Eo balled up a piece of paper and threw it out. He had been trying to figure out the secrets of octessence ever since he had joined the academy.
Octessence, otherwise known as just essence, was a mysterious energy that generated in one's body. It naturally regenerated over time, and essence could be used to transform into various elements (synthesis). Known synthesizable elements could be categorized, more or less, into the affinities. Affinities could be separated into 2 groups: Substance essences and energy essences. The substance essences were: Earth, Metal, Water, and Air. The energy essences were: Sound, Light, Heat, and Electricity. At the divination test some months ago Eo found out he was metal essence user.
The problem with being a metal user, as opposed to, say, and earth user, was the fact that metal had a much worse mass-to-essence consumption ratio. Most users with the metal affinity usually created their own weapons to attack with in contrast to most other substance users, who just threw their element at the opponent.
As well as training his metal affinity, Eo had also trained in essence manipulation. This was a completely original training regimen Eo made himself when he was bored during his free time.
Eo started writing on another piece of paper. He wrote down all of his findings so far: Essence could be congealed into a weird viscous substance he called "essence-gel". This essence-gel was named that way because it was a slimy wet substance. Eo had found out that essence-gel formed much, much, better inside the user's body. Eo's essence manipulation was to basically excrete this essence-gel outside of his body and move it around. His essence-gel, with much concentration, could move around on his will (albeit terribly slowly). It couldn't float or anything, but would make gross slimy sounds as it moved around on his body. The first time Eo tried showing this to his mentors, they thought there was something seriously wrong with his essence.
Eo's newest breakthrough was separating the essence from the essence-gel. Eo had figured that essence-gel was composed of at least two parts: one to move the gel itself and another to activate the element. The part that activated the element turned out to just be pure essence, meaning the congealment process he had activated inside himself actually added a strange substance to the essence to make the essence-gel.
The essence-gel minus the essence was a strange transparent texture. It still moved around on command of his thoughts, so he called this thought-gel.
Eo hypothesized that thought-gel existed to transport essence from inside the body to, say, concentrate it in one point. This would allow for much more powerful attacks or defenses.
Eo, however, thought of it as something else. Instead of using this strange thought-gel to merely gather essence into one point, he thought it would be interesting to transport essence as well.
This way, he could circulate his essence faster (which revitalized the body by destroying fatigue while passively healing other cells) as well as collect it into other parts of his body such as his back or knee.
The problem with the latter was that he couldn't effectively use other parts of his body to create openings for essence to flow out of. Eo and the others had gotten special tattoo marks that created a special opening on his body which essence could flow out of. The placement of the tattoo was determined by a test which measured the passive generation of essence on spots around the body. Eo's black tattoos were on his hands. He thought that was extremely useful, as his metal element almost always required the use of hand-held weapons.
Trying to make the essence flow to his back and synthesize metal was extremely difficult. His own skin was like a barrier preventing the synthesis, but through practice and boredom he managed to create a small sheet of metal on his back on his own will. Of course, as this amount of metal could make a small dagger, it completely drained him of energy.
Eo slammed his fist in frustration. Did he really need tattoos in other places of his body to pour essence from there? After experimenting some more, Eo had finally concluded that he needed to move his thought-gel from inside his body to outside through his hands, and then transport essence from the inside to the outside from within the thought-gel. Only after that tedious process could he synthesize metal from the essence-gel outside his body.
After realizing that most mentors were giving him weird looks after showing his findings of the essence-gel, Eo practiced alone in his room. He had somewhat mastered the process of manipulating thought-gel in general, but moving the essence to the outside was still extremely tedious and painful.
Eo was determined to prove his self-experimentation bore fruit. He spent all of his free days practicing, and his advanced knowledge on essence circulation, a basic practice, allowed him even more time to practice (his body had recovered much faster than he expected). Eo was not going to let some hero ruin the fun for him. Even though the savior had more "potential", Eo had a head start of about 6 months. It wasn't much, but Eo had figured out some underlying truths about octessence that had vastly expanded his knowledge in an area where most of his mentors couldn't even comprehend.
Eo really wanted to test out his theories on some monsters.