Name: Ambrosia

Lethality: Low.

Addiction: Very High.

Description: Ambrosia is a material found in both the Meneth and void , as well as several old legends of fae food. As far as healing goes, this material is miraculous in its original form – there is very little you can do “processing wise” to increase its good effects and those good effects are strong. Healing that goes above and beyond any existing medicine.

Healing potions are trash when compared to this liquid.

As far as negative effects go, ambrosia has an incredible inescapable and insidious addiction that cannot be removed – in fact as far as addictions go ambrosia feels surprisingly non magical.

Upon consumption of ambrosia, any living creature will find their soul protected from harm. Will find their mind healed and soothed from any trauma. Will find their body regenerated from massive wounds. Many who’ve consumed ambrosia talk of feeling like a child held safe in their mothers’ arms – a warm content feeling of absolute safety.

With a large amount of ambrosia in someone’s system they will instinctually begin to realize they literally cannot be killed. Every single ounce of a person’s being will latch onto and realize this fact.

But ambrosia is not a permanent effect. It’s a consumable substance and even without any visible wounds will be slowly used up – this is due to it healing every minor source of damage that exists including active aging. Someone full of ambrosia is Immortal.

And here lies the addictive effect. Ambrosia addiction can be better classified as a non magical withdrawal that only appears when the ambrosia runs out.

Someone’s mind, body and soul will all slowly feel the sense of safety disappear. They will find themselves grasping for that warm feeling as it disappears, and they return to mortality. A creature will feel the stark difference between absolute protection and the fragile state their regular existence is – this realization runs soul deep. Their body will crave the protection. Their subconscious will whisper they are vulnerable. Their soul will ache with the taste they have now lost.

Ambrosia addiction is one of the strongest addictions I have ever come across – it's also uncurable. There’s no magic effect to banish and the only real cure is time…Effects can be weakened linearly by weakening ambrosia's potency and usefulness.

One of the safest uses of ambrosia seems to be creating regular healing potions and finishing them off with a single drop of ambrosia – the healing effect of health potions is increased while the addiction is minimized. This recipe focuses on body healing however and doesn’t account for the mind or soul healing in regular ambrosia.

Excerpt obtained from “The alchemists handbook, Dangerous ingredients and where to find them”.

Innearth was planning on cheating his god creation project.

He had been trying to look for loopholes. Specifically in the system and over time he had started to focus on one specific one.

As far as his god creation setup was coming along so far…Innearth was trying his very best to create something similar to other dungeons. He was “working within the rules” as it were.

Lots of experience gained in an endless grind. Slowly increasing the level of a creature towards their ascension state.

To “cheat” Innearth wanted to bypass the levelling system completely. Over months of time, he had been reading up on "levelling" and more importantly what it had replaced – cultivation.

For the most part…the gods have done a great job of improving cultivation in nearly every manner. There’s no chance of spontaneous death or mutation. There’s no losing focus and leveling a town with your leaking aura. There’re no tribulations appearing and damaging others…Everyone can level! ...Even if a few people are better at it than others. There's also no bottlenecks due to impossible to understand reasons. If someone slows down and stops levelling it's due to laziness or a lack of desire to advance. Honestly, in nearly every single way I can think of levelling is better…save one teensy tiny point. Time.

By making the process safer, it also slowed down the advancement speed. I obviously don’t know what decisions the gods had to make or why they couldn’t just instantly make anyone able to gain 100 levels…but I’m imagining it's like a bunch of tradeoffs they decided was worth it. That makes sense to me even if it's now getting in my way.

There were two specific items Innearth returned to at this moment.

Demonic Cleanse [Tier 8 Consumable]

Description: Consuming this pill injects the very blood of demons into your soul. An inner host will awaken and attempt to consume you from the inside while burning through weakness and strengthening all in its wake. If you can manage to remain sane and fight off this challenge you will find your body vastly improved. A rough estimate can be given as follows. For a human +25 to all stats. Average chance of failure 95%. WARNING: Consumption of this dangerous item will momentarily cut your connection to the [system]. Failure to fight off the parasite will result in your body becoming puppeted by one of the worst creatures in the universe. Consumption is not advised without a willpower of at least 100. Consumption is not advised by any who rely on the [system] for ability.

The second material was the corrupted crystals.

