B2 | Chapter 32 - Solving the Slime Solidification Problem

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B2 | Chapter 32 - Solving the Slime Solidification Problem

Theodore stared at the latest batch of yellow slimes. Or more like, their dull and lifeless forms in the bottom of the containers. He'd been at this for what felt like forever now, trying to crack the code of sustainable slime cultivation. The yellow slimes were perfect for insulation, their natural secretions forming an incredibly effective barrier against both heat and cold once they went through their three-stage lifecycle from liquid to foam to solid. The problem was keeping the damn things alive long enough to harvest their slime like "shearing" a sheep's wool  without killing them in the process.

Every approach he'd tried so far had ended the same way. Glass containers, wicker baskets, wooden boxes, clay pots, metal cages with ventilation holes, open-air pens with barriers, even elaborate terrarium setups designed to mimic their natural cave environments as closely as possible. Nothing worked. Within hours, sometimes minutes, the slimes would start to deteriorate, their movements would become far too sluggish and then they'd collapse into puddles of inert biological matter.

Theodore had documented everything meticulously, of course, because that's what you did when you were trying to solve a problem. He'd recorded temperature, food sources, substrate materials, container sizes, population densities, and lighting conditions. He'd tried feeding them different types of organic matter, adjusted their living space, and even experimented with different methods of extraction to see if the harvesting process itself was somehow traumatizing them to death.

But it was the same end result no matter what he tried. Fresh slime secretions would start as a viscous liquid with excellent thermal conductivity properties, but when exposed to air and allowed to sit for a small amount of time, they would begin to foam up like some kind of biological expanding insulation. After a while, the foam would solidify into excellent insulation material.

It was brilliant, really.

A completely renewable resource that could solve heating problems if he could just figure out how to keep the producers alive. The applications were endless, and Theodore had spent more than a few sleepless nights envisioning workshops full of contented slimes living comfortable lives while providing their communities with sustainable insulation materials.

But every single attempt had ended with him scooping dead slime remains out of containers and trying to figure out what had gone wrong this time.

He'd been approaching the problem like an engineer, focusing on the physical environment and mechanical processes, trying to optimize living conditions through trial and error. It was the logical approach and it had been completely useless.

Theodore rubbed his temples and looked around his workshop.

Maybe he'd been overthinking this—

"Oh… Oh—oh!"

He had been overthinking this!

Because there was one incredibly obvious thing he hadn't bothered to check!

Something so fundamental that he should have started with it instead of jumping straight into elaborate experiments.

The mana!

He hadn't looked at how the goddamn slimes behaved with mana!

How had he been so dumb?

Theodore activated his [Arcane Awareness] skill and immediately felt like an idiot.

The slimes were absolutely saturated with mana, glowing like tiny magical beacons in his enhanced perception. But it wasn't the steady, controlled glow of a creature with natural magical abilities. It was chaotic, fluctuating, like they were absorbing ambient magical energy faster than they could process it. The mana levels were building up inside their simple bodies without any kind of regulation or release mechanism, and the excess energy was literally cooking them from the inside out.

Of course. Of course it was mana exposure!

Theodore had been so focused on replicating their natural cave environment and trying the solve the problem that he'd completely ignored the fact that caves were naturally low-mana areas. Deep underground, away from the magical radiation that all living creatures gave off, the slimes could exist in their preferred state of minimal magical exposure. But the moment he'd brought them up to the surface, into an environment saturated with the ambient mana that humans and other creatures naturally produced, they'd started absorbing it compulsively.

They couldn't help themselves.

Their rudimentary nervous systems weren't sophisticated enough for conscious thought or decision-making, so they just kept absorbing mana until it killed them. It was like watching someone drink water continuously without ever feeling full, except instead of drowning they were being magically incinerated.

The solution was so obvious now that Theodore felt embarrassed for not seeing it earlier.

It was mana regulation.

He needed to find a way to monitor and control the mana levels in their environment so the slimes could absorb what they needed without overdosing on ambient mana. Or, more specifically, he needed to make sure the slimes expelled excess mana, given that regulating the environment would be harder and regulating the slimes themselves was a far easier solution.

This was actually perfect timing, because Theodore had been wanting to experiment with his [Rune Inscription] skill anyway. He'd acquired a whole mental library of runic symbols he could inscribe into anything, but he'd never really sat down and tried to use his skill yet because he hadn't yet had the opportunity or time to try it.

This seemed like an ideal opportunity to test the limits of what he could inscribe and how effectively his runic work could solve practical problems.

Theodore tried to inscribe a simple mana detection rune directly onto the side of a glass container, figuring he'd start small and work his way up to more complex applications.

But the moment the rune made contact with the surface—just as the glowing tip of the etching line burned faintly into the glass—something shifted.

It wasn't a sound, not exactly, nor a sensation he could place, but his vision changed, as though a film peeled back from reality, and suddenly he could see it—the weave. The name came naturally to him as if he'd known it forever, and that was a strange thought to have.

It was not a weave of threads or fabric, but something else entirely. It was a lattice, a structure, not quite visible and not quite tangible, hovering just beneath the surface of what he thought was the physical object. Like the skeleton of the thing but far more intricate, far more important.

It wasn't on this plane. That much he was sure of, because he felt like he was only glimpsing it through the narrowest slit in a wall he hadn't known existed, a slit that had opened only because the rune had brushed against it.

