The elements your descendants can awaken depend in part on those you and their ancestors awakened. There are also hints that the saurian core’s affinity used in the awakening plays a part in the process, so be mindful when searching for cores for your descendants.

  — Excerpt from Introduction to Realm Cores

  Day 126, 5:10 PM

  “Hello, Newstar, I need some help. Nothing dangerous, just tedious.” I went over to the boy’s cavern after wiping off the blood and donning clean clothes.

  I wanted to make sure about the accuracy of the books I had read and observations I had made with lower realm combatants in the arena. Namely, authors claimed that knights’ physical prowess doubled upon awakening, then grew up to the triple original value at the peak of the realm, before once more doubling compared to the new benchmark which is the beginning of the previous realm.

  Mageknights nominally had another ten percent boost, but that was negligible for what I was trying to determine.

  “How may I help?” The youth was reasonably wary, and I applauded his caution. My sanity thinned after experiencing so many loops with no movement of the world timeline.

  “We wrestle. You are a second realm mageknight, nominally four times stronger than a non-awakened, while I am a first realm awakened, nominally twice as strong as a non-awakened.”

  That was naturally without taking into account my stats of twenty-five, which I knew for a fact quadrupled my physical ability. So, if my realm took those into account, multiplying them, I could crush Newstar, and if it didn’t, I would be slightly stronger.

  After several hours of testing, I found the data I needed, and no, awakening did not double one’s strength. It added the equivalent of roughly an average human’s strength to the awakened, linearly increasing by ten percent per layer until peaking at a bonus equaling twice the average human’s strength, or an approximate equivalent.

  In the two following weeks of the experimental loop, it was easy to extrapolate the data by realms and also deduce how much I needed to scale my stats to keep up with those of the next realm.

  The truth wasn't pretty. I needed roughly seven to all physical stats, and probably an equal number across my mental ones, to emulate the physical and mental prowess of a mageknight a realm above me.

  So with my stats, at the peak of the third realm, I would be as strong as someone at the fourth, and to achieve a similar feat at the fourth realm, I had to invest twenty-one points into strength, agility, and physique.

  I scratched my hair. Chasing after realm difference was a losing proposition. Just to match an awakened at the sixth realm, I would have to blow all attribute points I have on my body, and I would have to be at the fifth realm to even put up a fight.

  No, my superhumanity and advantage I have in both mental faculties and physical prowess will disappear. At the seventh realm, I would reach the point where I’m only somewhat better, but even that superiority would mostly disappear at the eighth realm.

  Even with a ridiculous dash across classes, and harvesting attribute points, I would soon reach a point where I was bound to lose. And that was without taking magic and perception into account. Those facts led to one possible conclusion - I needed to grow stronger by relying on this world’s magic, not the system.

  So, for several dozen loops, I experimented with my realm. The insulated lightning towers shot each other, providing me with enough ambient electricity to give birth to naturally occurring lightning. And once thunderclouds formed, the realm started to create spontaneous thunder and lightning, allowing me to remove the clunky constructs while drawing another two sources of mana.

  Finally, some seven years later, I was close to insanity, definitely unhinged, but I had perfected my pace, and went for the loop which would stick.

  I drew mana from the gem until I reached the third layer and filled half the fourth. Then I stopped and started shaping my realm.

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  First, the volcano rose, lava flowed down its slope, in the direction I took to calling south, because south was hot. Then, next to the flow of lava, I created twin pools which would produce steam for my realm, eventually birthing clouds. Since the experimentation phase was over, I only created two, whereas I had over thirty at some point in my tests. Faster was better, but once made, I couldn’t extinguish sources of mana.

  Next came water, the wide mountain river powering the two temporary electrical dischargers, one on the river and the other as far away as I could place it without breaking the line of sight.

  With the thunder and lightning slowly building up in the background, I moved onto the trees.

  Over the loops, I had explored problems and features of a multi-elemental realm in quite the detail. The first thing to note was that the draw of mana increased only up to a certain point, that point being the maximum output of ambient mana’s density. So, at some point, extra sources of mana became useless, but regions differed in ambient mana, and we were located in a poor region, where the Summersweald drew mana towards its core on one side and the empire towards itself on the other, stretching us thin.

