Two weeks had to pass before Konrad finally recovered from the blood loss and could start gathering his blood in a safer manner. He started by pouring his blood half a liter every four days and continued, until two months later he posessed a bucket with over eight liters of his blood that he kept in his storage.
Of course he wasn't idle throughout these two and a half month.
His magical control rised by a huge margin and with that there was another important change. His magic capacity doubled reaching a whooping 8 point! Yep he was working hard for it and the result confirmed what he believed to be the truth. His Mana rises exponentially as long as he continues exhausting it completely and letting it recover. It also seems like The Mana regeneration is based on how much Mana you have and seeing as he still needed 20 minutes to regenerate it completely, it was easy to calculate that it regenerates by a stable 5% per minute.
But from all of this achievements the biggest one was actually something else. Konrad managed to cast magic! Yes! After finally getting over his last failure, Konrad repeated the experiment and finally managed to force his Mana into forming a ball of light not particularly different from the ones he made using his formations. It confirmed quiet a lot of his theories, as when he was casting his spell he tried to recall the formation that he knew inside out, while wishing his Mana to activate it. At first he thought that it was a failure when the Mana stopped at his hand and didn't move but when there gathered a bit more, he suddenly felt a pull as the Mana transformed into a ball of light right above his hand. He felt that the little remaining Mana he had, was still pouring out sustaining the ball and when he finally run out of magic the ball slowly dimmed and disappeared.
It was a magical experience(pun intended) and Konrad Was giddy for the rest of the week.
But there were pros and cons of that discovery. Konrad had another thing that he needed to practice and experiment on, so his Mana control training would become slower.
He continued on his experimenting and soon came to the conclusion that the less complicated and simple is the formation he's imagining, the easier it is to use it as a spell. He concluded that he would need to design alternative, simplified, core-less formations redesigned specifically for casting spells. He was actually quiet excited with that prospect because now he would have to really make a magic Grimoire for himself, and his inner weeb was elated.
His understanding about magic formations also rised after he played with mixing the elemental formations and making them do different shapes and colours or move around. He was especially proud of his spinning fire donut with a cube of light inside of it. It was an experiment that was the culmination of this two months of hard work and it connected all three elements of fire, air, and light with the animation and shape-changing in a single formation! Konrad had to admit, formations were like programming, and the language he used could be compared to a programming language. Thanks to Konrad knowing all and every command the only problem was how to put them all together to make a working program, but he was getting better every day.
But there was also a flaw in this Formation, or at least that's what Konrad thought in the begining. Namely, The formation could work for around ten minutes before it would weaken and turn itself off only to activate after another half an hour. Konrad looked for any flaw in the design, but only when he activated a light formation in the evening did he realize that it also turns off together with the fire donut! That's when Konrad realized - The formation he created is so complicated that it absorbs all the magic in the surroundings and turns off when there's not enough for it to function!
That...was a huge problem in on itself!
If there's not enough Mana around for even this relatively simple formation then what about if he wanted to do something bigger and more complicated? Would he need to sacrifice even more blood to sustain the need of magic? 'Is that maybe why there were so much blood sacrifices in the history? Maybe the Aztecs or Egyptians were actually just looking for a way to power up their formations or something. After all, the formation that the old man created worked for me without a hitch, even if it wasn't as efficient as my own...' Konrad thought.
It was a new thing that Konrad needed to research, but he wasn't going to start now since he finally gathered 8 litters of blood and with the blood in his body it should be enough for the '11 for 10' Gacha draw!
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He was standing in front of the Gacha Machine once again, looking intently at the lever that was supposed to take his blood.
'How do i pour my blood inside now?!' He thought.
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It took him a bit of time but he finally figured a way, after trying and failing to pour his blood inside, using many weird contraptions that were supposed to mimic his hand so that the blade could suck the blood he collected from the bucket.
After two hours of useless struggle, Konrad got angry and kicked the tank causing a small cap at the top, beside the lever, to fell off and reveal a small funnel... Konrad, as the epitome of tranquility and peace, was completely unfazed with the two hours of lost time and so many lost nerve-
"God Dam*it!!!"
.
.
The blood soon found itself inside the tank together with the relatively new bunch he donated straight from his veins finally passing the ten litter mark.
With an exhausted expression Konrad looked at the tank and muttered, a slight smirk appearing on his face.
"Hope you give me something good for all this trouble i went through..."