Agnes was confident that they would eventually succeed once they solved the problem of making the phones reliably send and receive messages that could be interpreted by ordinary people. Once that hurdle was overcome, everything else could theoretically be handled by the quantum computer, which would process, sort, route, and organize the enormous amount of information passing through the network. The remaining challenge would essentially become a programming problem, and Agnes was confident that someone somewhere had probably already created programs capable of handling massive amounts of information. Programming was outside his own area of expertise, however, so he would have to find someone who understood that part of the problem and bring them into the project.
"I agree with Agnes," Laelia said as she looked around the conference room. "So, before we start dividing everyone into groups, I am going to give you a proper lecture on the runes." She wanted everyone involved in the project to understand the fundamental principles behind the new technology, because there was no point giving specialists access to a powerful tool if they did not understand what the tool was actually capable of doing. "Afterward, I want everyone to separate into groups according to their disciplines and start working on the parts of the theory that fall within your expertise."
With that, Laelia left the conference room and headed toward the lecture hall. The scientists followed behind her in groups, already discussing possible approaches to the problems they had uncovered during the meeting. The atmosphere had changed considerably from when they had first entered the room, because what had initially sounded like an ambitious theory now looked like something that could actually become reality. They still had countless problems to solve, but there were enough specialists working together that those problems no longer seemed impossible.
The reason Laelia was so confident that a functioning communication device would become enormously popular was also quite simple. At present, contacting someone outside your city within a matter of minutes required using the System's message service, which essentially involved sending a physical message through the System. The message could travel enormous distances, but the System charged according to the distance between the sender and the recipient. For something that was supposed to function as ordinary communication, those costs could become surprisingly expensive.
The system's method of handling those messages also created another inconvenience. People had to keep checking the marketplace because there was no proper notification system for transactions or messages that had been proposed to them. The System considered storing every pending transaction permanently to be an unnecessary waste of information storage, so it automatically deleted an offer if the recipient failed to accept it within an hour. That meant someone could easily miss an important message simply because they were busy doing something else when it arrived.
A proper communication device would solve both problems at once. Instead of paying the System every time they wanted to send a message, people could communicate through a network that was designed specifically for rapid communication. They would not need to constantly monitor the marketplace, and they could potentially send messages instantly regardless of the distance between two places. If Laelia's project succeeded, the demand would likely be enormous.
"Good news, everyone," Karl announced during breakfast the following morning. "Gaia has approved our breathing technique." The announcement immediately attracted everyone's attention because they had been waiting for the final evaluation for some time. "I received the result around six this morning, and there were quite a few revisions."
The room became noticeably quieter as Karl continued. "Several things we assumed were correct turned out to be wrong, while other parts of the technique simply did not work the way we thought they did." He paused for a moment before smiling. "However, the overall rarity of the technique is Rare." The entire dining room erupted into cheers at those words, because obtaining a Rare-quality breathing technique was an incredible result for something they had developed themselves.
Once everyone had settled down again, Karl immediately entered what the family jokingly called his lecture mode. "The biggest revision concerns how we filter the mana we breathe into our bodies." Their original theory had been relatively straightforward: mana entered through the lungs, traveled through the body, and was filtered as it moved through the various organs. They had eventually decided that the heart should serve as the primary filtering point because it was the most suitable location for the process.
Their reasoning had seemed sound at the time. The heart was centrally positioned within the body, and placing the filtering process there meant unwanted mana could theoretically be rejected before traveling too far through the body. The rejected mana could then be expelled quickly during exhalation instead of being allowed to circulate through the body's internal pathways. Gaia's revisions, however, had shown them that the actual movement of mana was considerably more complicated.
"Most of the revisions concern the way mana flows through the body," Karl explained. "That is important because the internal pathways involved are among the most sensitive parts of the human body." They had originally treated the body's mana circulation almost like a simple network of pipes, but the reality was far more complicated. Mana did not simply travel from one point to another without affecting the tissues and organs it passed through.
