The Way Ahead

Chapter 103b: Mindblowing Revelations

A bit more testing showed that no, it was not the amount of magic present. In fact, he couldn’t figure out why sometimes it came into play and other times it didn’t. Sometimes, Bomb Throwing activated for the mundane grenades, sometimes it didn’t activate for the magical ones with no apparent difference in his experiments.

He grumbled in frustration. What was this stupid thing doing that he couldn’t control when the Skill would or wouldn’t engage? It made it very hard to determine appropriate blast shields for testing when at any moment a given explosive might suddenly be ten times as powerful. He clearly needed to get a better handle on how to not make a Skill activate… hm. Maybe he could just make Bomb Throwing an active Skill instead of a passive one? He’d done it with Firestarting, after all.

It wasn’t a perfect solution by any means, of course. From a raw Skill-comprehension angle it was far better to understand the limits for a Skill’s activation than it was to just brute-force keep it from working, but he did need to make sure he wouldn’t blow himself up by accident if he started working with nitroglycerin at some point, so it was something to work on if nothing else.

He’d need to move to a room with better ventilation, as well. Fresh Air had made him sloppy with that particular bit of safety, but if nothing else, it was a pain waiting for all the smoke to clear every time he tested a bomb.

Seriously, though. What was up with Bomb Throwing?

That said, at least the Infused grenades did reliably produce the fireball and black phosphorus-soot, just without Bomb Throwing getting involved they were much more manageable sizes. He also hadn’t managed to prove what the black, graphite-like substance that his Fireballs left behind were, but he was pretty sure that it was genuinely black phosphorus. If it was, that raised a ton of questions about the explosion and why there was black phosphorus- which was normally only produced in a lab, under seriously extreme pressures- created in the detonation.

He considered himself lucky that the particular allotrope he was dealing with was stable, if nothing else. His fireball had enough problems, what with leaving clouds of caustic material hanging around. But where the heck was the extra energy to create the black phosphorus coming from?

Yes, yes. It was certainly magic. He was dealing with magical phosphorus, after all. He hadn’t seen anything that suggested mana cared about conservation of energy. At the very least, he hadn’t noticed any sort of consistency for how much energy a certain amount of energy that some fixed amount of mana could accomplish.

Heck, he could fly, and the energy requirements for that sort of thing were… insane, unless using clever aerodynamic tricks to help out, which he wasn’t. But also, that was with the aid of his Packing skill. Considering Edwin could lift giant boulders with only a bit of effort these days, that Skill definitely did a lot of heavy lifting, pun intended. And if that had been everything, he would have just dismissed it as ‘just magic.’

…But that wasn’t everything. Why did a bigger explosion create a byproduct that took some truly insane pressures- something like twelve gigapascals if Memory served- to make? Was it connected to the fact Infused Phosphorus was an albeit weak high explosive? It was either by accident or a deliberate- so to speak- part of the process. There was something strange here going on, and he would figure out what it was no matter what it took.

He was deep in thought when Kynigos dragged him from the lab and out into the daylight. Though he hissed in frustration at not being able to continue his testing, most of his reluctance vanished when he saw Rillah waiting for him. What was she doing?

“Come on, let’s go flying!”

“What do you need me for to do that, though?” he protested, “Last I checked, I needed you to fly and not the other way around. I’ve got stuff in the lab to do! There’s something strange going on and I want to investigate.”

“I don’t! But you haven’t been outside for a week! Your lab will be there when you get back, but it’s a great day for flying! Those’ll be rare as we keep going.”

It was actually true, especially since his training with Lefi, currently at about an hour a day, was predominantly indoors. Edwin definitely felt that he was actually learning stuff… not that it made any difference in how his skill was stacking up against Lefi.

“Don’t you have… time to spend with Yathal or whatever? You seem to have gotten Kyni on your side, but what about his boy?”

“Nope! Lefi’s keeping an eye on them right now.”

“Well... aren’t you in charge of scheduling the weather? Can’t you just make nicer days?”

