As much as he felt his fighting technique improve regularly, his progress with transmutation, both practical and theoretical, was achingly slow. Combining his three metals produced bizarre products that helped in no way to understand what the slit he was doing, and that was before he realized that it could be drastically modified by the ratio of combination, or if he added foreign Mana to the process, or even by how he concentrated each metal before transmuting them together.
It seemed like every minor experiment he did simply exploded the parameter space into further possibilities, as opposed to narrowing it down into something more manageable. If he had years and years to dick around and experiment, it would be great, of course, but the two weeks of his training ended, and his looming deadline felt like a slab of concrete pressing against his soul.
>>Terrania Quest (Ultimate Priority): Establish the Terrania Nexus.
>>Establish a Foundational Nexus for the Terrania Sub-System. Necessary attunements: Water, Earth, Metal, Void. Deadline: 1y, 11m, 20d
With a sigh, Axl looked up from the large bathtub he soaked in after power-washing the grime of a long transmutation session, the bucolic, living painting of fluffy purple clouds looking like they were taunting him with their easy trek across the ceiling’s mural. Almost enough to get him not to enjoy the pleasures of a full hot bath. He'd seen these things in the ancient vids before, and had vague memories of Roken going to the public baths a lot, but he couldn't have imagined how great these were. He wondered if some of it was his lingering water-elf nature was not quite overridden by his new Lineage.
For better or worse, he had a plan. Accept the Alchemical Forging Impartment reward, then maybe the revisited Dao vision, depending on if he needed extra help on that front, then the soul-attuned item, then establish his fief. The only part of that which made him nervous was the Dao vision bit.
Clearly, the Deep System wanted him to double down on lightning with the vision, but there was metal there as well, both in the mysterious figure's sword and the bunker, both also having a strong draw to him. But this banked on him being able to target the attention of the vision like he could the first time, and Axl wasn't so sure about that, it being a "revisit", not a new vision. Perhaps this meant he'd only be able to go deeper into the lightning again, so he didn't want to use that reward unless he absolutely needed to take that risk, or at least could mitigate it if it ended up being more lightning stuff that could trigger his building tribulation.
Soon, he finished his bath and went to the atrium at the center of the mansion, which became the unofficial meeting space where he got in the habit of discussing important stuff with Moxlin and the servitor. This time, Aria was there as well, sitting in the middle of the large couch, a chunk of her hair pressed against her head, the other side frazzled and unkempt, the first time he saw her with bed-hair.
"Your seclusion ended early?" Axl asked.
"No, but I felt I needed to be here." Aria yawned, her hand coming up too late to cover the comically exaggerated gesture—for a second, it looked like she could swallow something bigger than her head.
"Heya Aria!" Moxlin waved as she skidded across the air, riding on thin lines of golden thread, before she missed a step and tumbled onto the ground.
"Oh," Aria pointed at the threads lingering in the air. "Myriad gold! So beautiful. At least half the high court ladies in my clan would hunt you down for that form of weaving. You'd be making dresses for a thousand years and live like a queen."
"A queen doesn’t have to work for her castle" Moxlin harrumphed, even as she was visibly giddy by the oddly foreboding compliment.
"Anyhow," Axl started, nodding to the servitor standing to the side, "I want to pass my plan by the three of you, which frankly I'm not so sure about."
He proceeded to discuss the details, not holding back on his concerns about the Dao vision and his link to lightning. Moxlin knew all about that already, and apparently, that was how Aria even found him, so they weren't surprised, but the servitor's eyes widened slightly at hearing about it for the first time, by far the most overt response he ever got from the wooden guardian.
"Sounds fine to me," said Moxlin. "Probably a good idea to work towards your core, most elves basically start their cultivation there, so it's odd you're so far along without one."
"I don't understand," said the servitor. "How can you not have a core? I've seen you practicing your drilling attack, that alone would drain the average F-Grade cultivator."
"I have a Skill that lets me absorb and use ambient Mana, and I actually have to use that for [Attuned Drill Strike]. I'm not even sure a core would change that."
The servitor paused and looked to the side, as if deep in thought. "We should duel more with a full complement. Access to such powerful Skills will drastically change which tactics to employ."
