Chapter 770: Tan Han Joins the Self-Generated Mana Research Project
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 770: Tan Han Joins the Self-Generated Mana Research Project
"This is the place. At this hour... they should just about be here. There are a few mentors inside as well; just give them a nod if you run into them. They’re only here for their own research projects, which don't have much to do with our Self-Generated Mana project."
After granting Tan Han the necessary permissions to enter, I led her to our laboratory. This lab complex was sprawling, and without guidance, a specific room could be quite difficult to find.
I pushed open the lab door. I didn't announce my arrival with a casual "I'm back" as if I were coming home; this was a laboratory, after all. If my shouting caused an accident, it would be an unnecessary loss.
"Sister Xiao Han, you're here~"
Despite my silence, my appearance prompted several girls nearby to greet me enthusiastically.
"Mhm~ I am. I brought a new little lab rat with me today..." I said with a smile.
"Oh! I know her! I heard about what you did in the arena, Sister Xiao Han. This is Tan Han, right? The legend who challenged teaching assistants as a lower-year student and actually won twice!"
"Hello, hello~ I'm Cen Tan. I expect we'll be seeing a lot of each other from now on~"
"Hi, I'm Yi Rui. Let's work hard together. If you run into any trouble, you can come straight to me."
"Um, hello... I'm Tan Han. Please look after me." Tan Han introduced herself, though her name hardly needed an introduction; it seemed they already knew who she was.
Though both sides were a bit stiff during this first meeting, Tan Han handled herself much better than I had in the past.
"By the way, Senior Sister Yi Rui, is there anything I can help with right now?"
"Xiao Han brought you here, so I'm sure she has special plans for you. If you feel like you have nothing to do, you can start by familiarizing yourself with our research results. Since you're joining midway, you probably don't have a clear picture of what we're actually doing yet."
"Thank you for the reminder, Senior Sister."
Tan Han nodded, realizing she couldn't be of much help yet. Under Yi Rui's guidance, she used her Great Knowledge Seed to interface with the lab's shared database and learned the locations of the physical archives used for backups.
Along the way, Yi Rui gave her a brief rundown of the laboratory's safety protocols.
Before diving into the data, however, Tan Han turned her gaze toward me.
At that moment, I was busy sorting through the concepts of race and bloodline mentioned in the Great Witch Project. These two concepts were things that truly existed within the "Life Essence."
This meant that even if a life form died and its body completely dissipated—leaving only the soul or soul essence—its race could still be identified. If it were resurrected, the bloodline information could be read from the Life Essence to reconstruct the race, the bloodline, and even the specific constitution granted by that bloodline.
This made me think of my Reincarnation spellbook.
Wasn't that the very purpose of its creation? It could modify physical information to make someone anyone, alter racial information to turn them into any race, and change bloodline information to grant various constitutions. It could even deeply rewrite memories to change a person into someone else entirely at the cognitive level...
That was the original intent behind the Reincarnation spell, but it was incomplete. It remained a fragmented spellbook that required the support of various other techniques and could only be used by me.
In practice, it was simply a more convenient and flexible version of a Resurrection Spell.
To achieve anything beyond mere resurrection—to truly achieve "transmigration" or "rebirth"—required a vast amount of knowledge outside the scope of resurrection techniques.
However, I soon discovered the limitations of the Reincarnation spell. The effects I desired were... simply too heavy for a single spellbook to bear.
It broke a life form's loyalty to its race, disrupted the natural progression of life's development, and interfered with a life form's right to continue living as itself.
But were these effects truly impossible to achieve?
Theoretically, they were.
But to fully realize them, one had to accomplish something else first: touching the Life Essence.
One had to make fundamental modifications to the Life Essence itself. Otherwise, simply altering the physical shell was merely treating the symptoms rather than the cause.
If one did this recklessly, the consequences would be dire: either the Life Essence would fail to adapt to the race, constitution, or bloodline of the new shell and collapse, or it would be assimilated by the racial information and bloodline traits of a more powerful body.
Ultimately, it all came back to the Life Essence. Theoretically, things like race and bloodline weren't untouchable, but the cost of touching them was far too high and uncontrollable.
They were the taboos of life.
And I had unknowingly waded into such a profound field without even realizing it... mainly because the tools I possessed didn't match my level of understanding.
