Several months later.
The laboratory's constant-temperature purification system was running at full capacity, yet it still could not drain away the endless heat radiating from within. Countless discarded design drafts lay scattered across the floor. The rune arrays on the walls had grown slightly hot from operating continuously for too long, emitting a low hum. Benjamin and Viola stood before the experiment, their eyes red as rabbits', their faces tinged with an unhealthy bluish-gray. At last, Benjamin completed the final procedure.
His fingers left the nest's surface, and he collapsed into the chair behind him as though he had been hollowed out. The chair let out an overloaded creak.
Viola was even more dramatic. She dropped straight onto the floor, limbs spread wide like a dried salted fish.
"Finally... finished..." Her weak voice drifted up from the floor.
Benjamin leaned against the back of his chair and stared at the ceiling, no longer even having the strength to speak.
It could only be said that when two capable yet picky Wizards got together, their bursts of inspiration were inexhaustible.
Viola's initial revised plan had already been quite good. If they had strictly followed it, the nest's modification would have taken five or six days at most.
But the problem was... neither of them was the type to "follow the plan."
On the third day of the procedure, Benjamin suddenly thought of a better arrangement for the information nodes.
After Viola saw it, she felt they could be even more aggressive. So the plan was changed, the procedure was paused, and everything was adjusted anew.
Another two weeks passed, and Viola proposed a new energy-circuit structure that could improve information conversion efficiency by ten percent.
Benjamin studied it for three days, then added two more optimizations on top of it.
So