He looked tired as well, so he let her go with a brief hug before he presumably went to bed too.
But once she was in her room, Lexie didn't sleep. She materialized her cards and her study tab and sat at her desk.
She was determined to do this systematically, test each variable one by one and then record her findings.
First, she would start by observing the pathways and recording her observations to establish a control. And then she would begin to test her various theories.
Lexie took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and turned her attention inward.
An unknowable amount of time later, she was observing the pathway light up with a partial activation of her
The first thing she noticed–for each activation, the pathway looked slightly different.
Not in obvious ways–a crook becoming a softer curve, an edge smoothing out. The general shape stayed the same. Aiden often hammered in that deviation from the shape of the pathway could lead the card to shut down. But there seemed to be some allowance given for very slight deviations.
But why was it happening in the first place? It wasn't like Lexie had been trying to deviate from the pathway. Was she unconsciously varying each activation? She didn’t detect it, but maybe she wasn’t paying enough attention.
She took a short break and then did it again.
One partial activation later, she finally realized the difference. She was unconsciously varying the activation, putting slightly more mana in every turn. She confirmed it by checking her mana capacity and then doing another partial activation. Then she tried it thrice more, checking what was left in store each time.
Yes, she had certainly used differing amounts of mana during every activation.
And the more mana she used, the more malleable the pathway became. It made sense since people with more mana capacity tended to have higher affinity, which had to do with how flexible one's pathways were, which helped them handle their mana better.
Even though Lexie currently had a low mana capacity, she had a high affinity so her pathways were more bendable than others. The next question was: how much more bendable? What would happen if she pushed even more mana into the pathways? At what point would the card shut off?
She would try at the end of the session, right before she took a break.
In the meantime, she also mentally recorded another observation. Using more mana generated more waste. While that should have been obvious, she hadn't noticed as much before because she'd always been so focused on reducing waste. Now, she was doing absolutely nothing to prevent waste for the sake of the experiment, so she could compare the amount of mana expended each time. She could indeed see that more waste was generated when the pathway struggled to accommodate higher amounts of mana.
And the more mana she used, the more the path bent around the force of the mana moving through it.
Again, it was a slight change, that she could only see with the insight that the black hole exercises gave her. Physically, none of the activations felt different. And without what Elvira told her, she wouldn't have even thought to check.
But now that she knew that cards had not always been so limiting, she wanted to figure out what changed and how.
She planned to push even more mana into the pathway. She had a theory that using more mana also made activation faster.
Although she hadn't checked then, she suspected that she had unconsciously proven this when she'd rescued Dewie from the bullies and when she'd gone into the [Hero] party to save Xena. She hadn't used more mana intentionally. It was the adrenaline that made her do it, and it had given her her fastest activation time yet.
Aiden had told her that cards were not great for activating under pressure, probably because while panicked, people subconsciously used too much mana, leading to the card not being activated. But it seemed that the opposite was going on with her. Why?
Was it that pushing more mana into the pathway made activation faster, provided you didn't use enough mana to shut the card off?
And if so, where did the limit lie?
Well, time to test it.
She took a deep breath and held onto the
She could probably simply force her mana cloud towards and into the card pathway as fast as she could, but that was a more inelegant method, and it could strain her internal muscles.
Or she could mimic the adrenaline and psychosomatic responses that her fight-or-flight triggered, and use that to make the mana move faster?
Hmm.
She thought for a second, then started breathing in short puffs trying to increase her heart rate. She tried to get herself in that scared and desperate state of mind, hoping that getting her blood thumping would help her push out more mana.
Luckily, it worked.
When she partially activated the card, mana rushed out of her, and the pathways shifted to accommodate it.
She was happy that she at least knew one way of using more mana without straining her internal muscles. Of course, it wasn’t an ideal situation. She didn’t want to have to raise her heart rate and simulate fear every time she wanted to generate more mana, but it would work for now.
She continued to push more mana into the card, trying to see where the limit lay. How much mana would cause the entire pathway to shut down?
Or would it not shut down as long as she continued with partial activations? Maybe only a full activation triggered the feedback loop?
In which case, was the loop triggered by a sensor at the end of the internal pathway?
No, but that wouldn’t make sense, because if it waited for her to use damaging amounts of mana in the entire pathway before it shut down, then the damage would have already been done by that point, no? Which defeated the point of using the card's safeguards.
