34 - Chapter 33 - Day 1824

Adya had returned to her old routine once she had sent Jarel off on his task. She had known that he had not been happy about being set to hunt his comrades, but Adya did not have much of a choice. She needed to reduce the number of people who were looking for her, and gain some measure of control.

She also needed as much current information as she could get. Her need to push had removed the protection she seemed to have enjoyed from the system years too early. If she wanted to have any hope of retaining her freedom, she needed to know what those who would hunt her knew. If one tier 10 had a reason to find her, then it would be a reasonable assumption that others would also have a reason, if it was simply to oppose the elder who had started looking for at birth.

She had not been idle, she had started to push through her training, employing more and more of her strength. She had wanted to see what an increase in the body stat to 500k would mean. She had already been sure that the body would not be 250,000 times stronger. If that was the power scaling, then the cultivators would be all but unstoppable. Yet she had managed to have her men knock out a tier 5 cultivator, albeit with him not resisting.

Adya had noticed that there had been no mention of a stat for constitution or recovery. She wondered how that worked. So she had spent the last several days designing and running tests to get some answers.

On the constitution front, she found that stamina as a stat was actually mislabeled in her opinion. The energy served multiple functions. First, it worked as stamina, as you began to tire, stamina from the pool would infuse your body and allow you to continue to push yourself physically. The limitation she had discovered came from three factors, at least for her. The first was the stamina pool and regeneration. If you pushed yourself beyond your limits and kept pushing, then the amount of stamina required would keep increasing.

The increase was exponential. Your stamina would only kick in when you were already physically tired, then the stamina would soothe your body and start to let you push yourself. Once you emptied your pool, an easy thing for Adya to simulate by simply making stamina stones and stopping her regeneration from filling the pool. So the amount of stamina required started at 1% of the stamina pool. Then every 4 minutes, another place where the number 4 was important it seemed, the amount of stamina required to keep going would increase by 10%. So after 4 minutes it would need 1.1%. The problem was the escalation. If most people had a 10% regen rate, then they could keep pushing for around a 100 minutes before the regeneration rate was no longer sufficient and they would start to burn into their pool. At 124 minutes, the pool would be empty and the regeneration would do nothing at all.

Adya had the ability to push herself further by using her stamina stones to replace the pool, yet the escalating nature would have burned through her reserves fast. The exponential nature of the progression meant in the end there could never be enough stamina to continue forever. Still 2 hours of the ability to push yourself, after you were already tired, was already a powerful boost. It also meant that training took on a new importance. The stamina drain started when you reached your limit. For those who were stronger, faster and had more endurance, that would mean the point at which they needed stamina would come later, giving the ability to outlast their opponents. Of course that maths worked for people who had stamina and their regeneration in the same tier. How it would work for a cultivator with a stamina, instead of a mana core remained to be seen.

There was a second use for stamina, they would throw all the calculations out though. That was the use of stamina for recovery from injury. Stamina could be used, if properly directed and not wasted, to heal injuries. She was not sure if everyone else could use it as much as she could due to her gestalt nature, but at least normal, non critical wounds could be healed through using stamina. Thankfully this effect did not have an escalation factor. However, it was enough to seriously impact the endurance boost. It was not so much of an issue in the first 90 minutes or so. As during this time the stamina regeneration was greater than the boost required, depending on how much stamina was required to heal the wound of course., and so was not reducing the maximum stamina pool. Once over that 90 minute mark, any stamina required to heal would directly reduce the stamina available to boost the person.

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That was quite apart from the need to direct the stamina to a wound, and not wasting it in general. The upside was that she had found a use for the stamina stone she had been creating. They could be used as a combined recovery and healing potion. Though she did not want to let anyone know she could create those. Maybe, she would pretend she had crafted a new pill. It would be a useful item for their retainers to carry in cases of emergency. It was also why she disliked the word stamina to describe the resource. She would come up with a better name for it, even if she only used it herself.

She had also spent a part of her time on considering how to create the machine to convert mana stones into mana coins. The physical machine would be easy enough. Drop stones in at one end, the stones pass through a formation, then coins drop at the other end.

What she needed to do was to convert the stones to raw mana, extract a 100 mana exactly, then compress it into a coin with the shape, and design she wanted. As the stones were not exactly 100 mana, and the formation would need some power to run, the number of stones entering would not equal the number of coins created. She would also need to optimise the formation to minimise mana use, and mana loss. No point throwing money away. Also, no matter how useful her device would be, if the amount of mana it needed to convert was too high, then it would not be worth it to make the conversion. The utility would be lost due to the cost.

That was when she had another brain wave, she needed the machine to be powered by ordinary people, and their mana pools. It would also be possible to create a version that could make mana stones fast for people from their own mana, though she would create that and make it expensive, or limit it in some other way to keep control over the market. She would also need to obfuscate her formations so that no one else would be able to copy what she was doing, she wanted to maintain her monopoly. Sure some people would come up with versions that worked, but she was confident that it would not be nearly as efficient as the ones she produced.

It would be so much easier if she could work out how to give people passive skills. Though that would leave the issue of where the mana stones or coins would end up after being created. People did not have a convenient spatial storage as she did. She would need to test with her new retainers once Sai had come back on line. According to Sai’s original estimates, it should be not much more than another 50 days or so, though Adya hoped that time had been reduced somewhat.

She had also been called on to convert a few more spies to her side during this time. The family had taken her advice to heart, and were moving very slowly to ensure no one suspected a thing. Most of the spies would be sent back to their organisations as a double agent to further ensure no one noticed anything amiss. The head of intelligence was working with the converted royal spy to spread disinformation about the family, both for the sake of sending out disinformation and to use it to identify the actual people behind the spies.

Though it was still early in the process, the route to identify their enemies seemed long. They had good guesses of course, but evidence was proving to be elusive to obtain. The spies reported to handlers, who reported to other handlers and so on. The more layers they peeled, the more then found still protecting the instigators. Still it was not all bad. The confidence from having complete confidence in the core retainers was liberating. It allowed for more daring plans to be devised, to be implemented only after they had targets for their plans.

They would return the infiltration with the same, targeting senior retainers in the employ of their detractors.

All Adya could do for now was plan and wait. She needed her pieces in place before she took the next steps.