>>6085435You get to work before she changes her mind. You won't outright experiment on it per se, as much as you'll study its reaction to external, harmless stimulus. First, you use mana feel to see if there's any pattern in the flow of mana between the heart and 'leeches'. Mana is a strange thing, it's linked to the soul, or at least it's supposed to be. The main idea is that the soul generates mana, which it gives to the body, which the body uses for stuff depending on your race. However, that's not the case here, the 'heart' creates mana, something no biological organ should be able to do. You notice the heart occasionally beats slower, and that's when the leeches decide to grab what can only be described as 'magic mold' that forms on the side of the aquarium to bring it back to the heart.
So, it creates mana in the same way a body would create energy by using proteins and the likes. It does raise the question though, is the curse fueled by individual forgottens? Surely not, or else you'd be able to remember them past their death, and surely their existence would be more widely known if you could read about the dead ones.
You take more time to study it, even opting to start sleeping in the vault, only leaving it to get to classes. You only have a week, and you need some kind of discovery or it'll all be for nothing. Maybe you could skip some classes? No, that's a bad idea, you can't afford to be behind on anything as a human.
By some miracle, you manage to find something. The curse itself has a way of escaping your sight and memory, but using the same tricks you did to remember Table, you managed to get a better view of it. It's still not easy, but you're starting to get it now. It's something you wouldn't have been able to figure out from just studying Table, you're sure of it. It's just too subtle, too small, too quiet, too forgettable.
The leeches don't just transport nutrients, they also transport mana, and most incredibly, they will sometimes trigger a surprisingly potent version of the curse on themselves, and cast a pocket space spell to disappear somewhere else, only to come back a few seconds later. You can't look into the pocket space, it's just so small it can only fit the leeches, and they enter it the moment it opens. You do have a theory though, and it's that the curse is actually in that pocket space, and it's being drip fed mana by the leeches. The leeches also don't cast the curse on themselves, it's just that opening the pocket space would make the curse 'spill out' on the closest thing, in this case the leech.
