Supreme Magus novel Chapter 2007

Chapter 2007 Memory Crystal (Part 3)

Back when Balkor had developed memory crystals to guide his thralls, he hadn't had to deal with conflicting willpowers since what he imbued them with was his own personality. The limit of his memory crystal was that they couldn't be used by other people and that the knowledge stored inside of them didn't last for long.

Balkor's method consisted of storing the crystals inside a powerful array that insulated them from the world energy. The gemstones were left with nothing to feed on but the magical formation which was fueled by Balkor's mana.

The world energy stored inside the crystals would be slowly replaced by his spell that was imbued with his willpower, grudge, and anger, turning them into memory crystals.

The problem with this method was that once the crystals were removed from the arrays, the natural flow of world energy would be restored, flushing the mana out.

It was the reason Balkor's attacks on the Kingdom and his undead couldn't last more than three days.

It was still a perfect method to craft a powerful and loyal undead army, but pointless to anyone but him.

People like Jirni would have been unable to trigger his mana and even if they did, they would have been flooded by Balkor's stored emotions, ending up brainwashed or dead.

Lith had found the solution to both problems by studying of the Origin Flames flasks and the orc shaman's crystal bearing Vastor's device.

From the former, the research team had learned how to create an enchantment capable of storing two imprints in parallel. The method allowed the willpower of the maker of the Origin Flames to be retained without interfering with that of the buyer.

To achieve this effect, solely the inner half of the crystal/flask had to be imbued with willpower from the caster, leaving the other half free to host the willpower of the buyer thanks to a special insulant placed in between the layers.

Much to no one's surprise, the insulant required was Darwen.

Placing the Darwen's gel in the flask was easy since each flask actually consisted of two opportunely shaped crystals fused together. Using such a method to reproduce the Spell Hoarding Cube was impossible though.

To hold both spells and willpower, the crystal needed all of its power, and cutting a gemstone into two would also halve its effectiveness. It was the Cube's role to bear the layer of Darwen and allow the willpower of its wielder and that of the spells' casters to interact safely.

Yet it would still be useless if not for the orc shaman's crystal that Lith had stolen during his boot camp. Thanks to Vastor's device and the notes left from the late Manohar, the Archmages had discovered the secret to crafting a perfect memory crystal.

By tracking the mana imbued by the shamans over the centuries, the device had allowed the Archmages to find anomalies in the crystals, and only after a careful study had they understood the significance of the phenomenon.

Injecting willpower into a crystal like the shamans did or using both mana and willpower like Balkor were both highly inefficient methods due to the dynamic equilibrium that the world energy inside the crystal reached with the external one.

Without constant injections of mana and willpower, it took years for a crystal to retain even a shred of its user's personality simply because their essence would be scattered throughout the crystal and the stored mana would last for a short time.