The original ones – not the second or third generation ones but the “primary” crystals that consumed all mana types and forcefully improved someone until it didn’t anymore.

Innearth had gone through several experiments and ended up using it to increase the capability of his hardmode crystal golems… before focusing entirely on the second and third-generation versions and the filter system.

The silver flesh has a similar effect but the only time I can remember it not immediately taking over and making a monster an "expanding insane creature" was with the silver otter. They ascended and the ascension kind of forcefully fixed them. It integrated their existing flesh and stopped them from breaking further…that’s not easily reproducible.

Anyways there are a few ways I can imagine the corrupted crystals helping. Someone who has it embedded increases their strength steadily by a percentage. If they take too much or are too weak to handle the strength or… “give in” to the echo of a mutated demon they end up entombed.

Maybe I can see about replacing the system with this material? Or maybe I can see about replacing the more dangerous sounding “inner host” from the demon pill with this less dangerous entombing version?

Innearth had researched quite a bit both of these materials as he consolidated his plan to cheat.

The only reason he considered it cheating was because of that research – it was also why he was so apprehensive of this process. Both materials could be seen as…close to madness cultivation. Or spells adjacent to madness cultivation. As long as they weren’t taking over it was close to “normal cultivation” but any hint of madness was still a warning flag for the dungeon.

From what I can tell madness is inherently tied into the idea of shortcuts and unearned strength or gaining power without working for it…there’s very very little information on true madness cultivation – its essentially a crime enforced on the system level with kill quests and stuff.

The only example I can find of true madness cultivation is stealing the strength of others…taking over another’s body or stealing someone’s stats or skills.

So what I’m planning shouldn’t be fully madness cultivation – the system just gives a warning for the pill after all, not a “do not consume under any circumstances” sort of thing.

As far as I can tell…the fact that someone has to fight the pill is what is keeping it from being true madness cultivation. True madness cultivation is unearned strength without cost and the pill very much has a cost…

Is that a loophole in my loophole that is making it safe?

So to sum up my plan. I’m looking specifically on the section of the demonic cleanse that mentions “momentarily cutting someone’s connection to the system”. I want to revert some transcendents with enough skill to a cultivation system. Revert and hope that a more dangerous system is enough to increase levelling speed. I’ve already researched cultivation but I need to do a lot more than just revert them and hope for the best…

I need to do more. At least I think I need to do more....

From what I can tell and imagine, just reverting some sapients used to levelling will do nothing – they never learned how to manually cultivate and will be completely lost! Some might not even know cultivation exists…they might not know history who knows.

To make matters worse they would need to cultivate with their strength and mana levels of a transcendent not that of a level 1 small-fry. Their base has already been made by something else.

This is what I have to focus on. My current state could be considered, “its already dangerous and is going to be even more dangerous than if they had started from the beginning with cultivation”: “Fix this”.

So…okay.

I’m hoping I can abuse the system by shoving them back onto it after they cultivate and hope it – and ambrosia – can help heal them…fix any problems cultivation made while hopefully keeping their new strength.

Ambrosia can heal everything I’m sure of that even scars in the soul and stuff…and mutations can be fixed by the system. I have absolutely no hope of making a better cultivation system than tons of gods did – I’m not even going to try. What I want is the best of both worlds – fast levelling and safe cultivation. So greedy. I want all of the benefits with none of the consequences wew.

I feel like I’m going around in circles with my thought patterns without even focusing on solutions.

Okay, I want a trial that ends if they die and are resurrected. I should figure out how to administer this trial while I think of helping them cultivate.

To start off, Innearth began to mix about materials.

The spell system that worked the absolute best with combining mana and materials – more importantly environmental mana and existing materials – was alchemy. Potion-making could warp existing effects and enhance them and mixing several materials with alchemy reduced the chance of madness that happened with “wild mixing”.

Innearth briefly considered trying to make an alchemy-focused monster – creating a human-shaped dungeon monster with dim magical senses and then giving them more mundane ones as a base for example.

Nearly all creatures can create potions – but humans are the only species focused on it. …that’s something I still might do someday just to prove I can but for some reason…for "some reason" in this case making a monster to do it feels like giving up. I have my own version of potion-making after all…the “magical disease creation” spell that’s potion-making with a huge bias for everything to be a disease.

Innearth found various disease starters from the market and began mixing stuff simultaneously in different areas – just trying different steps out.

