I chose [Manima Nanosenses] for three reasons.
The first reason was that although [Prodigious Manima Senses] would cover a weakness of mine while increasing the skill’s potency, I felt like I could do that on my own with enough time.
A wider colour spectrum could be easily accessed by taking on a new host. The cat, for example. The night vision? There were animals in the jungle that had moved swiftly through the night.
Of course, there were disadvantages to walking this path. For example, I could see at night in one host, but not the others. This was a compromise I was willing to make.
The second reason was future upgradability.
I hadn’t taken this reason into account when thinking of the previous skill evolutions, and that was a mistake.
After many evolutions, I had noticed that if you didn’t take the general upgrade, most of the other options were specialisations.
I didn’t know the reason, and personally, I preferred a more generalised skill upgrade, but it seemed that the path to the zenith was one of specialisations.
Doesn’t that mean that the first skill evolution is the most important, as it’s the one that’ll decide your speciality?
I didn’t know the answer, as no skill of mine had yet reached the second evolution.
Although human civilisation had proved dangerous, I still believed its advantages outweighed the disadvantages because they probably knew the answers to such questions—knowledge was the most important and expensive commodity.
Anyways, the future upgrades for [Manima Nanosenses] should allow me to zoom in on more and more small things, which would probably be more unique and useful than what the other skill could offer.
The third and final reason was that, for my current endeavour, [Manima Nanosenses] would be more useful.
Before accepting the skill evolution, I activated [Hive Mind]. I wanted to see if it could help me to more easily process the instincts and knowledge of the skill, and maybe prevent a possible blackout.
I choose [Manima Nanosenses]!
Instincts flooded my mind, overwhelming me, while my spherical vision started to contract, expand, and warp.
It was painful, but not that much.
Darkness crept, but after pushing my brain power to the max, 13MBP, it receded.
After half an hour, the pain stopped as my spherical vision…
It shrunk?
It had been shrinking throughout the whole process, but I thought it was temporary.
The shrinkage wasn’t shruggable. It was huge. Maybe about three-quarters of the spherical vision remained.
Maybe that’s why it only had abundant upgrades, while being such a great-sounding skill… it has its disadvantages.
I was a bit saddened and annoyed by the System as it usually informed me when a skill had drawbacks, but not now, it appeared.
I shouldn’t take everything the System says for face value.
My spherical vision now expanded a distance of about double Somani’s height, with me at the centre. Not bad, but definitely a downgrade.
Maybe there’s a skill, with higher upgrades and without the downgrades, that I hadn’t unlocked because I didn’t meet its conditions.
I didn’t know, and even though it saddened me, I knew that a compromise like this wouldn’t probably be the last.
The only thing that mattered was that I survived to grow my All to live a happy life.
Saddened, but not discouraged, I tried the zooming ability of the skill, the reason I had chosen it in the first place.
It didn’t disappoint.
Reaching the building blocks, I wasn’t stretching the skill at all, unlike previous times.
I continued to zoom in…
Each building block of a building block was made of linear chains of…
Pyramids?
The lines of the pyramids had, in some blocks, angles, where in others they spiralled or twirled, forming the building blocks’ different shapes.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Amazing…
I continued to zoom in.
The pyramids became clearer, which in turn made them more confusing to look at.
At their bases, where they connected, the lines… they didn’t belong to a single pyramid; instead, they sometimes entered a pyramid, then became normal lines, before finally separating. This process continued in a loop, creating hazy interlocking pyramidical shapes.
I zoomed in on a pyramid, finding it difficult.
I pushed through.
My vision tunnelled as the zooming continued, until I could no longer zoom in.
In the far distance (Being small created the distance illusion), I saw…
Bundles upon bundles of spheres.
Through pushing myself even more, to the point where my mind felt like it was about to explode, I saw…
The spheres were inconsistent in form, and in their midst… a small sphere?
My vision elastically snapped back, returning me to observing the pyramid.
Although I understood nothing, and my biomancy skill, which had been my compass through its instincts for navigating the nanoscopic, had basically provided nothing on what these things were, I was still wowed and amazed.
These feelings of astonishment brought me back to a conversation I had had with Hambara.
Who created this?
Hambara had said he didn’t think anybody knew the answer, but was that real?
From comparing Somani’s and Kamos’s memories, I knew that the answer to this question differed in each of their respective countries.
In the Empire, it was the Noblesse.
In the Republic, I was not sure because of Somani’s young age, but they seemed to believe in something called… God?
A supreme, endless being with no beginning or end. They were the creator of the universe.
Could God be the System, or… are they the creator of the System? But who created God then?
Like always, more questions, but no answers.
This thirst for knowledge made me really excited, and… happy.
Yes! This is what I should use my All for: discovering the universe, which in turn gives me happiness.
Thirsting for more, I zoomed in on many things.
Like that, half a day passed before I remembered my responsibilities.
I had mostly zoomed in on biological creations—they fascinated me the most.
I had seen the connection between separate building blocks, but it was confusing, and, with my current biomancy tier, I wouldn’t be able to alter it.
I had got bored with it and moved on to other things, but that’s over now.
Now, it’s time to work.
I decided to try my luck with the Mana halo created after Mana infusion.
If I could somehow alter the Halo, then maybe I could strengthen the skill, which in turn would help in the Temporal creation.
Infusing Mana into the neuron tube, I zoomed in on the forming green halo.
It was no less impressive than biological matter.
The Mana particle broke into endless multiform green objects.
These objects didn’t have a specific shape, although they all had two things in common.
