The Succubus

8

Lying in the dark, Matt cradled the pad in his hands. He had tried to get some rest, but the anticipation and thrill of getting away with the theft kept sleep away.

He looked at his pad again. This was his lifeline. Some part of him kept expecting Benny or the party leader to burst into the room and snatch the pad and skill shard out of his hands. But all was gloriously quiet.

Delving without a skill was common at lower levels, but the casualty rate was much higher for those unlucky delvers.

Matt already decided he wouldn't let this pad out of his sight for the remainder of the year. This skill was near perfect for him. A channeled skill would allow him to use his full 1 mana per second of mana generation while he was under 0.1 mana.

Matt used his PlanetNet voucher time to check on the status of the Glesie public rift. The purchase price for a spot was still ten thousand credits and holding steady. A while back, it had spiked to eleven thousand for a few weeks before dropping to nine thousand for a bit. Now, it was back at its usual price. He then quickly searched for average mana stats for lower Tier mages and found a guide put out by the Juniper family that had the barony over the planet.

The guide was only recommended up to Tier 3, then more advanced versions had to be purchased. It focused on directed mana cultivation and its three aspects: Maximum Mana, Mana Regeneration, and Mana Concentration.

Fascinated, Matt read on. The orphanage hadn’t covered the nuances of directed cultivation. They taught that as you gathered essence from killing monsters in rifts, the person dealing the final hit absorbed the lion’s share of the essence.

Most teams wore devices that automatically divided the essence amongst the rest of the party. Ratios could even be changed so one person could get nearly all the essence, which was how crafters got the necessary essence to advance without having the skills to fight monsters themselves.

Once out of the rift, you would process the essence, allocating it to either your body or mana.

Cultivators could direct how they allocated the essence. Physical and mana were the two sides of cultivation. After that choice, you could target sub aspects of each, which was called 'directed cultivation,’

The other option was to let the essence go where it was needed, called undirected cultivation. It was an easy way to shore up weak areas.

The guide described directed cultivation as making mountains to have specialization and letting the valleys get filled in, raising the baseline to build your peaks even higher, is called undirected cultivation.

All power needed a strong foundation, after all.

None of these details were discussed at the orphanage. They were just told that the group they joined would have their own guidelines and recommendations specific to their position.

The guide said the goal at Tier 3 was to have 1,000 mana and Mana Regeneration of about one mana every two and a half minutes. The guide explained this was the ideal ratio for directed mana cultivation at lower levels, with 70% directed mana cultivation and 30% undirected physical.

The guide strongly warned against attempting directed physical cultivation until Tier 3, and only when the appropriate classes were taken. The guides specifically for it were not available until after the classes were taken.

What's the difference? Why are you allowed directed mana cultivation but not physical at Tier 1? Matt wondered but got back to reading. The information was interesting but not particularly useful until he could collect essence in a rift. It was still something to do, so he kept reading while he couldn't sleep.

The general idea was that a mage would regenerate 576 mana a day. It also wasn't recommended to delve more than once every three days, and delve slots reflected that. That would let mages fully regenerate their mana pool in under two days. That extra mana could then be used for practicing their skills or stored in rechargeable mana stones for quick mana recharges in a rift.

The rechargeable mana stones were particularly recommended. Because it was mana from your own mana pool, there wouldn't be any time needed to aspect the mana to match your natural mana pool. The guide also recommended emptying and refilling any low Tier rechargeable mana stones after a week because the mana would un-aspect, turning into ambient mana.

Un-aspected mana was great for powering devices but was hell on a cultivator's mana channels. Directly using it could cause near permanent damage.

The last and most interesting part of the guide covered Mana Concentration. Allocating any essence into Mana Concentration before Tier 5 was flatly not recommended.

Mana Concentration shrunk your other mana cultivation aspects to make your mana denser and more concentrated. Denser mana gave your spells more power for the same cost, but the returns were terrible.

To double the power of a spell with Mana Concentration, a Tier 5 mage would need to diminish their base Maximum Mana and Mana Regeneration values back to what they had at Tier 1. That was at a 70% essence allocation to mana through all the preceding Tiers.

That brought Matt up short.

What an insanely bad return.

The amount of essence a Tier 5 had would be massive. In the early Tiers, advancing to the next Tier required ten times the essence of the previous one. If it took ten essence to reach the peak of Tier 1, then it took a hundred to reach the peak of Tier 2.

It was why people didn't farm low Tier rifts despite them being safer. The monsters didn't have enough essence to make it worthwhile. Killing a single monster in a Tier 2 rift was worth the equivalent of killing a dozen in a Tier 1 rift.

The amount of mana and Mana Regeneration a Tier 5 mage would have would be insane, completely incomparable to a Tier 3. Doubling the power of each skill would force them to give all of that up to reset back to the base of around 100 mana and one mana every twenty minutes.

Mana Concentration, for all its downsides, was an important part of mana cultivation. Maximum Mana and Mana Regeneration had diminishing returns when applied to the allocated essence after a certain point. The spirit could only grow so much without strain, and Mana Concentration increased that cap farther than the cultivators lost from Maximum Mana and Mana Regeneration when allocating to it, eventually allowing a mage to have millions of mana.

Which just proved going from Tier 5 mana levels to Tier 1 wasn’t worth it. But, then again, this guide was tailored for lower Tier mages. Matt doubted this was the whole truth.

It was a good warning, though. Matt was sure many a young mage would have crippled their mana cultivation early on without that warning. They would be in the same boat as Matt, unable to cast a single spell but without his advantages.

Matt stroked his pad. His Tier 1 Talent wasn't perfect, but this skill shard synergized with it amazingly.

Before falling asleep, he plugged the pad in so the mana battery would charge overnight and tried to drift off.