Magicking Magic

In the end, while five days was _significantly _shorter than as many years, it was still an objectionable amount of time in Ahsch's eyes. After all, with the number of crises he and his group had on their collective plates, any amount of time was wasted time.

All the same, he couldn't complain too much - figuring out how to get around the seemingly inbuilt restrictions babies had on spells was about as hard as figuring out Daydreamweave had been. It required an entire paradigm shift in his head about how he approached magic, starting with the fact that his most comfortable, easy-to-use magic - including what he actually wanted to use - was so automatic it felt like figuring out how to control his heart with only his brain. After all, he didn't intonate or gesture or really do anything to cast his Innate Spells, he just... willed it to happen. Like walking, or controlling his breath, only his brain wasn't really set up to do it.

Yet.

He spent the first two days comparing his experiences casting his spells to using his bond magic. And quickly grew frustrated at not being able to actively do the former in the moment, then pissed at himself for never having thought to actually study the mechanics of casting his Innate Spells. Still, over a decade of using them provided something for him to work with, and since his goal was to move it towards how his bond magic worked, it was hardly an insurmountable problem.

The strangest, and most annoying thing, was how similar the bond magic and his Innate Spells were in execution. Neither involved incantations or obscure somatic components, just the flexing of his will and a draw on his Mana Pool. The main difference came from how the Innate Spells were still spells - they were structured, organized, laid out in a neat, predictable pattern: an upfront cost (and an ongoing draw on his Pool maximum if they could be maintained), a set range, neatly delineated power scaling, and a set of effects. Somewhat different from how the bond magic functioned, where - while Ahsch was sure it could be measured and organized in a like fashion - it was more comparable to an exercise of the body, like swimming: a flex of his intent, the pull on his Mana, and then the almost literal working of parts of his mind he wasn't really aware of (which he suspected were his various mystical 'stats,' his Mana Density and such) to shape the Mana into the effects he wanted. He was sure he could measure the exact cost of making a meaningless bond with, say, a random floorboard, but there was an inherent knowledge that the answer was such a large number that it was similar to computing the effort it would take to lift a spoonful of cereal - you could do it, but outside of math or physics problems for a test, why would you?

Given how much he was exploring his bond magic, he was pretty sure he would ace whatever task Rwnil had laid out for him next. And as much as that made him want to smirk with pride, it didn't solve the issue of how to turn Entropic Revelation into not-a-spell.

And that was where the problem really lied. After all, if he had to remind himself of how a bit of bond magic felt, he could just do it; likewise if he wanted to discover how a certain mental/mystical flex felt, again, he could just experiment - carefully - with the magic. But if he wanted to reacquaint himself with one of his Innate Spells, he suspected he had at least three or four years ahead of him. Which was not helpful.

It was especially troubling because he hadn't used Entropic Revelation much - a few casts when he was very young, playing with one of his safe spells, but after that, almost never, at least until he made Accelerated Stitch. And beyond that, time magic hadn't been much of a concern of his. Because of course it hadn't.

That would be too easy.

Therefor, he had to abstract how time magic was different from bond magic, extrapolate how Entropic Stitch might feel to cast spell-less, and pray to... himself? Maybe just hope that he didn't mangle the magic too terribly to kill himself or destroy the world or some shit.

Messing around with fundamental forces was actually quite terrifying, when one stepped off the carefully-paved path. Though he doubted that he had enough Mana to really fuck up cataclysmically. Maybe.

Hopefully.

It was a fear that made him stick with recreating Accelerated Stitch first, since he was slightly more familiar with that spell than Entropic Revelation - especially given he had actually cast Accelerated Stitch some time in the past year. At least, to his memory. He brushed aside concerns about the actual time for later, focused on recreating the spell in a spell-less form, and two days after he started, he managed to get it to work. With Mahat's help - since nobody else wanted to stick a needle in the baby, even if they all knew it was Ahsch - he managed to confirm it, and began working on Entropic Revelation.