“Oh, please. You know it doesn’t work like that. Besides, I can really only create seasonal-appropriate weather. I can’t make it warmer when we’re past the equinox.”

Edwin sighed, only really putting a token amount of additional resistance. It was clear that Rillah wanted to spend time with him, and he had to say he liked the idea. He wasn’t about to decline spending time with a pretty girl, after all. Besides, the last time he’d been outside had been his last flight with the girl, and in addition to having been lots of fun, was consistently a source of levels for his Flight skill.

“Do you have some sort of appearance-based Skill?” he idly mused as they rose above the tower, then promptly realized his mistake, “Uh! Sorry, I didn’t mean to ask that. I, um. I don’t actually have an excuse. I just didn’t think first.”

She laughed, and floated close enough to ruffled his hair slightly, “Why, Edwin. A lady loves to hear she looks pretty.”

“Well, sure. But I just figured… you know what, never mind.”

“I’ll tell you… if you tell me what your crystal-making trophy Skill is that Lefi loves so much.”

“Wait, Lefi likes Apparatus? He’s barely mentioned that to me,” he asked.

Rillah just shrugged, “Apparatus?”

“Sapper’s Apparatus,” he explained, “Evolution of Construction with Superior Alchemist. Quite useful, all told.”

“Really? Huh! How’d you get that Path?”

“Beat up a band of bandits, their leader was an alchemist.”

“Oh, yes! Lefi told me about that. Anyway, to answer your question, it’s an evolution of Unweathered Form.”

“Unweathered form?”

She nodded, “It’s really important for my magic, that I’m not really affected by weather or by the seasons. So, I made sure to get a Skill that keeps me from getting too hot or too cold, which is very important for me.”

“Because of your wings and your corresponding… inability to wear shirts?” Edwin knew he was on thin ice, socially speaking, but he persisted nonetheless. Probably a bad idea, but…

She laughed, “I’ll have you know that this is the height of fashion in the capital.”

Edwin raised a skeptical eye as they drifted through the sky.

“It is!”

“What, how does that…” Edwin trailed off in thought. Hm. From what he’d seen of fashion, avior tended to not wear overmuch, and while humans and the like tended to still wear clothing more reminiscent of medieval garb, he could definitely see Rillah’s outfit- heavy garb on the waist and below, very little on the torso- being more common. Though that would only make sense if…

“Is the capital further south from here?”

Rillah paused and looked at him curiously, “Yes, how did you know?”

“Well, basically not everyone will have your Skill to prevent them from getting too cold while wearing that, so it would have to be a lot warmer on average down there,” he explained, “So, further south.”

She pursed her lips, “Well-reasoned. Even when I’m just messing with you, you figure stuff out.” She ruffled his hair again, and Edwin started feeling a bit self-conscious. He hadn’t really washed himself lately, so his hair was likely filthy with smoke and oils and probably caustic desiccants from all of his experiments. Actually, what did he look like? Did he have a patina of smoke covering him? When was the last time he’d washed his clothing?

He’d take a bath when they landed, he told himself. There was a bath off in one corner of the tower, and the water was actually heated (and kept clean) by some magical object embedded in the corner.

At least Purify made washing himself relatively easy, and incidental use of the Skill while Refining stuff meant his hands were practically sparkling. He’d still need to rinse off first to keep the water from turning into phosphoric acid, though Adaptive Defense was probably pretty much completely protecting him from the stuff these days.

“What were we talking about?” Edwin realized, “I got distracted.”

“Me,” Rillah readily supplied.

Her? But… Oh, right.

“So Greater Unweathered Form?”

“Similar ability but much more potent and with a wider array of uses. It’s great in the rain. Keeps me completely dry.”

“And… Idyllic Form?”

“That’s what makes me so pretty,” she teased, “Makes me ‘Possess the natural beauty of a fresh snowfall,’ I’ll have you know. I’m quite happy with the level I got it to.”

“Oh, so you’ve evolved it too? What is it now?”

She gasped in mock offense, “Honestly, so many personal questions? Don’t you know it’s rude to ask about Skills?”

