Deceiver of Fools

Feat: Kill a Nymph.

Passive: Intuit falsehood.

Active: See through falsehood; can see through all illusions and mirages and many physical tricks.

“‘Intuit falsehood’... so that would be why it felt so weird earlier. Hmm...”

The active effect wasn’t greyed out, despite how I remembered it being before. It seemed that completing a partially complete Feat didn’t give you a notification, it merely unlocked the Title active effect quietly.

“‘See through falsehood’? That’s a bit unclear. What limits are on that? Oh well, let’s see what it can do!”

I tapped the slider to activate the Title, and suddenly the entire room blazed with now visible mana.

“Woah!” I jerked back, then realised the room-filling mass of blue-white light was neither obstructing my normal vision nor my newly activated magic vision. I could focus on any part of the mana regardless of how much other mana was in the way.

“I guess mana being invisible counts as ‘falsehood’ then,” I shrugged. “Bit odd but I’m not complaining.”

I sat and watched the flows of mana, trying to follow them from start to finish. Most started at the walls or floor, with a few emerging from the ceiling, then dissipated into the cloud filling the room, from which mana drained back into the walls, floor, and ceiling.

That was fairly cool to watch, but I was much more interested in observing how the mana was being sucked up by the orchard of Gem Tree saplings. Little lines of light followed the root system and then up into the trunk, spreading throughout the stone sapling, and then out through the leaves, similarly to how water moved through normal plants. It was fascinating to see such a distinctly magical plant.

Some of the cloud of mana flowed sedately into my body, no doubt reinforcing the extreme mana density buff/debuff (Buff: Extreme Mana Density. Mana regeneration and growth of mana pool massively increased. Debuff: Extreme Mana Density. Losing life due to oversaturation of mana.), which was fairly uneventful, instead, what draw my attention was how my own mana circulated around unusual patterns at certain points of my body. I lifted my shirt over one of the points, revealing the stylised outline of one of my accessories.

Experimentally, I tried halting the flow of my mana to the pattern and felt the effect of the accessory stutter and vanish. Allowing the mana to flow around the pattern again restarted the effect.

Some part of my brain poked at me, reminding me that I’d seen something that should be relevant to this somewhere... Following that hunch, I brought up the description for the Master Enchanter Title.

Master Enchanter

Feat: Craft an item with master-level enchantments.

Passive: Reduces the possibility of mana circuits failing or developing a fault during the crafting process.

Active: Receive knowledge and guidance on the creation of mana circuits when enchanting items during crafting and once complete.

“So this is what it means by ‘mana circuits’!” I exclaimed. “Interesting... I wonder what happens if I push more mana through it.” Gradually I increased the flow of mana to the accessory; I could feel its effect increasing and increasing, then suddenly plateau. “I guess there’s a limit to it then.” That meant I couldn’t just overcharge my accessories to gain stupid amounts of power, which made sense, even if it was a bit of a shame.

An idea struck me and I concentrated, shifting my perception to a point behind and above me, and looked at my wings. Their shape belied the way the mana circulated around them: instead of filling the space of the wings, the mana circulated in a half-star shape within each wing; put together the circuits made the outline of a star, that of the Celestial Starboard. Concentrating on one wing revealed that the Spectre Wings’ original mana circuit was still present, merely disconnected from my mana. I tried shifting my mana into Wings’ circuit instead of the Starboard’s, and instantly felt the two switch functionality, the Starboard’s circuit becoming inactive.

It was clear that it wasn’t possible to have both vanity and the underlying ‘active’ accessory active at the same time, with the active accessory’s mana circuit superseding and leaving inactive the vanity accessory’s.

I switched the accessories back and returned my vision to its normal state. “Fascinating,” I muttered to myself, standing up and walking towards the wall closest to the mana shaft. I pulled out my Rod of Discord and teleported back into the shaft, briefly pausing to hover as I observed the Rod’s mana circuit light up with mana.

It didn’t draw from my mana or the ambient mana, instead fuelling itself from an internal store, which was then instantly replenished by absorbing ambient mana.

“Interesting,” I murmured, flying back up the mana shaft, then teleporting to hover over the surface of the pool.

The column of brilliant blue-white mana poured through the mythril cap of the mana spring, splitting into tendrils, spreading and dispersing through the water. From there, my new vision revealed how it disseminated from the surface of the water and flowed gradually upwards, filling the Tower.

I stepped through the teleporter, observing how its complex mana circuit flared, its signal instantly reaching the paired teleporter through the connecting wire.

Now standing in the entrance hall, I turned toward the main door. It was an interesting duality of perception: to my normal vision it was a largely unmarked section of outer wall, but to Deceiver of Fools, the doorway was filled with a hazy glowing mist; it practically had a neon sign over it. With arrows. The hidden switches were glowing brightly, and they were on the other side of the wall.

“This is definitely going to be useful,” I murmured to myself. “Should I leave it on permanently? Hmmm.”

On my way up the Tower’s central shaft, I noticed Tear on the stairs. Her mana and lifeforce flowed as they circulated around her body, and I realised I might be able to use this to estimate a person or monster’s health and mana. That would be vital in a fight.

I spent almost the entirety of the rest of the day going through item after item and watching how the mana flowed through their mana circuits, with only two breaks to provide food to Tear. I was too busy carving the mana circuits of each item into appropriately sized pieces of obsidian with my laser drill, taking great care in ensuring the precise duplication of the complex 3D structures had no flaws.

The carved mana circuits would have no effect, the item’s actual mana circuits being the product of the item’s shape, mana flow through components, alignments of more mana-permeable regions, and several other factors I was still working out, but I was still creating the carvings to help me memorise their shapes. I was also trying to work out what parts different mana circuits had in common to get an idea of what they did.

I stopped looking through the item’s when I got down to the silver/tungsten level; only items with some form of additional effect seemed to have a mana circuit, and the tools, weapons, and armours made from conventional metals didn’t have any such effect.

I didn’t look at the Zenith; I didn’t feel confident enough that I could study its mana circuit while also preventing it firing arcs of ethereal swords everywhere. If one so much as touched Tear she’d die... best keep the Zenith tucked away for now. I had enough mana circuits to examine.