[Due to starting your journey as a craftsman who uses magic, you have received a gift, please check your inventory]
I did as told
[Inventory: Beginner magic craftsman's gift x1 (press to receive gifts)]
I pressed
[Inventory: mana awakening pill x1, book (how to control mana) x1, book (how to increase mana)]
How generous…I guess, well if the system didn't give me these, I would've had to live manaless, guess that's that
I popped the pill and…passed out.
And then woke up as if nothing happened, but there was one small thing…
A bunch of prompts flashed in front of me, but that wasn't important.
Around me was a puddle of a black liquid whose stench was so foul I would much rather inhale the smell of that one sock (R.I.P.) which I wore for around year before it got too many holes and then threw it into the shitpile (very literally) since the sock was made from cotton and undyed, meaning had little value to me.
So, wanting to rid of this liquid, I sacrificed a few blankets to wipe everything clean, then put the blankets in my 'extra ordinary incinerator 9000™' and got rid of it for good (P.S. the stench still remained for 2 months before it disappeared)
After that was done I went back to my house..
I built it, it's more like a medieval castle with modern or futuristic furnishing and renaissance décor, but since I live alone, it's a single person apartment.
There I took my time to sort out through the system prompts
[Congratulations for unlocking mana]
[As a consequence of unlocking mana, a certain amount of impurities in the body was expelled]
[Due to unlocking mana, certain skill levels will be recalculated]
[Your INT stat influences the amount of mana you unlock, mana regeneration and total mana amount increased]
[Please read the books you've received as soon as possible]
…
Ok, amazing news, no debuffs received, only buffs, time to check stats
[Name: Javen Belgham
Age: (irrelevant)
Health:100%
Mana:358/358
Stamina: 100%
Level:1
Str: 119
Agi: 84
Dex: 173
End:148
Vit:122
Sen:92
Int:200
Luck:14
Cha: 14
Traits: 'Blessed by the craftsman spirits', 'craftsman (master)', 'Strong body', 'Stable mind', 'The old one', 'keen eye', 'sensitive touch', 'steady hands', 'limit breaker', 'mana pool'
Skills: 'foraging lv10', 'mining lv10', 'non-magical crafting lv.100', 'regeneration lv10', 'Physical damage resistance lv50', 'Environmental resistance lv50', 'Mental resistance lv50', 'meditation lv10'
Inventory (click to open)
Return to your world]
Well that's not fun, I was proud of having only lv100 skills, well, guess the world's a big place.
Next thing, reading the books.
Thus I began with the one about increasing the amount of mana.
The very goal is to use up mana and it'll increase just like that, but there are different ways to specify what I train more. If I constantly bottom out my mana, I'll raise max mana more than mana regen, but vice versa happens if I don't bottom out the mana and instead never let it to regen fully.
That's the entire summary, there are also other details, but those are irrelevant for now, since turns out anything less than 1k mana is inadequate.
…
After reading the other book, I learned how to utilise mana and increase mana control.
For now, since I have so little mana, the best way is to try to eek out a thread as thin as possible and control it, after I reach a good enough level, controlling mana while it isn't connected to my body is the next step.
The book also taught telekinesis as a way to increase mana control, best part of the book, with one con… I don't have enough mana to learn it, my mana control is so shit that just raising a pebble 1 cm of the ground uses up 10 mana a second.
With that I began my first fantasy training montage, albeit a very monotone one.
The routine is very simple: wake up, meditate, control mana, breakfast, telekinesis learning, fool around till dinnertime, more mana control training, sleep, that's it.
And to clarify, fooling around means I go do some shit, I read a few books on potion making, even went to the alchemy section. In both sections I could try do some stuff, but the process will be at a snail paces, since as I said before anything below 1k max mana is too little for anything…
So my goal 20k mana with decent mana regen, either way meditation increases mana regen.
Either way this place is now like a home to me, I spent that much time here.
*Breathe out*
Another irrelevant time span later, my mana manipulation skill is at lv9 and my mana finally touched the 20000 max mana I set upon myself.
Time to learn the magic stuff.
The thing with magic involved, that moments where laws of the world and logic become irrelevent, because magic can overwrite that with its own rules, its only a question of how well can I overwrite the rules and how many rules I overwrite.
I can sacrifice stuff to increase effects of spells, since turns out my mana is the best conduit for my mana, but for my mana only, for others it's an average mana conduit at best.
Thus I started to abuse the shit out of my blood, before sleep I'd make a few open wounds and let those drip out into pots, before I'd use them to draw magic circles or runes or whatnot.
There are multiple languages in programming, there are also multiple languages in mana, be it runes, circles, totems, talismans, the list can go on and on and on.
But the end result is the same, I overwrite rules of the world with my own.
But I came across another way to utilise the world, not by overwriting the rules, but manipulating them, be it through making some stronger or some weaker.
All of that led me to the power of concepts themselves.
Thus I seeked out these concepts, some are more easy to understand, like fire or earth, since I already studied both from a scientifical perspective a lot, for production and farming respectively.
But then there's shit like chaos, reincarnation, time and whatnot, I don't even bother to start those since I don't even know where to begin learning about them.
There are also more, let's say, interesting concepts like concept of swords, axes and whatnot, there are multiple ways to wield them, are you telling me to learn them all of comprehend that?
Sounds like a scam to me.
Anyways
Slowly but surely, I explored every magical room, learned the crafts by heart, used the 'industrialization' card on the magical resources after enough research on them and learned how to automise the whole process.
Some key takeaways though
Alchemy is entirely based on the principle of equivalent exchange, but how is the value decided then?
Very simple, based on how much of that something is in that world, or if the object is a mix of materials, the materials plus how long it takes an average talent to learn to make the item.
That's why I genuinely struggled, since every resource in my world is infinite and easily obtainable, they're worthless basically and it was cheaper to just make what I want to get myself.
The other question is: can I overwrite the rules?
No, I couldn't completely overwrite them, but…I could somewhat bend them. It requires a lot of prep, by a lot I mean over a year of prep for just a single transmutation.
As I got better at twisting the rules of transmutation, the time spent on the prep and the materials needed decrease, since I could eliminate irrelevant parts of the process, like when drawing the magic circle, I used my blood, yes, but…
When, the first time, I've had to combine over 1 thousand different circles into one giant circle, well it was more like a hexagon, but still. Now I need barely 650 and the circles themselves are smaller.
As you probably figured out by now, I took a liking to magic circles, because when I have to draw magic circles, the end result always looks way more badass then any other big scale magic project which uses non-magic circle tools, like for talismans I would've had to raise pillars, connect ropes with the pillars and hang the talismans on the ropes.
That's what I did with the transmutation rule bending case, since just wrapping it up with talismans didn't exactly work.
But my biggest achievement is learning how to use transmutation without any incantation or any other indicator, that increased the efficiency of my spells by a lot.
And by a lot I mean if it took me 100 mana to throw a tiny fireball with no mana control, my current mana control drops that to 26, applying transmutation drops that to 1.