physical power can be. Though one guy simply flooded his entire body with Mana. That guy died, but at least he left a journal keeping track of what happened.

See, he had originally had an unnamed power of some sort that he couldn’t figure out how to use. Said power encompassed his entire body and so when he figured out how to gain the use of Mana, the guy did the same thing with it. Except the two powers didn’t agree with each other and started to react. This, in turn, resulted in the guy slowly losing his life as his very resource regeneration killed him.

Ruby was more than a bit annoyed that the fool didn’t at least record down what the system had called his first power. Anyway, this showed that pools could interact, something Roslyn took advantage of, as well as the knowledge that you could make more pools.

Not that others hadn’t done so. It is simply that you don’t get extra Mana regeneration for it. Rather, your current Regen rate is split among all your pools and you have to have at least a little going to each pool. This doesn’t even provide extra space, as the creation of the pool is more along the lines of pinching off some of another pool.

So, taking all that together, Roslyn did something relatively unique for newly integrated worlds. She created a small ten point Mana pool and then figured out how to align it. For the first pool, she went with fire as that was the element the town was most experienced with.

Now, that wasn’t the unique part. Any random person can figure out that if you hold aspected Mana within a Mana pool too long, the pool will pick up that aspect. Most even figure out how to lock that aspect in so that any Mana being regenerated would be aspected Mana. No, what she did that was unique, was to connect her smaller Fire Mana pool to her main Mana pool and set it so Mana would flow into the smaller pool and be aspected.

Once that was in place, she didn’t stop at just fire. Water, air, earth, and honestly any other type of Mana she could figure out. The only problem would have been the size of her original Mana pool, except by doing this she received both a skill related to expanding her Mana pool and a deep path for it.

Now, Ace had tested what happened when you had a second normal Mana pool. The dungeon didn’t give you twice the Mana regeneration it did others. However, Roslyn didn’t just have a redundant Mana pool. To pool an aspected pool back with the other requires you go through a process to remove the aspect. Not just that, but all signs point towards this separation eventually not being reversible.

You can’t even switch around how much regeneration the pools are receiving like you can with two unaspected pools. Rather, once regeneration has been directed towards the aspected pool, you need to also go through the effort to remove the aspect separately from that. So with all that in mind, Ace hoped that her situation would result in a massive boost from the dungeon’s regen effect.

And it worked, sorta. Roslyn received a boost to each group of aspected pools. In particular, if two pools were too similar, they shared the boost. That meant her Fire Mana pool and Wildfire Mana pool had to share. Once this was discovered, Roslyn cut back on the number of pools she had.

In fact, she used this to determine if a new aspect of Mana required a new pool or not. This was mostly because it wasn’t as straightforward as you might think. For instance, Heat Mana didn’t share with Fire Mana, but it did with Cold Mana. There was even a couple that at first seemed to be unique enough until she realized an aspect could be shared across multiple groups. Oh, and doing so was inefficient so she actually lost some regen when that happened.

For those aspects, she didn’t just merge them back into the respective pools. After all, the fact those aspects were shared across multiple pools, to her, meant they weren’t a perfect fit for any of them. Instead, she worked on separating those aspects from those original aspects even more.

One example of this was Mist Mana. It shared with Water Mana and Air Mana. Roslyn got a little distracted on this one when she realized Liquid Mana didn’t share with Water Mana, but eventually she figured out a corner to tug at. While combining water and air to make mist was easy enough, she instead focused on what it did. Mist Mana was meant to obscure.

Water suspended in the air wasn’t the only way to do this. Smoke, dust, ash, sand, and so much more could do the same thing. Not just that, but you didn’t have to limit this to air. Sand suspended in the water will cloud your vision just as much as sand suspended in the air. From Roslyn's perspective, the only reason anyone should ever restrict themselves to just mist would be if they weren’t actually using mist, but rather water. Even the shared aspect of air would be better used in shielding the mist from being blown away.

Not that adding in Water Mana was useless. Rather, just as Air Mana is better used to maintain the mist, Water Mana is best used to enhance the refraction being caused by the water. And so Roslyn experimented with the Mist Mana, trying to strip out those other elements until she was left with a new aspect, haze.

Alone, Haze Mana created an area of restricted senses. Yes, senses and not just vision. This included senses such as Mana sight, the sense of balance, and against a weak enough target it could even target the sense of self. Haze wasn’t just about particles in the air preventing line of sight, but also such things as the mental state of being confused and so on.

The only problem was that the more esoteric and the closer to the source of the sense, the more Mana needed to be used. This meant a few interesting quirks. For instance, it is more efficient to fill a room with haze to prevent one person from seeing something than it is to shroud just the person’s head in haze. Also, adding in other aspects is a great way to boost the effect, even if it means restricting what senses it does work on. For instance, adding water to make mist is particularly effective against lasers and fire.

And this one aspect reveals why the Dungeon’s boost is so important to her progress. The more Mana Roslyn has, the more aspects and combinations thereof she can test. Sure, Roslyn wasn’t going to be of direct use to Wolf’s Rest at the moment, but her potential, even before Ace knew for certain that the dungeon would regen all her pools, was more than worth inducting her into the inner circle.

And she wasn’t the only one like this. As a newly integrated world, nothing is set in stone. Unlike worlds that have been in the system for generations, Ace and his people have no blinders of tradition and false facts to chain them. On any other world, what many people are doing would have them labeled mad or foolish.

People would laugh at Ruby for her fire ribbons. Why bother with that when you could just learn the fire dart spell? Roslyn’s multiple pools? A waste of time! Jim? Why is he even working for the Guild, let alone being the local guild master? He isn’t strong enough, rich enough, or a noble!

But it is within their ignorance, that some can rise up. With time and stability, people forget one important fact. While skills, stats, and levels are nice, Paths are the true source of power. Not just that, but the most powerful path isn’t the one that someone else used to rise to the top, but the one best for you.

People forget that even when people walk the same path, each experiences it differently. Not just that, but no one else can walk the path for you. Guide you? Sure, but you can finish a path by backtracking or stepping off of it, just as easily as you can by walking it to the end.

The restriction on sharing your paths has a deeper meaning than just secrecy. Though admittedly, most places don’t realize this and instead support it as a way to hoard power. But no, the reason the system encourages people not to share such things, even if it isn’t communicated all that well, is the fact that knowing too much limits you.

While knowing your path can be a boost at the start, it limits you the farther you go. Time and time again, civilizations have dabbled with forcing their armies to all follow the same paths for their position. Time and time again those civilizations will fall as their to end fighters leave or die and no one rises up to replace them. Because if people can’t walk their own path, eventually they either won’t be able to walk any path or will end up walking in circles.

A Little Strong - Chapter 323

Ace Decides Something - Chapter 325