And my second, when the first one failed. I’d misunderstood how to use one of the runes, which made the calculation always evaluate to zero. Oops.
Professor Vellum was surprisingly enthusiastic about helping. I’d never seen her take any serious interest in one of my projects, but she had me check in every few days with a status update, and even made me some of the crystals that I needed.
I didn’t have anywhere near enough mental mana to make the analysis runes myself — and I couldn’t afford them — but she handled that personally.
And after all that effort?
It worked.
I had a silvery disc the size of my palm attached to a chain with a fraction displayed on it: 31/31.
The last thing it had measured was my own mental mana. It had gone up a bit in the last few weeks as a result of my practice.
That puts me at Rank A in Quartz. Finally. I’m still a long way from Carnelian, but I’m making some real progress.
I wasn’t going to celebrate prematurely. I went to the Divinatory and had them run the standard tests to confirm my results.
They told me my safe mana usage would be 32.
Close enough. Probably a rounding error.
I hadn’t quite figured out how to get the device to round yet, so fractions of a mana point were simply ignored.
After confirming that it worked for my mental mana, I checked the rest of my body...
...and those were all wrong.
That didn’t keep me stuck for very long. After asking a few questions, I realized my problem. I was always running the same formula, which I’d found in a book about evaluating safe mana usage for the mind specifically.
Every body part had a different “safe” tolerance. That was a set value plus a percentage of your maximum amount. Apparently, as your mana pool got bigger, your body used more and more on routine bodily functions. It made a sort of sense.
So, if I wanted this to work properly, I needed it to run a different formula depending on what body part I was checking.
That was considerably more difficult. I needed to add an extra stage where it detected the type of mana, then branched out to running different equations based on the type. The device’s complexity, and thus its cost, went up considerably.
The beloved profit margins that I’d been harboring in my imagination shrank.
Still, after another few days, I managed to get it working with every part of my body. That made me beam with pride, even if I couldn’t expect as much profit.
At the end of the week, I’d finished a second functional device, which I gave to Vellum.
When she used it for a cursory test, I got a glimpse at one of the measurements she ran on her hand: 2565/2565.
And, for the first time, I understood just how far I had to grow.
She grinned when she saw me gawking, set the device down, and said, “Well, dear, now that the easy part is over. It’s time for the paperwork.”
She was right, of course. Headaches from using my attunement? I could deal with them. Existential terror at the possibility of destroying my own mind? Pretty much routine at this point.
Doing paperwork for the government?
Now that was brutal.
***
All told, I spent more than four weeks on what I was calling my “mana watch” project. I started wearing it around the campus. Fortunately, basic jewelry wasn’t explicitly disallowed in our uniform guidelines. I got a lot of odd stares and a handful of questions.
Sera was one of the first to comment, of course. “I know you’ve never been one for fashion, Corin, but that thing is such an affront to the concept that I’m a little worried for you. I could see fashion manifesting itself in anger just to extract vengeance for the crime you’ve perpetrated.”
I chuckled. “You’re just jealous that you don’t have a masterpiece of modern art like this. But, for the low price of — how much did you say you made in that arena, like two hundred silver? — you could have one that’s almost as amazing as mine.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’ve always liked to donate to the needy, but I think you’re beyond my help.”
“Don’t worry, Sera. Your affection is all I’ve ever needed.”
I knew it’d be a while before the patent paperwork went through — months, probably — so I wasn’t going to start selling them yet.
Instead, I just made use of my own. I’d activate it with a flare of mana, set it to check the mana in my head, and then set it down while I began to work.
I still had 24/31 mana remaining when I started getting my headache. I’d been stopping far before I was at any risk.
Even with that knowledge, my terror at the idea of causing myself harm meant that I wasn’t willing to risk spending anywhere close to the maximum that the device was telling me.
Sure, it was irrational. I knew that the values that the formula gave us were already designed to give us wiggle room for safety before we caused ourselves any permanent harm. Unfortunately, when I contemplated the consequences of pushing myself, it put me into a state of panic that no degree of conscious knowledge could counter.
The mana watch served a valuable purpose, though. With it, I managed to steel myself sufficiently to go down to half what the device told me would be safe. And that meant spending almost more than three times as much mental mana than I ever had before.
Regularly. Several times a day. After all, my mental mana recovered fast. Any mana directly connected to an attunement would recover much more quickly than normal mana would.
Within another week, I’d upped my maximum from 31 to 40. I was still behind where I should have been roughly seventeen weeks into the year, but finally, I had some chance of eventually catching up.
***
I was in the middle of trying to form a mana crystal without a quartz case when I heard a knock on the door.
A conundrum.
If I got up to answer, I’d lose all my progress. The mana I was channeling into my palm would evaporate almost immediately when I stopped concentrating on maintaining the crude mana shell around it.
I settled for a middle ground. “Who’s there?”
“Corin! It’s Patrick!”