My Floating World Level Spirit Vision allowed me to peer into domains that others could neither interfere with nor perceive from the very beginning.
The information gathering of the Tree of Great Knowledge allowed me to fully utilize the data obtained through Spirit Vision. The Consciousness Firewall allowed me to wield Spirit Vision more easily without suffering the cognitive damage I used to face. Not to mention, the ability itself was utterly heaven-defying.
The incredibly high foundation I gained from my self-awakened Body Cultivation gave me a terrifying level of understanding regarding the physical body. Since its roots were structured upon the Life Essence, it provided me with a unique path to understanding what Life Essence actually was.
Furthermore, I had unconsciously embarked on the Great Soul Subject. My instinctive understanding of the soul—which is the Life Essence—was also extremely deep.
Any one of these abilities or methods would allow someone to achieve greatness. The fact that I had combined them all just to touch upon the taboos of Life Essence... almost seemed childish in comparison.
As I was lost in thought, Tan Han cautiously approached me.
"Hm? Is something wrong?" I asked, looking up with a hint of confusion.
After bringing Tan Han to the lab and seeing her get along well with Yi Rui and the others, I had gone back to my own work. I assumed Yi Rui had already started involving her in their research.
After all, their Tenfold Base Resonance Method hadn't yet reached the ten-thousand-source limit. With Tan Han's help, things should proceed much more smoothly.
As for why I predicted it would be smoother... it was because Tan Han was a Child of Destiny!
The concept of a Child of Destiny was essentially a mechanism for utilizing Luck. However, the Child of Destiny themselves was "shackled" by the Script and the World Consciousness. At least, that was my interpretation. The end result, however, was that Tan Han would unintentionally act as an invisible catalyst for anything that benefited her.
This was one of the reasons I had been so high on her from the start.
Her value as a promotional tool was her value to me. Her ability to accelerate the experiment was her value to the project. But whether this specific experiment succeeded or failed didn't actually affect me much.
As I had said before, I was only conducting this experiment to gain a deeper understanding of what Self-Generated Mana truly was.
And Tan Han couldn't help me understand that.
She would only help the progress of the experiment, instinctively choosing the most correct path at every turn to reach the final result.
"I was wondering what I could do to help in this lab?" Tan Han asked.
"I saw you just connected to our shared research database. You should first learn what Self-Generated Mana is, and then look into how we plan to achieve it. You don't need a profound understanding, but you should know the basic principles."
"Is... that all?" Tan Han was confident in this. Given detailed records, she felt her comprehension skills were up to the task.
"If you run into anything you don't understand, ask my clones over there. Try not to disturb the people who are busy." I pointed to the clones nearby that looked exactly like me.
"Those... I understand." Tan Han looked at the clones. When she had gone looking for Xiao Han earlier, she had almost approached one of them. Fortunately, she knew Xiao Han had clones, or she would have made a fool of herself.
"Oh, I almost forgot. Reading through those records can be quite dull. If you find yourself with nothing to do, you can ask Yi Rui and the others to help you try the Witchified Body Cultivation method. I think they really need you to cooperate with them on that experiment."
"Witchified Body Cultivation? What's that?"
"You can think of it as a transcendent power system in the form of Body Cultivation. It's a prerequisite cultivation condition for obtaining the physical talent for Self-Generated Mana. We are currently refining the framework of this system and need a large number of practitioners for experimental cultivation to summarize successful experiences."
So now, I just had to wait for Yi Rui and the others to completely finalize the upper limits of the Witchified Remolding Rebirth Technique. Meanwhile, I would continue to perfect the Self-Generated Mana Shaping Ritual to complete the architecture of the Witchified Body Cultivation system. Once that was done, it would be more or less finished.
As for the problem I encountered earlier—how to establish a foothold for "Self-Generated Mana" within the Life Essence without the foundation of self-awakened Body Cultivation—I was working hard to solve that as well. I now had a theoretical understanding of the race concepts and bloodline information within the Great Witch Project; next, I needed to explore how they worked together in practice.
"So, I need to practice this Witchified Body Cultivation too, right?"
