JAN 18 Friday.

I walk over to Entropy and pick her up from where she is sitting down on the wood to rest. "Feeling ok? I know that can take it out of you." I ask and carry her with me over to the pavilion.

I also picked up the medium gem we just re-imbued with shadow magic. This is the gem I've had hidden inside of my small statue of Luna for a while now, and after checking on it Entropy found that only half of the shadow magic it was originally imbued with was left.

It seems that the gem could stay inside of that shadow for roughly more than two years, but with that in mind, I thought it best to just redo the Imbuing ritual now and make sure I don't need to worry about it. I keep the gem with me and sit Entropy on a pillow to rest. "Feel ok, just sleepy." I nod and pass her a few treats.

"I guessed as much, thank you for the help Girl, rest up." I encourage her and walk away with the gem heading back to my shack. It's been a few weeks now and the snow has lessened by a third while the weather is already warming up, although it seems winter will be here a little longer than normal, as expected.

I step into my shack and place down the gem with several others to let it hide in plain sight until Entropy can put it back in the correct shadow. Recently I haven't had much to do with my time. The only thing I've completed is one more frost crop this year, the aptly named Frost Squash, it might be an odd choice but squash is a good food source.

Beyond that though I've completed something I've been slowly working on over time, upgrading my armor to being completely made from Mithril wood. I let that project fall to the side for a while but now it's done and with nothing else to really do at the moment I've been thinking about a few ideas I've had.

Namely to do with a few of my plants, specifically the Vita Tree and my New Mantle Bloom. To start with the latter of those two I've gotten another letter from Celestia and to say it's interesting is an understatement. A lot of it was uncertain though and many things she is still fuzzy about.

While testing the gem layers she's found some better names for them as well. Naming the clear outer layer is Gem Peel, the middle layer is Gem fruit, and the core is Gem Pit. I can see the theme she went for and while it's simple it works well enough and at least is better than anything I'd come up with.

The magical effects of the different gems are what is really interesting though. The Gem Peel turned out to be good at absorbing magic from its surroundings, and more than that it's also amazing at moving large amounts of magic without anything exploding.

The downside to that is that the gem is both structurally weak and also can only hold a little magic. Its a great magical conductor and a pretty good magic gatherer, but stably storing magic is something it can't really do. For now I don't have much use for such a gem but it's useful to have and I can think of a few hypothetical uses for it.

The Gem Fruit is basically on par with a regular ruby in many ways. It's nearly as dense and holds a similar amount of magic, it also gathers and conducts a similar amount of magic as well. It's a good replacement basically, and something I will be trying my best to make use of as a replacement.

The Gem Pit is the truly interesting one of the three though. It's not fast at gathering ambient magic, in fact its ability to do that is more near topaz. But it can hold a huge amount of magic for its size and its ability to absorb magic is near that of pure diamond.

The Gem Pit is so good at holding magic that it actually outperforms pure diamond, making it a step higher in some ways and pushing the limits of things. The problem with this all is obvious though, like I mentioned it is not great at actually gathering magic, so filling it becomes the problem.

Still, the Gem Pit is basically a perfect magical battery, capable of taking in, storing, and outputting a large amount of magic all at once. All this new information on gems is great and something I can see being used in several ways, but at the moment I can't do too much with it.

That's because of a discovery on my end, and one that's proving to be a thorn in my side to a lot of ideas I want to make with these new gems. I spend a moment looking around the room and picking out a seed from a box where I keep several types of seeds I used often enough to not want to walk to the seed vault.

Over the past week I decided that I learned enough about the Mantle Bloom's magical flows to take a crack at controlling the growth of the plant and trying to make a desired shape. But much like when I tried to just keep the flower small It quickly turned into a frustrating and annoying experience as the plant stubbornly refused to follow my Will.

I didn't try much before stopping but even changing the shape of one of the plant's spike-like leaves took a lot of mental effort. The magical cost was about what I expected and even less because I studied the magical flows before, but the Will and concentration I needed to make the plant change at all was so much more than anything else I've worked with before.

I walk outside and trot around to the back of my shack before tossing the White Oak seed down onto the ground and dumping some life magic into it. It takes a little mental effort to make the quickly growing tree change from anything natural and start growing into support beams.

Different plants take more or less Will depending on the amount of change I want and what I'm trying to do, but the Mantle Bloom is on a whole other level. Even after dumping half of my magical capacity into a single leaf and heavily concentrating the entire time it still took ten minutes to get what I wanted.

