Modak sat on Ryan's desk chair, his head laying on the faux leather mat. A small plastic model figure was sitting at the side of the desk. He remembered which one this was.

  "It's, uhm... Lord Baragdorn of the Elysian empire... A great warrior king who led his people into reclaiming his lands from a dungeon that had grown to overtake the entire Archimedean peninsula..." he said quietly, staring at the glistening armour. When the actual model arrived, it was much worse quality than Ryan hoped, so him and Silvia sat down and took a whole day to customise it to the point where that armour might as well belong to Maximus, appearing like it was made of real metal. Even the figure's face was realistic to a creepy degree, though they obviously had to improvise since it had been so long and nobody knew what he looked like in the past.

  There were just a few things that were known, the topmost being that, apparently... this guy wasn't an Awakened. He was one of the most powerful men of his time, but somehow hadn't received the 'system's blessing', as it was called back then. That was actually one of the reasons why Ryan got so interested in him, because he was trying to help Modak learn about powerful individuals that never made use of the system. After all, Modak was incapable of Awakening, due to the necessity of mana for the system to be supported within someone.

  But over the past few months, despite the constant support... Modak wasn't able to get anywhere at all. Sure, he could actually control his aura to some degree now, and he manually cycled it as much as he could so that it didn't grow stagnant and get 'stuck' inside of him like that again, but none of the techniques he tried using really worked.

  With a loud groan, Modak stood up, just standing there for a moment. He had probably smoked and drank a bit too much, so he wasn't feeling particularly hot right now.

  Though as he stood there... it sounded like something was going on downstairs.

  "Huh? Oh... right, Ryan mentioned that, some kind of spell..." Modak muttered, continuing to slowly walk around the room, as though his legs were made of lead and he had to pull them up with all the force in his body with each and every step.

  In the end, he just dropped down onto Ryan's bed, staring at the ceiling. There were a few cobwebs between the wooden boards of the roof. From here, he could see a large black spider sitting in its middle, as if trying to relax after a hard, long day of building its new home.

  "So pretty..." he muttered quietly, staring at the geometric shape of the web. It was so intentional, and so planned-out. It was different to the aura channels he was supposed to form. He had found a few old methods with the help of the Aglecards. While the basis was built around the layout of the physical body, most of these techniques required something else. Something deeper. But all that meridian and dantian stuff weirdly was far too... spiritual for him. Sure, Modak adored magic with his entire being, but he was also a logical scientist at heart. The idea of getting epiphanies and sensing your own body, and simply working based off 'vibes' alone wasn't his style at all. Ryan excelled in that. But Modak... he was the opposite.

  Maybe that was why he wasn't chosen by mana. Maybe that was why he wasn't given even a speck of it by the heavens.

  Modak continued to stare up at the cobweb. It could have been the alcohol. It could also have been the weed. It was definitely the combination of both that brought a ridiculous idea into Modak's deeply influenced mind.

  "What if I just make my own method...? My own... my own way of letting aura flow through me..?" he whispered, "Just like a cobweb. Based on logic and patterns that are engrained in the spider's very being. The instinct of logic and rules that makes spiderwebs be built in the same way each time."

  Modak held up his hand, staring deeply at his skin, feeling the sensation of his aura sloshing around inside of him. To improve his control, he had to first establish proper channels inside of him that supported the passive flow of his aura inside of him. Not only would this act as a base for improving the quality, but also the amount of his aura. Plus, it was supposed to give him a baseline physical boost.

  But what if he didn't follow those rules down to the smallest details. He understood how these channels were supposed to be constructed, and there were already certain points in his body where aura was simply more concentrated, so it wasn't as though it was all just based on vibes. Though the specifics - the actual way that each path was supposed to flow through one's body, the twists and turns, was something that just never clicked with him. He would need to try out hundreds if not thousands of different ways to connect his aura just to create the channels in one of his arms.

