42 - Chapter 41 - Day 1871
It had been more than five weeks since Adya’s family had returned safely. Adya had spent that time in her training and experimenting along with playing with her father and brothers.
There seemed to have been an unspoken decision to put any more caravans on hold until they got to the bottom of who all the groups targeting them were. On the positive side, with the largest bandit group operating in the three human kingdoms wiped out, and no one, outside her family, having any real idea by whom, bandit activity had substantially decreased.
Without proper information sources, it was hard to tell if that was because that one group had been responsible for so much of the bandit activity, or that the other groups were laying low after hearing about the group being wiped out. Still it was good for ordinary people and other merchants.
Lastly, the family had, to coin an apt term in this instance, made out like bandits. When the camp had been claimed, along with all the valuables therein, her family had not only recovered much of the lost loot from their own caravan, but also gotten their hands on all the other loot that the bandits had accumulated for some time. The incident with the bandits had effectively increased the value of returns almost ten fold. This also ameliorated the loss from not sending out another caravan immediately.
Adya did not particularly care about the wealth issue, as by now her personal reserves were not that far off from the entire net worth of the family, and that was not even taking into account her value as an artificer.
Apart from the times Parth and Peter asked her to convert another converted spy, Adya had been focused on improving her telekinesis. She had leveraged the spare parallel processing to truly push the skill to its limits. She had not only looked at the artificing angle, but also at how the skill could enhance her fighting prowess and movement abilities. The training was reflected in the significant growth of her Environmental Dominion skill. The skill had reached level 63, and as she had gained skill levels and insight into wielding her new abilities, she had also gained much more control over the three energies. The improvements had been made at both ends of the spectrum. Her finesse had substantially improved, and so had her ability to control large volumes of energy. Her next direction of training was to mix the two, and attempt fine control of massive volumes of all three energies, to apply them in all possible combinations.
Her training had not just been limited to that skill, and she had also made substantial gains in Waking Meditation, with the skill reaching level 32. She had achieved this by training her energy control as she meditated, effectively pushing the training of both skills. She felt she was close to another evolution in the skill and was eager to see what the system thought. She was trying to get to the point where she could meditate constantly regardless of what else she was doing. She had a feeling if she could achieve that mindset, it would offer her a massive boost in power.
Her cultivator army had also not been sitting idle during this time. Her group had grown substantially and now boasted 8 tier 6s, and almost 50 tier 5s. Adya was not even bothering to keep track of the tier 4s and below. She had given blanket instructions to capture and bring to her for conversion any cultivator found to be hunting her or involved in bandit activity. This order had led to a few more bandit groups effectively ceasing to exist. Except, this time they were not wiped out, but captured and converted, adding to Adya’s growing numbers of retainers.
Speaking of bandit cultivators, the questioning of those captured during the rescue of her family had yielded very little in actionable intelligence. The ones behind the attack had been extremely cautious in hiding their identities, by using multiple cut outs. Adya had sent Evelin to track down and capture the cutouts, but as news of the demise of the bandit group had spread, the cut outs had started to disappear or turn up dead. This had led them to conclude that whoever their enemies were, they were extremely paranoid and careful. That investigation was effectively stalled until they unearthed new leads.
Evelin felt certain that they had effectively scoured all cultivators who were hunting her in the three kingdoms at this point, as in the last few weeks it had become harder and harder for them to find any more. Unfortunately a few had been killed when they became suspicious and chose to fight, rather than be taken alive. The advantage of the conversion process was that they could now find out what was happening in all the factions from the Council of Sects, while not raising any alarm about the state of play in the search for this mysterious child.
Adya had still not confirmed her status using any of the talismans that the cultivators had carried. She had, however, made sure to take a note of the formations and add it to the analysis Sai was carrying out. She had also added any other changes in formations knowledge gained from the different formations she had encountered while converting the cultivators. She had originally thought that they would all have the same network implanted through their bodies, but had quickly been proven wrong. Each formation network was unique, though they could be categorised in groups. Some were optimised for stealth, some for speed, some for dexterity, some for strength. Others had some combination of optimisations. Adya could not tell if that was on purpose, or it had adapted to the way the individuals had developed, or was linked to their use of mana or stamina.
She had also learned that, while all cultivators in this world formed only one core, their core was not always a mana one. About a quarter of her cultivators had stamina cores, and were considered body cultivators. Instead of enhancing their mana, and magic skills, they choose to empower their bodies. They were not considered any weaker to those with mana cores, and their progression was not impacted. Of course, there was a massive difference in strengths and weaknesses between the two. And while those with stamina cores either took substantially longer to maximise their cores, or lived with smaller cores, their stamina delivered substantially better results due to not having to be lost to the environment.