I grew the leaves into a flat gem plate five inches wide and six inches long, just to see if I could. After that, I felt a little tired and had to rest my mind from the mental strain I put it through. The Mantle Bloom is highly resistant to me trying to change it, even to a small degree like I did, I can't imagine what it would take to change the plant permanently.

I can still do it but unlike the extension I am now growing onto my shack I can't just force it into whatever shape I want in seconds. To make a large custom gem from the plant I'd need to work on it for a few days and take breaks to rest myself often, which would stop me from working on much else, and boy is that annoying.

I am not unused to things taking time though so I've decided to go back to learning the Mantle Bloom's magic flows, this time in even more detail. Last time I focused on the large flows but now I'm going to start picking apart the smaller ones while unfortunately having to slowly grow my gems.

Well, maybe not that slowly, making a custom-shaped gem in a week or two is massively faster and more controlled than any gem cutter could dream of. I leave my thoughts as I finish the last wall along with the roof to seal out the cold wind and snowfall from outside.

When I originally made this shack I made the wise choice of shaping it as a hexagon, with the ability to add more sections on with ease as much as needed. So with little effort I've added a third room to my shack, the original one is for storage, one is my bedroom, and the newest one is for Entropy's use.

She needed a space to paint and properly practice her magic, and this was the easy way to go about that. I make sure everything is stable and not going to collapse before leaving the room empty for now and moving on to my other priority today. I gather my woodworking tools and walk out into the snow heading to the Vita Tree.

I can have Entropy help decorate her room and add whatever she needs later, for now I have something else I want to work on. I want more Vita Tree wood, or Gold wood as I once called it. I only ever took one small branch off from the tree and I used that in my staff, and now I want more.

Imbuing the gem again brought back memories of my work on rituals. I haven't been using them but I've kept learning about rituals and expanding my knowledge on them as much as I can. I still have that idea about the sun, but that is still little more than an idea though.

Sure I've found more runes that could be used in such a thing and having the new gem types could make it easier, however the ritual would be anything but simple and I'm not that skilled yet. I could see how it would function though, at least hypothetically I could.

Back to the point, I want to imbue my life magic into a piece of Vita Wood, mostly because I am curious about what would happen. The ritual I have at the moment is for shadow magic but I made it so I just need to swap out a few runes that are for shadows and change them for life runes.

Once that's done I could imbue something with life magic, even if the runes are not the best and will lose a decent amount of the magic due to inefficiency. The thing is, I have no idea what will happen when I do this, but I can think of a few things I might be able to use it for.

I look over the Vita Tree and its branches, searching for a piece of wood I can take off while healing the resulting cut quickly enough to not kill the tree by accident. I've improved in several ways since I last tried this but the Vita Tree represents years of work I'd lose, so I need to be selective.

Eventually I settled for an offshoot of a larger branch. The smaller branch I want to cut off is three inches thick and three feet long, with a split two thirds of the way down that length. Before I start, I check on the barrel of golden dust that still collects everyday and after a moment I see the barrel is full and seal it before replacing it with an empty one.

Over time the Vita Tree has been making more and more golden dust as it grows, especially during winter as I don't have as much to use it on, and my stockpile has started to grow a lot. At this point I have twelve barrels filled with the dust and even with using it to help my projects I still can't consume everything it makes in a day anymore.

I need something to do with it, I can't let it just sit as it's an immensely useful thing, but I also have no idea what I can do with it. Sure I have more than enough for me but not enough to supply anypony else on a larger scale and giving some to Celestia wouldn't do much either.

She might have some use for it, at least she might be able to have somepony study it? I've never needed to try and find out how it works, even if I am still very curious about that. To be blunt, my time is better spent on other things than learning how this dust works, and I'm not entirely sure how to go about testing it.

I make a mental note to talk to Celestia and ask her to see if she can think of anything to do with it. I could give her some at least and she can mess with it, I'm not scared about anything happening as I'm the only Pony who can make it so her giving it to others is also relatively fine. I leave that alone and focus my Will and mind on the Vita Tree.

I bring over my fully charged staff to help myself and put on Wolf's Grace to walk into the air and stand next to the branch I want. The branch is on the bottom of the tree's larger branches and is ten feet off the ground, it should cause minimal disruption to the tree when I cut it off as it's still a small piece overall.