Demonic mana, demonic mana materials, corrupted crystals. Different stirring methods, different infusions of his own mana in the area, changing the environment to be damp or setting a fire by it. Innearth gave some monsters corrupted crystals and harvested converted flesh. He snuck some chunks of whale flesh from their newest catch.

Unlike with circuitwork he had no sense to guide his influence – just trial and error some based on vague hypotheses, some just him randomly changing variables to see what they did.

Amy helped him out – she was happy to answer any and all questions he had and was better at teaching than random websites.

For the most part, Innearth wasn’t just “solving” his problem – a majority of the results would probably be considered calamities or war crimes or something if they were released on the surface. Alchemy was much better than most at mixing conflicting elements safely but when Innearth was using madness in the ingredients…well sometimes they exploded or spontaneously turned into twisted creatures or even more concerning created a disease with a corrupted status –

ᗩ𝘭⊂11 ᖱ⫯⟆8313⟆ [Ƭ⫯∈ᖇ 333] ̵̯̆D̵͚͌é̵͇s̸͙̏c̵̺͋8̴̹̀i̷̬̅p̷̀ͅṭ̶͘:̴̨̚ ̷̲̒R̷̨̎ë̶̙́ṕ̴͈ē̵͖n̸͔̉t̵̨͑ ̷̭̔5̶̤͐ỉ̵͙n̴̳͋ﬡ̸̅ͅn̴̉͜e̵͈̚r̸̹̄,̸͈̋Ŕ̸̫̈́e̷̢̜̍p̷̗̈́͌e̷̻̅n̸̝̓̚͜ṯ̶̲͑ ̴̪́̀S̶̯͚̐1̴̫̓n̶͍͂́ﬡ̶̛͖e̸̛̩r̴̦͎̒,̵̠̟͊̋R̵̨͕͇̓͋̅e̵̞̹̾̂ṗ̷̰̣͜e̴̙̤͋̓̎ﬡ̶͚͓̹̒̈́t̸̨̉ ̵̡̞̎5̶̫̲̞̆̈́̔i̷̚͜͠n̷̡͕͉͌̎ṉ̶̒̌͠è̶̟̺̌r̸̮̾͛͜,̸̙̟̺́̑ ̴͎̇̾Ř̴̙͓̮e̸̱̎p̷̡̀ë̸̛̻́͌ͅﬡ̴͖̹̇ẗ̶̲̞̚ ̸͈͔͊̿S̴̭̪͌̑̾⫯̷͉̬̿̌͝ͅﬡ̷̧̡͓͊̍̔n̶͚̦̔e̶͔͈͒͐͜͝r̴̜̦̞̋́͌,̵̡̙̓͑̉ ̴̧͈̖̀̾̄R̵̟͈̿ͅë̷̖̜́̊̽ͅp̵̮̌̓e̴̞̯͛n̴̞̺͌̀͌͜t̶̙̚ ̷̱̜̃S̶̨͇͇͗̃1̸̩̦̤͑n̷̲͔̰̽͗͠n̷͖̈́e̴̱̐̐͝r̴̡̺͓͗,̵̞̯͙̈̽͛ ̶̡̯̆͊Ṟ̷̺̫̟̾̅̋͘͝5̸̡̛͇̰͇̬̞̳̱̋͊̈p̷̳̓͛̚ĕ̸̡̨̙̞̞̝̜͇̇́̈́n̶̥̰̝̭͈̐̓͒́͂̚ͅť̷̯ ̷̧̰̝͂͒̿S̶̹͙̹̝̔̋i̸̳̪̺̇́̃͊n̷͍̒ﬡ̷͕͗̈́̇͒̀͌ȇ̸͉̻̀̀͒͠r̶͖̞͗̅̕͘.̶͉͋̂̀͐͌͘ ̵̰̍̎͑̆͌̕͝

So that was fun.

Innearth scrubbed his whole disease area after that – as much fire mana as he could fit to try and burn it. Some void walls to melt everything that remained and then, because that didn’t necessarily delete any madness mana, he cordoned off the whole area with cosmic void and pulled his influence out.

A safer and more promising disease was one that prevented anyone who contracted it from seeing their status. Everything still worked normally but they wouldn’t be able to visually see their interactions with it.

