Marissa nodded. “I’d be glad to serve you.” She was still blushing a bit. I didn’t understand why.
I wrote down ‘Fire Amplification Amulet’ below Sera’s gauntlet. “Okay. I think we’re good for now. Let’s plan to meet up and talk about ideas again in a week. We’ll grab Jin next time, too.”
After that, I nudged them gradually out of the room. I had a lot of work to do.
***
The next few days involved a lot of studying.
Professor Vellum had assumed that telling me that using my attunement was already draining my mental mana would make me more comfortable using it directly.
She’d been wrong. It had the opposite effect.
I was now deathly afraid of using my attunement at all.
I knew it was irrational. I hadn’t suffered any obvious side effects from using the attunement, and I knew that other people used their attunements actively all the time. The attunements were built for people to use them.
But I still couldn’t get past the idea that I was going to burn out my mind.
So, I turned to alternate ideas for how to make my attunement stronger.
I dug through books, bothered teachers, and nagged second year students for ideas. Advancing attunements was one of the main goals of any student, so there were lots of studies on different ways of doing it.
Most techniques were designed to supplement practice with the attunement itself. Some of them were attunement-specific exercises. Summoners tried to make as many small summoned fragments as possible, or to quickly summon and dismiss the same one. There were different schools of thought about how Elementalists should train, but usually they involved casting the biggest spell you could and then resting and doing it again.
For Enchanters, the most popular method was just to enchant progressively stronger items, but relying as heavily as possible on the mana that was directly connected to your attunement.
So, pretty much the exact opposite of what I’d been doing.
I hit up the Divinatory and learned that my mental mana had advanced from my minimal use of my attunement, but only a bit. I’d gone from starting with 18 at the beginning of the year up to 22.
I was informed that most students had somewhere between 30 and 60 mana in their attunement’s location by this time in the year. I was lagging pretty far behind in that area, but I’d improved my right hand’s mana considerably. It’d gone from 24 at the start to 40, just under double.
Apparently, having more mana somewhere outside of my attunement was a very bad idea, because I got scolded for it by no less than three different students and teachers before I left.
No one seemed to be able to tell me why it was so bad to have my mana unbalanced like that; they just seemed to be regurgitating what they’d heard elsewhere. Still, I tried to internalize a core part of the message. I really needed to bump that mental mana up as quickly as possible.
On the plus side, I knew my enchanting was working for improving my mana. I’d just been improving the wrong type.
My first idea was looking into a way to shift my mana from my right hand into my mind. That way, I could keep training the same way and just convert the mana over.
So, I did some reading on that. Apparently shifting a person’s mana balance was an entire field of study, and strongly connected to ongoing research in how to make artificial attunements. There were some promising studies coming out of Caelford, but the essence of what I learned was that I’d need to study for years to even start attempting that kind of thing.
It was a fascinating subject. The idea of making artificial attunements appealed to me on a very fundamental level. I kept some of the books and planned an eventual trip to Caelford to talk to some of the researchers there, but for the moment, that was nowhere close to a viable approach.
Next was looking for ways I could boost my mana without exercise. This was, of course, also something that had already been heavily explored by others. Virtually everyone wanted to avoid doing work, or find ways to make it more efficient.
I found out that they were having a relevant lecture in the alchemy class the following week, so I dropped in on it. The teacher, Professor Zou, was a short woman that looked like she hailed from Dalenos.
“Many of you have asked me how to distill enhancement elixirs. The answer is simple: don’t. You are not ready.”
She pointed to a student. “Yun. Why do Enchanters not transfer mana into other attuned?”
The student stood. “Every person has slightly different mana, Professor. The body resists and rejects foreign mana.”
Professor Zou nodded. “Yes, this is true. You may sit.” As the student sat back down, she lifted one of the vials from a stand on her speaker’s podium. “This is the simplest of enhancement elixirs. To create one, a student must learn to collect their gray mana into a liquid state, which is already a feat that most students cannot learn until they are of Carnelian Mage level. Then they must purify it. Even some Citrines cannot do this through their attunement alone. Instead, we have studied how to distill mana. But an ordinary still will not work for this purpose; heating the mana to evaporate it will alter it toward an affinity with fire.”
The teacher drew a multi-chambered device on a slate at the back of the classroom. “This is an elixir still. It is not a standard alchemist’s still; it is specifically designed for this purpose. This chamber houses the liquid mana. This funnel,” she pointed at the design, “is used to add in a distilling agent. The agent is a unique mixture based on the exact composition of the base mana, designed to force it to evaporate while exposed to room temperature air. From there, the evaporated mana collects here.”