I activate my body enhancement and full concealment skills, then start sprinting off into the forest. Getting lost doesn't really matter anymore now that I can teleport.
After a few minutes of running, with periodic release of my silencing spell to recycle the air, I see my first slime. I walk up close to it with concealment and search for its core. There.
I pull my dagger, drop my silencing spell, and slice into its core in a clean motion. The slimy part sort of dissolves, then I pick up its fractured core.
I place it in my palm and tune my magic to react with it like I did for the marbles. Then, I use magic sense. I feel probably fifteen reactions around me within 5 kilometers.
I spend the next twenty minutes running around slaughtering slimes until I have the ten cores that I need, then I teleport back to my clearing. I drop off the cores in my pack, then turn my attention to the last necessary thing on my agenda today – locating an Elder Dragon.
How can I use magic sense to locate something I've never been able to tune to before? Finding another Elder Dragon to tune to first would be just as hard, and I'm betting parts of it for sale are rare to nonexistent. I also don't have that kind of time or money.
Hmmm…I wonder if I can make my magic react with other magic? It won't be very specific, but if I can tune the sensitivity of the reaction, I might be able to slowly sort out things with magic power above a certain threshold. I'm assuming that Elder Dragons are basically as powerful as it gets.
Fortunately, I'm now familiar with the sensation of magic, so this should be relatively easy to tune. I spread my magic sense in all directions until I start to feel moderate strain on my magic reserves. Then, I imagine my magic reacting with other magic.
For a few minutes, it's to no avail, but then I'm suddenly flooded with a swarm of reactions pulling me in every direction. I'm so overwhelmed that I gasp aloud and break the spell.
Well, that sucked.
Eventually, I begin again, but this time I'm prepared for it and grit my teeth. I close my eyes and imagine the reaction between my magic and others' slowly becoming weaker, like I'm partially releasing the spell.
After a little time, I feel the number of reactions start to drop off. I keep lowering the sensitivity until I can discriminate the actual number of reactions to around ten. They're mostly in the city.
I spend about half an hour trying to get the initial sensitivity to where only the strongest presence shows up from the start. After a while, I can do this reliably.
Now, time to try making a dragon radar.
I face deeper into the forest, then spread out my magic sense to its very limits in a roughly sixty-degree arc. I activate magic detection at the highest level I detected earlier, and I am once again overwhelmed by number of reactions. I slowly drop the sensitivity until the number of signatures is manageable. They are still too numerous to finely discriminate, but I can estimate that the furthest signature is around 400 kilometers away.
So, this is my upper range huh? Not bad at all. Honestly, I'm shocked, but I'm sure that using an arc instead of a circle helped a lot to extend the range of my magic sense.
I slowly start lessening the sensitivity again until I detect only two presences – the number of Elder Dragons that there are supposed to be. I sweep my arc back and forth several times but don't detect any other presences, then I greatly narrow the arc to maximize its range, and I repeat the sweeps.
Still, only those two presences are detected. I don't know exactly how deep the forest is in that direction, so I can't be sure I'm getting the whole region, but those are probably the two Elder Dragons. Nice.
Now…which one of them is the earth one, and which is the wind one? Also, they are both around 300 kilometers away in different directions, so getting there would be a serious problem. I'd guess it'd take weeks of hard hiking to get there with those elves slowing me down. No way am I doing that.
I could try teleporting with the magic sense as a guide, but in a dense forest I'm likely to teleport into a tree or something around the signature. Nope, high speed flight is going to be necessary here.
This is, of course, a separate issue from how I'll get them there without tipping my hand too much, but I have an idea for that.
"Okay, time to learn to fly!" (Mizuki)
My idea for flight is to basically fine-tune gravity control around my own body. So, it's not so much me flying, as it is me falling in abnormal directions, but that's not important.
First, I need to try actual gravity manipulation as a general spell. Since it's a form of spacetime manipulation, like teleporting, I think I can do it.
The marbles should work nicely for testing this. I place one in my palm and hold it out in front of me. I will my magic to fill the space within and around the marble, then to 'grab' the spacetime that permeates it.