43 - Chapter 42 - Day 2122

It had been almost two months of constant testing for Adya. She had even started to ignore a lot of her other training to solely focus on her task.

There had been a part of her, a childish part, that just wanted her to focus on gaining personal strength. In her old life she had been at the level of these elders who were chasing her, if only she could regain that power. She had even started to indulge it by planning out a path to increase her cultivation. She would not need to rely on anyone or anything else if she was strong enough. Those day dreams had come crashing down when both Sai and Mai had castigated her for her foolishness.

Her own mind had interceded and reminded her of the realities on the ground. She had taken several thousand years to reach those heights in her previous life. It was also her desire for personal power that had placed her in danger in the first place. Had she not formed her cores, the protection protocols would still have been in force. She had not realised just how much the system had been protecting her until she lost her shield. She had also not realised, or rather failed to take into account, how the powerful of this world would view her. At best she was a natural treasure that they wanted to control, to put to use for their own ends. At worst, she was a danger to the existing power structures, even if she took no action herself. The fact that others would seek to contain and use her would make her dangerous enough to destroy.

Adya had taken similar actions multiple times in her past lives. She had rarely been bothered by concerns over the loss of self determination suffered by the treasure. This was not a concern when it was just a natural item, but even in cases where the item in question had been sapient or worse sentient, she had still taken the action that aligned best with her own interests. She could not expect different behaviour from those who ruled this world. You did not seek and achieve the true heights of power through altruism. All that did was to allow others to surpass you, leaving you vulnerable to their dictates.

So she had accepted that even with all her knowledge and experience there was no way to gain sufficient power in the short term to make any meaningful difference. Her growing cultivator army now numbered fifteen tier 6s, over a hundred tier 5s, and an assortment of other tiers. Having all but wiped out or taken over all the bandit gangs in three kingdoms had given her a powerful standing army. She could successfully defend against most attacks at this point. However, that was only true for threats up to the tier 7 range. At tier 8 and beyond, she was still highly vulnerable.

The system was a possibility in terms of gaining levels and powers, but that had also been denied her, leaving her locked in the child class. She had asked her mother, and there was no known way to remove the restriction until the system considered her an adult. She had a feeling that she could shave some time off the normal system unlock cycle by advancing her cultivation, but that would still take years to achieve.

That left her with her original plan. Worse now that most of the other elders were actively hunting her, it only left one elder as a viable choice. The one that had known of her even before the protection protocol had dropped. Though she had no way to confirm her hypothesis, Adya thought that it meant that the particular elder truly did not mean her harm.

However, that was no guarantee that the elder would let Adya dictate her actions. Locking her up to keep her safe until she was old enough may still be considered benign by the system. Also openly approaching the elder would reveal her primary secret to everyone. It would be like writing a massive announcement in the sky right above her family estate. It would move the battle from overt to covert with her family becoming pawns in the game to bring her under an elders control.

So she needed the elder to give her protection, and justify it to the others, in such a way that it would obfuscate her actual value. They could continue their search on this vast continent, or wider a field, leaving Adya the time to gain personal power in relative peace. She also needed a way to launder the vast amounts of wealth she could create. If she could not leverage one of main strengths, it would make getting stronger significantly harder.

This was why she had started the push for the mana coin artifact. It would allow her the ability to obfuscate the reason for her importance to the other elders. It would allow her to launder her own mana coins, giving her access to immense wealth. Ultimately it would give her the freedom to pursue true power.

With her mind firmly set on her path forward, Adya had returned in earnest to her testing. She had also been ignoring her family’s demands on her time, with the only exception for when she needed to put formations on anyone. Her mother had been checking up on her a lot more regularly and forcing her to take breaks to at least eat and bathe. Left to her own devices, Adya knew that she would have largely ignored both concerns.

Thankfully, her dedication had paid off in spades. She had managed to refine an amazing simple formation for the creation of mana coins. She had not stopped there, she had come up with a formation that would work with each energy type. It had not been strictly necessary, but the branch research had not added more than a few days, and the potential pay off was huge. She had also understood the full intricacies of how the energies interacted. She had already known, from the understanding gained when she had created the passive skills, that the three energies were converted from a more primordial energy that was generated in the soul plane. The energy was converted at the soul body connection points and absorbed by the body for its own use. The more the body could store, the faster the connection point was able to convert the energies. It seemed to be a natural limit designed to stop damage to the connection itself.