What was she missing here?
Her temples gave a warning pinch and her eyes flashed open. She realized that it was almost midnight now and she wasn’t hearing any sound from anywhere in the house. Aiden was probably asleep.
And Lexie should be too. She'd reached the limit of what she could do tonight without giving herself a pounding headache. She would have to figure out the rest tomorrow.
But first, she had to note down her findings. She wrote:
The pathway is malleable. And it gets more bendable the more mana you pump in until you reach a threshold. More mana does not shut down partial activation though. Perhaps maximum mana might? Or maybe the
Or maybe there's another safety system somewhere else on the pathways that I'm missing?
As Lexie got into bed, the thoughts raced through her mind.
The more she thought about it, the more she was sure there was something else at play here. The card's feedback loop could not just be triggered at the end of the activation pathway. It wouldn't make sense.
Apart from the risk of already having damaged your pathway by that point, there would also be a lot of waste generated at the end. It made more sense to put the deactivation trigger sensor at the beginning of the pathway or even midway.
So why on earth was there not a mechanism at the beginning of the pathway that detected excess mana to stop partial activation?
Lexie wished there was someone she could talk about it with, but the only mage she knew was Aiden and if he knew what she was doing, he would be upset with her.
She decided that she might ask Elvira Ernest the next time she came to her school to give a talk.
She wondered what expression the woman would make if she did.
While imagining it, Lexie drifted off.
Lexie woke up before daybreak the next day to see if pushing the maximum amount of mana into a partially activated pathway would shut it off.
She tried it, using both the makeshift adrenaline boost and her mana cloud exercises to shove every mana particle close by into the
It didn't shut off.
Which meant one of two things. Either the maximum she could push–somewhere around 100 mana points–was pretty low in the grand scheme of things.
Or there was only one deactivation sensor at the end of the pathway that her partial activation hadn't reached yet, and only that triggered the shutdown.
If the latter was true, and if she found and manipulated the sensor, maybe she could avoid the feedback loop, tricking the card into allowing more power for a skill.
Maybe she could use that to tweak her lower-powered cards, like
Of course, this was all theoretical and she wouldn't know until she actually activated the card. But even just the thought of it excited her.
Her other thought was that there should have been another sensor at the beginning of the pathway that prevented her from pushing more mana in, but there wasn't. And that meant something.
What that something was, she wasn't sure.
She thought, perhaps, the reason for this was due to the elementary and low-power nature of cards. Cards were designed for beginner mages, who wouldn't necessarily have the best control of their mana and might accidentally push in too much at the start before evening out. Although cards were meant to train against such a thing, they probably had to still give allowances so that young mages could actually know where they went wrong, rather than just being frustrated because the card refused to activate.
This meant that card crafters had a complicated job due to contradictory aims: to make a card as beginner-friendly as possible, but also as safe as possible, while prioritizing strict pathway training techniques that cards were known for.
So the lack of a sensor at the beginning could be to make the card more beginner-friendly, allowing the mages to visualize the pathway itself and see where they went wrong.
But how did they prevent unintentional pathway damage? Just by making the card low-powered?
Lexie thought that there might also be another protective mechanism at play that she couldn't see. After all, even when she pushed in the majority of her mana, the waste wasn't as much as she thought it would be. Tracking waste versus the amount of activation mana used, it seemed like it was more of a logarithmic rather than linear scale, petering out at the top.
So what did that mean?
She didn't know but it was one of the questions she noted down.
To truly confirm that there was only one sensor at the end of the pathway, Lexie had a plan to intentionally veer the middle portions of the pathway right before the end. She could do it by pushing her mana slightly to the left or the right of the pathway, only slightly so she didn't trigger any other mechanisms that might have been baked into the pathway walls themselves.
This wasn't something she could have done before, as it required excellent fine mana control. But thanks to weeks of dedicated training, she was just about able to do it now.
Doing so allowed her to see where the sensor was.
As she filled the pathway, pushing the walls, using the golden mana to twist around the shape she was used to, she finally hit a point where the sensor triggered. The pathway snapped back into its original form instantly, the card shut off and the mana in it instantly dispersed through the pores as waste.
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Ah. So that's where the sensor is. Near the very end.
So the final step to increasing the power of a card was circumventing that sensor somehow.
But how?
She thought about it as the birds began to chirp outside her window.