The weave was the shape of the object, yes, but it was more than that. It was the way mana understood the object. The true shape, the real rules that made a glass container glass and not, say, water or bone or sand.

He froze when he first saw it because he hadn't expected something like that in the slightest, and he had been afraid. It reminded him of purple fire, the way it'd appeared so suddenly and fucked up his arm. He did not want that repeating.

But as he probed around, he realized he couldn't exactly interact with the weave of the object, not directly at least. He could interact with it, though, not with hands or tools or willpower, but through the runes. Runes were the language, and willpower and mana were the fuel required to burn a rune into the weave.

The rune formed properly under his touch, glowing with soft blue light as it activated, but within seconds the entire container shattered. Apparently glass wasn't compatible with runic inscription, or at least not with the amount of magical energy he was trying to channel through it.

The second attempt was on a wooden box, and while the container survived the inscription process, the rune itself faded after a few minutes and stopped working entirely. Wood absorbed some magical energy, but not enough to sustain a functional runic array over time. He supposed that the excess mana off a slime would suffice, but he needed to try other things first.

Theodore tried clay next, then metal, then stone, working his way through different materials while trying to figure out what would hold a rune long enough to be useful. Some materials couldn't handle the initial inscription process, cracking or burning when he tried to channel mana through them. Others could hold a rune for a short time but couldn't sustain it indefinitely. A few seemed promising initially but developed problems after extended use, with the runic patterns becoming unstable or producing unpredictable effects.

It took him three full days of continuous experimentation before he finally found a combination that worked.

The breakthrough came when he had started inscribing directly onto the slimes themselves.

Theodore had been reluctant to try this approach initially, but living tissue, it turned out, was an excellent medium for runic work. The slimes' bodies could handle the magical energy involved in the inscription process, and their natural mana absorption actually helped stabilize the runic symbols once they were in place.

The rune he eventually settled on was more complex than anything he'd attempted before, requiring two distinct functions that had to work in harmony with each other along with a few supportive ones. The first component monitored mana levels continuously, reading both the ambient mana present in the environment directly surrounding the slime and the amount of mana the slime had already absorbed, or the amount of mana it had. The second component acted as a release valve, automatically expelling excess mana from the slime's body when levels exceeded a predetermined threshold.

Finding that threshold had required sacrificing more slimes than Theodore had initially thought, but it was necessary research. Too low, and the slimes wouldn't get enough mana to maintain their basic biological functions. Too high, and they'd still die from magical oversaturation. The sweet spot was surprisingly narrow, requiring precise calibration that took hours of careful observation and adjustment.

But when he finally got it right, the results were immediately obvious.

The slimes with properly calibrated mana regulation runes remained active and healthy even when exposed to normal surface-level ambient magical energy. They moved around their containers naturally, grew "fat" and their slime could be "sheared" off their bodies and harvested for later use.

They showed no signs of the deterioration that had plagued all his previous experiments.

The only issue now was the harvested slime, because that still had the same problem. Though, the solution wasn't that hard, it only required special containers that regulated mana.

Regardless, the mana release mechanism was particularly amusing to observe. Every few minutes, when the slime's internal mana levels approached the dangerous threshold, the rune would activate and expel the excess energy in a small puff of invisible magical discharge.

Theodore could see it with his [Arcane Awareness], little clouds of mana being vented into the environment like steam escaping from a pressure cooker.

It was essentially a mana fart, and Theodore couldn't help but chuckle at the absurdity of it.

All this time, all these weeks of complex experiments and elaborate theories, and the solution had been as simple as giving the slimes a way to relieve magical buildup. They needed to fart out the excess mana they were absorbing, and now they could do exactly that thanks to his runic inscription.

Theodore watched his first successful batch of regulated slimes going about their business, contentedly oozing around their containers while periodically releasing tiny puffs of excess magical energy into the air. The runes glowed softly on their translucent bodies, monitoring and regulating their internal mana levels with mechanical precision.

This was going to change everything.

With a reliable method for keeping yellow slimes alive and productive in surface environments, Theodore could establish sustainable insulation production on any scale he wanted.

Of course, all this experimentation had positive impact on his skills' levels:

[Rune Inscription] has leveled up! – Lvl 0 > Lvl 3!

[Arcane Awareness] has leveled up! – Lvl 8 > Lvl 10!

[Meditation] has leveled up! – Lvl 21 > Lvl 22!

[Mana Control] has leveled up! – Lvl 5 > Lvl 6!

[Basic Rune Creation] has leveled up! – Lvl 17 > Lvl 19!

[Basic Magic Script] has leveled up! – Lvl 7 > Lvl 10!

Your class, [Runic Mage], has leveled up – Lvl 1 > Lvl 3!

Not only had [Rune Inscription] levled up, the last few days had helped him level up his other skills as well, along with his class. The progress was nice to see.

Even aside from the level ups, this success proved that his [Rune Inscription] skill had real practical applications beyond just combat. He could solve everyday problems with runic work, creating magical solutions to mundane challenges that improved people's quality of life in measurable ways.

Not to mention, this whole experimentation had proved something far more interesting…

…Inscribing runes on the body worked a lot better than anything else. He was excited just thinking about what he could inscribe on his body.

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