[NR] Courtney Wrong? - Chapter 616

Time had passed and Jason now sat in his VR room, staring at the first draft of his eventual book. During its layout and creation, he had realized something that made the process both easier and harder to the extreme. Problems got shifted around or replaced, but the list didn’t get shorter.

The biggest discovery was Courtney had been wrong and Energy might be the best power of the three for writing a tome. Which isn’t an official term like grimoire, but most accept that a tome has magically animated parts, information impressing itself on your mind, or really any magical effect that makes it more than just a book.

The debate for what counts as a tome comes into play as people have argued since before the beginning of NeoRealm’s written history. With one of the most common points of disagreement, being whether the effect of increased learning speed counts.

After all, that can be any number of things. Maybe the System is the one causing the effect and not actually the book itself. And sure, maybe a good quality book does increase learning speed, but that doesn’t have to be a “magic” effect. It might instead be the System judging the you present the information and slapping a label on the description to denote the book is easier to learn from by natural means. Or it could be a mix of all three and more.

Anyway, Jason was definitely making the most tome-like book that even by the current loosest standards would not be a tome, though most would certainly call it as such if they didn’t know the details. After all, to be a tome, a book has to be magical. There isn’t even a good word for what his book will be and so once the broader intellectual sorts discover the possibility of an Energy-based tome they’ll give it some stupid designation and everyone will just call them a tome. Maybe an “energized tome” if they want to be specific.

Jason couldn’t help but sigh to himself as he thought back to his discovery. Magic made tomes because Mana can extend outside of the body. Except there’s a catch. Magic leaves, but the Mana doesn’t return. So for a magic tome to be anything besides a consumable, it needs to absorb environmental Mana and will have a cool down for how often you can use the tome.

For many books that limit their effects, the cool down can even be short enough as to not be a limiting factor. Other books might use so much power that it can’t recharge at all and those tend to be one use items. Sort of like a scroll, but so much more powerful, even if not directed towards a combat use.

Energy, unlike Mana, both leaves and returns to the body. Can you send out Energy and not have it return? Sure, but isn’t how it is meant to be used.

What that means for an Energy-based tome is the effects are self contained. Does it lose some of its Energy when used? Sure, but the amount lost is so small it would take days of constant use to deplete and even the slowest of “recharge effect” on the Energy supply will more than suffice.

Jason had not originally invented to try out the whole “magical book” thing originally. After all, it was universally accepted in and out of NeoRealm that only magic could make the fancy books with the moving pictures. Except it is those very moving pictures that had him try.

One tutorial on how to make a book in NeoRealm had a super simple section to test if you can actually make a tome. It was the simplicity itself and akin to making a stick figure flip book animation. The thing was so simple and had removed everything Magic specific. Not in some attempt to try the process with another power, but so that someone without spells could follow. A simple exercise in power finesse that Jason felt more than qualified, so he gave it a shot.

He hadn’t expected it to work. His attempt was almost more of a test to see how the process would fail instead of if it would. Then his test didn’t fail. Mind you, those first attempts didn’t work as well as the tutorial said they should, but that was with Jason trying to use Energy like it was Mana.

Then Jason threw out that part and adapted the process to Energy. Still not perfect, but nothing ever was. His new method however was good enough. If he was to compare it to the Mana method, it would be between sixty and seventy-five percent as effective.

Which seems impressive, but it is always the last few bits that are the hardest, while all the early stuff is simple if you have the foundation. Jason figured if Energy had a proper heritage like Mana and Qi, he could have easily gotten it to eighty percent or more. Though just as much, he felt that Energy should already be there, but no use complaining about the System’s repression of Energy.

Though there was one limit on Energy compared to Mana. A normal tome can act almost like a hologram projector, throwing images and animations out into the area around the book. Sure, only the person actually reading the book will gain any of the magical benefits, but sometimes being able to expand a graph to take up a large volume of space is handy.

On the other hand, an energized tome is much more limited. After some experiments, Jason figured out that the area it can project in is the area where a page being turned passes through when the covers are at a right angle. Though there are some extra limitations for bigger books, that means you can’t just make a huge one. Also, as the book is opened beyond a right angle, the volume it can project into stays the same, shrinking closer to the page the further you go.