Edwin frowned, “Oh come on, don’t flip on me like that. You were just telling me about your Skills. Besides, I thought you were all for not being formal and that sort of thing? Actually, now that I think about it, aren’t the vast majority of classes and skills public knowledge in the Empire? How does that translate to them also being really private? ”

“What?”

“Rillah, I know you can hear me,” he didn’t even need to speak up even with the onrushing wind from their dive, “You have at least three Skills constantly active concentrated around your ears, and I’m pretty sure it’s your Hearing skill that lights up every time I talk to you.”

She continued her pretense of not hearing him, and Edwin sighed before returning his attention to enjoying his Flight through the clouds.

“Step! Up! Up! Left! Dive! Step! Right! Step! Jump!”

Edwin had gotten used to switching between Flight and Longstrider in a single instant, to the point where Lefi had chained multiple commands together. That training exercise lasted for about a week before Edwin could do it in his sleep.

Then, however, Edwin had figured out something new with Longstrider. Namely, its Infused effect. Most, and in theory all, of his mundane Skills had some sort of magical effect when paired with his third-highest level Skill, even if it wasn’t always obvious. His magical Skills on the other hand couldn’t be Infused, but made sense.

“Jump! Step! Up! Right! Right! Back! Left! Down!”

Most of them directly utilized Mana Infusion in some way or another, and you couldn’t use the same skill twice simultaneously any more than you could hold two big objects in the same hand or speak two words simultaneously. Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. He could use one of his magical Skills while also Infusing something else. He did it constantly with Flight, after all. Improbable Arsenal explicitly changed the effect his Infusions had on container-like objects, Flight was literally made by combining Mana Infusion and Packing, and while Edwin was still trying to figure out if Fey’s Caress was magical or not he did suspect the shapeshifting Skill used Mana Infusion somehow in its base effects.

“Down! Left! Left! Left! Left! Jump! Right!”

But in any case, Mana Infusion was great… if he could figure out how to use it correctly. There were three layers of difficulty in Infusing his Skills. First was just figuring out where the Skill could be infused and how to shove his mana in. It was like trying to plug in a USB drive where the USB was invisible, the computer was invisible, and if the drive had twenty different possible orientations.

“Up! Up! Down! Down! Left!”

The second difficulty was figuring out if anything else needed to be Infused simultaneously. Well, technically not simultaneously, just in unison. Some Skills didn’t seem to have any effect when Infused on their own. Even Firestarting, Edwin’s premiere Infused Skill, still required him to Infuse the air near his fingertips in addition to the Skill itself before it would deign to create sparks. Others, like Seeing, seemed to have the effect of ‘can combine with another Skill,’ and he needed to figure out what other Skill was needed for there to be any effect. Of course, that tied into and was made all the more difficult by the third component of Infusing a Skill.

“Right! Left! Right! Jump! Step!”

Namely, figuring out what the Skill did. His Skills didn’t come with instruction manuals, and Infused skills doubly so. He still didn’t know what Nutrition and Survival did when Infused in a pair- heck, he didn’t know what Infused Survival on its own did- despite sporadically working on it for nearly two years. Most of the time, it was just luck that he found some new application of an Infused skill, and his Longstrider discovery definitely qualified.

“Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump! Up! Right! Back!”

It had been the result of an overly tired slip-up, amusingly. He had been at the end of a particularly long training session trying to figure out exactly what Infused Longstrider did, when his exhaustion- Longstrider could be really tiring when was pushing at its limits for hours on end- had led him to tripping over his own two feet during a particularly quick turn, and his panicked attempt to straighten his legs and catch himself had launched him over ten feet through the air.

He could jump. Now, that may have sounded like a really stupid magical application of Longstrider, but for a Skill whose primary limitation was that one foot had to be either firmly planted on the ground at all times… unless you were running in which case it was a little more flexible. But other than that, the Skill had a very clear requirement: firm footing on or near the ground.

When it was Infused, though? All the Skill required was that he had a solid foothold at the point of his jump’s start.

“Back! Left! Up! Jump!”