She didn’t figure it out by the time Aiden called her down for breakfast.
Mission number one, she told herself as she got out of bed, donning fluffy slippers that she bought at the mall with her new allowance. Figure out how to bypass the sensor.
"Hi bumble bee," Aiden greeted as she sat. He slid some pancakes in front of her and her mouth instantly watered. "How did you sleep?"
"Good," she responded, avoiding his eyes somewhat.
Lexie felt a little guilty speaking to him because she knew exactly how Aiden would feel about what she was doing.
Experimenting with your pathways is dangerous and foolish, he would probably say. You can hurt yourself.
But Lexie had been learning her limits over these few weeks and knew the signs of approaching burnout or mana exhaustion. Her mana control was also good enough that she could somewhat make minor adjustments in her pathways and her visualization was good enough to see it.
So she was doing everything as safely as possible. But Aiden probably wouldn't see it that way and would blame himself for teaching her the black hole technique in the first place.
So she swallowed the guilt, ate her breakfast, and assured him she was a nice well-functioning child who would stay indoors and do the dishes once he was gone.
Rowena was apparently supposed to come over at some point and babysit, but Lexie wasn't concerned since Rowena was very good at leaving her alone.
After Aiden left, she went back up to her room to continue the experiments.
Her next step was to try to fully activate the card to see what happened. It was a little annoying because she would have to take a long rest following it, but still, it had to be done.
She got her heart rate up and activated the card, using her internal muscles to push as much mana as she could into the pathway. And she watched very closely.
She watched the pathway struggle to accommodate the rush of mana and then finally she saw it snap straight as the card shut off. She saw the pores widening slightly to allow the mana out.
And then suddenly an idea occurred to her.
The pores.
Do they work in both directions or just one way?
She thought it might be the former. She thought she saw some of the mana particles bounce out, then in, then out again, attracted to the rush of the other particles leaving.
So rather than just exiting the pathway, could she leak them in?
That was experiment number 2
Try to leak the waste mana back into the pathway.
The first thing Lexie did was check on the NET to see if this could be done. Also how safe it was.
While she didn't think she could hurt herself doing it, she wanted to make sure. She didn’t want to rupture her pathways or burn out. Or have Aiden be mad at her.
Frankly, she didn't know which of those things would feel worse. They would all equally suck.
She found a few articles about pushing mana back in through pores, but most of it had to do with unbound magic and ancient techniques of magical conservation during wartime. Of course, she couldn't access any of the full articles without a scholar ID (it would be nice if she could get her hands on Elvira’s) but she could surmise at least from the bits and pieces that she read that it was possible. Just difficult, due to the lack of knowledge about the exact mechanism of such a thing.
Thankfully, Aiden had already taught her visualization.
And then Lexie had another thought.
"Osmosis," she murmured.
Fluid moves through a partially permeable membrane when it's more concentrated on one side.
Did mana work like that? Did the pathway work as a partially permeable membrane and that was how mana kept moving out of it? From her observation, mana particles were super attracted to each other, and that should go against the basic principle of osmosis.
But then, if they were so attracted to one another, then how did they escape the pores in the first place?
Maybe osmosis and mana attraction played off each other in different ways.
To see if osmosis was in play and if she could use it to move the particles back into the pathways, she would need to somehow increase the concentration outside the pathways.
Which probably was unlikely given the way mana was dispersed in the mana cloud. Even if I move the cloud as close as possible to the pathway, it still won't match the concentration of mana within.
Yet another thing she had to figure out.
Lexie went downstairs at noon to get lunch. Rowena had still not arrived, which informed Lexie that there might have been an emergency at the Healing House. Lexie was probably supposed to call Aiden and tell him, but she wasn't going to. She could take care of herself.
She opened the fridge to get a quick bite for lunch, only to find the fridge empty. Aiden was supposed to go grocery shopping yesterday but he'd probably been too busy. She decided to do it herself. She had a lot of money sitting in her bank account and as long as she didn't buy too much, he probably wouldn't be too alarmed.
She could get him some cream to relieve the itchiness under his Tilling bands while she was at it.
Lexie trekked to the town center she saw for the first time on the way to the train station. It was a charming area, with little wooden shops and a one-storey strip of building that functioned as a grocery store.
She walked in through the sliding doors, staring down at the shelves as the system came to life to direct her. It also told her the prices of each item and what sales were currently happening.