  But there was something that he did know. Maths, patterns. Logic. Rules. Slowly, Modak tried to carve some channels inside of his arm. It basically just meant creating a concentrated flow between different concentration points, taking into account the numerous smaller and lighter concentration points that were going to keep popping up as one's amount of aura increased.

  Since Modak already had an ocean of aura, he had so many of these tiny, hard-to-spot points that it was almost impossible to figure out for him. If he had a normal amount, he might have actually figured it out.

  But these past few months weren't useless. He had at least managed to spot and memorise the locations of each and every one of his major and minor concentration points, and the supposed purpose of each one. And most importantly, he figured out the purpose of each of them. Why they existed where they existed, and how they interacted with the physical body. Not that it helped him connect the paths that he was just supposed to vibe out, letting his 'aura flow to the points it wants to flow', or whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

  That wasn't how Modak did things. He was an engineer. An inventor. While his eyes were technically still staring at the cobweb, his focus was entirely on his aura. Like a circuit board, mechanical channels like wires were drawn between each of the small points. Each concentration point had a purpose. When aura flowed through that point, its nature would be slowly changed. Like a 'current' that got stronger or weaker, or a stream of data with variables that were slowly being changed with every small access point, until said data could be accessed and interpreted through the larger concentration points.

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  He started building the connection from his fingertip. It went joint by joint, and then got to the centre of his palm where one of these larger concentrations laid. And as though something really clicked, Modak could feel the channels stick to his body. They weren't dissolving like they normally did.

  Modak sat up on Ryan's bed, startled. He had done this weirdly absent-mindedly. He was designing custom circuit boards every single day recently, trying to shrink his work down as much as he possibly could. That felt much, much more natural to him than just... vibing something out. It wasn't perfect by any means. Now that he looked at it closer, he knew that there were ways that he could improve on this. Right now, it was just a bare-bottom circuit that was riddled with inefficiencies, but it was there. Modak didn't need to keep maintaining it at all.

  Could he... program his own aura? Certainly, it was possible to replace aura with electric currents in a lot of machinery, and Modak did so quite a lot, basically simulating certain scenarios to act as a non-mana support to the actual mana processes happening within his inventions. Since he often manipulated mana in his work in ways that aura was usually manipulated, this offered itself as a good solution for a few specific cases.

  But now, he could do that just inside of his body. And if it was possible to treat mana like aura, maybe it was possible to treat aura like mana. Rather... maybe he could try to simulate certain magical effects inside of his own body as long as he had something to reference. He stood up and walked over to Ryan's desk again, shakily looking through his drawers to find another small bags with blood-rose pills. They didn't work on Modak, since the magic inside of them was just pushed out of his body. But what if he could force his aura, the parts of this ocean of it, that wasn't flowing through the actual circuits and instead in the spaces in-between, to simulate this exact effect, the specific, unique, special frequency of mana within this thing? Sure, it probably wouldn't work just as well, but he could try at least. He was pretty distracted, but this shock just now sobered him up long enough to remember what Ryan wanted from him. He needed his help. And even once Rose got here, it wasn't like things would be solved just with that - they could still use his help even then. But the way he was right now, there was no way he could offer that. Plus, what was this about a chapel? Modak didn't want to sit around here, fucked up while something serious was happening at his own house. At the end of the day, he was still Ryan's aide.

  Immediately he sat down on the ground in lotus pose, trying to take deeper control of his aura. Being intoxicated made it way harder to control, partially because the aura was just wildly and randomly moving around like in some kind of storm. But even then, he had to try.

  First and foremost, if he was going to turn his body into an aura computer, he needed to make a choice. Most aura users placed the centre of their channels in their heart, because that was the source of aura. But for Modak, there was another place that felt much more natural, another one of the largest knots of aura inside of his body. Starting from his brain, branching outward, Modak carved out channels of aura inside of his body.

