Chapter 266: Chapter 266 – The Notes

The third example in the book covers an area the size of a town and requires a moderately sized Energy font. It has an effect that is both the simplest and yet at the same time most useful for the people able to afford these things. All the ritual does is keep track of when sapients enter and leave the area it covers.

What raises this above similar things is how encompassing it is. Doesn’t matter if someone walks in, sneaks in, or teleports in. The ritual can detect the intrusion. Even if someone attempts to control an animal or construct to enter the area, they will be detected. And because the ritual is based on Energy, it is extremely hard for any of the normal stealth skills to bypass it.

Even if Jason can’t use anything else, just that last bit would have been worth the read. It isn’t exactly shouted from the rooftop that Energy is hard for the other two powers to deal with. Sure, attacks can be countered easily enough. But the more passive uses of Energy can both bypass others while at the same time being hard for them to bypass. Of course, this is not too overpowered, just enough that someone close in level will be out of luck. The third ritual is so pervasive only because it uses the world’s Energy which puts its quality a step above mortal reach.

Then after the extravagant uses the book gets into the juicy bits. That of small scale Energy enchantments. Jason hadn’t been wrong with his original ideas on it. Because Energy doesn’t pool like the other powers do, you can’t use the same battery design. The simplest method of making a “magic” item that uses Energy is to make it so only people with Energy can use the item. By hooking the item into the users own Energy flow like a farmer digging a small irrigation ditch, it simplifies so many things.

Of course, you can do the same thing with the other powers. In fact, it is kind of standard. Except of course for the fact that with the other items the power is fed into the batter to be used later. In turn, the battery acts like a surge protector so it doesn’t matter if the user is barely trickling in power or their power is like a flood. As long as the user isn’t trying to overpower the device, any modern enchantment will be able to vent excess power.

With Energy you don’t have that option. The flow of power goes directly into the device. This means that in most cases, Energy based items will have an Energy range instead of a level range. The only way around this works just fine for Jason. When a device is created by someone, their Energy signature will be ingrained in the item. While not perfect, it gives a larger margin of error.

There are ways to make an item only take what is needed. Jason has an example of this in his lungs at this very moment. The only problem is that doing so takes what is in the end a simple ritual and transforms it into a complexity that requires a master rank skill to create. Well beyond Jason who doesn’t even have a single journeyman skill.

But then Jason reaches the end of the book and he hasn’t found what he had been looking for in the first place. He trusts Gregor wouldn’t tell such a pointless lie though and settles in to comb through the last third of the book.

On the fourth pass, he finally figures it out. No one particular note has the solution. Instead, the method to increase his Energy is spread across about half of the notes. Not maliciously or to hide the information. Rather to Jason, this feels more like the author had taken a letter and broken the text up into parts to be used where it fit the best. A section about a person’s energy total attached to one of the small scale rituals, some about the nature of Energy at the front, another bit thrown in with the big rituals to explain a detail.

Separated, the notes mean little. But once Jason has gathered them together, it provides not quite an answer, but at least a path towards his goal. While cultivation uses free floating Energy and can help grow the total. This doesn’t take into account the actual source of a person’s Energy. Jason feels particularly dense once it is pointed out. He feels deeply that he should have noticed that his constant flow of Energy wasn’t coming in from the outside but rather flowed out from his core.

While before he formed his core, the Energy was gathered from without that wouldn’t be able to explain why this would prevent conversion by Mana or Qi. The reality of it is that forming an Energy core opens up a connection to some source of pure Energy and the other powers can’t convert you just like you can’t pour dye into a hose if the water is flowing. The dye will be expelled before it can do anything, and the same is true with Mana and Qi.

Whoever wrote the notes admitted to not knowing the actual source of a person’s Energy but this idea of drawing upon another place is key to increasing the Energy one has access to. After all, no matter how much water you push through a garden hose, only so much can go through it or else it will burst. Luckily, unlike a literal hose the connection to this source of Energy can be grown to allow more through.

The trick of it is how to grow the connection. The author of the notes talked shortly about their own experiences, but in the end their biggest tip is that the process is personal. They weren’t even sure if everyone connected to the same source or if it was a personal realm of Energy. Magic and Qi don’t work this way, and so few people use Energy to a large enough extent for a comparison to be made and mean anything.