As Lexie moved through the aisles grabbing things on autopilot and placing them in a self-rolling basket, she thought some more about enticing leakage back into pathways through the pores. She was so engrossed in her thoughts that she didn't notice the few people who were watching her, some of whom were whispering behind their hands.
Within a few minutes, she then sauntered over to the checkout line still wondering about mana attraction and osmosis.
And apparently, she was doing it out loud because while she was in the checkout line, someone said, “Quit talking to yourself, little girl. We don't need any more crazies in this town.”
Lexie’s head shot up to meet the sharp gaze of an older woman who was currently bagging up her groceries. She had fierce facial features and short hair with stiff curls that had probably sat in curlers all night. Oh, and bright purple eyebrows.
Lexie was instantly intimidated by her gaze.
“Sorry,” she said. “Just trying to make sure I got everything.”
She checked her cart surprised to see she had indeed subconsciously picked out everything she'd wanted to. Go autopilot-Lexie!
She was glad to see that her multitasking abilities hadn't diminished since she left Earth 2.
The woman analyzed her. “You’re the villain’s daughter.”
Lexie stiffened a little. “Um…yes?”
The older woman's frown deepened. She reached into the bag of groceries she’d already paid for, pulled out what looked like a slab of meat and dumped it unceremoniously in Lexie’s basket.
“Too skinny,” she said and she walked away.
Lexie's eyebrows furrowed. What just happened?
The woman at the other self-checkout across from hers also seemed similarly confused. She and Lexie blinked at each other for a second.
Then, she shrugged and Lexie looked away.
What was that about?
But the strange woman's actions only occupied her thoughts until she paid for the groceries. Once she left the store, she was back to thinking about her pathways and osmosis.
How did she make the outside of the pathway so repulsive for the mana particles while making the inside more enticing?
The carrot and the stick. She had to think about it two ways. What did mana hate? And what did mana love?
Mana hated black holes.
Mana loved itself, but it also apparently moved by osmosis.
Two contradictory things.
On Lexie's long walk back home, a tentative idea formed in her mind.
What if she took a section of the external mana cloud and shaped it around the active pathway, thereby forming a higher concentration of mana directly outside the pathway?
That could work, she thought.
She went home and put the meat away and then went up to her room to try it. She partially activated her card. But then came her first hardship.
It was supremely difficult to shape external mana outside the pathway while also doing it inside like Aiden had taught her. Not just difficult but downright impossible. Her head hurt when she tried and she gave up after the second try.
She noted down the observations she made from the second trial.
Shaping mana in two different places is difficult. Will try again when better at shaping.
Lexie took a deep breath and she went back to the osmosis thought.
She decided to go over everything she knew to see if maybe something would click.
"The mana moves body to card to body,” she muttered to herself. Body to card to body. Repeating it in her mind didn’t help her with her breakthrough. At least not yet. “Mana in body, moves into the card, back into body. But it's all one unit on the mana field." Her mind drifted down another path, following that trail of thought. "What is the link? How does it know what direction to flow in and what controls it from flowing back in the opposite direction? There must be something holding all three systems together or it would fall apart."
She sighed. One more thing she had to research.
I bet Elvira Ernest might know.
Now Lexie regretted not asking more questions and letting the conversation derail. More than anything she regretted not taking the woman's card or contact or something. What if Elvira never came back? What if she decided that middle schoolers were too awful to handle?
Maybe Lexie could track Elvira down at her college but she could just imagine how well that would go. Elvira mentioned she didn’t like talking to people and Lexie doubted she would be more endeared to a ten-year-old stalker.
Perhaps Lexie should search through the World Library to see if she could find a book on it, but from her experience, most publicly available books didn’t go in-depth into the mechanics of magic. Seemingly, the mage guild kept such things under wraps so as not to be used dangerously by people who could hurt themselves or others. To get access to the truly helpful books, she would need to be a mage or mage-in-training, or a [Scholar] in that field. Her Dad could do it if he wasn’t a [Villain]. Elvira probably could too.
But she couldn't ask any of them right now and the only card magic books she could access were all about how to start a career in cards, shaping, how cards could help you be a better person, more shaping, rules of card use, shap–
Lexie bolted upright. “Osmosis.”
The answer came to her…not the answer for the most recent question, but for the osmosis question.
Of course. It was so obvious.