  The number of sources, however, did impact the balance of elements, a single stream or water produced less mana than two streams, and considerably less than a river. The amount of water sources impacted other elements in a delicate balance, and I eventually settled for a balanced approach, with a twist.

  How much magic I could use depended on how much mana of a certain type I had. Once I ran out, or once the balance was ruined, the spells unraveled. So I made spell seals which converted mana from one type into another. It took several visits to the Hailstown’s scribes’ guild, and paying through the nose for the immediate, personal admission tests, but I eventually ransacked their library for all it was worth without giving them a single silver.

  My excitement was getting to me. Decades of preparations were about to bear fruit, and the transmutation spell formations were reserved for the second realm.

  Instead, I focused on the first oak. The plant grew huge, its trunk over forty feet in diameter and three hundred and thirty-three feet high, but its colossal proportions were just the beginning. Runes decorated its bark, its branches, instead of conforming to random whims of nature, also forming constellations of seals. Imperfections existed, since twigs and leaves needed to exist to keep the behemoth a plant rather than an object, but all in all, I weaved dozens of runes in three dimensions, where I might only fit half a dozen had I drawn them on land.

  Sculpting the first three layers should have taken five to six hours, but with all my advantages and skills, it took eight due to the sheer complexity of my work and the enchantments I weaved into it. I left the portion around the river empty, reserved for frost runes, which would generate winds, which would give birth to air mana, but since frost impeded lightning, they needed to come later, after the first seven lightnings formed naturally, otherwise electricity wouldn’t take.

  With my realm taken care of, I drained the manarium crystal for another four hours until I entered the eighth layer.

  The elements rampaged in my realm as I entered it, oaks shedding acorns, which rained on the ground into the groves which led them into the water, following which they slowly drifted towards the realm barrier and smashed into it with wood energy.

  The torrential river raged, carrying all before it, while eight jets of metal fountained into the lava rapids. Lightning struck once more, finally coming down from the sky for the seventh time, and I unmade the electricity generators. As the elemental storm passed, I replaced the tower and its surroundings with frost runes, reshaping the portion of the river into the flow rune to ensure it kept moving downward despite getting clogged up by rapidly forming ice.

  The wind picked up, conjuring air mana from somewhere. I observed my half-baked world with a smile. All in all, it was decent. I focused on the new tasks, regretting I failed to make sources of other mana types.

  I successfully used acid techniques by mixing earth and water mana, which made no sense in my opinion, but apparently, magic didn’t care about my opinion. Wood and water, two healing elements, when combined, produced rot or decay mana, for which I hadn’t found any techniques yet.

  “Eight’s not bad. It’s a nice, meaningful number.” I would have preferred ten though.

  Focus! And I did. I toiled for hours, and in no-time three days passed. I was exhausted, but my realm was a thing of beauty.

  Eight elements, earth, fire, water, lightning, wood, metal, thunder, and air coexisting, theoretically more than doubling my mana intake and increasing my mana capacity by roughly a third of what those with a single element had in them. The numbers sounded nice until you realized that eight elements reduced my magical stamina to one sixth of what others of my realm would have, at least when using a single element.

  I watched with pride as leaves swayed in the wind, the branches behind them a complex, three-dimensional amalgamation of power I had spent months and years perfecting. Lava to the south, blocks of ice floating atop a river carrying them north, a flash and a thunderclap released from a cloud lazily sailing through the sky.

  The smooth metal seals stood out, looking like remnant sculptures of an advanced alien civilization, survivors of the catastrophe which had erased their makers from the face of the world.

  Other runic seals seemed more natural, or at least more a part of the landscape. The only ones lacking were air, lightning, and thunder. My intellect, even when I pumped it to over sixty, failed to come up with a way to make stationary, physical manifestations of the elements.

  “It’s good enough. Not everything needs to be perfect.” With that, I left my realm and started drawing from the second piece of second realm manarium, which would push me into the second realm.