"You're too fast to let me prepare the drill attack," Axl sighed. "That's why you didn’t see it. Slit, my movement skill gained a proficiency step from how much I needed to rely on it when you weren't holding back your Agility and Dexterity anymore."
The servitor returned a polite bow, but was still deep in thought, clearly reevaluating some aspects of how Axl could fight better. He'd come to appreciate that she was a real sword-fighting specialist, always working to improve the details of her forms, and a valuable resource to learn from. It was on his to-do list to figure out a way to wake up more of the mansion's staff to get her more time away from her more mundane tasks so she could focus more on her fighting. He was able to activate some of the other puppets, but she said that he'd only be able to get the bulk of them online when he reached the F-Grade.
"How is your metal transmutation study going?" Aria asked, her gaze steady and piercing, back straight and hands neatly on her lap.
"Not well," Axl admitted. "It simply takes too long to do any of it, and I don't have a manual to guide me as I do with other alchemy."
Aria nodded, but didn't reply.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
"I guess you're saying I'm not ready?" Axl continued. "Like I need some momentum with the practice to really get the most from the impartment?"
He turned to Moxlin. "When I got the alchemy impartment, I was deep in making potions, and it felt like I was on a roll there, using the potions and designing new ones even as we were rushing to complete the timed quest."
Moxlin shook her head. "That's not a good comparison, 'cause I'm not sure you understand how good the [Selsin Clan Glyphic Compendium] is, together with your bizarrely good control of Mana, not to mention that weird Mana-absorbing Skill you have. That's the perfect set of conditions for learning alchemy, but metalwork is famously the hardest subfield of alchemy. You're talking about duplication and concentration as if it were just an annoyance that takes a bit longer than you'd hope is already absurd. And transmutation? There's probably a reason even the compendium doesn't address it—it probably considers the practice only really viable in the E-Grade."
Axl grunted, admitting she was likely right. He'd been able to blaze through his previous growth on the back of his rare Skills and attention from two different subsystems, and he finally reached a wall when out of unnatural advantages.
"I just feel that neither of the metals I know of is quite the right fit for my core," Axl continued. "And that feeling only got stronger since my tempering, in fact."
"Can you mix the Mana types alone?" Moxlin asked. "Maybe you don’t need to make the perfect metal itself, just the perfect metallic Mana attunement."
Axl shook his head. "I tried that, and mixing Mana from different metals creates vastly different effects than metallic transmutation of said metals. Mixed attunements have useful effects, sure, but they feel hollow compared to the physical thing, and even the badly fitting transmutations feel better to cultivate with. The [Elided Tome of Equanimity] mentions this, too, that trying to create a Mana mixture for a core without a natural source is far harder, and often leads to a split core with the different sources, which is in many ways worse than an attuned core. This can sometimes be turned into a dual core in the process of splitting, but that’s also rare. And all that's only possible if you even know what precise Mana attunement mixture you want to create."
He turned to Aria, carefully considering each word. "Do you have a cultivator's core? Is any of my speculation wrong?"
"I have a manifested dreamscape instead," she said, "and I never studied core formation in detail. But I do know the underlying commonality of all cultivated progress—it needs to be forcefully claimed from the heavens, hells, or Dao, with a sure hand and unshakable will. Anything less will result in an unstable foundation, at best."
Axl watched as Aria's deep purple eyes closed and her tense posture tilted, her body slowly falling to its side. Her breath was even and deep before her head even touched the pillow the servitor deftly placed down to meet her descent.
"Now that's faster than usual," said Moxlin.
"Yeah," Axl said. "I wonder if she said too much this time."
"I'm not sure that counts," Moxlin scratched her head. "It was just so vague."
"No, it really wasn’t." Axl paused and took a deep breath to re-center himself from his disappointment. "It's too soon for me to take the alchemical forging impartment. I need to feel metal better, and for that, I need to fight."
The words came as a surprise, the conclusion not follow this discussion at all, a digression. Still, his body relaxed slightly, his mind energized, and even the mental defense around his soul seemed to glow more deeply at the realization. Metal for him wasn't an inert meditation, it was mining, construction and battle, it was a tool actively used: the sword, the dagger, the drill, the rig. His cultivation was a Balanced Path, after all. And he’d done enough sitting around.
