Today was a busy day. The primary focus was on refining the various bits of gear, but between working with Azrezel and helping Trovich evolve I only managed to work on that for about half of the day. So about two and a half more days before I finish the easily refined stuff.

Early in the day I helped Trovich evolve. After making sure I wouldn’t be disturbed I did the necessary preparations to keep him awake during this process. That mostly consisted of something I made using Drowsy Clover, Ergen, Astrie, Dead Tulip, and Pipeweed, it could keep a corpse awake. Aside from a small amount of concentration on the plants that are supposed to keep him awake my entire mental prowess was focused on Trovich, I even stopped pouring excess mana into growing my forest during this time.

I didn’t expect any issues, but it was also the first time I was evolving something that wasn’t myself and wasn’t plant based so I went overkill with the precautions. Luckily everything more or less went off without a hitch, the only hang up was that he started to thrash about pretty early on so I used the plants to paralyze him. He wasn’t in pain or anything, I think it was caused by his brain being changed.

My first revelation came almost immediately after I started. I took some Solar Energy and used it to trigger the world to evolve him, a show of power of a sort. Not his though, mine. I was shocked when his body was then flooded with Solar Energy on a scale I had never even thought was possible outside of the suns, and the weird part is that it came from underground, like it always does with mana, and not from the suns. It makes sense in retrospect, the body was made out of Solar Energy to begin with and is completely immune to mana, of course it would be evolved with Solar Energy.

And it did nothing. The all-powerful hand of the world showed up at my request and waited for me to direct it, like it always does. And so I did. I fell into a sort of trance as I worked. In the end, it wasn’t very different from what usually happens when I evolve one of my plants. And so I was able to focus a lot more on what was actually happening, I already had the routine of evolving something down.

Really it isn’t all that different until you get down to the nitty gritty of what is going on. Something I am disappointed in myself for not doing to this level sooner. The level of skill and control the world has over Solar Energy is astounding. At the time I was in a sort of trance just trying to learn as much as I possibly could from watching what was going on in front of me, but now it feels overwhelming. Like a child being put in charge of a massive army or being granted supreme magical powers. And yet the world expects me to continue to create new things, because it is somehow incapable of that. If I hadn't already proven that I am capable of that I would refuse this power, thinking that there is no way I could use it properly. But I wasn’t granted it by some unknowable entity, I reached out and grabbed it with my own hands. Accidentally, yes, but I still earned it. And that idea, that I somehow earned the right to use the hand of the world like this is possibly even more overwhelming.

Watching the small scale of what was happening helped me learn quite a bit. I learned quite a bit about how to manipulate Solar Energy, and that will be very useful, but the real benefit is something else.

Every time you evolve you get better at everything you are capable of doing, if you have wings you will get better at flying but if you don’t you won’t. With mana that is done two ways, the first is by directly improving everything about your physical body, mostly by changing things in subtle and not so subtle ways to make it better. Ultimately this part doesn’t have quite as much of an effect as the second part, which is where the mana being used to evolve you forms into complex spells that directly improves your body in much the same way that training causes the same to happen, only much faster. This is the same stuff that I move around with Astrie when I make someone stronger at the cost of being dumber, or other things like that. However, that second part can’t happen with Solar Energy, it simply isn’t stable in the same way that mana is and would be rapidly destroyed, giving you maybe a week of improved ability if you are lucky.

Instead, it modifies, refines, and reinforces the body in a way that mana is simply incapable of, as it necessitates the destruction of the Solar Energy to do. Nothing I know of can destroy mana, while Solar Energy just seems to create and destroy itself.

I think I can do this outside of evolution, if I can watch the same process happen to myself that is. This puts evolving myself much higher up on the priorities list, which also puts fully digesting the knowledge about healing I gained from Origin slightly higher than that, I still want to finish that before I make myself evolve.

I’m not sure what exactly the possibilities are there, but I know there are possibilities. I’ll figure that out once I can actually make use of it.

Other than that progress was infuriatingly slow with figuring out how to keep the smarter undead alive, but at least it isn’t a standstill.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.