I am the first to get back to the tower, which is unsurprising, as it has only been about three hours since we all left. I decide to let my mind rest after the strain I just put it through, so I lie back down on my sleeping roll and close my eyes, trying to clear my mind. I feel the pounding in my head recede bit by bit as I lie here, and after a while it completely passes, freeing me from the consequences of overstraining my mind.
With nothing else planned until the other two get back, I check my waiting notifications, all from my time looting that tower.
[You have leveled up an active skill]
[Mana shaping] lvl 14
[You have leveled up a passive skill]
[Mana Sense] lvl 13
[Mana Sense] lvl 14
Well, at least all the effort was worth it, even if [Space Control] didn’t gain a level. Maybe opening two portals at once isn’t impressive enough? I’ll just have to keep pushing the skill. That seems like the only way to level them up anyways.
I spend the rest of my time waiting by cultivating my [Beast mana-heart] and doing more mana experimentation. I want to develop a mana-based attack if possible, as using [Space Control] to output damage costs far too much mana.
My first trial is creating a small orb of mana and trying to launch it like Daniel does to his projectiles, but [Mana Shaping] only allows me to do as the skill says, shape mana, not launch it.
My next thought is trying to create a knife edge from mana. I find that it’s actually rather easy for me to create the shape of a knife now, not that it's a very complicated shape, but I’m surprised by how little concentration it takes for me to keep the knife stable. I push as much mana into the knife as I can, increasing the mana density until it starts pushing back on me, nearing the limit of how much I can compress the mana.
The knife is completely solid now and about as strong and dense as steel, while being only a fraction of the weight. The color went from a very light green to a more grass-green color, a bit darker but still pretty light. The mana leakage from the knife is minimal, but it is happening. The knife should last a few hours before completely dissipating. As long as I’m holding it, I think if I let go it would dissipate within seconds.
Next, I move my attention to the edge, where the blade should be, and start compressing it even more. I feel some pushback from the mana, so I use the same method I use to sharpen space, but on mana this time. The edge slowly starts narrowing, becoming thinner and thinner until it too reaches a limit I cannot surpass. Once the edge is as condensed as I can make it, my focus turns to keeping the knife stable.
With a mostly stable knife made entirely out of mana in my hands, I do the only reasonable thing. Test it out. Using my regular knife as a comparison, I make sure to test sharpness, edge retention, and overall durability.
My mana knife blows the regular one out of the water in every test except drawing it quickly. I can have my regular knife in my hand in moments, even quicker if I use my skill to teleport it directly into my hand. The mana blade, however, takes me almost two minutes to create, far too long for any kind of fight. I completely reabsorb the knife and then make it again, and again, and again. It’s all I do until the other two finally return an hour later.
As I watch them walk up the stairs through my spatial perception, I create one last knife. It takes me about a minute to do so, still not fast enough. As soon as I finish and start inspecting it, I get another notification.
[You have gained a new active skill]
[Condense] lvl 1
I can immediately feel the new skill in the back of my mind, waiting to be used just like my other active skills. Feeding mana into the skill, I feel it activate and focus it on the mana blade. The mana inside compresses, turning a darker shade of green and making room for more mana to be pushed in, which is exactly what I do next. I compress the new mana as well, adding more and more when I can, until I reach a new mana density limit.
Next, I focus [Condense] on the edge of the blade, making it as thin as possible, increasing the sharpness several times. I test the edge of the blade with my thumb, drawing blood instantly and bringing a smile to my face.
[You have leveled up an active skill]
[Condense] lvl 2
[Condense] lvl 3
I fail to realize that Corvax and Daniel have both returned and are currently watching me cutting myself while smiling at a knife made of mana.
“I got a new skill and made this knife!” I exclaim as soon as I see my two friends. “Check this out. It’s way sharper than my steel knife, and check out its density.” I hand the knife to Daniel, confident the new density should last several minutes without me keeping it stable until it starts to dissipate.
He takes the knife in his hand, testing the edge against a part of his gauntlet, nodding at the small groove it leaves behind. “Impressive. What is the new skill called?” He hands the knife to Corvax next, who looks at it questioningly.
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“The skill is called [Condense]. I used [Mana Shaping] to create the knife and make it as dense as I could, then I used [Condense] to pack in even more mana and make the edge razor sharp.”
“This is made of mana? Only mana?” Corvax asks, bending the blade with two of his massive hands. “How durable is it?”
“Let’s find out,” I say, watching the blade bend more and more. It’s acting exactly like steel, rigid but with enough give to bend a little and snap right back into place.
A few more seconds of bending, and the blade breaks in half under the strain of Corvax's might. The two halves of the blade immediately start dissipating, so I walk up and reabsorb all the mana I can.
“Pretty strong,” Corvax says. “Is this what you spent your time doing?”
A smile comes to my lips. “Only for the last hour or so. The real prize of today is this.” I pull the crystal I looted from the other tower out, showing it to the other two.
“Woah, what is that?” Daniel says as he takes a step closer.