While Innearth was working on diseases FED was also talking about potion making – his cult had explosively grown over the past few years due to a very specific concoction. Eternity self-time slowing liquids from his dungeon were mixed with ambrosia sourced from Amy’s dungeon creating a world changing potion.

An alchemical potion of youth.

Or, more accurately, a potion that slowed aging – essentially solving the main humanoid system barrier to godhood by extending its drinker's lifespan. With continued periodic doses, a sapient’s life could be extended by…potentially centuries at the minimum. They would need to wait that long to confirm it but this was still game-changing.

I’m nearly positive with those youth potions and the high-level hunting ground creating a god is only a matter of time. Its turned my “high chance over a long time” to “Basically guaranteed given a long enough time”. Currently the cults are the only ones with this potion and their fanatical sort of devotion makes them perfect candidates to become levelling maniacs but…well…that…

The thing Innearth was starting to finally realize about himself was how selfish he was about his goal he had gained. If youth potions were the most important point towards creating a god…that wasn’t him.

He wanted to be the cause.

He wanted to be the cure.

He had already gotten plenty of help from his friends, but at those times he had been the ones directing them. It was his plan they had been helping with. His ideas being followed. Sitting around and letting a creation he had no input on solve the problem was…unsatisfying.

He didn’t actually care about the goal itself. He thought it was cool and was invested in trying to complete it but…what he actually cared about was being the one to beat the goal. To “win”. He was starting to realize he didn’t want someone else to solve it. All his fellow dungeons with the same goal weren’t companions they were competition.

Innearth wanted to be responsible. It was a selfish wish. A selfish selfish wish he had to admit to himself… but at the end of the day one he decided he needed to embrace.

He wanted to be first. And that was alright.

If someone else solved the problem before him it would feel like his work was for nothing. He didn’t want to wait centuries he wanted to solve the problem now!

Innearth continued to grind recipes.

A "system surpressing flu" slowly edged closer to being formed. He didn’t have a disease masterwork sense…but potion-making did have more ridged rules and it was becoming easier to remember actions and steps.

While Innearth continued this grind, the main focus of his attention began to turn to the second goal he had. “helping a sapient cultivate”.

The obvious first step was to understand what cultivation was. To actually understand what he wanted them to do. Cultivation was the first spell system. A spell system with one single goal – making someone stronger.

Rather than an information suppression problem Innearth was met with an information overload. Two thousand years wasn’t a long time when it came to saving information for something no one wanted to erase.

There were literally millions of ancient scripts describing cultivation if you actually went to look for it. Describing what it was, describing scriptures holding methods to cultivate.

The problem wasn’t that there wasn’t information, it was that most of the information there was was contradictory and written in an obtuse way – philosophy, the “dao”, descriptions written in poems…

Innearth was a dungeon. He read a massive amount of information sifting through and condensing down common points and some of the descriptions that made the most sense.

Okay, so I think I get a simplified version of it. It's easy enough to understand if I remove a lot of the mysticism from these old scrolls.

Yin energy or “energy inside one's body” is personal mana. Personal mana stored in the soul but also personal mana held in the body and not released in a spell yet. Internal mana completely under control of the “cultivator”.

Yang energy or “energy from outside of one's body” is environmental mana. External mana the cultivator has no control over, pulled into the body "somehow".

There is also a messy bit that has a lot of fluff and is the worst part of these descriptions.

The formula is something like “Yin+Yang+messy bit=permanent strength”

Of the first two parts, yang energy is the most important, but also the part that’s dangerous. It’s the part that has most of the bad effects I can see…

Yang energy was external energy. Environmental mana. Growth needed external stimulus.

To cultivate, an equal amount of internal and external energies needed to be used – cultivators in history alchemically created pills of concentrated mana, or ate mana-dense foods, or meats, or found densely polluted “mana wells” to sit and soak in yang energy. The “problem” with this was that while yang energy was one half of the base equation – one very important unremovable external influence needed for growth…it was also environmental mana.

It held intent – fire mana burned, kinetic mana moved…but its intent had already been used and spent – now it couldn’t be easily changed. While someone’s Yin energy was under control of the cultivator and more importantly responded to the cultivator's intent…Yang energy’s intent had already been formed. It had already been “spent”. Cultivating with environmental fire mana burned someone’s channels. Cultivating with environmental sword mana sliced someone’s body apart.

