“VERY IMPRESSIVE,” Flowing Silver acknowledged. “STORING THE COMPRESSED MANA FOR ASSIMILATION FROM THE OTHER SIDE IS FAR FASTER THAN DOING EACH POINT IN SUCCESSION... IF IT CAN BE DONE?” He’d figured out what I meant to do, having been there since the beginning as I made up the Syzygy False Starry Heavens to store the Mana in.

Each Starry Heavens had to be different or it set up a very destructive resonance that rapidly blew any replicated patterns apart. That meant I had to set up over a thousand different valid Sage spells to do what I was doing.

It was a LOT of Sage spells, a whole gods-damned library worth of Sage spells already put together in my head.

Sama was tasked with, as one of her more whimsical jobs, breaking into the libraries of Great Families and powerful organizations and stealing their Sage spells and Archmagery versions thereof. We also had a lot of people around the world watching for the use of said spells and using Divinations to replicate, record, and write down such variations for use by others.

The Mage Associations were the biggest holders of such spells, naturally enough, and exploited the fact to rope in more Sages. That a large number of them used Dark Mana and the Elements thereof was merely incidental to them, and really, to me, too, at this point. I just needed valid Starry Heavens, and while I could use Dark Mana, I didn’t need to do so. The Sage spells were splayed across my Syzygy in patterns, all kinds of them. The biggest benefit I had for them was for use as instant Counterspells, and knowing exactly what each and every spell did so I could unravel them more easily and recognize them when being Cast.

That wasn’t to say that there weren’t more unique Sage spells out there, but they’d only be a surprise to me once, and then I’d replicate and Write them out, and they wouldn’t be someone’s secret ace in the hole any longer.

You’d think that 1028 Sage spells was a hard number to reach, given the relative rarity of Sages, but... basically every single Sage had at least one unique spell of their own, and all the Sages out there had been associated with the Mage Association or a Great Family for hundreds of years. Borrowing spells from an ancestor instead of making your own actually could stunt your own growth if that was ALL you did as a Sage, and that even applied to me. So, there were actually hundreds of different Sage spells out there, some overlapping, most not, in both mono and overlapping Elements in many combinations that were alternately bog normal, inspired lunacy, clever trickery, sophisticated complexity, and crafted solidity.

I admit I enjoyed going over all those Sage spells and working them out, analyzing the intellects and mindsets of their inventors. It was plain that many of them came from arrogant, overbearing, presumptuous, and entitled sorts determined to make their mark on the world, while others were gems of generosity and benevolence meant to aid any Sage who could Cast them on behalf of humanity.

A few Good Sages, and many, many proud arseholes.

Making Sage versions of Valenced spells was a perfectly acceptable thing to do for innovation, especially with the time constraints I was under. I wasn’t an Egghead who could think up a totally new spell in a day or two, I was a Warcaster that could take an existing spell that worked and make it dance a tango.

I think I would have freaked out any other Sage alive if I let them know I could basically insta-Cast 1028 different Sage spells. Many probably had no idea so many such spells existed, or that actual new Starry Heavens could be derived from them.

New Starry Heavens meant a 20-30% or greater boost to the spell, as it was no longer being ‘bent’ from a ‘universal’ Sage spell. It placed much greater demands on Intellect to learn them, of course, but that was what wizards did!

Wizards also got ahead of themselves on rote drudgery and tried to figure out better ways to do such things, while mages just sighed and did what they had to do.

Silly mages.

I pulled in 360 Mana, checked it to make sure it was correct, and Ignited it.

Burn, Compress.

The basis of this check was nearly twenty points higher to do the Compression, the Burning actually didn’t take any longer. Ignite, swirl, form Arcane energy, fine enough.

This should have taken thirty-six minutes. I did the first ten Mana, got comfortable with the pattern, and accelerated the skill check.

Twenty more Mana flashed by in the next minute, I nodded, and bore down on the third check.

Forty Mana per minute flowed into the complex pattern, hotter, brighter, and smaller than the 40xMana, compressing ten times the power into the same amount of space.

I held that for one minute, and then Focused.

Eighty Mana per minute into a 360xMana Point!

I noted Flowing Silver Emperor’s eye was very narrow and focused on what I was doing. He simply didn’t have a skill modifier high enough to do what I was doing, processing that level of Mana at eight times the normal rate!

What should have taken thirty-six minutes to process I blitzed through and completed in under seven, and only then because I started off slow.

Flowing Silver huffed to see the completed Mana Point, hard and shining with Arcane light there in my hand. I pressed it into the second Soul Star Diamond Pearl, plink!

It shimmered and radiated through the free-floating Mana inside the Pearl, once again starting a resonance effect and lining the Mana up in a complex form.

That left the 4000xMana of a High Emperor, where I ran into two problems.

