It had been 5 years since then and Regius had long ago finished turning the mana space of each cell into a single drop of Liquid mana. He had left the warehouse rarely in the last year or so, other than Jobs for MacArthur or going back to the main house to see Peter. He had spent most of his time here with a much bigger Link. The dragon was now the size of a bus when standing on all fours. They had decided that the boys would go to separate Mana colleges after Peter asked to go to school with friends he had made as well as the fact that they did not know which college that Ley would attend.
Magic colleges had become the new standard after Mana came back into the world. They were to give growing teens the means to become adventurers by the time they graduated. They were all run by the government that had reformed and its newest branch, the adventure union. The Adventure Union was in charge of managing all of the new adventurers that would charge into the portals that spawned across the world and in an effort to bolster them to their old status a tax was levied on anyone going through the portals. Ten percent of all material acquisition and considering that other than very specific circumstances a traditional team consisted of 5 people this stacked up as the numbers in a party got higher and higher but for certain amenities that made going through portals more accessible to all adventure parties it was a sacrifice that many were willing to make. Regius stood from his father's workbench and cracked his knuckles and punched the air with a quick jab to test his strength after finally completing what he called the evolution of his mana body.
The air thrummed with the force of the jab as he laughed out loud. The space in each cell was nowhere near the size of the space that resided in his chest so the changes they brought were not as significant as breaking through his main mana space but the strength of his body had risen exponentially; he had turned himself into an army of 1 not to mention the vast reserves of mana he had access to, no one in the same rank had anywhere near the amount of mana he had not that he didn't need it with the path his creation mana had taken him down.
There was a lot of practice that went into it but basically, someone with creation mana was not limited to any single element of mana and through much practice, he realized through complex combinations he could even access mana beyond the base elements of wind, fire, water, earth, lightning, and metal. Creation mana was the birth of all mana and therefore all elements bowed to it but as someone who had to wield it the case was different. His mana was still the vibrant gold lettering that it had come to be that day after Link finished eating that Astra but the resistance to cold that had come from his concept was gone.
It hadn't faded away in the least he had simply used it. His creation mana in concert with his concept was able to store the other types of mana he came into contact with and he could then apply it to his creations. His creations on the other hand were permanent. He was able to create what was equal to forbidden rank Astra given enough mana and bestow on them any of the properties that he had taken in with his concept and like Astra, he could store them in his mana space, and since there was a mana space in each of his cells he could store trillions of weapons. He was a walking armory at all times and he had been so creative in the past 5 years.
The library and his father's leftover notes had unintentionally helped him greatly. It was funny when people told stories of his father. It was always about how fearsome he was on a battlefield or how dominant of a man he was when commanding humanity's forces but truthfully he was simply an inventor. His father had discovered mana early but he was an inventor before Mana came back but when it did he blossomed. The notes and journals detailed some of the early days of mana coming back to the world. It told stories of how the mana returning caused the world to want to return itself to its origins of how the very planet once it regained strength had spawned tendrils of pure mana that attached themselves to the continents and pulled them back together to its Pangea-like state.
They call the moment when Pangea came back into being the gathering, mainly because humanity had a tendency to name events that claimed millions of lives. The gathering decimated the population even before the demon wars started on a scale that no one could have imagined. Volcanoes dormant for years erupted in a fireworks display to celebrate the birth of mana and the earthquakes swallowed cities whole and reduced whatever they cities they didn't to dust and rubble. His father didn't talk much at that time and Regius had never known the world like that. He never knew of the sprawling metropolis that was New York City. He knew of the city that floated in the sky above the now dubbed Manhattan Forest as the New York Aerial Zone, even if too many it was still simply New York. As he was recalling some of this information he had learned in the past 5 years the phone that MacArthur had made him keep started to ring.