Imri fell into some sense of routine for the next couple of weeks. He started his morning with physical training, joining the soldiers. While staunch in his insistence that there was a reason for how everything was done, Major Owen Harper slowly started to adapt. He begrudgingly admitted that the system created a broader variation in each soldier's physical capabilities. While he didn’t go as far as creating an individualized regimen, he split everyone into groups based on their general physical attributes.
To Imri’s surprise, he was grouped with some of the more able-bodied soldiers. While they likely had higher base attributes and classes more heavily focused on the physical side, Imri made up the difference with his sheer number of levels, achievements, and new title. It was strange for him to go from sickly patient to where he was now. His physical stats were nearing what Zhaire’s had been at the start of the integration. This was a bit incongruous because he still looked average in terms of build. However, this just meant he still had room to grow if he had enough time.
His agility still lagged a bit behind his other attributes. While this wasn’t an issue in many endurance or weight-training exercises, it was immediately apparent in any more practical exercises. Still, going for long runs or lifting weights he couldn’t have fathomed using before the integration was exhilarating.
While Imri was only dedicating a small portion of his day to physical exercise, he made up for that by being consistent. He continued to see steady improvements and increased one of his base attributes every few days.
The population increased steadily as more refugees came in daily, most from the South. With all the foot traffic, the route up the mountain had become a well-worn hiking trail. The porters had taken the initiative to improve it, carving out paths through natural obstacles, building stairs or bridges over difficult stretches, and adding fences at the edge of narrow switchbacks. They even added a few quality-of-life features, such as trail markers and several signs with the distance and direction to Celestia.
Likewise, similar initiatives were making the entire plateau easier to navigate. Natural trails had formed between Celestia and the major natural resources, mainly the caves with Espeonite Crystals and the Zopralt mine. These trails were being widened and flattened in anticipation of roads being built for large-scale resource distribution, which was currently done manually by a large contingent of porters.
In addition to Celestia, other camps began to form as groups of miners, prospectors, and gatherers congregated around suitable areas closer to the resources they were harvesting. He expected these areas would eventually become towns themselves, allowing for specialized arrays for their specific resources, with Celestia as the central hub.
Despite all the progress they were making, there were still issues, mainly food. While a good portion of the plateau was allocated to farming, it would take some time before they saw the fruits of their labor. Even with many farmers augmenting their yields and growth speed with magic, it wouldn’t be enough to sustain the growing population in the short term.
That was why Imri spent a good portion of his day hunting Drakes. They had stopped presenting him with even a modicum of a challenge as long as he avoided their initial diving attack. To keep things interesting, he alternated how he killed them each time. He mostly avoided Dimensional Tear, opting only to use it when a shortage of time dictated it. Instead, he challenged himself to use as many different spells as possible. He practiced using his Spatial Collapse, targeting their heads and crushing them like a large zit. It was slightly less efficient than Dimensional Tear, mostly because of the creature's resilience. Still, using that spell felt similar to Dimensional Tear in that it was obvious how to apply it in combat.
Wanting more of a challenge, Imri decided to see if he could beat the creatures without using any of his spells. Of course, he would still use his enchantments. He had remade his personal items, gaining a considerable jump in mana efficiency thanks to his increased level and the Manufacturing Array.
With those improvements, he could maintain a 1.3 to 1 ratio in time for an extended fight. This easily allowed him to evade the Drake’s attacks and left him with a wide opening where he brought the Dimensional Saber down, meeting no resistance as it surgically sliced the tough skull in half. Having proved he wasn’t solely reliant on his spells, Imri moved on to other methods.
He had several more fights that played out similarly, only this time he used his own spells, alternating between Temporal Expansion on himself or Temporal Collapse on the Drake. In the end, the result was the same. After a particularly high amplitude Temporal Expansion, he was rewarded with a rank-up, though not to the spell itself.
Trait Rank Up Being of Eons from E to D Trait Improved Being of Eons 1D has improved to One with Time 2F Being of Eons 1D: You are a being that has achieved control over time within your body. You age 3.15% slower, both from natural and magical effects. Improves the mana efficiency of beneficial time-based spells that target you by 3.15%. One with Time 2F: You have achieved control over time within your body, making it a part of you. You age 5% slower, both from natural and magical effects. The mana efficiency of beneficial temporal spells that target you is increased by 5%, while the efficiency of harmful temporal effects is reduced by 5%. You can always accurately perceive how much time has elapsed in a given period, with precision dependent on Willpower, and will be instantly aware of any changes in the passage of time instinctually.
