Blacksmith vs. the System

Once I was on the fourth floor, I was ready to experiment once more. And, my first objective was to figure out a way to use mana offensively.

It didn't look like the most effective strategy at first glance, but I had seen Maria fight. More importantly, with my class suddenly giving me more Essence than Strength, and with enough Wisdom to match Dexterity, I could actually be an effective mage.

One that is more than merely effective even, considering the amount of mana the dungeon could potentially supply me.

"If only there were no drawbacks to the connection," I muttered. Admittedly, I didn't know what side effects there were, except for the fact that I couldn't move too far away from the dungeon, but I was almost certainly sure that there were many.

Otherwise, the dungeons would have been even more valuable commodities.

I raised my hand to target a thick iron wall, not willing to spend time on baseless theorizing when there was practical experimentation to be conducted. First, I started by targeting the wall from some distance, throwing simple balls of mana, more as a control group than anything else. Soon, I was forcing the mana to change shape, which didn't go as well as I had hoped.

Even sending a simple slash, which I could achieve through my sword easily, proved to be more useless than expected. Which was a surprise.

"Maybe the skill was doing more of the work than I had realized," I muttered. Just to test it, I created a dagger that was too small to trigger the sword skill before I repeated the trick.

Only for a slash to bite deep into the wall.

"Or, the weapon is doing more of the work," I realized, correcting my thoughts. Before gaining Wisdom, I would have just written it off as the dagger somehow imbuing a sharp edge, but the Wisdom allowed me to notice something interesting.

Even without the skill, the weapon was adding something to it. A metaphysical weight that I could detect through Wisdom.

I sighed, letting my mind wander as I tried to understand the additional reality. Everything I had done until today treated mana as a natural force, not unlike electricity. Yes, it was more mysterious and more unstable, but ultimately, it was merely a medium of energy. An idea that was helped by the fact that both Maria's spells, and every single enchantment I had been able to get my hands on working on the same principles.

"Maybe I was wrong." Once again I sat down, trying to understand. Yes, I could repeat the various mana tricks hundreds of times to get a better sense, but that would be the approach of a barbarian.

Instead, I started pondering upon the simple idea. What was a concept? "Or, is a concept even an appropriate definition in the first place," I muttered, realizing that I was falling for a dangerous fallacy. It was Maria who referred to Wisdom-based casting as conceptual casting, and while it didn't seem like an inaccurate description, it didn't necessarily mean that it fulfilled the whole range.

Unfortunately, a brief check of the skill stones didn't reveal any new available skills -- well, other than the upgraded versions of the ones that I already had — which meant that there was no Wisdom-based casting available.

My Meditation was the only Wisdom-based skill I currently had, but I was reluctant to experiment with it, afraid of how things might end up.

"Back to the drawing board." I moved to the anvil. Just because I had a new stat that was linked with the idea of sudden philo.optical enlightenment didn't mean I would start sitting under a waterfall searching for epiphanies.

I was a scientist, and a fancy new stat didn't change it.

And, like every experiment, a granular, systemic experimentation was the way to start. The daggers were a good basis, especially since I realized that the slash had some kind of conceptual existence. I had forged four types of daggers — single-edged with a curve, straight double-edged, modern combat knife, and stiletto — three different base materials — copper, iron, and silver — and four different qualities — ordinary, with dungeon materials, ordinary mana alloys, and epic quality.

Admittedly, it was a trivial experiment. My earlier experience had shown that epic daggers were much better at conveying stronger mana attacks, which implied that they would be the obvious winners; but that was not a good excuse for a lack of scientific rigor.

Sometimes, experiments existed to create a baseline —

"And, sometimes, they existed to teach arrogant scientists a lesson," I muttered as I finished a mana attack from the first set of knives — copper, straight double-edged — only to find a very surprising result.

The 'conceptual weight' — which I decided to continue using until I could find a better definition — from the ordinary dagger was the strongest, while the epic dagger was the weakest, which promptly threw my assumptions into the garbage bin.

It didn't mean that the mana attack from the epic dagger was any weaker. It was still by far the strongest, the most damaging, but for some reason, the conceptual weight I could feel was weaker.

It had multiple possible reasons for it, the simplest two being the stronger attacks shadowed the conceptual weight and made it harder to detect … my theory was completely wrong, and it had nothing to do with the ranged mana attacks from the weapons.

Naturally, those two reasons were nowhere close to creating a comprehensive space for all valid reasons, but they had a good start to explore. Even if they didn't give me the rule I had been trying to unearth, they would point me in a better direction.

"At least, they should," I muttered, but before I moved to the next set, I used every other dagger I had crafted, even repeating the process with attacks of different strength.

As I worked, I realized another nice benefit of having Wisdom. I didn't actually need to write down the experiment results. They were clear in my mind, like I had spent a night working hard to memorize them verbatim before a critical meeting.

I still wrote them down, including the appropriate notation and labeling, and I even placed them on a new shelf with the appropriate daggers.

Having magical stats wasn't a good excuse to bypass proper experiment procedures. History was filled with people who decided they were too good to benefit from proper scientific procedures, often ending in humiliation.

And, with the way the world was, I doubted that my bad end would be limited to career death.

Once the experiment was completed, I noticed some interesting details. The type of metal didn't play a role when it came to conceptual weight, but whether it was magical or not, or whether it included dungeon materials did.

Why, I didn't have the slightest idea.

Meanwhile, by alternating the mana strength of the attacks, I was halfway convinced that the attack strength or integrity didn't conceal the conceptual weight, nor did it exactly enhance it. As for whether it had anything to do with the damage, it was harder to test.

"How about a composite dagger," I muttered after sitting for a minute, remembering how I used various weapons with gold and silver cores with various geometric shapes to channel the mana and vitality, therefore enhancing the efficiency significantly.

They allowed me to use more complicated attacks, which allowed me to improve my Rare combat skills rapidly. It was time to use them to increase my understanding of concepts. I rapidly forged one composite dagger and used it for a ranged mana attack.

It didn't go exactly as smoothly as I had expected.

The attack from the composite dagger had an even weaker presence. Significantly so, to the point of being shocking. The conceptual weight was not something that was easy to quantify other than identifying them as lesser and greater in intensity, but if the conceptual weight of an ordinary dagger was a hundred, the epic one had a weight of about seventy.

The composite dagger, which had created a beautiful curved mana slash that had cut even deeper than the epic dagger I had used earlier, only had the presence of one.

"It doesn't make sense," I muttered, frustration battling with excitement. Frustration because my initial hypotheses that seemed obvious, to the point that I only checked them to fulfill the principles of scientific rigor rather than expecting them to be inaccurate, turned out to be flat-out wrong, in a way that didn't make any sense.

The excitement was there, because such surprising results had the potential to turn into something truly incredible.

Unfortunately, there was also a drawback. Predictable results meant experimentation horizons were equally predictable, while radical results represented a quagmire, the kind that consumed the lives and the ambitions of the scientists.

I wasn't afraid of tackling that, of course, but the growing number of lizards, not to mention the other threats meant that I didn't have the luxury of ignoring the low-hanging fruits that could improve my combat potential.

It was time to move to the fifth floor to hunt.

I needed more skill stones.

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