The final ingredient in this recipe is the intent of the spell and I’m pretty sure most cultivators didn’t fully understand what it was. If I compare it to other spell systems…The “intent” of cultivation is meaning. Instead of abstract logic, shapes, sounds or specific movements like other spell systems…Cultivation used “meaning” for its main way of conveying intent.

I’m looking at these descriptions of someone’s “path” of meditating on ones “aspect”, of forming a seed of dao and becoming said seed…There was some that referenced turning your soul into a thread and sewing it into your body while others mentioned taking your body and shoving it up into your soul...and what my admittedly non experienced mind is realizing is that cultivation uses actions, achievements, and thought processes to create its effects.

I…I’m pretty sure “experience” in our levelling system…the fake resource “exp” was created to represent all this cultivation meaning. I’m preeetty sure the gods used natural law mana or something to turn this invisible thing into an equally invisible but storable and “applicable” thing…

In the cultivation system, someone could meditate and cultivate to get stronger simply by thinking about stuff they had done and cycling Yin and Yang energy…but after some time they would stall out and reach a bottleneck with just that.

Without going out and proving themselves to mana and probably themselves they wouldn’t advance.

It's simple enough to describe like this... the problem is this “meaning” becomes more convoluted the higher up someone cultivates. That’s why there’s strange philosophical descriptions and roundabout contradictory information. There’s also something called tribulations that some cultivation methods cause when someone reaches a bottleneck – their spell reacts to their intent of getting stronger, finds the problem of having no meaning... and then creates a hard scenario that once beaten gives a cultivator more “meaning” to continue cultivating with…

I think…as a spell system, cultivation seems halfway between the mana enhancement of the orcs, and environmental mixing of potion-making with a manner of conveying intent that’s as obtuse as the circuit system.

Similar to potion-making it uses an uncontrollable input – environmental mana – and I can’t even imagine how you would do something like the [fireball] challenge because of that.

Innearth continued to grind out diseases while pondering his problem.

Can I give someone a cultivation skill using circuitwork? From what I can tell…literally everyone has the potential to cultivate so a skill isn’t needed to activate it

Cultivating well is the real problem. I have no clue how to even start making a circuit that is based around “cultivating well”. A circuit to give information? A circuit to help passively tell someone what to do? That…that feels impossible for me to figure out…

There’s probably a cultivation/masterwork sort of sense but I can’t imagine a way to cheat that sense with a skill I can just give adventurers.

Innearth watched adventures fight demons. He watched adventurers solving his few puzzles. He watched CISC play with a group – mocking them through mental pads as they attempted to find the next sub-boss.

Maybe…when I created the crystal dwarves and gnomes they had a weakened masterwork sense – they intuitively knew how to use runes and enchantments. Can I not just make a monster that intuitively knows how to cultivate?

But as my dungeon monster they wouldn’t be able to cultivate…they can’t level after all until they ascend.

If I do manage that however I’ll have created a cultivation teacher that can then use mental mana and help direct any adventurers completing my trial. That’s my main goal…it feels perfect. It feels possible my circuit sense is confirming its possible even if its not telling me how I can even do so.

…Sometimes circuit building being entirely intuition really pisses me off. Can I even fix that?

Innearth had been steadily increasing his circuit-building skill for over a decade by this point.

He had come to rely on it all the way back since he wanted more efficient monsters... and had stubbornly kept working with it long past the point any dungeon he had heard of had given up by.

He was fond of circuits, but he also knew deep down how many problems they had. Some of those problems became useful “features” in certain cases but they were still problems and barriers that had put other dungeons off this system for a long time.

I’ve been wanting to spread my knowledge of circuits for a while – I’m nearly positive no one else has gotten as far as me – but I also haven’t spread it about, so there might be a hidden master or two that aren’t spreading their knowledge…

Innearth slowly shifted his focus onto fixing circuits as a “side quest”. It was something that could very well have been a whole goal like “god making” from the start. It was not an easy prospect, but it was something that could help thousands of dungeons in the future. Just being able to better shape a monster's skills could help dungeons make better themes and more interesting fights or puzzles – and that was completely ignoring the efficiency gains as well.

…if Innearth was being self aware he also knew a faint prideful part of him liked the idea of being known as the one to fix the system – to be put down in history as an important figure in circuit building.