The next major problem concerned the fact that the entire body participated in the process of breathing. The lungs were obviously responsible for the overwhelming majority of a person's physical respiration, but mana did not behave in exactly the same way as ordinary air. Every part of the body possessed pores that could interact with the surrounding mana, meaning the skin was constantly participating in the exchange even when a person was not consciously thinking about it.
"There are already countless theories about this online," Karl continued. "One of the more popular theories claims that the legendary cleansing of the bones and marrow described in cultivation stories is actually a misunderstanding of how the body handles rejected mana." According to that theory, what ancient cultivation stories described as impurities being expelled from the bones could instead be the body gradually clearing accumulated attributes from its pores. Whether that theory was completely correct remained uncertain, but their experiments had shown that the pores could not simply be ignored.
At first glance, that conclusion seemed strange because ordinary scientific measurements suggested that the skin was responsible for only around one or two percent of a human's total physical respiration. By conventional standards, that percentage was too small to justify giving the skin much attention in a breathing technique. Mana, however, did not follow the same rules as oxygen and carbon dioxide, which meant that physical respiration percentages could not be directly applied to mana circulation.
"The pores may only account for a tiny percentage of our physical breathing, but they are still extremely important for mana," Karl explained. "They help prevent blockages from forming throughout the body, and they are constantly exposed to the mana in the surrounding environment." That meant the skin was not merely another entrance for mana but also one of the body's mechanisms for dealing with mana that had been absorbed and rejected. Ignoring that process could cause unwanted mana to accumulate inside the body.
The problem became even more complicated because most of the mana a person absorbed was not actually retained. The body could only make use of a fraction of the mana it encountered, while the remainder had to leave again. The lungs were obviously one of the primary routes for this exchange, but the pores provided another important pathway. If the body absorbed mana without having an effective method of releasing the excess, the resulting accumulation could interfere with cultivation.
That was why they had struggled so much with the breathing technique. They could not simply create a method that concentrated on inhaling mana, because cultivation required both absorption and rejection. They also could not treat the skin as an insignificant secondary system simply because it contributed little to ordinary human respiration. Instead, the entire process had to be coordinated so that mana could enter, be filtered, and leave the body without creating blockages.
Eventually, they found a workable solution. All mana absorbed by the body would first have to pass through the heart before it could be considered usable mana. The heart would therefore serve as the primary checkpoint through which the body's various mana streams were processed. Only after the mana had passed through that filtering process could it safely enter the rest of the body's cultivation pathways.
Unfortunately, that solution came with a severe requirement. A practitioner could not simply inhale, immediately exhale, and repeat the process like normal breathing. They needed to hold their breath until the mana they had absorbed had passed through the heart and been properly processed. Only then could they exhale the rejected mana.
"The same principle applies when you breathe in again," Karl said. "You cannot simply start the next breath before the previous mana has completed its journey through the heart." That meant the breathing rhythm of the technique was fundamentally different from ordinary human breathing. Practitioners would have to learn an entirely new rhythm and gradually train their bodies to handle the altered circulation without panicking or losing concentration.
Even beginning the technique for the first time was difficult. The practitioner had to establish the breathing pattern while simultaneously forming the mental image required by the technique. The image was not something they could simply memorize like a diagram because the practitioner needed to construct it within their own mind. Only after the image had been properly established would much of the technique become automatic.
That requirement was particularly troublesome because their chosen mental image was relatively complicated. The practitioner needed to imagine and maintain the image of a bow and arrow while simultaneously controlling multiple streams of mana moving through the body. Even someone with excellent concentration could struggle with the process during their first attempts. Trying to control one's breathing, visualize the image, regulate mana, and maintain the correct circulation all at once was an enormous mental burden.
"Handling all those streams of mana while trying to picture and draw a bow and arrow is not going to be easy," Karl concluded. "That is probably going to be the hardest part of teaching the technique to everyone." The family had expected the Rare-quality technique to be difficult, but Gaia's revisions had made it clear that its difficulty came from more than simply having powerful effects. The technique demanded that the practitioner understand their own body and maintain control over several processes simultaneously.