"It was a lot bigger before but it seems to have shrunk down back to normal size at some point."
Rune was looking down at the containment cube alongside Shelly and Reef. He had been expecting too see the same giant tentacle-like whisker, but just as he had explained a moment ago, what lay inside the cube now was much closer to a normal sized catfish whisker.
"Are you sure you won't need another sample," he asked.
"The size of the sample isn't important," Shelly replied, shaking her head. "This will do just fine."
The technique she was going to use was was she came up with herself. She called it "Mana Tracing". It was a technique she developed to reverse engineer the formulas for existing potions and other alchemic mixtures. It used complex mathematics and mana processing to trace a recipe back to its roots. While it was technically against the law to use a technique like this on existing products, that had never detered Shelly in the past. But that was neither here nor there.