I toss the orb to him as I explain what little I know about it. “I found this under the basement floor of another tower, hidden behind two layers of security. It seems to be the power supply for the tower and its enchantments. I think it collects some kind of ambient mana, as it still works after I ripped it out of where it was installed.”
“So does our tower have one of these as well?” Daniel asks while examining the crystal and its housing.
“Probably, the other tower had the same exact layout as this one. But we should crack open a few more before we start to experiment on ours.”
“Agreed,” Daniel says as he hands the crystal back to me, which ends up in my storage just a few moments later. “But that comes later, as we have two deer to skin and then a bear to hunt.”
I notice that just outside the tower two dead deer are lying outside the door, both killed from a shot through the heart. He is getting terrifyingly accurate with his shots. I wonder what level his [Metal Manipulation] is at.
The other two begin skinning the animals, and Corvax offers to teach me the basics after he notices me watching him. He shows me where to cut and, most importantly, how to cut, as cutting too deep or in the wrong places can ruin the pelt or meat. He tells me of the importance of having a sharp blade, to which I create a small blade of mana off the tip of my pointer finger and use that.
I continue cultivating my heart as we work. It’s something I want to be able to do automatically without even thinking about it, like breathing. It still takes a good bit of my concentration, but I hope that if I start doing it constantly, it will become second nature.
An hour and a half later, both deer are skinned, and the meat is cut into thin strips for smoking. Daniel builds a fire on the roof of our tower and sets most of the meat to smoke. Corvax builds another fire, this one on top of the wall, and starts cooking three steaks for our lunch. The meat tastes good, great even, but it doesn’t compare to the ant steaks we had last night. I make a mental note to harvest any giant ant meat I come across.
After our meal we gear up, which for me just means emptying out my storage space of all the junk. I fill up my old backpack with the silver and gold coins, as well as the other junk I had stored in there, which was really weighing the thing down. The only things left in there are the ten crystals from the support ants, the two from the sentinel ants, two full waterskins, my bone dagger, one of the healing potions, and the power core from the tower.
Twenty minutes after our late lunch, we gather at the staircase leading down, ready to scout out the city.
“Everyone ready?” Daniel asks.
Corvax and I both nod, and he walks down first, as we agreed earlier. Corvax is in the front, I am in the middle acting as our radar, and Daniel is behind us. I don’t need any light to navigate in pure darkness anymore, but if I did, I’d be pretty thankful right now. Corvax's sunlight energy causes him to glow pretty bright, and he can even increase or decrease the amount of light he gives off, but he can’t stop it completely.
A few minutes later we exit the wall at our usual point, the southern gate of the city, and push inwards, toward where the bear tried to trap us last time. With my increased spatial perception range and learning how to use it more effectively, I can observe a truly terrifying amount of space at once. In this tightly packed city I can see into dozens of buildings at once and scan streets several intersections ahead of us and behind us, all while also scanning for any mana that my [Mana Sense] can detect.
We walk through the cramped alleyways between buildings squeezed together with barely enough room to walk. A few times I reroute us because Corvax is too big to get through some of these pathways. Clearly this city was not designed with eight-foot-tall, four-armed aliens in mind. This city was designed for the undead, or maybe it was by the undead. Merrick didn’t go into detail about the history of the city. Is that why these buildings are all empty and packed together like this? Was this part of the city meant to be used by the undead? It’s where I would put any undead minions, at the edge of the city, so they can also act as the first line of defense.
I constantly keep mana flowing around and through my heart, slowly growing the crystal in there. I can feel it’s already producing a smidge more mana with each beat, and the shape is starting to form from a grain of rice to a rough sphere. It’s still small though, so I double down on my decision to make cultivating it a priority. It’s probably my biggest advantage over any other initiate, so I can’t afford to neglect it like I have been.
Eventually, once the building and alleyways open up a bit more, I start to notice undead in some of the houses, just like before. It’s smaller groups this time, only two or three undead in each building, but they appear pretty frequently. I mark each of these houses on a map I’m making on another of the red crystals. After a little while I notice a pattern, and when I bring it up to the other two, they agree.
We think that the bear is using these small groups to scout out the border of its territory. Our current theory is that they are like sentries and an early warning system for the bear if anything decides to enter its territory.
“Well, what do we do now?” I ask the group after we backtrack a bit to get away from bears' territory.
“Do you think we could bait the bear over to us if we take out some of the undead?” Daniel asks.
“Maybe. It’s worth a shot at least. I don’t want to go further into its territory before we have an actual plan for killing it, though.” I respond while Corvax spins his axe in one hand, getting himself ready for a fight.
“Let’s just take out a few groups with warp shots from a safe distance, and then wait a while to see if the bear shows up or sends more undead or whatever it chooses to do.” Daniel says, to which Corvax and I agree.
We set up in a four-way intersection that should make fleeing easy if we need to and start killing undead. I open a rift into one of the rooms with undead in it, Daniel lets off one or two shots to wipe them out, and then we move on to the next group. In just a few minutes we kill about ten undead and then decide to wait for a response.
“Well, that should get its attention.” Daniel mutters as the last rift closes.