Crystal Grid

A 3x3 Crystal Grid

The Crystal Grid is an extension of a person's Spirit, and thus exists in the Spiritual Plane. It can hold the patterns and signatures of Spell Crystals, Support Crystals and Amplification Crystals, allowing a person to benefit from their abilities.

Put plainly, the Crystal Grid is the "place" where a person can "equip" these types of Iserial Crystals in order to be able to use Iserialogies, gain access to support skills and passive bonuses, or amplify other crystals. The process of doing so is relatively intuitive, and most Cemarelij naturally learn it during their childhood or early youth. If a crystal is "equipped" in this manner, it disappears from the Material Plane and effectively becomes a part of the person's extended Spirit. "Equipped" crystals can also be "unequipped" again, which removes them from the person's Crystal Grid and returns them to the Material Plane.

In order for a person to access his/her Crystal Grid, he/she must first learn an Iserialogy on his/her own. This Iserialogy then becomes the base of the person's Crystal Grid and can't be "unequipped". Likewise, any other Iserialogies that a person learns without an Iserial Crystal also become a permanent part of their Crystal Grid. This is mostly the case with Fatikelij, who don't usually utilize Iserial Crystals (though some can be taught) and mostly expand their repertoire of Iserialogies by this method.

## Structure

Though its actual spiritual nature is more complicated than that, the Crystal Grid can best be thought of a an array of rows and columns forming a grid, where the rows correspond with different ranks, and the columns correspond with different Iserial Elements.

A Crystal Grid does not necessarily have to be "rectangular" in appearance (that is, with all columns having the same amount of rows). It is far more common for a person to have the biggest amount of rows in his/her primary element, and fewer rows in elements he/she acquired later.

A column can have up to six rows, which corresponds with the ranks of Iserial Crystals. However, normal people usually do not acquire more than 3 rows in any given column.

Likewise, normal people do not usually gain more than 3 columns, which allows them to use their primary element along with two resonant elements. However, Iserialogists, Soldiers and Adventurers can gain up to 12 columns in total, allowing them to use all of the Sphere Elements. However, in practice, this extreme number occurs only very rarely, and a more realistic maximum value for the number of columns is 9.

Unlike Spell Crystals, which can only be "equipped" in the column of the corresponding element, Support Crystals and Amplification Crystals can be "equipped" in any column, regardless of its element.

## Growth

When a person first learns Iserialogy, his/her Crystal Grid features only one column with one row, which is permanently occupied with the Iserialogy learned by that person. As a person grows in age and experience, his/her Crystal Grid will gradually develop. The direction of growth will depend on the person's nature, environment and attitude. Two characteristics in particular seem to play a large role in determining the direction of growth:

Progressive people tend to gain additional columns faster, allowing them to master many different elements.

Conservative people tend to gain additional rows faster, allowing them to master stronger Iserialogies of existing elements.