One, I couldn’t gather a single shot of 4000 Mana, I was limited to the 2401 of my Stars. I could multiply that with the various doubling effects, but it wasn’t the same thing. This was one effect, not mirrors of it.

Second, I didn’t understand the full Pattern needed for the 4000xMana, a sign that I didn’t have the skill Ranks to comprehend the interactions of the Mana or the profound nature of the feat.

But then, I could always cheat.

Arcane Fusion let me Cast two separate spells at the same time. Since I had XIV Slots, I could totally do that with Sageworthy Valence IX+ spells. Technically, to contain Sage spells, I also had to use Sage Mana on the Arcane Fusion, meaning a triple Starry Heaven... and yet, it was one spell shooting off two other spells.

Secondly, I didn’t need to make 4000x right now, I only needed 3600x. I would need 4000x when I put the 400x and 3600x together!

I put up the Arcane Fusion, wrapped the 3600 Mana I needed into the spell, and started to grind again.

Flowing Silver Emperor started holding His breath as He watched me work.

The 4000xMana took a base 100 check, the 3600x wasn’t quite so high... so it gave me room to accelerate twice, as I could pull off Concentration to 140+.

And that’s what I did. Soon enough the weighty, lengthy period of time needed to make a near-High Emperor quality Point of Mana was sprinting along at 40 Mana per minute, taking a near seven-hour duration down to a mere ninety minutes.

Flowing Silver could tell it wasn’t a High Emperor Mana Point, but He could also tell that added to a True Emperor Point it would form one. He watched in breathless amazement as I went through the Compression in an impossibly short period of time, faster than He had ever been able to do such a thing Himself, and barely stopped Himself from shaking His head in disbelief, for fear of distracting me.

Ninety minutes passed, and the 3600xMana Highpoint hovered in between my hands, too blinding for a normal person to look at.

I tossed it into the Soul Star Diamond Pearl made from the Undead High Emperor, and it blazed brightly in the Mana Cloud within, a fascinatingly complex and shimmering Pattern of living Mana instantly coalescing about it.

A 40x Mana Point that should take four minutes to apply I could do in twenty-four seconds, applying the whole mass at once to the 4xMana already there, integrating it into it and forming the whole. I could make the 36x Point in 18 seconds.

A 400xMana Point that should take forty minutes to apply I could do in four minutes. I could make the 360x Point in just over five minutes.

A 4000xMana Highpoint that should take almost seven hours I’d be able to get done in forty minutes. The 3600x Point, instead of taking six hours to form, I could do in ninety minutes.

It was so much faster than applying one Mana point at a time that it wasn’t funny. The additional care that was needed did slow me down at the higher stages, but the base 600/hour was going to be the equivalent of 3.6k an hour with this method for x40 Mana, 2.4k for x400, and 1.6k for x4000.

And there wasn’t nothing that said I couldn’t make a Mastery to make it all even faster.

Current end goal: 1028 False Starry Heavens, times 2401 False Stars, x4000 Mana, going to increase quickly enough...

,872,912,000 potential Mana... and only going to go up.

At the rate of one Mana per second, 14.4k a day, 365 days a year... 5.265 million a year. It was going to take me nearly two thousand years to actually fill my Syzygy doing it the way the Great Beasts did.

No wonder they were so damn old.

“It’s too damn slow,” I muttered to no one, and carefully didn’t look back to see the absolute incredulity in Flowing Silver Emperor’s eye at that statement.

I was sure there was a straight-up Feat and/or Mastery to increase Compression Speed.

The problem was that if I ever wanted to be able to Cast Emperor-worthy spell multipliers, I would need that 4000xMana, and I wasn’t going to reach that in a human lifetime with this method.

Okay, I had to adjust how I was going to be doing things, then.

Sure, my entire Arcane Pool could do this. Too bad I needed access to that high-end Mana now, so that was absolutely useless having access to all of it. All the work painting a thousand Sage Starry Heavens across my Syzygy was nice, but I didn’t need them.

I needed the higher quality!

My fuguing thoughtstreams paused in their applications. I was working through the 4xMana, over two-thirds done, and then I could start on the 40x.

If I split off Soul Essence on its own, that was a mere 80 I needed to complete! I could then begin the 40xMana applications IMMEDIATELY! Furthermore, I would be done with the False Stars in those in merely twelve days, and be working on the x400!

I was such a goddamn idiot at times.

Soul Essence was moved immediately out of the existing Arcane Pool, since it could form False Stars all by itself, the other energies were basically mimicking it through the Pool. Ruthlessly, my thoughtstreams grabbed the needed Mana out of the False Stars still in the Pool, de-energizing those Starry Heavens so I didn’t need to worry about Resonance effects.

Since the Mana was already at x4 instead of normal and had already been Burned, the Compression took only six seconds, and then it was adding in the last four Mana, once per six seconds.

Done, and my first 40xMana Point flared to life, while nine False Stars went dark inside me!