The Vita Tree is a being with a lot of magic moving through it, and that means I need to spend nearly a full minute just moving my space magic into the correct structure without anything going out of place. It takes concentration and time to make sure the highly magical plant doesn't lessen my control over my space magic and cause anything unwanted. Interestingly enough this proves it's harder to cut highly magical things with my space magic, something I might test more.

When it's all ready there is a small pop and the branch falls, being caught by me a second later. I press a hoof to the branch and another to my staff, watching as small streams of golden green magic spill out of the cut I have made. The cut is bigger then last time but with me dumping life magic from my staff and reserves into the tree the cut closes shortly.

It's been a while since I've done this but it takes a longer to heal this cut as well, and in the end, it's spilling magic for over a minute and a half before it fully heals and stops. I breathe out slowly and see I used around double the life magic I have to heal that, and after counting my life magic reserves the staff has lost ten percent of its stored magic.

I breathe out and walk back down while looking at the branch I just cut off. The cut point has that same golden and green flows of magic, concentrated enough to be seen easily and giving off some light. They are leaking out rapidly and after a second a thought occurs to me.

I am too late to do much as most of the magic has leaked out already, but in the future, I could try healing the cut quickly to hopefully form bark and have the branch keep some of the life magic it contains. I'm not sure what that would do but I find the idea interesting as I'm not sure how condensed the life magic inside really is.

What leaks out quickly spreads out over the area and the bark of the branch blocks most of my life sense, the main reason I can tell the life magic has been drained away from this branch is because of the leaves. Once the flow stops the golden leaves rapidly disintegrate and a small amount of golden dust moves over to the barrel and is collected.

I keep the branch with me and put my staff back before walking back to my shack. If I want to imbue this branch to hold life magic I need something to actually do with what I add. I need to add to the ritual something that would direct the life magic, yet very few things actually do anything with life magic. A healing spell would work well but it wouldn't be reliable as the effect would be cast by an object. It might heal you, assuming your injury is related to the specific spell on the branch.

I can only add one effect or spell to the ritual, and even basic healing needs more than one spell. I think as I walk back to my shack and settle in at my desk to start the process of cleaning up and debarking the branch. I cut off the small offshoots that are too small to use and put them to the side for now.

After that, I slowly remove the bark in the largest pieces I can manage, and I'm left with the familiar gold color of the wood. This piece is two feet of wood with a y split and another foot of wood split in two directions. I could do several things with it but first I want to test something.

Once the life magic had left the branch it was dead, an inert material that I can't mold with my life magic. At least not directly, while the wood is dead there is some small amount of life in the bark. Although that too is fading fast and as soon as I notice it I add my own recovering magic to help it.

The only reason I even noticed it was still alive was because unlike last time I did this I carved the branch quickly and took off the bark in large pieces right after I took it off of the Vita Tree. I chug some tea from my flask and study the bark closely from the other side. The inside has a white color to it and some parts of gold from the wood I separated it from.

I can just barely feel some life magic leaking from this side, but the other side still blocks my life sense from sensing it's still alive. This bark was containing and blocking a massive amount of life magic, and even then it didn't totally do its job and some leaked out. More importantly though, this I can work with.

I take a smaller piece of bark that is also just barely alive and line it up with the larger piece, adding life magic and watching with anticipation despite my low magic reserves. Even without my control the plant still knows what to do with life magic, grow, and it tries.

The smaller piece of bark slowly grows onto the larger piece and after a few seconds they become one. I want to take notes but growing those pieces together and pushing my life magic into the backside of the highly resistant material has me a little lightheaded as magical exhaustion kicks in somewhat.

I grit my teeth a little and shake from the familiar but normally less intense feeling before running out of my shack with the bark. In a full sprint, I make it to my staff quickly and breathe a little as I use its magic to keep the bark stable instead of using my own.

I breathe for a moment and start using Mana Mimicry to recover faster while drinking more tea. Drinking more so soon won't help much but every bit counts. After a moment I look back at the bark and try to think of some way to keep this alive, preferably before my staff runs dry.

At the moment the draw on my staff is small but it still won't last forever and even with me adding life magic to the less magically resistant inside of the bark the effort to keep it alive is constant. After a few moments of slightly panicked thought I have a stupid but possible idea.