While the improvement wasn’t massive, it pushed him closer to immortality while improving his self-targeting Temporal Expansions. The ability to know exactly how much time had elapsed was nice but not a game-changer. Likewise, being more resilient to harmful temporal effects was nice, but he had yet to meet anyone else who used the concept of time.
Sticking with his Temporal spells, Imri decided to use a spell in his arsenal that hadn’t gotten much use, Aging. He hadn’t used it, thinking it would be too inefficient to age something to death slowly. He immediately reconsidered that assessment after using it.
After only maintaining the spell at a relatively high amplitude for several seconds, the Drake began to stumble and slow. After a few more seconds, the creature collapsed, dead after the equivalent of only a few days had passed. Puzzled by the effectiveness of the spell, Imri inspected the corpse.
He wasn’t able to determine why the spell was so effective, and it took Caroline inspecting the corpse to realize that the Drake had died from severe dehydration. Imri didn’t need to age them to the point where they died of old age. Instead, he just needed to have enough time pass, and dehydration and sleep deprivation became issues.
Imri immediately reevaluated the spell, moving it up the list of potential weapons he could deploy. It also had great potential, as it was this effective at only tier 1. After a couple more fights, the spell was raised to E rank, and Imri stopped there for the time being.
Next, he experimented with his High Gravity spell. Imri knew they were vulnerable mid-dive, but killing them in that fashion didn’t really accomplish anything. Instead, he used it while they were fighting on the ground. His first experiment was to see how far he could push the High Gravity without showing any restraint. While this certainly wasn’t efficient, the results were catastrophic for the monster. It collapsed as its limbs shattered under the extreme amount of weight it was suddenly subjected to, and that was just the start of the damage that had been dealt; its organs began failing as blood was too heavy to circulate properly, which was only compounded by the heart being unable to contract properly under the additional strain. Within seconds, the Drake stilled, killed several times over from complete organ failure.
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While the effect was dramatic, it was far from efficient, as the amount of mana needed to maintain that effect level was steep. It would have taken far less mana to sheer it in half with a Dimensional Tear. Fortunately, the experiment yielded more than information as the spell improved to tier 2.
Spell Rank Up High Gravity E to D Spell Improved High Gravity 1D has become Celestial Gravity 2F Celestial Gravity 2F: Increases the force of gravity upon a given object, effectively increasing its weight and falling speed by a factor of the amplitude. Cost / second increases by the distance from the caster to the object, the mass of the object, and the amplitude of the effect.
The wording of the spell hadn't changed at all, and it took Imri a few experiments to understand the difference. As with most tier upgrades, the scaling was slightly improved on a specific attribute. In this case, the mass of the target contributed less to the overall cost of the spell. This came at the slight expense of a higher base cost, which resulted in edge cases where the spell was worse, but in most scenarios, it was an improvement. This included his primary test subjects.
After refilling his mana, he repeated the test on another unknowing victim. While the end result was the same, the mana needed was significantly less. It still wasn’t as efficient as his bread-and-butter spell, but it was close enough that there were probably use cases where it would be better.
After that success, he continued experimenting with the spell, testing it at various amplitudes. At slightly lower amplitudes, the spell was still nearly as effective. It only took a few seconds longer to kill the creature he had once considered almost unkillable. However, this was less efficient considering the extended duration, if only by a point or two.
The effect changed dramatically at a more moderate amplitude, about half his maximum. While the Drake was too heavy to move effectively, it took considerably longer for the higher gravity to result in organ failure, to the point where Imri needed to absorb mana to keep the experiment going. At that amplitude, it was more effective as a restriction on mobility than a source of damage. After several minutes, the Drake collapsed as its organs failed.
He continued his gravity experiment by focusing on the gravity of specific body parts. The result was something similar to his Spatial Collapse, though in some cases, it was more efficient. This was mainly due to the direction of the force, with Spatial Collapse crushing inward while a targeted Celestial Gravity pushed downward. Imri guessed this would be more effective against durable enemies that were resistant to being crushed but whose body weight was already straining to support the dense armor.
Imri found that the most effective use of a targeted Celestial Gravity wasn’t as a killing blow but as a way to unbalance his opponent. A sudden increase in weight often unbalanced the creatures, sending them stumbling at even a moderate amplitude.
