Chapter 172: Rock Head
The problem was while the magic elements and the world elements seemed the same but truthfully the magic elements just imitated the things in the world and while there was some interaction between them it wasn't like he could move stone just because he had Earth affinity.
Lake knew there was a way though because the people here were clearly doing it to build their homes. Crouching down so he could touch the stone he was standing on Lake put his hand on it and saw his mana went in with little issue. It reminded him of how he was able to use Imbue to add an element to his weapon and it made him think he might need to use his own mana to do this instead if he was hoping to actually control this stone the way he wanted to be able to.
He would try that after this if he didn't have any success. Moving the earth mana around inside the stone Lake found that he wasn't causing anything to happen to the stone by doing this. Pulling his hand away Lake then used the Imbue spell to imbue the stone with the Earth mana. Like he had expected it worked but he could no longer control the mana he had put into the stone.
He had expected this because once you used the mana to cast a spell you always lost the ability to control it. This was why he had foresaw the need to use his own mana instead. Lake had never tried to imbue something with his own mana because he had assumed it was impossible because things needed to be made in a curtain way to hold your mana.
That was what Mana Vessels were but now that he was thinking about it Mana Vessels were made to have abilities not just hold mana but if he was able to just add his mana to anything his skill Magic Arrow would literally be useless. That being said he still had to try before he gave up.
Doing his best Lake got a small amount of his mana out of his hand and used Imbue before it could dissipate. When Lake did this he felt a brief second of his mana clinging to the stone but it disappeared too fast for him to consider this a success. Lake was pretty sure he might be able to get something to happen if he was just slightly better at controlling his mana when it was outside his body.
So far every time he had tried to do it he hadn't been able to keep it stable and he couldn't really even control it. Lake knew people who could control their mana very well were pretty rare so he thought maybe he was going in the wrong direction because everything here had been made in the method he was trying to figure out.
If everyone who was building these houses had to be a master at mana control he doubted this city would be anywhere near as big as it was. Once he thought this he realized something he had seen in the past might be the answer to his problem. When he had been fighting that guy for that shield he had seen them use a spell to repair their weapon.
That was an example of what he was trying to do so what he needed was some kind of spell he would need to unlock by using Earth magic. That meant he was going to have to spend some time trying to understand the element so he could train in its principles so he could get to the next level of its spells.
As he was looking at it all he could identify was the fact it had a color and that it was solid. He was sure earth would be a simple element but he doubted it would be to that level. There were probably one or two other main principles that would affect the element in a big way and to find those he would have to mess around with the mana.
Casting Stone Throw Lake watched the way the rock he had made crumbled as it hit a wall and wondered if weight would be a principle he could control. Another could be how hard it was but he was pretty sure that would be part of the solid principle. The weight thing was definitely something worth investigating though.
After a while of messing around with the mana Lake realized weight was also probably part of the solid principle as well because as you condensed something to make it more dense its weight rose as well. That meant he had been wasting his time for the last few minutes and he was still stuck at square one.
Since the solid principle was the only one other than the color he could identify after all this trying made him start to think it might actually be the only thing in the earth element but just because that was true didn't mean it was simple because earth had a lot of different types of solids it dealt with.
Soil and stone were the main two he was sure, but there was also things like sand and he was sure someone was using lava magic somewhere with earth magic. He was sure it took a lot of practice in the solid principle to turn a rock into sand and then back into solid stone and he was sure that was what he was trying to do to get through these peoples houses.
Lake already knew some training methods for the solid principle so he could just try using those for the Earth element and see if he was able to do anything with the more dense mana he created through this method. Making the cube of mana from the wind training he had done, Lake started to compress the element down and it didn't take long for him to notice a difference between what he was doing now and when he had done it with the Wind mana previously.
The Earth mana wasn't trying to fight him and almost seemed happy that he was doing what he was doing to it. Lake knew the mana you gathered technically belonged to the gods and sort of had its own personality but he hadn't expected it to be so different.
As he went he saw the brown color slowly get darker and darker until it almost looked like the dark stone a lot of the buildings here were made from and not wanting to stop until he reached his limit, Lake kept going.
After a while Lake was already on the fifth round of compression and with how big he had made the cube during the stretching part of the exercise Lake was pretty sure this stone mana was at least a hundred times what it had been when he had gathered it and he still wasn't feeling any resistance from the mana.
At this point the mana didn't even look like mana and instead looked like a cube of polished dark gray obsidian but since he still wasn't at his limit he started the sixth round of stretching which he was sure was going to take a while even here because you couldn't allow the mana density to drop as you made the cube grow in size meaning he was having to add hundreds of times the mana each second as he had for the first round.
As he was slowly filling the cube, Lake couldn't help but think he was sure he would be having an easier time if his affinity for stone wasn't still the lowest possible. If he had leveled Earth Mage he would have gotten a skill that would have raised his affinity by at least a level which would have increased the speed at which he would be able to gather Earth mana.
Once he was able to get the cube to full size Lake started the compression once again and noticed this time the stone didn't seem to be that happy and he was pretty sure he could tell why with his eyes. The cube was starting to get a metallic sheen to it and Lake remembered a passage he had read in a book about how metal had been part of earth until the god of metal had ascended and made it its own thing.
Lake guessed the god of earth's mana realized it was doing something that was technically not within its uses and wanted to stop. Lake was trying to learn earth magic at the moment so he stopped and started uncompressing the cube which he had some difficulties in doing but was able to get it back within the realm of stone and using a small amount of the mana he split from the massive amount he had made Lake formed it into a ball and when he heard a voice whisper a spell name to him he repeated it. "Boulder."
Lake launched a massive rock out towards the wall he had been using to test his spells this whole time and regretted doing so almost instantly. He had been caught up in the moment and hadn't thought about what would happen if he was to cast a spell with the mana he had condensed.
Turning to run, Lake remembered what his original purpose for doing this had been and when he heard the huge crashing sound behind him he realized just how big of a screw up this had truly been. Turning his head, Lake was able to see the boulder he had launched had gone through the wall and was still going through every obstacle it met.
The only good thing about this was he was pretty sure the part of town he had just destroyed was pretty much uninhabited because he had run pretty far from the house with people when he had set off their alarm. That being said he was sure people were on their way now to investigate what had happened.
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