I start to run back to my shack and hurriedly sit down with the bark and my woodworking tools. The bark is only losing its life magic from the inside, the outside of the bark is still blocking it from escaping. So I just need to stop the leakage from happening and it should stay alive.

The bark is a little thick and while it can bend it's not by enough to fold it into a two sided piece without leaving the sides to leak life magic, but a ball might work. I lay out the bark as flat as I could and take a knife to try and cut it into small shapes, driven by a goal and little reason.

It takes a few minutes of focus to cut out a shape I am familiar with from my past life. It's a slightly far off memory but the idea behind making six strips and putting them together is simple enough to remember. The bark is little so I can't make much but after some work I have each strip.

By this point, the staff only has half of its magic left and I'm cutting things close. I take my space magic and move all six pieces into the air before placing them edge to edge and bending them carefully while leaving a tiny bit of one strip peeled back so I can still add magic inside. As I add more and more magic this frankly silly idea starts to work.

Several thoughts start to pop up as I watch it grow together, mainly, why? I pause for half a second and shrug a little. The idea of actually keeping something from the Vita Tree alive was exciting, and it seems I ran with it at the moment. This could be useful though even if it's probably stupid.

All the seams have grown into place and the only gap left is the small part I kept open. I dump the last bits of the staff's magic into the ball and move the last bit into place, watching it heal and finally stop once it is done. I breathe out and feel my body and mind slump from the large magical use.

I breathe out heavily for a moment before gently placing the ball of bark on my desk. Its small, only two inches across, and as I sit there I realize it's stupid and amazing. I mean, it seems stable, I can't feel the life magic inside that much, barely any at all actually, but I can say it is alive.

"I guess it tests my idea earlier?" I mumble to myself as I question why I went so hard for this small ball. "Actually." I look over the ball closely and start making notes in my bracelet. Sure this might have been silly, but it actually gave me some interesting information about the Vita Tree.

Mainly that the bark is still alive and survives longer than the wood, maybe its ability to block life magic also helps it lose its own life magic more slowly? Either way it means my idea of healing a branch after I cut it off to keep it alive would probably work, and that leads to other possibilities.

If the branches can be kept alive I can actually study them in much more detail than before. I normally have trouble making out much to do with life magic when I'm next to the tree because even if the Vita Tree's bark blocks most life magic, the amount that it gives off overwhelms my senses to a degree.

It makes small details hard to make out and differentiate. I lie down and lay on my side for a moment to rest my head against the floor. I didn't overuse my magic by much, not to a dangerous degree at least, but directing all that magic took a lot of concentration and I have a damned headache now.

I guess I also proved the bark can live without the wood itself, at least for a while it can. I assume that bark ball is still leaking tiny amounts of life magic out. Such small amounts that I can't detect them over the ambient life magic around me, still it means my new creation will die eventually.

I sit up after a few minutes and keep Mana Mimicry active while drinking even more tea, just to keep the effect as active as I can. I also take a moment to drain my water flask and eat some fish jerky I normally use as treats for Entropy. With that done I continue making notes and look over at my desk.

The other pieces of bark are now thoroughly dead, and the branch is just as it was. The ball is also just sitting there, a mostly blurry spot in my life sense. I can tell it's alive, but for how long is a complete mystery. I check my watch and mark the date and time, thankful to my friend that I don't have to cast a spell to check the time right now.

I look over the ball and poke it a little with my hoof, the ball bends a tiny bit and it seems air tight, it is solid enough to not fall apart at least. Cutting the bark even when dead takes enchanted tools so I don't think I'm risking breaking it with my hoof without really trying to do it on purpose. I move it around and look at it from various angles.

I don't really know what to do with this. I've basically made something to store uncontrolled life magic, I could keep adding life magic and see where that gets me? Or I wonder if I could grow this? If I stockpiled enough life magic inside it might be able to actually start growing, or it might destabilize and become a grenade.

Maybe it's best I play it safe then, that does remind me that I might want to try and grow another Vita Tree, at least a sapling that I can have as backup. I don't want to grow it too much though, I'm still trying to grow my original Vita Tree bigger at the moment.

I keep the odd invention in place while letting my mind wander over the possibilities of it all. If nothing else I made something interesting to tell Celestia about.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading. :]
Current year is 997

I didn't have anything to do before Avalon returned, so I thought we could do some messing around. Honestly I feel the experimentation has lesson a lot, witch I think fits better and the beginning had too much of it, but I would like to mix it in a little more when I can.