They were all made of seemingly flat surfaces connected at sharp angles. The other thing in common between them was the way they moved in a wave-like motion—going up before they dipped down.
I decided to call the weirdly shaped small Mana particles Manies.
The Manies then attacked the cell.
…What?
The Manies hailed down on the cell. Even though they were too small, their sheer number caused damage.
Millions, if not more, Manies attacked the cell wall. They broke through its walls.
Inside the cell, nothing was spared from the havoc caused by the Manies.
Through sheer numbers, they attacked every part of the cell.
Mitochondria, nucleus, the cloudy things, the hex things, everything was damaged.
Thankfully, with the Manies being so small, the damage seemed to be substantial, and I knew that if left for a few days, the cells would either kill themselves or fix the problem, leaving no noticeable trace.
All that havoc happened in a fraction of a heartbeat.
I had only managed to observe it thanks to the new skill and [Hive Mind], allowing me to observe the entirety of the cell at once, while increasing my processing power.
The next part began.
The Manies started to settle in the destroyed parts, and…
They reconstructed them, but instead of biological matter, they were made of Manies.
This is crazy.
The Manies reshaped the destroyed part by taking the same form and function of the matter they had razed.
The cell wall, for example, was made of a head with a tail. The head on the outer part of the wall faced the outside, while on the inner part, it faced the inside. The tails faced each other inside.
The Manies were way smaller than these heads and tails, way smaller. If I were to compare their size, they were about the same size as the pyramids, forming the building blocks of the proteins
Through clinging to each other, the green Manies reformed the wall, but instead of being made of fat tissue—heads and tails—they were made of billions of these Manies, which in turn formed heads and tails.
The reforms weren’t perfect replicas when I zoomed in too closely, but they were close enough.
This happened all across the cell, but it didn’t stop there.
The Manies didn’t stop destroying the cell; they even destroyed the fixed parts before fixing them again in an endless cycle.
This process continued, between fixing and destroying, until the Manies cloud—the halo—encompassing the cell, was spent.
When the Manies’ cloud was spent, there was no more Manies to destroy anything, so everything stayed in stasis for a few seconds until…
The Manies structures, that had fixed the cell, started to fall apart before disintegrating into something smaller that I couldn’t see.
There were no more Manies left, returning the cell to normal.
Not exactly normal, as it’s a bit destroyed.
The cell had lost about 0.2—0.5% of its mass. How much lost function did that mean? I didn’t know, but I could see the cell quickly working on fixing itself.
Incredible… just incredible.
What I understood from this was that Mana, through a process of creation and destruction, had managed to do something incredible: strengthen and improve the cell.
But how did it do that?
Was it just Mana being better than biological matter, meaning that the fixed parts functioned better, or was it something else?
Maybe I had missed something?
I was pretty sure that there were many things that I hadn’t noticed for many reasons.
I think the better question to ask is how to improve this masterpiece.
Contrary to what I had known, I didn’t need to understand something fully to improve it. I just had to experiment enough until I liked the result.
An idea crossed my mind.
What if…
I turned the [Mana Infusion] skill off.
I infused Mana into a cell manually without any skill.
This time, the Mana particle didn’t break until it directly impacted the cell.
That destroyed a not-so-small part of the cell wall.
This alone did more damage than the previous experiment, but it didn’t stop here.
The Mana particle, at impact, broke into many Manies, but these Manies had different sizes than the more standardised ones when infusion was active.
It was like when Hambara’s house had exploded. The house turned into different chunks, some huge stones, others small sharpnel.
The Manies went on to wreak havoc on a bigger scale than before.
The next step happened, but unlike before, the fixed parts were made of worse replicas than the first experiment, being made of large and tiny Manies.
The cloud of Manies disappeared quickly this time, and with it, the Manies’ constructions quickly crumbled.
If I were to estimate it, 30% of the cell was destroyed this time.
So that’s why, before I got the skill, every Mana infusion I did faced the risk of destroying the infused part.
That got me thinking about something else…
Is it the System that turned Mana into Manies before, helping in standardising and ordering them? Or is it the skill’s doing?
From sparse pieces of knowledge—like Mana engines, and some understanding of Mana weave functions—and pure speculation, I leaned towards the latter.
My current understanding of skills was this: inside a person’s soul, there were these complex cubes that represented skills. They had weird inscriptions on them, probably Mana weaves in written form, that when Mana passed through, they created a certain function.
I knew that the System was incredibly powerful, but micromanaging all of this… it’d probably need an incalculable amount of BP.
I think the System has a set of preconditions; if met, it will offer you a certain skill that’ll ease in achieving the same result.
But what about unique skills? Does it constantly observe us to see if these actions deserve to be turned into a Mana engine—a skill?
I decided to ignore these questions for now.
When I finish this project and get my freedom, I’ll be doing lots of zooming in on these skill cubes, that’s for sure.
I did more experiments, but this time, I spread my brain power across multiple cells to hasten the process.
To fully observe a cell, I needed about 1.75BP, so simultaneously, and using 10 BP—I didn’t want to burden Somani’s brain, or he could notice—I could observe about six cells
This won’t be fun.
***
It took me two days to notice something.
After the first day, I had moved from cells to pieces of bone. The reason was simple, cells just had too much matter that the Manies needed to restore, making the process more complex for me, while bone shells are more dead than alive—they were built more simply.
From time to time, I had to change the bone as the repetitive infusions ate at the substance, which made me realise that infusing unregenerable substances, sword and armour, with Mana could wear them over time.
What I had discovered wasn’t that hard to notice, but with there being so many things to see…
Let’s hope this ends up being as simple as it sounds.