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As part of the latest rounds of testing, Adya had tried to forcibly increase regeneration rates, and had to stop immediately from the resultant damage. Thankfully the damage had fully healed, but that was a route she would not be exploring any time soon.

Once the formations for the coin creations had been optimised, she had started work on the parts that would make the coins usable as currency. She had taken inspiration from the coins minted on old earth before the expansion of digital currencies.

The first thing she did was to change the shape from a flat round coin to a flat dodecahedron coin. The twelve sided coin was close enough to the round coin to maintain the aesthetics, but would fix several issues that occurred with the use of round coins, like the ability of the round ones to roll away.

On one side of the coin, she had created a standard template that would display the value, the energy, the tier and the year of creation. This was to make the value clear to all. On the sides of the coin, she had added the ability to record the serial number of the artifact that minted the coins in the first place. It would also add a serial number denoting the number of the coin itself. Of course, she would be able to falsify it, but no one else would.

Lastly, on the final side, she had left with the option of personalising the design to the country or organisation that would use her artifacts. The idea was to allow for a small metallic disk with the engraved design to be slotted into a space on the final artefact. This had necessitated the creation of more formations to work in conjunction with the main formations.

Once she had the full range of formations in place, she had started work on creating obfuscation formations for her artifact. She did not want it to be separate from the main formation, as that would allow anyone with the ability to copy her design. To obfuscate the actual important parts of her design, she went with multiple angles.

First she created the actual combined formations that would do the work in her new combined language. The design was updated to make it impossible to read. This had led to her first major shock, and a glimpse into her future. She had received multiple prompts from the system.

Attempt to obfuscate newly created language from system skills detected.

Scion protocol is in effect. System standard protocols suspended.

New language will be subject to full obfuscation and will be unrecognisable to all system skills.

Please name the new language.

The fact that the system would make it impossible to directly translate her formations was a massive boon. She would have to test whether the system applied the obfuscation to all uses of her personal language, or only to the obfuscated variant. It also meant that it was potentially possible to learn her language the old fashioned way. Though that would be next to impossible for anyone in this world.

Adya had used an ideographic language with symbols that had no relation to any known language. Nor did she have any intention of leaving a key behind to make it easier for people. If anyone wanted to learn her language, they would need to brute force all the permutations through trial and error. With the obfuscation adding even more ideographic symbols, ones with no meaning or rather no meaning to the formation, the sheer number of permutations that would need to be tested were in the quintillions.

That would allow her to create her primary formations with some assurance. Though Adya knew that would not be enough. She planned to build a replaceable core for the artifact, the actual formation would be on the inside of the core. The outside would have a formation in the local language that would work for an individual, but not for another artifact. This external formation would look like it was wearing down over time, requiring it to be replaced.

The reason for the replaceable core was multifold. One, it would give Adya a reason to sell cores for the artifacts as replacement parts. She could not realistically expect everyone to ship all their mana stones to her for conversion, so she would need to let them get access to her machines. Two, She needed a way to cut off their supplies if they tried to target her.

Most importantly was the third reason. She needed to provide the stamina and willpower that would let the artifact function. That would not be a resource that she wanted to become public knowledge. With a replaceable core, she could hide everything inside, with yet another formation designed to destroy the core in the event of any tampering. The visible degradation on the externally visible formation would give her a good excuse for the return of the cores.

She would also ensure accurate records were kept of who had which core, and new cores would only be provided in exchange for a spent one. Her version of intellectual rights protection and recycling in one. She did wonder if she could embed a tracking formation into the designs too, but that would be an additional feature that she would look into later.

Adya had, with the help of Sai and Mai, created a workable design. A part of which she had put to paper. The core design would never ever be written down.

With the design work completed, the next task was to actually build the device. She would need the help of an artificer for that part. It was time for another visit to the city.