"I'm setting my fief now," Axl said. "Everybody get ready for a system challenge."
The servitor took a step from the wall, rapier and buckler in hand, and Moxlin deftly set up some defensive arrays around Aria, just in case. When the little spider finished, Axl reached into his nobility title from the vale and willed the setting of his fief centered on the manor.
For a second, nothing happened, then a notification appeared.
>>Title: Irialith Nobility (Shrouded Crescent Valley, updated):
>>Pebblar fiefdom established. Manage your holdings well, Irialith noble. Territorial controls unlocked.
So far, so good, and a second notification appeared right after.
>>Title: Irialith Nobility (Shrouded Crescent Valley, updated):
>>Your fiefdom has been challenged by the Laws of Succession. Overcome the challenges to rise within the ranks of Irialith, with benefits proportional to difficulty of chosen challenge, boosted by Geas of the Weak.
>>Choice of three challenges available (accept within 1 week):
>>Claim the spoils of the three greater obelisks in your territory (easy).
>>Survive five waves of invaders upon your manse over 5 days (medium).
>>Conquer a settlement with a minimal population of 1,000 and hold it for 1 month (hard).
Axl frowned on each of these options, instinctively wanting to go for the hardest one, but not liking the idea of springing warfare on unsuspecting people for no good reason. Luckily, he barely had a moment to contemplate his options before another presented itself.
>>Further challenge provided by Oocile and Terrania (accept within 1 hour):
>>Assist in rebuffing the siege of Valioon (very hard, proportional to contribution).
>>WARNING: Should Valioon fall within 100 days, quest will fail and nobility title will be rescinded. Limited access to territorial holdings available during challenge duration.
His frown deepened at this option, seeing Terrania do something for the first time in a long while, which could mean there was something important in that option. But the last few times the subsystem offered him something, they were Skills that he managed to do without, and he wondered if this case was also a suboptimal use of the limited resources humanity had to expend on his mission.
However, the challenge was mostly provided by Oocile, whose sub-system's name was listed first, a tidbit of knowledge dropped in passing from Oocile's notes. Hopefully, that meant the time depletion shouldn't be too bad, even as he also wasn't thrilled about the challenge taking over three months to complete.
Still, the biggest problem was that if the city fell despite his best efforts, the challenge would still fail, and that fail condition could be quite bad—would he also lose his mansion? It was part of his fief now, after all. Plus, Valioon was one of the largest cities of the Oocile subsystem, so this wouldn't be about defending a rinky-dink town from a group of bandits, but proper large-scale warfare. And Axl had plenty of experience with how that could become a straight-up meat grinder. He also didn’t need to wonder who was doing the attacking, as it was obviously the Undead Legion.
A part of him still felt excited about the option, however, the more he thought about it. Part of it was that he'd get to strike against the Undead Legion, and he still felt annoyed at how things went down in Piril. Another was that he'd get a chance to recruit people to his fief, and a city that large should hold some good talent that he might be able to bring over. This was a sense he got implicitly from his nobility title with the Vale, that he’d have to work on that at some point to upgrade it.
The biggest draw, however, was how the second part of the warning suggested he'd have access to his mansion. As in centuries' worth of high-end alchemical material stockpiles and crafting facilities. Maybe these wouldn't be useful to the people defending the siege, but if they were so well-equipped to last a prolonged siege, would he even get the challenge? Or maybe this was meant for an entire city or country to help with, and he was grossly overestimating how much his one building could contribute.
He briefly discussed the options with Moxlin and the servitor, and after describing the last one, Moxlin jumped up and down in excitement. That she could now leap over three meters into the air was bizarre to see. She looked like a mechanical toy in the middle of a catastrophic malfunction.
"Slitting yea!" she shouted. "I can make talismans and arrays faster than entire F-Grade teams back in the nest. This will give me a huge market to cater to!"
"I agree with the esteemed master's assessment that our stores would be useful to a siege. In fact, your concern that it may not be enough underestimates the depths of our capabilities. Even in periods where more substantial settlements flourished in the vale and the young masters holding the manse were lacking, our baseline production rivaled that of the other better-led forces. Our founding master made sure of that."
With a nod and a large grin on his face, Axl accepted the challenge, ready for war.