Innearth was getting better at seeing that part of himself and was tired of either trying to suppress or ignore it and purposefully try to act differently. That was a part of him. As long as he didn’t let it control him it was just part of his personality.

What about the circuit system needs to be fixed? How can I even fix it? I’ve made small pushes to solidify parts that felt needlessly wrong before but how can I make a truly massive change?

…what needs to be fixed that seems normal to me now – which of these rules were more confusing than needed when I was trying to learn circuit building?

More important than all of this, what will let me and others build up to skills that haven’t been made before. To more complex and specific results? How can I use logic to solve problems instead of just "intuition" – which is actually just a list of rules and some results that have been made before?

Innearth made a list of problems and rules he didn’t like. He then set that aside and thought about runework and enchanting – how they differed, their pros and cons.

One thing he wanted to fix was to have a “starting point” and as Innearth thought that starting point became more important towards fixing the rest of the problems as well.

Circuits were a web of connections with no start or end – adding an extra node would sometimes flip the way a circuit should be “read”. Sometimes the largest node was the most important sometimes the one with the most connections. Sometimes a random one placed in a part of the monster's body the system decided was “important” was picked.

There were rules that governed all this of course and Innearth no longer ever got confused by "it"…but he remembered how terrible it had been at the start.

Another thing he wanted to fix was separating out the different types of skills some way – creating a better way of altering specific parts without simplifying it into no longer being as strong.

He wanted to give options and hated the idea of simplifying circuit building into being weaker…but he did want to make everything more accessible.

The base of his plan was to create a special type of node – one that was relatively unique and hadn’t yet been made in the circuit system. One that was easily mouldable and could affect other rules.

At this point in time that was surprisingly easy to do – Innearth just made a pure core in a shape that didn’t have much use – a doughnut – and then connected it to a cone as if it was a ring of a hat.

This was his “starting” node. The cone could be extended to any tier/size without affecting the size of the ring and acted as a confident sort of arrow to point in which direction he wanted the circuit to start.

Innearth was solidifying his plan at this point – currently, there weren’t really any rules for the specific shape he had made as very few circuit rules cared about the shape of the nodes.

This can be a new circuit language that builds upwards slowly. A "language" built on top of the old language. If you don’t use this “start” node then circuits should follow the old rules!

Innearth knew just making this node and deciding what it would do was not nearly enough.

For the very first circuit, he made he decided to increase the chance of it working by changing it into a ritual of sorts – he didn’t want the ritual to become required every time it was used, but the very first circuit needed a slight push.

On one side of the starting node a single rune was placed. A dwarf carved the “beginning rune” used in some directed runeworks into the cone without connecting it to anything. {begin}.

On the opposite side a single sentence was written by a gnome – it translated roughly to “this is the starting point”.

For good luck Innearth wrote a dungeon script spiral on the bottom of his core – no circuit rules cared about dungeon writing and dungeons couldn’t enchant things…but every single unique but simple addition he made felt like it helped.

Innearth tentatively called this system an “S-Circuit” – S for simplified or S for Starting point.

The rules of this situation were undefined. Innearth couldn’t just say what he wanted to have happen – nor could he do whatever he wanted and wish for it to work as much as he wanted…what he could do however, was look at the huge database of circuits he knew and repository of rules then try and pick a specific existing case that worked in a way he wanted.

For this new circuit language, Innearth wanted to separate out the two most distinct parts he could think of – mana type/intent and shape of the skill.

He wanted to split them out so they could be modified separately – for example, a [fireball] that could be changed to [lightball] with a swap of the fire section with a light section.

Right now there was over a dozen potential inputs that could change either or both of those cases. If Innearth wanted to be lazy he’d try to double down on the affinity of each node – make it so the same physical circuit shape with different mana types in the different nodes, would create the same spell shape using different mana types…that was something he wished would work when he was younger.

At this point in time he knew setting it up like that would be easy to understand, but would prevent some of the strongest results – instead Innearth tried to physically separate the two sections.

Before the “arrow” was the fuel for the spell – a sub circuit designed to create a specific mana type – and on the other side was the shape of the spell.

The simplest fuel section would be a single core with a mana type – a fire core for example – and the most complex would be circuits of several cores to make something like goo mana – something dungeons couldn’t create themselves but Innearth had a few circuits for.

