I spend the rest of the day practicing making shapeshifter forms. It’s a bit like sculpting, if most of the shape forms more or less on its own. It’s a good thing, too, because most of the forms are a WHOLE lot more complex. Except the slime form, for which I simply had to make a blob of slime.

Well, that and a core. I couldn’t find any cores in the slimes in the water temple, but I seem to be unable to control the slime, remotely or by shapeshifting, without one. On the note of summoning forms from my aspect subspace, controlling more than one body is hard, but became somewhat easier when I got [Multi-body Control]. As an ability I need to equip it for the full effect, but as I’ve subconsciously noticed before, even having an ability gives a small bonus.

When I shifted my consciousness to the slime form, which is the ‘Gel’ slime archetype, being more like jelly than slimy water, I panicked. Badly. Complete sensory deprivation: No sight, hearing, touch or anything else, except my own thoughts. I immediately shifted back to my human body, breathing heavily and shaking.

With my senses back, I calmed down pretty quickly, and I think the shock of sudden nothingness caused the worst of it, because when I tried again I managed to stay calm. Soon after, I found managed to get a form of proprioception, the sense where you know where your arms and legs are, even if you can’t see them. Using that I could, in a way, sense the ground beneath me.

I spread out my mana to try to sense my surroundings, and with my mana abilities, it didn’t take long to get a somewhat indistinct sense of my surroundings. That trick should carry over to any form, causing a mental facepalm given how common sensing one’s surroundings with mana is in fiction. Why didn’t I try this earlier?

As for hearing, I couldn’t find any good way to process sound, even if I know how it works, but I did find a way to detect vibrations in the general. Well, knowing that vibrations happen isn’t that useful, even if I get some idea of their frequency.

Perhaps the most useful thing I learned from trying the gel form was that it is my original body that uses magic, even when shapeshifted. Which is important, because having the mana go from the subspace to realspace through an intermediary is inefficient and limits range, power and control.

But that lead to another question: If the ‘me’ is still my human body, that means it is not in frozen in time or anything like that. How do I not suffocate? Will my body deteriorate or die if I hold a form for too too long? Or will the shapeshift just break and pop my main body back to reality?

I decided not to test out that particular question, but the idea of putting a form in stasis is a good one. Otherwise, each living form will drain me of resources - My food bill is high enough only from my increased physical activity and taking on bigger forms.

And so, I spent the rest of the day experimenting.

Let’s review what I found out yesterday. First off, materials have no ‘upkeep’. With full forms it’s a bit more complex. However, making a form to shift to takes time, moreso if I want something more than a slime or plain version of a species I have a strong aspect for.

Well, it’s not that complex. Apparently the subspace is not one continuous subspace, but several smaller ones. One for each form and one for materials, which seems to be connected to my gut, somehow. When I shift to another form, I swap it for my human body.

Curiously, it seems like time varies in the different spaces. One thing I quickly found out was that by ‘looking’ at a subspace, it has a timeflow equivalent to my realworld body. I’ll get to why I phrase it like that. The simplest space, the material storage, seems to be more or less frozen in time, but with no direct control I can’t say for sure.

What do I mean with no direct control? I can pull material from there to make forms, and if I break down forms it’s returned there. And it takes from what I eat. I hypothesize that my body might draw on the storage if I don’t eat for a while, which I will test by not eating today and seeing if I get hungry and/or the material is used up.

As for shapeshifter forms, it’s complicated. The slime, which is not quite living, being ‘dead’ matter animated by magic. It is in real time, but does no more than a rock unless I make it. As for living forms, like the wolf serpent and mistwolf form, they seem to enter a sort of semi-stasis, where time passes very slowly, when I don’t actively use or ‘look’ at them.

They draw nutrition from the material storage. However, they also need water and air, right? With that realisation and some deeper inspection, I learned that water is stored as part of the material storage (or maybe it converts some materials to water), and air is also stored in that subspace. I also found out that every space and each form draw a bit of mana at all times, with bigger spaces using more mana, like I found with other subspaces.

In other words, there is a limit to how many or large forms I can have at all times, though with the slowed time it’s quite manageable. Checking, changing and making forms matches the relevant space’s timeflow with that of my realworld body.

Why ‘realworld body’ and not ‘real time’? Because, by mimicking what I’ve subconsciously been doing with the aspect subspaces, I found a way to change their timeflow. And then I thought of a somewhat common thing in fiction: Dungeons and other spaces with time warped compared to the real world.

Pom pom! And that’s how I learned [Temporal Magic]. Time magic. I didn’t get to play around it too much before I got tired and went to bed, but I found it impossible to use without subspaces and/or [Spatial Magic]. I figured out how to take a piece of space and essentially make it a separate space, a spatial boundary, for the purposes of [Temporal Magic], anyway.

I sped up and slowed down time in that area, and after testing with a slime puppet (which I will make my goto ‘guinea pig’), realised going between different timeflows would be dangerous. As in, potentially lethal. Speeding up and slowing the space doesn’t seem to harm anything that is completely inside it, though.

