Morning came far too early for John’s liking; he’d stayed up far too late last night talking with his father and doing some research. Now he was regretting it. He could have slept in and skipped communing with the tree, but that didn’t feel right. The tree might not be fully sentient, having more impressions and feelings than true thought (when John wasn’t losing himself in it, anyway) but he still felt his absence would likely be noticed by it. So he pulled himself from the warm embrace of sleep, slipped on the headset, and logged into the game.

When he stepped out of his front door it was, of course, raining. Sending a trickle of mana to his umbrella token he made his way toward the shrine, stopping only to give a brief “Good morning” to the knights who were currently on guard duty at his front gate (or, where it would be once he got the actual gate from Phillip), and the ones at the shrine. Then, shaping his customary stone bench, he began to feed his mana into the tree.

Once more he found himself in the proto-mind of the tree, experiencing its feelings and gaining brief images of the way it saw the world around them. It was strange to him that something with no eyes should have such a clear image of the world around itself, but he supposed that some form of magic was at work. He could feel the water in the ground, the rain pelting against leaves, and the annoyance at the lack of unobstructed sunlight. It seemed even the tree was starting to get tired of the constant rain. He could also feel the runners as they slowly grew up the sides of the arches the tree had chosen. John wasn’t sure what those were for, and the tree wasn’t telling, not yet anyway. However, given their rate of growth he was certain he’d find out in little more than three or four days.

The alarm he’d set went off, and John disengaged from the tree and started running mana back to his umbrella charm and began using Mana Sight once more. As the mana in the air snapped into focus, John realized that it wasn’t as thick as he was used to, and that it wasn’t nearly so overwhelmingly space and life attuned. A quick look to the arches showed that the mana flowing through the ritual lines was slowly fading and a quick recounting of the days told him it had about three days of functional lifetime left.

Running his fingers through his beard, he considered if he should reactivate the ritual immediately, or if he should take a few days to go over the ritual and see if he couldn’t refine the structure so that it could achieve a higher grade. After perhaps two minutes of back and forth he decided to simply reactivate the ritual once it’d run out. He simply didn’t have the money for higher grade materials, which meant it didn’t matter how much better he might be able to make the ritual.

Returning to his farm, John fed and watered the chookers, collected the eggs (dropping a dozen or so off with his guests) and checked the auction. All of his life stones had already sold, netting him a solid 54 gold. John smiled at the number; he was fairly certain he’d have enough to run the final ritual now.

Finished with the auction he spent some time in the greenhouses, checking over the plants and making sure they were in good health. There were some complications while doing so. He couldn’t regenerate mana while within the area they’d cleared of ambient energy so in order to water them appropriately he had to keep heading out to the higher density locations nearby.

Finally finished with the plants, John returned to his house and sat down near the Ritual of Imbuing. The first thing he needed to do was create the material that would house the core of his mana well. Pulling out the oversized sphere, he carefully considered it using Measuring. The core itself was around seven inches in diameter, which made it a little smaller than a volleyball.

At first he figured he’d need to shape the stone specifically to hold the core, but then he remembered how the sockets on his amulet had worked. Specifically, the fact that they’d morphed to fit the stones he tried to place in them. He suspected that something similar would happen with the enchanted stone this core was supposed to sit in.

Putting the core away he turned his mind toward what he’d be using. BR had suggested quartz or nebula marble. Of the two, nebula marble was harder to create given that it didn’t form naturally and had to be forced into existence against the natural inclinations of the spell. As was a reoccurring theme effort equaled quality, so it was a no brainer to take the option that would require more effort on his part.

With a thought John spun out a thread of earth mana and fed it into the pattern for the Create Earth spell and began focusing his intent. This was the part that was tricky, because just visualizing the end goal had led to the Poor quality stone of the henge. Later, an increase in his skill had pushed the quality from Poor to Good. But he didn’t want just Good quality, he wanted Exceptional quality. John had spoken with his father about that and been given some advice; what happened if, instead of just letting the spell figure out the details, he gave specific instructions instead? That had lead to a couple of hours of figuring out what metals made which colors. So now he bent his mind to not just visualizing the end product, but considering precisely what it was made of.

The basic stone was dolomite fused with carbon by extremes of pressure and heat. Shot through it were veins of dolomite that had been otherwise colored by different materials. For red of ruby brilliance, chromium. Followed by a cadmium compound for a deep and powerful orange. There a brilliant gold created by inclusion of arsenic trisulfide, a pigment once known as ‘King’s Yellow’. Copper, acetate, and arsenite to make a brilliant emerald also called ‘Paris Green’. Here a vibrant lapis blue, created by sulfur, and chloride. Finally, a combination of aluminum and sulfur to create a deep violet.

The spell fought against him, bucking and twisting in his mental grip. Some of these pigments weren’t found regularly (or in some cases, at all) in nature and the spell wasn’t necessarily meant to be used this way. Still, he narrowed all his focus down to this one task, letting the colors mix and match in his mind, creating blends and variations of intensity even as he forced his will on the weave of the spell. Eventually the spell gave and a large block of nebula marble manifested in the center of the Ritual of Imbuing.

John gasped as a lance of pain spiked into his brain, a clear result of pushing the spell further than it was meant to go. He grunted and spoke out loud, not feeling up to navigating a menu. “System, reduce pain threshold by fifty percent.” Immediately the pain dropped from mind numbing to merely annoying. He was glad to have figured out that feature, he only wished he’d read the full manual before his first run in with nebula marble, it could have saved him literal hours of headaches. The only downside was that the system would eventually revert the pain settings to the recommended 80 percent. Apparently bad things happened if you got used to the pain being too dulled.