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Given the differences identified, and additional volume of data generated, Adya expected Sai to take even longer to complete the processing. She hoped it would not be too much longer. She was ready to move forward with her plans as soon as Sai was done. She was confident her team would be able to comfortably subdue even a tier 7 cultivator at this point.
Adya had a team keeping an eye on the estate, from a distance, to ensure someone couldn’t attack unnoticed. The rest of the cultivators were out gathering intel, providing misinformation or just hunting for any other cultivators to join their growing numbers.
Adya was just in the middle of an energy finesse control practice exercise, when Sai came online.
Sai: I have completed the full analysis of all formation data, and updated the unified language to reflect the updated understanding.
Adya: Does that include all the additional information that we have managed to gain since you started your analysis.
Sai: The additional data helped reduce processing time by filling in substantial gaps in knowledge. Without those files the analysis would have taken substantially longer and returned subpar results.
Adya: Give me an overview on how this impacts our capabilities.
Sai: We have the ability to create far more complex formations, arrays, talismans and runes. The vocabulary has increased by several orders of magnitude. In addition, we are no longer limited to only using mana. Stamina substitutions are now possible, but the results will be uncertain without additional data or testing.
Adya: What about willpower?
Sai: I have extrapolated the impact of using willpower, however we will need to design and run several hundred tests of increasing complexity to even begin to understand its impact. We should create a subroutine to design and document the tests required. Once we have a list, the subroutine can use the results of the tests, as we carry them out, to refine the list of further tests. It is not something I see being available to us in the short term.
Adya: OK, let us create a subroutine and assign it as a passive using one core for now. We really need to focus on the creation of a formation for the automatic creation of mana coins. I am hoping the increase in levels of energy control will allow us to understand the process at a level of detail that will allow us to recreate the process.
Sai: Do you want to start with that first, and leave the subroutine for me to do when you are sleeping?
Adya: Ok, let us do that. We have everything else in place and just need to be able to create this formation to progress with our plan.
With that Adya’s plans changed. She started to experiment with the creation of mana coins. She left her passive running creating mana stones in the background and used her massive cores for the testing. She did not need to use a lot of mana in any case. 100 mana at a time was compressed into a flat round coin. Adya started with a blank coin, designs and security markers could be added once she understood the process for the simplified coin.
Adya purposefully slowed down the process as much as possible, with both Sai and Mai watching all energy fluctuations in detail. Adya also had her passive skills fully utilise the regeneration, ensuring the cores did not refill at all. This provided a control point for the experiments. With each coin created, the process recorded and then the coin scanned with environmental dominion skill, Adya started to get a better understanding of the details behind the process. As Adya started to understand the details, she would make slight adjustments to the process and test again. The process of creating, understanding, changing, and then iterating through the steps again became Adya’s sole focus.
As she refined her ability to create coins, removing and simplifying some steps and merging other steps, her understanding of the process grew. As her understanding reached an apex, at least in the creation of the simple discs, she started to speed up the process again, still iterating with the help of Sai.
To get a better understanding, Adya, Sai and Mai started to use all the parallel processing capabilities to iterate through 135 versions simultaneously. The results of each process were fed into subsequent processes, creating exponential improvements.
Sai: Our improvements are so far beyond the crude passive skills we created so long ago. We will want to recreate all of those skills. The efficiency gains would be massive.
Adya: Can we have one process create multiple coins of the same energy, or single coins of multiple energies simultaneously?
Sai: I will add testing to that effect in our iterations.
They found that it was indeed possible for a single process to create multiple coins of a single type at the same time. It was only limited by the energy throughput and level of energy control. At Adya’s level they could create 630 coins per process at the same time.
Sai: It seems like it's the energy control level multiplied by 10.
Sai’s assumption was proven correct with the skill leveled to 64 and their maximum increased to 640. That just drove them to push through the testing even faster.
It was not until they had created 1M mana coins, hours later that the real discovery was made. They finally had an answer to the question of why no one else had managed to solve the coin creation issue.
To create 1,000,000 tier 2 blank mana coins had cost 100,000,000 mana, but it also cost one tier 2 willpower and one tier 2 stamina. No wonder no one else had managed to automate the process.
Now they would need to test the limits of this process and ascertain what processes impacted the amounts of willpower and stamina used.