Timeflow differences affect even light, though, meaning that from the inside, a sped up area will get less light(be darker), while the opposite is true of one that is slowed down. That applies to mana as well, so a sped up area is hard to influence from the outside, while a slow one lets you control and use stupid amounts of mana. The time difference messes up control, though, and if the space snaps back to realtime you might get… unintended effects.

Enough about that. I have finished the remake of the ‘5 minutes about the [System]’ video (which took a lot longer than the roughly ten minutes I used on the first one), and made one I call ‘The basics of mana: Some things you should know’.

The latter, about mana, repeats information that was available before the Upheaval, but I also bring in knowledge I have learnt after the Upheaval, including the fact that some people might be unable to use mana, and a bit about mana and the [System], mostly about abilities.

While those are uploading, I head grab my stuff and head towards the military camp.

I meet with the people from last time, minus the guy who can’t use mana, and they discuss how they will teach magic and the [System]. I point out that I have made a video on each topic, and after watching the video, they decide to base the first ‘lesson’ around them. After that is a long and frankly boring discussion between the others, with input from me here and there. I know the contract makes me a consultant, but this is boring. I expected to come here and answer questions for a few hours, with demonstrations now and then. In hindsight, that’s pretty unrealistic, isn’t it? I’m not some teacher in a magic academy. Hmm, maybe…

The day proceeds according to plan. We enter what I can only think of as a classroom, with the magic test platoon (my name, not theirs) being the students, and the few soldiers from last time being the teachers. I sit in the back and watch while they go through the basics of the [System] and mana/magic, and then we (mostly I) test each of the soldiers for mana capabilities, in the categories ‘manaless’, ‘has mana’, and ‘can use mana’.

To my surprise we find another manaless person. It’s a small sample size, but it seems more common that I assumed. After testing, we head outside to the track & field area, and we (including me, who finally got to do something) teach everyone how to use mana. The manaless person was excused and dropped from the magic testing, but it sounds like the researchers wants to find people who can use other kinds of energy. I could only shrug and say that I think my neighbour can do that when they asked me.

When the day end all the soldiers have the basic mana abilities, and can make both heat and light using magic, with some of the quicker learners trying out more complex tricks like [Body Enhancement] and/or [Levitation]. For a day where I essentially didn't do very much, I feel pretty tired.

In preparation for tomorrow I would like to test a couple things about subspaces and my bag of holding. I don’t know what the side effects might be, and whatever happens, the result will be interesting for the military. I explain what I want to do with Thomas after the soldiers, both instructors and ‘students’, go off to do whatever soldiers do. Thomas being the researcher, whose name I’ve somehow managed to remember.

Apparently he also knows a bit about D&D, since he immediately understands my worries when I explain that I will “[...] make sure that everyone stands at least ten meters away, then I’ll put the subspace storage in the bag of holding and vice versa.”

After the tests I share what I learned with Thomas: Whether you put the storage in the bag or the other way round, the mana drain increases drastically. More than either of those, putting a storage in another storage massively increases the drain. I can’t do the same test with bags of holding since I only have one, but with the data I have we can already see a clear trend.

One onlooker asks why we were so careful when nothing happened, to which I reply think of it as a bomb defusal: ‘Nothing’ is a good sign. I almost start explaining what happens if you put a portable hole in a bag of holding in D&D, but stop myself in time, knowing that I’d probably ramble for a while going way off track. Besides, the little nod tells me they got a satisfactory answer, no need to elaborate.

In short: Having spatial boundaries inside others increase the mana drain, but otherwise do nothing. As for putting electronics in those things, I accidentally tested it when messing with temporal magic this morning and nothing interesting happens, so yeah.

I do a short trip back home to grab my flight tools, consisting of a spherical compass on a keychain and a flat orienteering compass on a necklace, before heading back out. I want to get my flight speed, specifically for a longer flight. So far the longest I’ve flown is maybe ten minutes? I also want to figure out how to use tools while flying. I should at least be able to read a compass. I also want some practice flying and navigating, and as such I have set myself a goal just over an hour away with car.

Back home I do a couple tweaks to the videos I uploaded, uploading proper thumbnails and going through the comments, of which there are quite a few. It got a so-so reception, though with others picking up the ball, the novelty value has decreased, so it’s understandable. I’m glad, that means there’s less pressure on me. I would rather have a semi-obscure channel where I just upload whatever every now and then, over the pressure of a schedule and promised content, explicitly or otherwise.

I make sure to check opening times and get tickets for the trip to Denmark, rounding off my planning. The trip will take the next three days, with day one being the trip down and a visit to Scandinavian Wildlife Park, which has moose and deer and bears and wolves, in short: Animals you can find in scandinavia. For day two I will visit Randers Rainforest, which has all manner of creatures. When done there I will head back north, probably doing some city sightseeing in the evening. The third and final day starts with the North Sea Oceanarium for aquatic aspects, before I see the so called ‘eagle show’ in EagleWorld.