The shape section was in its simplest form, a bunch of pure cores to make a spike or wall or internal enhancement…sometimes a shape or type of movement was much easier to make with affinities in those cores – for example placing kinetic cores would help give the intent of movement to the skill – kinetic cores made something like fireball much easier to cast as it made the fireball move in a direction.

This was the simplest case Innearth wanted.

He made one of the simplest circuits he knew – pushing mana out of the body part – and stuck it on the shape end with a single fire core on the fuel end.

He knew it would work. It was so simple it couldn’t fail and Innearths masterwork senses essentially bullied this simple case into working. It didn’t contradict a single existing rule after all. Innearth made a turtle with this circuit contained inside of them. Out of one end fire mana burst occasionally burning anything the turtle butted its head into. A sort of [Fire touch].

Innearth continued to let it weakly flame before turning to the next stage.

One of his least favourite rules was the way a circuit changed depending on the monster’s shape. It had been helpful once or twice with conveying really vague intent for what he wanted the skill to be…but it had been annoying more often than not. A key part in giving him enough experience to become a circuit master was the creation of skill organs – a whole plan that had been originally made just to let him transfer skills between different shaped monsters. A whole setup to bypass this rule.

Creating a snake with an identical fire circuit and then a bipedal headless dog shape, Innearth made sure to try and remove any monster shape biases before they started.

He started to vary the fuel for this circuit – replacing the fire core with a poison core and creating a series of monsters with a sort of “poison touch” on their heads. Next life cores and “healing touch”. Next an ice core and [chilling touch]. Some monsters were given a limb or hand with the end of the “touch” portion focusing on that limb, others had it focused on their whole body.

Innearth knew if he focused on too many obscure rules as the only one to make them they would slowly become “Innearth only” spells. With these simple cases all he had to do was give schematics his friends could print and make them create a few.

It was all only a few because these circuits were so simple and already followed all the existing rules.

Slowly Innearth built the complexity up. Hundreds of schematics at a time because he knew for a fact one of the reasons circuits had originally grown so convoluted was dungeons starting at a huge complexity level instead of building up to it.

As a circuit master Innearth’s designs and rules were worth more than a regular dungeon. His designs were solidified as if 100 dungeons were making them and his “intent” was conveyed much more strongly than it would have been otherwise.

It would be nearly impossible to do what he was doing now if he hadn’t spent so much time mastering free/normal circuitwork before this point.

This steady creation of a new circuit language was an incredibly slow process and because complexity was important in a spell system, Innearth built it up in a way that left plenty of room for “optimization”. He slowly let existing rules effect his unique designs in a specific sort of way. He wanted circuit work to be “easy to start” and “simple to get a result” but then increase efficiency and power with slight changes. The two sides fuel and shape were created with different “most important” points – for skill shape the physical shape was the most important goal. Changing the physical elements used would alter the results but not drastically – using gold for a node or surrounding flesh might increase or decrease efficiency by 10% but not change the actual result.

Similarly the most important point of the “fuel side” was the mana types used in it…the shape it was put in the number of nodes and all those changes would effect the result slightly – sometimes stringing together 20 crystal nodes instead of having a single massive crystal node made a stronger spell for example. It wouldn’t mess up the shape of the spell however or suddenly change crystal mana to water mana.

Innearth spent ages creating the barebones of this system – he took so long he finished his system surpassing disease and had begun creating the rest of the trial setup.

He also realized he had gotten so distracted with his S-Circuit design he had started realizing he wasn’t even solving his cultivation problem.

…oops?

A part of Innearth began focusing once more on creating a monster with natural cultivation system.

The S-Circuit setup was great for a lot of skills but didn’t account for giving creatures a spell system.

In many ways he was creating a system that worked closer to runework when he was using it…what Innearth needed was a system closer to enchanting. He started over this time, creating a starting node that was shaped like a long rod covered in alternating spikes. It was essentially a circuit without a node – and after a similar ritual with enchanting and runework Innearth started to consider the rules of this new system.

This world didn’t have typical programming or Innearth would know he was currently creating the equivalent of different programming languages each using the same assembly.

For his second circuit setup – tentatively called W-Circuits with the W meaning “word”. Innearth wanted to communicate something complex. He wanted a way of creating a soul based skill or skill focused on knowledge or a type of action – something he had only managed to do with strong monster design or enchanting being worked in the background.