"Yes. However, this is different from ordinary Body Cultivation. The threshold for entry is very high, and the prerequisites are demanding. If you can't accept it, I won't force you. That's why I want you to understand what we're doing before you try it. Essentially, I'm helping you remove your cognitive boundaries."
After all, an ordinary person might not be able to accept the "sacrifices" necessary at the beginning of the Self-Generated Mana project. They might think we were stacking "human lives" to build success. But in essence, that wasn't the case. Seeing through the concept of death was the very first threshold for this experiment.
Even though the threshold for Witchified Body Cultivation no longer required death—but rather "Rebirth"—many ordinary people who clung to the idea that life is untouchable and sacred still couldn't accept it.
While I didn't think Tan Han was that kind of person, internal hesitation and discomfort were still things that needed to be cleared away.
"I see. Alright then." Tan Han nodded.
She likely didn't realize just how heavy the current experiment was, but she chose to accept it nonetheless.
"If you need anything, you can call me directly. I'll cooperate fully." Though Tan Han knew she couldn't help much yet, she still made the offer.
"Mhm. You can open a private, sealed lab room in the back of the laboratory. It'll provide a better reading experience."
After giving Tan Han one last suggestion, I plunged back into my own world.
What I urgently needed to understand now were the issues of the Witch Race Concept and bloodline information.
And that, naturally, was inseparable from the issue of "Witchification."
One could say that the Great Witch Project, from beginning to end, was a circle.
That was the "feeling" I got after gaining a complete understanding of the project.
There was a sense of powerlessness where concepts like "Mana," "Mana Source," "Self-Generated Mana," and "Witchification" all structured each other and served as each other's supports.
It felt as though you could push toward any direction or branch from any single node. It must have had an original starting point, but now... with the emergence of other sub-projects, that original point had been weakened or assimilated. It was no longer possible to determine the sequence of events based on their functions; only through concepts could one distinguish which had structured which first.
It was like Mana and the Mana Source condensation technique. Conceptually, Mana came first, followed by the Mana Source. But in terms of function, the two could be derived from each other.
Perhaps the answer to the question I was chasing could only be given by the "Primal Witch."
That felt a bit unrealistic...
Rather than indulging in such fantasies, I was better off keeping my feet on the ground.
I glanced over at Yi Rui and her group. They were still busy, so I didn't disturb them. I went back to my old habit: if I wanted to conduct an experiment, I would use myself as the subject.
As for what I was experimenting on... naturally, I was using myself as a sample to observe the foundation of "Life Essence" structuring "Self-Generated Mana," and to explore more deeply the profound changes Witchification had brought to me.
The primary reason for doing this was to discover my own Witch racial traits and bloodline information.
However, I wasn't a Transcendent Witch yet, so I urgently needed to understand the exact mechanism of this transformation.
Perhaps this could reveal the inner workings of Witchification.
While we were constantly conducting in-depth explorations in our laboratory, the new semester at the academy began.
The first class for the freshmen wasn't just about class meetings and signing contracts like in previous years; there was another important procedure.
That was the distribution of Knowledge Seeds and teaching the basic ways to use them.
With the start of a new year and the update of teaching tools, the curriculum for freshmen also needed to keep pace with the times.
Of course, the "Witch Meditation Method," being the most fundamental element, was something that could never be discarded.
However, regarding the contact with and application of transcendent power, as well as the explanation and guidance of principles, the Witch Academy had begun to move these more important subjects forward to this stage.
In the past, first-year courses were merely about popularizing common knowledge of the transcendent.
But now... the popularization of common knowledge, the application of the transcendent, and the development of interests were all placed in the same phase. This was a theoretical trial. As long as there were no major issues, this trial would become the new teaching standard.
Following this, the lower-year students would enter a phase of explosive growth in combat power.
In the past, the combat power of lower-year students was truly a case of "the extremes"—either they had nothing or they had everything, depending on individual ability and resource allocation.
But now, with the Power Network, everyone was treated equally. At least within the borders of the Witch Academy, the power everyone wielded was the same.
As long as power was equalized, students would pursue things beyond mere power. This was the experiment the Witch Academy was currently conducting.
Similarly, this was a way to distinguish between the mediocre and the geniuses.
The mediocre would be content with the power they already had, while geniuses would not be limited by the teaching tools in front of them, but would instead chase after something far more profound.