Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube

He’d taken the job and he had the skill, now all that there was left was to raise it and to do that he first stripped the enchantments off of what had been his job crystal before turning to the few other bits of rainbow mana crystal he had.

The batteries he kept in his shoes, the ones he kept within his mythril bracelets for enchanting practice too, in the end it wasn’t much but it would do for the time being until he could make more as he carried out his various tests.

With the first test leaving him ignoring all of that, instead focusing on the air in front of him as he created a soul, watching it exist for milliseconds before vanishing off to wherever they’d end up, telling him they wouldn’t just linger if it was made free of any bindings which was expected but still disappointing. There was no reason to think it wouldn’t disappear beyond the hope that the effect that was keeping him and the other prisoners from dying would apply to them too but he’d already seen his first attempt disappear when he broke his crystal before. It just would have been convenient if he could have filled the area with souls so he could have kept stealing from them to refill his mana pool.

Oh well, just gotta do this the slow way then. Let’s see, it looks like I’ve got enough mana at one time to materialize two souls now that I’ve gotten the hang of it a bit so onto the second one.

That one he tried to see if he could make within a crystal again, only without placing the enchantment for binding a soul upon it. Given that the first had remained after he removed the enchantment the last time, he had his hope it might be possible, and unlike the first test, he had his success. The soul stayed in place, bound and ready to be taken advantage of as he carried out his next experiments.

He stole what mana he could from that one, finding it to be the same trickle of power he’d gained from his first attempt but tried not to let that worry him. What he’d done was recreate the worst possible soul, what was going to come next was attempting to improve upon it to expand upon the mana it would hold.

It was an experiment that took a span of hours, not from the difficulty but because of his own limits in the matter. He knew what regions of the soul he needed to alter based on his past talks with the gods on the subject and the things he’d observed through the soul mages’ eyes but he kept needing to let his mana regenerate after making only a couple in a project that needed constant work.

Sometimes he’d spend the mana without managing to create anything at all either due to some unknown failure in his overall process but by the time he created something that had reached its limits, it was enough to get his own bit of growth.

…This means I probably have a new upper limit, doesn’t it? Ugh, I’ll test this one and then start again.

He took what mana he could from it, using its power to help replenish his own reserves and looked at his card to see exactly how much it refilled before spending more hours on tests, slowly watching to figure out its regeneration rate.

It was once that was done he did it all over again, trying to create a new soul at his new higher level of skill and then determined its limits all over again, leaving him with more results to look at by the time he was done.

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Interesting, so my upper limit for the amount of mana I can get a soul to hold looks like it translates to one-twentieth per level if it stays consistent, which means I just need to get it to the ninth to have something that can hold half of my mana. More interesting is the fact that regardless of the soul, it seems to take less than fifteen minutes to regenerate, comparable to how my own regeneration rate has matched my total pool. I wonder why? I know what I have is particularly good compared to a lot of other people so this is good for me but does that mean the potential of any soul I can make is going to be limited by the max potential of my own?

Not the best news for him but it could have been worse. He didn’t need any soul capable of vast acts of magic beyond what his affinities would allow, nor did he need anything that allowed for outrageous levels of lifeforce. So long as he kept leveling it, that would be enough for him.

Which means onto my next thing to test, how small of a piece of rainbow mana crystal can a soul be contained in?

It was something he very clearly needed to know but still made him want to sigh. It was going to be another few boring hours of work to go.

“Done,” He muttered as he fell back, letting his head rest as he closed his eyes for a bit.

He’d found the smallest volume of rainbow mana crystal that would hold a soul, being just a bit bigger than what he could materialize in one go, and after he’d gotten his next level he’d confirmed with that the amount of mana he could make a soul hold as well as their regeneration rates were continuing as expected too, with additional bonuses he hadn’t been prepared for.

He knew that materialization would cost less as a skill’s level rose and he knew that the right sort of inclination skill could lower the cost too but he hadn’t been prepared for how much. With his own mana pool, he could now create four souls at once and still have a bit left over, more than he could have hoped for really and it managed to give him a little hope for the future.

He could already tell he was raising both soul production and soul inclination quickly. He hadn’t been able to use the first to nearly the extent of some other skills given his need to wait for his mana pool to refill each time but he was already gaining levels, a likely result of combining his massive list of jobs that were already there with a third tier one too.

And if I’m right, modifier compatibility is going to be playing into it as well. Still really want to know for sure what that’s doing for me. He thought as he pulled out his card to look it all over. And still no levels for the job. Hmm, this is going to be a tough one for sure.

Despite all of the skill levels he’d gained upon taking it, he was still sitting at a job level of zero, telling him exactly how hard it was going to be to progress in it, but that was fine. He would chip away at it with his acts and he would hope that a constant amount of what really was the most unimaginable work would help him speed through it, especially with how he’d soon be ramping up the speed he could work at.

With his momentary break over, Ben sat up again before taking all of the rainbow mana crystal he had and used his material manipulation to break it into the smallest pieces that would work, embedding them into his mythril bracelets from there before beginning the process that was filling each one with a soul.

Getting that done was going to instantly increase the speed of his work as he connected to each one, refilling and overfilling his soul as he stole from them while he worked on materializing more, making them at a constant pace.

It was going to affect his growth rates for both his mana total and his recovery rate but he had no choice but to accept that fact and hope that the various jobs he took would keep it from lowering too much and from there he passed the time, training and growing as he did.