A New World, An Immersive Game Experience

With a sigh, Eldrian decided to brute force things. Since he couldn't reach the spear, he created steps of ice. Sadly, this proved much more difficult than he had expected.

Naturally, he couldn't use earth magic. The ground was made of voidstone. Eldrian couldn't even seep his mana into the stone, not to mention deforming it.

As for ice magic, the air wasn't humid at all. Requiring every piece of ice to be formed from mana. Luckily, the room was filled with mana. But it still meant it was going to take a while.

Climbing until he reached twenty meters in height—which took about an hour. Eldrian felt like crying. He had already decided to let the stairs below melt to remove the mana drain they required to stay in existence.

Sadly, when they did, they didn't turn into water, but rather returned to being mana. Not increasing the humidity in the room and causing things to move just as slow as always. Eldrian also realized that letting them melt might cause later instability issues for his staircase.

Thus, he got to work to stopping their melting and was forced to share some of his regenerating mana to keep the ice stable.

Taking a rest at this point, Eldrian reflected on what he was experiencing and what all he had recently learned with his talks with the two goddesses.

He again pondered the connection between mana and matter. Especially taking into account all that Ziraili had explained—most of which had flown over his head. Watching the ice seemingly sublimate had allowed him to grasp some inspiration.

Accordingly, Eldrian tried a few simple tests. Forming some ice by different methods of visualization. The cornerstone of dynamic magic, and an act he truly had to improve upon. His visualization was often lacking, and his imagination much the same.

'Tier 4 and below—simply envision steps of ice.' Eldrian did this, playing with the quantity he of mana he was throwing in—altering the combination of ice and darkness as he did too. The room was slowly turning cold and Eldrian wanted to figure out if he couldn't perhaps form some warmer ice to stand and sit upon.

This was more a repetition of what he had already been doing, so after a few minutes, Eldrian moved to the next step. However, he quickly realized he couldn't really accomplish much with it.

The next method of visualization was meant to interact with the natural surrounding, lessening the burden on the caster while also increasing the strength of the spells. But Eldrian's surroundings weren't natural. Leading to the casting process increasing the burden on him instead.

'Envision the actual reaction taking place, or the structure of the substance you are forming. Tier 5 and 6.' Sure, it sounded easy. But it wasn't.

With fire, one simply thought of heat and flames. With ice, cold and frozen water. With healing, you simply thought of a wound closing.

But to visualize the actual structure of fire, the chemical reactions, the makeup of the flames. That was not easy. Simply holding the knowledge of what a fire actually was didn't help. One needed to apply it when visualizing and forming the spell, while still keeping the image of the spell at large perfect too.

Naturally, during all this, you also had to guide your mana to form the spell—though this came naturally to Eldrian at this point and required little to no extra focus.

When Eldrian tried to force this microscopic image (the vague image he had of ice structure from high school) into a spell, he found himself completely failing.

He produced some cold mana, but it simply scattered into the room. Dropping the surrounding temperature so sharply, Eldrian was forced to conjure some fire for heat.

"It's beautiful, but useless." Eldrian mumbled, watching the glittering reflections of his flame throughout the room. The scattered ice was a magnificent sight that came at a painful cost of over four hundred MP.

Asking Two's help, they played with the responsibility.

In one attempt, Eldrian would imagine the ice taking the form of steps, and Two would imagine the structure of ice and focus this on the mana moving to fill Eldrian's visualization.

In another attempt, they would reverse responsibilities. As they were doing this, they also practiced how to form spells as one. It turned out to be fun and the two quickly lost track of time.

When they reached thirty meters, they had grown accustomed to this and also found that the new steps were far sturdier than the former—requiring less mana to keep their shape. However, the mana cost to create them had exploded.

Regardless, the drain becoming less was an absolute positive and the two focused on creating the more stable steps moving forward.

This was shockingly perhaps the first time Eldrian truly tried to add science foundations to his magic. At least, this was the first time he was trying and succeeding to add microscopic visualization to his casting.

He normally relied on learning the feeling of a spell's mana first through static magic and then using that as his baseline for dynamic spells. Or he simply went ahead blindly.

In fact, with teleportation, Eldrian was using the standard static spells to accomplish it. He wasn't ready to try to take it to dynamic casting, not one bit.  Generally, teleportation wasn't possible to learn at Tier 5 because of the mana cost, but Eldrian had plenty of mana. So he could attempt it early.

This entire visualization process, however, was completely useless for standard static magic. The spell module contained everything related to the spell. Runic magic was in a similar vein, though there Eldrian had experimented somewhat.

Of course, he had always pondered what was happening. But this was his first time focusing on the science part, more so than the flow of mana and the overall image he wanted it to take. It was fun focusing on this fresh approach, and Eldrian felt he was learning a great deal.

Sadly, the focus required to picture the ice structure, a lattice of layered hexagonal rings, was simply too draining. After they finished another ten steps, Eldrian found some similarity between this and Ice Rain (Tier 5 AOE ice spell).

Casting that spell to retrain his feeling for it. Needing to first rely again on the spell module—which, luckily, Two had stored in their soul for emergency use, since Eldrian had completely forgotten what the module looked like.

Altered between the two spells, one static and the other dynamic. Eldrian tried to pinpoint and memorize the differences and commonalities. During this process,  Two took on the role of large visualization, while Eldrian focused on the flow of mana moving through him. This, sadly, Two could not do.

After half an hour, Eldrian managed to produce what he considered Tier 5 ice steps all on his own. Having ingrained the feeling and its differences into his mind.

'We are close enough now to use ether manipulation.' Two reflected once their experiment completed on a success.

"Right." Forming a larger base, Eldrian produced a rough surface so he wouldn't slip on the ice. Then he formed once again a hand of ether. Moving it to grasp the spear and wiggle it free.

"Dang..." Eldrian sighed. "Something's draining my mana." Eldrian assumed it was the roof, or perhaps the cracks in the roof since the floor hadn't done this. Regardless, he soon confirmed that ether manipulation wasn't going to work. Especially not on the level he had mastered it.

Getting to work, he continued to build his ice staircase. Around two hours later and well above twenty thousand mana in ice, Eldrian reached Crystoi.

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