Before his next day of hunting, Imri considered what he was doing when he manipulated gravity. He was essentially bending space, making it more or less curved. He theorized that he could change the vector of gravity entirely by bending the curvature in space in a different direction.
With that idea in mind, he willed his mana into the spell. He targeted his silverware and manipulated gravity so it bent slightly in the opposite direction. The silverware fell upward, slowly accelerating until it clattered to the ceiling, and remained there until Imri released the spell. The various pieces of silverware returned to the normal rules of physics, raining down onto the table where Imri was seated.
New Spell Learned Reorient Gravity 2F: Changes the force and vector of gravity upon a given object, effectively changing the direction and speed at which it falls. Cost / second increases by the distance from the caster to the object, the mass of the object, the amplitude of the effect, and the angle of reorientation.
Imri smiled as he began thinking of ways to use the spell. His first practical experiment was a bit lackluster, as the Drakes weren’t killed from a long fall after having gravity reversed for several seconds. However, such a fall would have killed any opponent that hadn’t evolved for cliff diving.
That changed when he targeted a specific part of the Drake with a Reorient Gravity. It was only moderately effective on its own as the creature was accelerated toward the greater force. However, when combined with Celestial Gravity on the rest of the body, the combined forces were enough to eventually rip the creature into two pieces.
Other variations were effective, such as using Reorient Gravity on limbs, which caused the creature to stumble due to the shifting forces. Imri also produced a result similar to his Spatial Collapse by creating two fields: Reorient Gravity on the lower half and Celestial Gravity on the upper portion. While this didn’t flatten the tough creatures, it wreaked havoc on their internal organs and blood flow, eventually killing the resilient Drake.
In addition to using it as a weapon, Imri also used his new spell for its incredible utility. With a Reorient Gravity, he fell upward for a few seconds until he picked up a decent speed. He dismissed the spell but continued gaining altitude as normal gravity started to slow his ascent. At the apex of his upward fall, he used Reorient Gravity again, this time targeting a point in the distance. He sped off towards his target, falling forward at increasing speed. Once he had gained a decent amount of momentum, he let go of the spell. He continued forward at the incredible speed he had built up, slowed only by wind resistance, which was considerable with the amount of air he flew through.
Imri continued flying through the air, adjusting his trajectory with lower amplitude Reorient Gravity. He would have continued for hours, but his mana wouldn’t support it. He used a final Reorient Gravity to cancel out his momentum, then returned to the ground below with a Blink.
He smiled as he began hiking back toward Celestia, having gone to the plateau's edge. It hadn’t been an efficient method of travel, but Imri considered it a successful test run. The first thing he did when he returned to Celestia was to commission a base jumping suit made from the Drakes he had been hunting.
Near the end of his two weeks of hunting, the food supply stabilized, with freezers full of Drake meat that would last several weeks. It was good timing, as Imri had made a significant dent in the nearby Drake population, and he had been forced to venture further from town each day to find a target.
Most of the food was donated, with Imri only accepting a small amount of credits from the inn for the portion that would go to paying customers rather than refugees. While Imri could have gotten some credits from the town's virtual coffers, he knew every credit was needed with so much money spent on the settlement upgrades.
In addition to the inn, an enterprising individual had set up a food cart in the center of the tent camp. The smells of grilled Drake meat wafted throughout the packs of people, drawing in a large crowd wherever the stand was placed. While the proprietor was happy to take credits, he also accepted another form of payment, mana. This allowed everyone to have some method of paying, and it gave the refugees a sense of pride that they were no longer taking free handouts.
The idea was good enough that another person piggybacked off this idea. Instead of trading food for mana, they offered credits for mana. While Imri was still selling his mana to the town for only a few credits per mana, most of this was still reserved for essentials, and demand still far exceeded the supply. With another source of mana production, the available mana pool was now opened for more frivolous use, though at a higher credit cost per mana.
Even with Imri’s charitable giving, he still raked in millions of credits from his hunting expeditions, even after paying the porters and processors who broke the creature down. He sold as much of the creature as possible to the various crafters, mainly Naomi and Elliot, but they quickly had more supply than they could use in the next few months. After that, Christoph sold the rest of the carcass to the system. Seeing the reduced prices after the event had ended was disappointing, but Imri made up for that in volume.
Between his various income sources, Imri’s credit supply ballooned to an amount approaching eight figures. Hopefully, the auction would have some unique items he could purchase with his accumulated wealth.