The circuit Innearth used was completely flat. It was a square shape surrounding an inner slate of a thin core.

Innearth abused the hell out of rituals. The general setup he was creating was writing dungeon words using circuits – bending high concentration wires into words written in dungeon script.

He would then have both his gnome and dwarf create spells for what he had written – writing on top of his large “plate” with their rules.

He was trying to make a system that would let him write words and copy enchanting…sadly while a few incredibly simple words were starting to work…they weren’t working as “words” – just individual shapes that were creating effects. They made the effect individually but not in context of others and it would be an incredibly long time before Innearth could start writing paragraphs explaining what he wanted to have happen.

It was currently almost failing.

What was starting to work well was the inclusion of the other spell systems.

As this setup expanded Innearth shifted a version to hold a box instead of a drawing slate. The barebones square circuit wrapped around the inner box and became better and better at turning its contents into a skill.

So a gnome could write down an enchantment describing a spell. Innearth could place this enchantment into the box and the W-circuit could take this box and change it. The dungeon circuit could morph its fuel and create an innate ability in the monster.

…not nearly as exciting as Innearth being able to write his own enchantments – and not even that unique considering a lot of enchantments or runes could be added directly to the monster without putting it inside this box…but it was definitely progress towards something. Innearth was now renaming this subsystem to B-Circuits because of the…well the box being the focus of it.

Where the interaction became unique was when Innearth began combining the two subsystems.

Innearth could make a B-Circuit containing a relatively complicated “enchanted description of a spell” – creating timed bombs for example that went off after a specific number of seconds – and then stick that sub circuit in the “shape” section of a S-Circuit.

By changing different inputs Innearth could use the same shaped B-Circuit with a fire input to make a timed flaming blast of magic. He could use a poison input to make a small squirt of poison or a poison mist combo to make a timed poison cloud.

Innearth could also turn around and have the fuel section replaced with an enchantment that described souls and a manipulation “shaping” section. That made the impossible to make before now “soul manipulating” monster… which admittedly wasn’t strong enough to do much more than move some recently dead souls a bit. It would have at least been useful when Innearth was creating the reincarnation system.

Innearth’s circuit skills had increased in leaps and bounds while designing these new ways of creating circuits – but a lot of them were starting to become too focused on him and his way of doing things. Wanting to make these changes more permanent, Innearth created a huge amount of relatively strong circuits and monsters then released the schematics for a 100 mana each – essentially giving them away for free no dungeons at this age cared for mana.

Innearth finally moved to creating a cultivation monster to start finishing his "cheating" plan.

A B-Circuit was made surrounding an incredibly old book that was called “Intro to cultivation”. This book contained some of the more understandable descriptions of cultivation but more importantly it held some unique properties.

This book was being used as a unique material – it was so old ambient mana inside of it had warped to “book mana” and “knowledge mana” all with ties to its contents. The B-Circuit was to best make use of the unique material turning it into a skill “somehow”.

Surrounding this inner knowledge base Innearth created a strange sort of circuit – slightly gaining the idea from all his attempts at writing with the B-Circuit design. Instead of a web of connections he created a massive looping circuit with no nodes.

A single circulatory system that travelled through the whole body in cycles and was directly copied from a cultivation manual.

…because yes most cultivation methods created channels in their users. By moving one’s mana in certain paths those sections of flesh would become more magical over time slowly permanently burning these channels into existence – some methods even gave humanoid sapients cores like monsters something that had been quite common before the system came along and took over in an even manner.

Innearth created a simple humanoid body to surround this circuit – decorating it a bit more than he needed to… cheated the mental mana connection by grabbing an item from his loot stores and then added a skill organ for viewing far away. Finishing it off, Innearth seeded his new monster and waited.

In a room off the side of the facility Guru1 slowly opened his eyes – two perfect crystal marbles covered in a silky eyelid that took way too much time to get just right. They slowly stared at themselves and the walls before closing once more – signalling the guru was looking further away.

Innearth described their new job in detail and asked if they knew how to cultivate. It took a while to respond but guru1’s voice slowly drifted into his mind.

The guru’s response came evenly – his tone reminded Innearth of a wise old man.

Perfect.

Innearth was happy to know it worked and began buying more cultivation manuals to make guru’s 2-16.

A bit more setup and I will be ready.