Pain managed, John turned his eyes to the stone block he’d created. It was a deep, polished black shot through with lines of color that glimmered in brilliant jewel tones. Just looking at it he knew that this marble was on a whole different level than that which he’d used for construction. With little preamble he identified it.

[Name: Nebula Marble]

[Quality: Great]

[Description: Found absolutely nowhere in nature this marble has to be created by use of the Create Earth spell in an area where sedimentary rocks and trace elements are normally found. This particular chunk of marble is a quality example and might grace the home of a well-off merchant.]

John sighed. Even with all of that he’d only managed Great quality. That was better than his last attempt, but fell just short of what he was aiming for. He had been hoping for Exceptional, which would have been a 50 percent conductivity, Great would mean only 40 percent. It wasn’t a huge difference, but it would be noticeable. He quickly did some calculations and came to the conclusion that he could probably survive with only 40 percent efficiency. That was a mana regeneration rate of about 56 mana per second, a little under 3,400 per minute. In other words, he could run almost 170 items at 20 mana per minute.

For the first time John considered that he might have overengineered the materials he was planning to use. Shaking his head, he opened the auction interface and started looking through the items on offer. He needed one item for each of the elements and they all needed to be at least Great quality.

Fire, air, water, and earth were easy enough. He bought cumulous cattails, iron, blazing peppers, and spring water once more, all coming to five gold. Ten gold saw him in possession of more void stone, and another eight got him more ageless ivy. Light and Dark were a little cheaper, with the glowstone clocking in at four gold, and shadow ferns costing only three. In total it only cost him 30 gold, which left him a nice buffer of 28 gold.

Placing all the items on their pedestals, John pushed the required mana into the circle and watched as the precise lines lit up with an ethereal white glow. Stepping back, he eyed the circle and activated Inspect.

[Name: Ritual of Imbuing (Active)]

[Quality: Great]

[Description: Carefully constructed, this ritual is meant to imbue mana into materials placed within it. Because it was designed and constructed by someone with the Ritual Master and Ritual Mastery abilities it is 50% more effective at it’s given task, which is the imbuement of materials placed within its confines.]

[Active Duration: 6 Hours]

[Effect: Will imbue contained objects, infusing their structure with mana over the course of six hours.]

Nodding in satisfaction, John turned and headed for the workroom.

Poking his head in, he could see that BR was reading from a large tome. The gnome looked up as he entered and put the book down. “What’s up?”

“I’ve got the stone imbuing and wanted to talk to you a little about the design,” John replied.

Bamboo hummed in what sounded like annoyance. “You know I’ve never made a mana well before, I’d prefer not to stray too far from the common designs.”

John nodded. “I understand that, but I was wondering if you could work in a way to limit discharge and prevent the mana well from fully emptying?”

BR was shaking his head even as John was speaking. “Those are features that could maybe be included, but I’m not quite sure how to go about it, and I certainly wouldn’t want to try it on a final product.”

“Alright,” John replied with a nod. He’d been hoping for those two features, but it wasn’t a surprise to him that they might be out of reach. “Do you know what the effects of a mana well will be on the local mana?”

“Sure, a mana well will disrupt the local mana in a radius equal to one foot per mana per minute,” BR rattled off.

“So if my well could absorb, say, three thousand, three hundred, and eighty-three mana per minute…” John trailed off.

“That’d be like, half a mile. But you’d need a stupid amount of cores to hold that much mana at ten percent efficiency,” the gnome noted.

“Yeah, about eight hundred and twelve of them at forty percent efficiency,” John replied with a vaguely sinking sensation.

“Those are oddly specific numbers, in fact, so was that mana absorption rate. Is that how many cores you purchased? You’d need a massive chunk of rock to place them all.”

“Well, I fused them all together and then purified them,” John supplied.

“So you have one massive mana core, and I’m going to guess you’ve got, what? A great quality slab of stone to put it in?” BR just shook his head as he looked at John. “I can see why you wanted the two safety features; they’d probably prevent the core from breaking.”

“Ugh, the forum post never mentioned this,” John muttered, and then frowned as he thought back to that original forum post he’d read on mana wells. “In fact, I’m pretty sure it gave some completely different information on how mana wells worked.”

“I’m betting I know the post you’re talking about, it’s the one that mentions rocks can hold mana right? That thing is almost entirely bunk. Parts of it are pure speculation and other bits are from a previous era,” BR groused.

“Previous era?” John asked, confused.

“That’s what the locals call time periods between major patches. We’re currently in the… thirteenth? Era. They’re further divided into early, middle, and late periods, but those are only classified after an era is over,” the gnome explained.

“Alright, I guess that makes sense. Alright, if the mana well is going to be that big a disruption, what about hooking it to a ley line?”

BR frowned at John. “You want a ley line tap? That’d certainly be easier on the local mana, but we’d need a ley line. Wait, are you saying we’re on top of a ley line?”

“Yeah, I increased mana sight a few days ago and there’s a ley line that runs right down the road and under the farm,” John replied.

“Wow, that’s both convenient and lucky. Yeah, we could do a ley line tap instead. It uses basically all the same stuff, though it’s supposed to be slightly more difficult to set up.”

“Why’s it more difficult?” John wondered.

“Because if you fill something with more mana than it can hold it tends to explode and ley lines tend to ‘push’ their mana into anything connected to them,” BR replied. “Also, you have to dig down to the ley line and place the tap directly inside it. Honestly, it’s basically a mana well with a fancy set of runes that keeps it from overfilling.”

“Alright, so new plan, ley line tap?”

“You’re the boss. But you’re going to want to think about what you’ll do if that core breaks.”

“Will do, thanks,” John replied.

“It’s what I’m here for,” BR said, then turned back to his book.