Junior is doing significantly better at this exercise than Askos is, at the rate she’s going Null won’t be able to affect her at all in a day, maybe two. Askos will take three or four days before he’s able to fully overcome this challenge.

Both of them have improved in other ways as a result of this training. When even the smallest expenditure of mana is punished then you tend to figure out how to do things more efficiently. When something is actively trying to strip control away you tend to have a tighter grip, metaphorically speaking. In practice it’ll be harder for anyone or anything to prevent them from working their magic, I bet that not even a solid blow to the head would be enough to make them lose control. Very useful if they ever want to learn other forms of magic, they should have spells backfire less often which means that they will be less likely to get sick.

Speaking of getting sick, I am currently sick. It isn’t anything severe or life-threatening, and certainly nothing contagious, but the constant headache and hunger pangs are annoying. I didn’t have a spell backfire or anything like that, it just kind of happened. Which is rare but not unheard of, and my current situation has made it much more likely to happen, at least according to the scholars when I asked them today.

See, sickness is caused by a random formation of a spell inside of your body, this is something I already knew. This is caused most frequently by having a spell backfire on you, but it is possible to cause it in someone else intentionally, in that case it is called a curse. It is possible to make self-perpetuating curses, but doing so gets you hunted by the most powerful people in the scholar’s order, more often than not wielders of nuclear fire. Something to take note of in case I ever decide to study curses.

Anyway, those same spells can also be caused naturally by random formations in ambient mana. This isn’t really able to cause someone to get sick as it happens in open air, but it does happen quite often. Small bits of stuff are being constantly conjured into existence by any sufficiently dense collection of mana, which explains why places that haven’t been visited in a while are always dusty.

Those same random spell formations don’t really happen in someone’s own mana pool because in general people with large mana pools also have a lot of control over their own mana, which prevents random spells from forming in their own mana pool, while people who don’t have that kind of control generally have small amounts of mana to work with, preventing any random spell forming in their mana pool from doing much of anything before it burns itself out.

I’m a bit different, as I have said before by access to mana has nothing to do with my ability to control it. I am capable of controlling my mana pool quite well, especially considering my hivemind, but I don’t as unlike most people with the kind of mana I have it takes active effort from me. Now, this was all well and good for a while, but recently the amount of mana I have access to has dramatically increased, most notably because of Requiem, while my control over mana has stayed more or less the same. Me getting sick wasn’t a matter of if, but of when.

I’m just glad it happened in such a small way, now that I realize it is something I need to actually deal with I can deal with it. Actively settling my mana pool with my hivemind is simple and not very strenuous, but I still had to know it was something I needed to do in order to do it.

Anyway, enough about my mild headache. The actual meat of the day was occupied by trying to get Digger Root to manipulate metal. I’m starting to hit a wall in my progress there, you can only get so far through manipulating impurities in metal, while pure metal has proven impossible to manipulate. I was hoping that intention would be enough to bridge that gap, but either I’m not close enough or I don’t want it badly enough quite yet. I have no doubt that this method will work eventually, as I will get increasingly emotional and frustrated about the lack of progress that eventually I want nothing more than to actually get this thing to work, but I would really rather it not get to that point. I’ll give it one more day of solid work, if that doesn’t work then I will try something else.

I ended up spending my downtime looking into why I got sick and what I can do to prevent it, and though the conversations I had on the subject were fascinating, they didn’t exactly leave time for much else. It did remind me of Mest a bit though, specifically of him telling me that pretty much every single one of the scholars is at least trained in how to identify and classify different types of sickness so that they can root out self-perpetuating ones before they become a threat. That seems to be more or less true, while none of the scholars here specialize in studying sickness and curses all of them still knew quite a bit about the subject. The people in charge of their order must be really terrified of the prospect of a sickness that is self-perpetuating.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.