Edwin was in pretty good physical shape, all told. He was still scrawny, sure, but he still was very physically active and had several Skills giving him a pretty much perfectly nutritious diet when he ate- and when he was especially active, he ate regularly. That was to say nothing of Athletics and Flexibility giving him downright superhuman levels of fitness. Without Longstrider boosting his jump, he could very easily jump more than a meter in the air.

With the skill, though?

Well, he could clear almost eight times that.

“Jump! Down! Right! Forward! Jump!”

And it was awesome.

Edwin certainly never felt bored, as he didn’t let his work with alchemy slack either, and he spent many an hour explaining to Lefi what he was doing and why it worked, along with all sorts of questions the man had about chemistry and science. Considering the amount of progress he had been helping Edwin make in his Longstrider and other Skills, though, it was a well worthwhile trade.

He had tried Refining phosphorus into being more explosive, and it… didn’t really do much? Not that ‘explosive’ was a property he could really refine, but neither speed of combustion nor temperature impacted the destructive potential of his grenades.

It left him puzzled for quite a while, and it was only when he managed to get an accurate read on a fast-explosive’s temperature one time that it finally became clear to him. Explosions were basically the result of a material getting really hot really fast, tearing either itself apart or heating up the air to increase its volume.

But, his Refined phosphorus only burned hot or fast, not both, and the properties changed at essentially the same rate, leaving the overall explosion the same size. It was a frustrating conundrum, but Edwin figured he shouldn’t complain too much. It had been an interesting diversion, but he was pretty sure the only way he could make pure phosphorus be any more explosive via purely alchemical means was by making the entire thing catch on fire at once.

He had hoped that Firestarting might come to his rescue, but it seemed not. He was pretty sure that the only reason he could ignite an entire log simultaneously was because the organic compounds did have some amount of oxygen locked away inside of it… or something like that, anyway. If he wanted to improve his burn rate of phosphorus, he’d need to make it into a gas and allow every molecule to combust simultaneously.

It was an amusing idea, but how would that even work. Phosphorus only sublimated at temperatures around 1000° C, and…

“Sub… limated? Vanished?” Lefi asked, breaking Edwin out of his lecturing mode.

“Sublimated? It’s like evaporation, but with solids instead of liquids,” the explanation got a confused stare from the adventurer, and Edwin continued, “So there’s three forms of matter, remember me saying that? Well, technically there’s like seventeen if you want to be comprehensive, but while time crystals are cool, literally, they aren’t relevant right now. Three states of matter that matter right now. Normally, you have a solid- like ice- that melts, and then boils or evaporates into a gas- like steam. With me so far?”

“Time crystals?”

“Just ignore that. It’s this weird state of matter at hyper-cold temperatures where particle motion has no energy because of how cold it is… I read like one paper on the stuff years ago, and I haven’t even begun to explain the absolute basics of the stuff that you would need to understand how it’s even theoretically possible. Moving on. So, solids, liquids, and gases. You with me?”

“I do believe so.”

“Great. Well, sometimes a substance can skip the liquid phase and jump straight to a gas. That’s what phosphorus does. Heating it to a thousand degrees Celsius would give diphosphorus, and that’s super reactive like the hellish element it is. But it also wouldn’t be practical to really have, because it would need to stay that temperature, and I think I’d need to be like level ninety in Basic Thermokinesis to make it work. But what might work is if I was somehow able to powder normal white phosphorus to the molecular level and then somehow distribute that powder over an area, then that would create quite the…”

He trailed off in realization, “Fireball.”

“Edwin?” Lefi asked.

“Yeah, yeah.” He vaguely waved his hand at the adventurer, springing up from his chair, mind racing.

“I need to get to my lab. I think I figured it out!”

Congratulations! For receiving extensive lessons from ? Lefi Forolova, you have unlocked the Student of Power path!

Congratulations! For successfully developing a new application for the Longstrider skill, you have unlocked the Athlete path!

Level Up!

Skill Points 939→995 (Average level: 52)

Adaptive Defense Level 33→41

Alchemical Analysis Level 35→37

Alchemical Dismantling Level 45→46

Basic Thermokinesis Level 31→32