Elemental Cats

After he limited its coverage to only his hand, Toz found it a lot easier to control and change the structure of his consciousness, but he still didn't seem to be able to achieve what he wanted. Since he made minimal progress, Toz had a hard time maintaining his absolute focus and his thoughts wandered.

He absent-mindedly wondered if he could use his consciousness in combat. Not by having it absorb mana at the same time as he fought, but as a way to attack his enemies. After getting that idea, Toz almost wanted to try it out immediately. But there weren't any suitable targets around. If it worked as a means of attack, Toz doubted that it would work against the Adaptation Trees.

Toz also had to mind the fact that the cats were delaying their rest to let him practice his passive training, not for him to play around.

With a new bout of motivation, since he didn't want to push the cats' patience too far, Toz started working on the film of consciousness wrapped around his hand again. He also realized that maybe he should take it one step further.

The trees actively absorbed the bark, but so far, he had only tried making the mana flow through the consciousness and into his body. Maybe he needed some initiative to prompt the mana to enter the consciousness and his body.

Toz tried various things, but it didn't seem like simply changing the structure of his mind would be enough. Or he didn't do it well enough. But if he could succeed by doing that, he might as well try something else.

So instead of trying to change the stream of consciousness on a fundamental level, he began changing it in a more general way. Since the most obvious way to increase the consciousness' activity was to move it actively, that was what Toz began doing.

He shifted it around his hand to try and stir the mana into getting absorbed. Since it seemed like it might work, Toz also moved his hand in sync with his consciousness, and he made it look like he physically grabbed the mana and absorbed it.

It was surprisingly successful, but it was also mostly useless. Toz quickly and efficiently absorbed the mana his hand grasped. But he would look like a fool if he did that all the time. But even if he did it all the time, it would hardly be worth it since his hand couldn't grasp enough mana to make it worthwhile.

However, it was still a success since Toz could use it to figure out a more effective method of absorbing the mana that came in contact with his consciousness. And after doing that, he only had to apply it to his entire body, which was something that would be difficult with the grasping method he had just devised.

The grasping method itself might be relatively useless, but it had shown him that it was a lot easier to absorb the mana, or rather make the mana enter his body, if he could envelop the mana. With Toz's consciousness surrounding it on all sides, the mana only had one option when it came to moving, and that was through the consciousness, after which it would inevitably end up inside Toz's body. When inside, Toz's mana would move on its own to take care of the foreign mana and convert it to the element Toz had in mind.

The concept of enveloping the mana led Toz to come up with the new and improved blanket method. Instead of swathing himself in a blanket of mana and absorbing it directly, Toz would cover the mana in a blanket of his consciousness.

Toz separated the already thin layer of consciousness on his hand into two separate layers.

Since the mana still had to bypass the outer layer, it had several small openings to let the mana inside. And then, when the small space between the two layers filled with mana, Toz would close the holes. After that, he would use the outer layer to push the mana inside his body.

It worked about as well as Toz hoped it would. Most of the mana between the two layers of his consciousness entered his body. And unlike the grasping method, it could be applied to his entire body.

But unfortunately, it required a lot of concentration, especially if he wanted to do it repeatedly in order to make up for the minuscule amounts of mana he got each time he opened up the outer layer to accept more mana.

Toz tried it with his entire body just to see if it was feasible, which it was. But it wasn't sustainable. The amount of mana he got wasn't worth the effort he put in, so he decided to try and find other methods that would be more effective.

For the sake of it, Toz began trying out various ways he could envelop or cover the mana. After a while, he realized that he didn't have to seal the mana on all sides. As long as he could get a grip on the mana with his consciousness, he could push or pull it inside his body.

That discovery led him to add a couple of creases to the layer of consciousness in his hand.

And then, with movements like those of a horse eating or maggots squirming, the creases moved and twisted to drag and push the mana that caught onto them into Toz's body.

It looked a little strange when Toz used his mana vision to observe the creases in action. But since he barely moved his consciousness when doing it, it took him hardly any effort to absorb the mana.

He wasn't quite satisfied since the mana he absorbed with the crease method was lacking, but Toz could sense that he was on the right path. If he developed the method further and perfected it, increasing its effectiveness while maintaining the effort it took, Toz would have achieved his goal of creating a stable and easily adjustable passive mana training method.