With osmosis, particles moved from a higher concentration to a lower concentration. So she had to create an area with higher concentration and an area with lower concentration simultaneously.
It was a partially insane idea, but if it worked….
Then it would change everything.
Lexie scrambled out of her chair, needing to pace so that she could sort through the thoughts that were currently falling into her head.
You can't activate two cards at the same time, she started. Only consecutively if you have enough mana. Activating two cards at once will cancel each other out. Aiden said that once the first card is activated, the second card won't activate. But will the deactivation happen once the first card begins its pathway or when it has completed its pathway?
Based on everything she'd observed today and yesterday, she thought it was the latter
So, in theory, whichever card reached the end of its pathway first would be the only card activated. And the other pathway would just be shut off to generate waste.
And that waste would probably provide a high concentration of mana outside of the pathway.
Lexie bit her lip, heart racing. She tried not to get too excited as she followed the logic, in case she was off-base here.
If enough waste mana was produced from one of the two activated pathways, and they were relatively close enough, the waste mana could be used to create a situation that was more favorable for osmosis into the first pathway.
To do so, she would need large amounts of waste mana, which meant that she could only push slightly less mana into the second pathway (which she tagged as the waste pathway).
She also needed a mechanism to prevent the waste mana from dispersing evenly throughout the mana cloud. So she had to shape it outside the first pathway, like herding sheep.
She also couldn't shape inside and outside the pathway at the same time, so she could simply focus on the outside, shaping tightly to prevent any mana from escaping.
The steps played out like this in her head:
Partially activate two cards. Push more mana into the first card and a little less into the second. The second is simply there to create waste.
The waste goes into the mana field, creating a higher density of mana outside the pathways compared to inside. Shape waste around first pathway to prevent escape of mana.
Then osmosis.
She took a deep breath and repeated the steps to herself. “Ok. Let’s repeat that. Step one, is partial activation of two card pathways, one as the intended skill and the other to generate waste mana.
Then fully activate the first card to shut down the second and create waste mana. While it's going through the card and external activation phases, shape waste mana around the first pathway, and theoretically, the mana should go into the pathways through the pores." She thought about it. "Or better yet, partially activate both cards and then intentionally botch activation of waste card, by attempting to deviate from the pathway and intentionally triggering shut down. That should also create some waste and use that to completely activate the first card."
She bit her lip as she worked through it in her head, wondering if she missed something.
Could it work?
If it did...it would change everything.
Now, she needed to find cards with pathways that were the closest together. The good thing was that the deck manual showed the ideal card organization based on pathway proximity.
So
Lexie materialized those two cards.
She waited a little for her mana to refill to its absolute maximum, took a deep breath, and said, "Here goes nothing."
She partially activated the two cards, watching their pathways fill up simultaneously.
It was supremely difficult, like wrangling two different bulls. There was way too much information she had to pay attention to, too many things lit up. She almost lost focus a few times. But she refused to let it shut off, holding on and visualizing, directing some of her mana into the second pathways while focusing on the first. Her head hurt when she did it but she ignored it, pushing the first pathway towards the end.
When it was halfway there, she botched the second pathway to shut it off and mana dispersed out.
Lexie released hold of the first pathway and immediately hurried to grab onto the waste mana particles, using her phantom limbs to shape it closely along the first pathway, rushing to plug the holes from the outside. She held her breath and pushed with all her might. And then she saw. Some of the mana was pushed in.
Total activation of the card took nearly twenty-eight seconds, but it was the best she'd ever felt.
There was no mana exhaustion, maybe a mild headache but that was already going away.
And when she hurried to open her stats she saw that thing that told her she'd succeeded.
Mana: 361/400
She gaped at it. Her breath fluttered with excitement. Her heart clenched.
She had generated no waste even though she'd given the card more mana and felt the effects of the card more potently. In fact she had more mana left over. Typically, she would need to use at least 80 points of mana to get the same feeling, but she'd done it with the minimal amount of mana possible.
That was...incredible.
But by far the most incredible thing was what happened after, the notification that popped up in the corner of her vision.
Lexie gasped again.
She'd earned [Research] points.
AN: This chapter is...a lot. It's also fairly technical and I've adjusted it three times just to make sure that it would be more easily understood, but I feel some parts may be still confusing. So please don't hesitate to let me know if there's anything that needs clarification.
Thank you