“Meaning that either he was willingly risking our health by giving us an amount of mana that would be unsafe, or, more likely, that he has a method to give people large amounts of power without compromising their safety.” I took a breath. “I want that method.”
Sheridan sighed and scratched the back of their head. “Of course you do. Don’t you have any easy questions?”
I chuckled. “What’s your favorite food?”
“I said easy ones. Okay. What are you offering?”
“For the first question or the second one?”
“For information about Katashi’s methods.”
I reached into my bag and pulled out the mana regeneration bracer. “I tested it. It works.”
Sheridan shook their head. “A few weeks of testing isn’t going to be enough to satisfy me.”
I’d expected that. I pulled a hairpin out of my hair and offered it to Sheridan.
“What’s this?”
I smiled. “I could tell you for the right price.”
“You’re cute, but hiding the value of what you’re negotiating with isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
“It’s a magic lockpick. Put it into a lock, it opens it.”
Sheridan turned the hairpin over in their hand, considering. “Interesting, but no.” They handed it back to me. “I’ll make this a little easier for you. Use your Arbiter attunement on me.”
“That’s all?”
“I want to know what it feels like. And it should permanently increase my mana, if only a little. That’s nothing to scoff at, even at my level of power.”
I nodded. Sheridan extended their hand. I removed my glove, took Sheridan’s hand, and channeled mana into them.
“Tingles a little bit.”
“Don’t move.”
“Sorry, sorry.”
I continued concentrating until my hand burned, then released Sheridan’s hand.
“Interesting.” Sheridan flexed their hand experimentally, examining it. “Thank you for the experience.”
“So, what was the hidden objective behind that?”
Sheridan’s eyes fluttered. “What makes you say I had a hidden objective?”
“Your personality.”
“An excellent answer.” Sheridan smirked. “And you’re right, but I won’t answer that particular question. You’ll find out eventually. As for your previous question, however, I can give a little bit of insight.”
“What can you tell me?”
Sheridan leaned back. “Are you aware that attunement designs have changed over time?”
I nodded. “There are different generations of attunements. Either the goddess herself or the visages are still improving them somehow.”
“Correct. One of the elements of attunement design that has changed over time is how quickly they can grow.”
“Meaning that it used to be harder for your attunements to get stronger?”
“Mostly easier, I believe, although I haven’t studied the details of every individual generation of attunement.”
“But why make those sorts of changes? And if there are mechanisms in place for that, how do they work?”
“Excellent questions.” Sheridan retrieved something from their pouch; the mana watch I’d given them. “You made this little device to measure the amount of mana that someone can safely use.
“Every attunement has something similar built in. Or, several somethings, really. Functions for measuring the amount of mana in the body, and storage functions that determine how the values have changed over time. And also functions for determining the health of the body.”
I could follow the logic. “So, the attunement stores what your last maximum mana was, and continuously tests you to see if you meet certain conditions. If you do, your maximum mana increases.”
“And at certain thresholds, the attunement unlocks entirely new functions,” Sheridan explained. “Carnelian, Sunstone, all of those levels are mana thresholds built into the attunement. And they did not always exist.”
That was new to me. “They didn’t?”
“The first attunements just gave all their abilities to the attuned immediately. The result was a form of mana poisoning that was almost always fatal. Attunement levels and the safety thresholds for mana growth are designed to prevent that.”
“Okay, that explains a bit, but it doesn’t…” I stopped as it began to make sense to me. “Katashi didn’t make my friend’s attunement more powerful. He fundamentally changed how it works.”
Sheridan nodded. “I can’t say for certain, but that’s what I suspect. He most likely changed the values in the rune to say that she was ready for a higher level attunement. In theory, the safety functions in the attunement would still prevent it from flooding their body with too much mana all at once. Your friend’s mana capacity probably increased gradually over the course of several weeks at the maximum possible rate that the attunement deemed safe.”
And Marissa spent those few weeks feeling sick and under-performing.
Still, I knew a lot of people that would be happy to be able to have their attunement level increased rapidly without any significant effort.
There had to be a greater downside than I was seeing.
“If that sort of thing is a possibility, why aren’t all of our attunements designed to increase in power automatically by a certain rate every day?”
“Every time you cast a spell, your body acclimates to using that type of mana. Using mana types and amounts that your body has not acclimated to properly can cause your body harm. If your body had a tremendous amount of mana, but you had never used mana before, and you cast a spell that used even a tenth of it, you’d kill yourself. Because of that, attunements generally require a degree of mana usage before your capacity increases.”
“Why would Katashi make an exception, then, if it’s an important safety function?”
“He was probably able to evaluate your friend’s situation and determine that they could handle it. For example, some types of mana are safer than others. You can safely have — and wield — more life mana in your body than fire mana. If your friend was a Mender, for example, Katashi may have been able to increase their power with minimal risk.”
I nodded. Marissa was a Guardian, and life was one of her mana types. Her attunement was generally defensive in nature. It made sense to me that there would be a lower risk of damage from saturating her body with extra mana.
She also trained constantly, and it was possible her body was able to handle a higher amount of mana than what her attunement was giving her.
The overall answer made sense to me, but it was disappointing. It meant that there was no quick and easy way for me to just change someone’s attunement to Emerald and give them a tremendous amount of power in an instant, even if I figured out how Katashi had done what he had done.
Still, there were avenues I could explore with this knowledge. If Katashi somehow knew that Marissa could handle more mana than she was currently getting, maybe I could figure out how he knew that and learn to do the same. If so, I could potentially accelerate the power growth of other people when it was safe to do so.
And there were some other options I’d have to think about as well.
“What about things that increase mana capacity without exercise, like lavris fruits and enhancement elixirs? How do they work?”
“I’m not an expert on those, but there are a few ways they could work. Lavris fruits and similar foods probably strengthen the body in ways that help it tolerate more mana. It’s possible they also simply use up some of your mana in the digestion process, which would effectively be the same as casting a spell.”