  "Holy shit, if you don't settle down already, I swear to all the gods whose name I can pronounce that I'm going to kick your motherfucking face in, you hear me?!" Ryan pushed away one of the people fighting downstairs in the living room. He was one of the ones that had a bit more to drink than the others, and had clearly grown a lot more violent, much faster than everyone else. Not that it mattered, though, considering that there was a group of six or seven people that were fighting in here. Even Ryan could feel himself get even more pissed off. Though, that didn't seem to be related to the spell, but just his regular old, innate anger-management issues.

  Somehow, Ryan found that he wasn't going out of control like the others. Even other Awakened people were being affected, so it must be a much stronger effect than he usually thought. At least, Yanna's mere presence was intimidating enough that a lot of people didn't continue getting completely rowdy and instead went the opposite direction, rather cowering in fear as if trying to get away. She was a little hurt by that fact, but she ended up just leaning into it further. After all, it was better than having an even greater mess than before.

  The floor was covered in shards of glass and alcohol, and splinters of wood and crumbs of dirt that were pulled in with the people rushing in and out of the living room. Ryan continued trying to make sure that things wouldn't go completely out of control. There were just another fifteen minutes left until Rose showed up, at least as long as she showed up on time.

  And then, Ryan felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around, and before he knew it, felt a fist being planted in the middle of his face. Getting punched right in the face was always a confusing feeling, but something about the blood rose pill cleared up his mind a ton so he wasn't actually that affected by it. Rather, he was more stunned by who the punch came from.

  "Kim, what the actual fuck?!" Ryan yelled out, staring at the half-orc, who looked back even more confused.

  "Huh? Wait, you're not-"

  Rolling his eyes, Ryan punched back, though just enough to startle Kim and not to actually hurt him long-term. He might feel a little bruised-up, though, "No, I'm not affected like everyone else here, and even if I were, why the fuck would you just punch me straight in the face without asking me?!"

  Kim pulled back, holding his hand to his nose to see if he was bleeding, "You just yelled at this guy that you were going to kick his face in, I just thought-"

  "I have a lot of unresolved issues, alright? Anyway, how come you're fine? You drank a ton," Ryan pointed out, pushing his arm back to grab onto the shoulder of one of the aggressive guys, who was clearly ready to storm at another one of the other party-goers. He just pushed down on his shoulder to force him into place for now. Kim groaned and shrugged.

  "I'm an alchemist, one of my skills lets me control and filter things that go in and out of my body, so I learned to just filter out any magic unless I intentionally drink potions," he explained quietly, trying not to let too many people overhear. Though, it wasn't like anyone was really paying attention anyway. Most people here were starting to seem pretty dazed, like they were getting lost in some sort of hallucination.

  "And how are you fine? Another one of your super special unique abilities?"

  "... I guess so," Ryan sighed. It was probably partially an effect of the 'seed of blessing', which was meant to strengthen Ryan's magical capabilities. It probably filtered out certain unwanted magical effects passively, "But what about the others? Are they okay?"

  "They could be better, but..." Kim slightly looked around, continuing to whisper, "We've all had training to deal with mental manipulation magic, so they can at least calm themselves down a bit. They'll be useless otherwise, though."

  "Okay, that's fine. We just need to hold out another fifteen minutes, Rose is coming with a standard corruption cure. Do you have something that can maybe amplify that or let us spread it to everyone here at the party?"

  "Uh..." Kim wasn't sure what to say, slowly shaking his head, "Not really? It would be best if we can just let everyone ingest some of it? I know those potions, a little bit goes a long way, and I doubt she'd bring too little, so... maybe we just mix it into new drinks?"

  "How the hell are we supposed to do that? These guys won't even stop punching each other in the face when I ask them to."

  "I don't know, have Morgana force it down their throats?"

  "No, she doesn't have a spell strong enough for that..." Ryan groaned, "But... and it may be a long shot, but I do know a water mage that could help us out."