Another week passes by, I spent most of the time experimenting with magic. I have learnt to see mana in the environment by casting a spell onto my eyes in a way similar to body strengthening magic, but all I see are blurry outlines and when I look at the dragon I see nothing or in other words an absence of mana. My hypothesis is that the dragon is controlling his inner mana well enough for there being no radiation for me to see but in reality I have no clue. So many hypotheses to verify while being watched by a dragon and stuck in a cave...

From my perspective my progress with magic has been good even if I still do not have the slightest clue about how magic works. I have mastered heating and cooling objects sufficiently, after that I moved onto shaping stones or in other words direct mana manipulation. The dragon supports my shaping training as he says this is the way he learnt it. I can only feel bitter when I hear him say this as dragons have insane mana levels and have an innate gift to manipulate mana from a young age by their will alone. Other races can develop minor mana manipulation, as I have, and are forced to use symbolism to guide their intent to form a spell... So my training may give me minor mana manipulation but it will be useless for combat but it is perfect for creating objects like a knife. I have no choice but to depend on my limited body spells for combat just like everybody else but I may have a slight edge compared to others. From what I understand, even though I have what can be said entry rank 0 mana levels, my spells have insane efficiency and good effectivity. I quite sure my efficiency and effectivity is high because I know how and what I want to manipulate in the physical world so I do not need as much mana as other beings.

The dragon has started to sleep more as my mind wanders off onto the topic of experiments in turn interrupting our conversations, but there are still times we play chess and I talk about my home world which he reciprocates by sharing information about this world. My next project will be to to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, I keep getting excited thinking about the possibilities and future experiments.

After successfully splitting water molecules, my excitement was through the roof, I can manipulate the physical world on the nanoscale! Immediately I think of creating a diamond but decide that may undesirably grab the dragons attention so I make ice from the moisture in the air, I was able to make a perfectly transparent ice crystal. I suspect making a diamond will not be much more difficult, just finding the correct structure for the carbon atoms and maybe a bit more mana to change the atomic bonds and the result would be a diamond.

For the sake of my future I have concluded I need more inner mana and more knowledge of how to use mana, essentially I need to understand what is mana. For now I will keep following this mana cultivation technique and study how mana interacts with the laws of the world. My interaction with mana so far is limited to using it as an energy source, I can not transform or create mana... So far I can guess mana is not physically present, is a form of energy and is similar to a gas. As compressing mana is hard but possible, I have no idea what is the limit but 10 times the density of ambient mana is possible, while my inner mana density is at about 4 times ambient. As I do not have any tools available to represent units of measurement I am familiar with, I can not accurately state the energy density of mana per volume but from what I have seen 1 liter of ambient mana is enough to separate 1mL of water to its base elements with some leftover mana. *Ambient mana energy density >15kJ/L*

From the dragon I heard about artifacts that are enchanted with magic. These artifacts can store and use mana per its design so even a rank 0 mage may use such an artifact. Their purpose ranges from casting spells, improving the casters spells or independent functionality like a lamp. Now my objective is to create a device that can gather, store and use mana. Building such of a device may be hard but I have yet to try, as the advancement of my inner mana is very slow I need another source of strength. I can cast what I suppose is a rank 1 spell but I have never tried and it may just blow up in my face, all that I have shown to the dragon would be classified as rank 0 spells. I am pretty sure this is far from enough to ensure my survival outside of this cave.

After listening to the dragons knowledge about enchantments and removing all of the nonsense I can sum up his knowledge with 1 sentence: To make an artifact that can interact with mana an enchantment is needed, to do such a thing you need to inscribe the object using symbolism to form the intent of the function which makes up the enchantment. In the case of the container I took the simple road by using an empty ball enchanted to not let any mana pass through by writing 'block mana' on said container and a openable cap on top through which I can input mana. The ball of about 10 liters of volume contains about 100 liters of ambient mana, I decide against increasing the pressure any further. I put off gathering ambient mana for now and decide to make the core which will use ambient mana to produce light. Enchanting the core was done by writing what many programmers would call pseudo code, after many attempts this is what I came up with, 'absorb mana from source, emit electromagnetic radiation from 500 to 700 THz, radiant flux = 10W'. The failures include nothing happening when I did not state the spectrum and most likely radiating myself in a large spectrum including x-rays and gamma rays. Another failure was a blinding and burning flash after stating the spectrum but not the rate of emission of light. Overall I learnt that it is very easy to kill yourself when applying modern knowledge to mana manipulation. Of course you can simplify the design into something that says emit light as the people of this world do, but I can not do such a thing as light has a different definition to me compared to people of this world. Visible light is another option but then visible light to whom? For a dog or a human or a dragon? I may put in my intent of visible light for humans into the inscribed words but from what I have found an exact enchantment with precise definitions of the functions will give a higher efficiency of mana usage.

The result of this project is a 10W lamp that has a power source that would last over 50 hours if my approximate prediction is correct. On a few separate experiments I have found the efficiency of mana usage is higher than when I used mana to separate water into its base elements. This only confirms my hypothesis that the more directed and precise the intent, the higher mana efficiency. The dragon was impressed with my lamp that did not fade even after a few days of working. It seems similar enchantments run out of stored mana much fast due to mana inefficiency and they can not work directly on ambient mana for the same reason. While I can make 0.1W glowing rocks that only need to be present in ambient mana without a need for an intense source of mana. Scaling the power of the glowing rocks would require a larger area for the rock to gather mana from, so a larger rock would be the solution and a change in the code to specify the place of emission of EM radiation… but all of this would just be an inefficient use of space. After the lamp used up the mana when I opened the container while having my experimental mana sight on I saw something invisible rush out and push back the ambient mana, after a few minutes the container was full again with ambient mana.

'Eureka!!!' As a child I always wanted to yell this... This gives me so much information, how could have I missed this? Gas mix that tends to a homogeneous state?

From my present observations of mana, mana acts as a homogeneous gas mixture. I suspect the other part of this gas mixture is mana that has no energy. So mana is not energy itself but is a non tangible substance that stores energy, present everywhere in this world and follows laws similar to gases. Continuing this line of thought I can name these 2 unknown substances and then use the name with my intent to affect these 2 substances. I shall call them charged mana and discharged mana for simplicity's sake. From my past conversations with the dragon, it seems that he is not aware that mana is not consumed but the energy it holds is used. I may have overestimated the intelligence of dragons and the people here if they can not even perform a few experiments, as I have, into the nature of mana, but all I have is my personal experience with this dragon and I am fairly confident that if I explain my findings and knowledge about gases he will be able to comprehend this knowledge. Damn, I may have jumped to conclusions... The dragon may have decided against sharing this information, thats all.

Before I continue onto the next experiment I ask the dragon on how to affect ambient mana beyond minor mana manipulation, excluding enchantments that use ambient mana. He says direct control of ambient mana is very difficult. Only rank 3 mages and dragons can do such a thing but it becomes useless at a distance and weaker than rank 2 spells. I did get additional information about inner mana from him, the meditation technique the dragon gifted to me affects ambient mana and transforms it into my inner mana. I wonder if I can use my own language as the base of the intent that gathers ambient mana into my own inner mana but I fear experimenting with such a thing.

Directing my intent to make charged ambient mana gather in one spot, I taste success after a few minutes concentrating and chanting my intent. When I stop concentrating the charged ambient mana starts to dissolve back into the surrounding ambient mana. Most interestingly I met failure when trying to have an affect on discharged mana, it seems mana needs to be charged to follow an intent.