The next item Felix pulled out was the necklace he found the small skeleton clutching.

[D - Rare] Necklace of Protection

This necklace was given from father to son on his death bed with the only hope that the child lived longer than he did. The child activated the amulet and it shielded him from harm until he passed away a short time later.

This necklace can store a small amount of energy then be used to cast a sphere of protection around the wielder. The sphere will automatically cast itself to block any life threatening attacks. The sphere is impenetrable but blocking an attack consumes energy. Once the energy is completely depleted, the sphere will disappear. This necklace can store up to 100,000 energy.

That's… sad.

It's exactly what we expected though.

That doesn't make it any less sad.

I guess.

Anyways, this item is not useful for me at all.

Yeah you are much better off just using mana. Plus, you'll either find something better in here or you could likely even make something better.

Any idea who would want this?

Anyone, probably just sell or give it away.

Hopefully I can actually use the next item.

The last item Felix had found was the bracelet. Visually inspecting it a little more intently, Felix noticed that the bracelet seemed to be made of 8 very thin concentric white metal bands all pressed together. On the outside of the outer most band, there were a series of tiny runes inscribed all the way around.

[D - Arcane] Kryptos Repository

[Soul Bound][Growth]

This bracelet was designed and crafted by the master craftsman Kryptos. They remain completely hidden and no one knows exactly what they look like but their designs are legendary throughout the multiverse. This bracelet was created to keep items hidden within even if the wielder were to perish.

This bracelet can be soul bound allowing the item to grow alongside the wielder. When bound, the bond may channel mana into the bracelet and align the runes on the each band to open an extra dimensional pocket. Each set of runes contains a different pocket.

Felix quickly counted the runes on the outer band then the number of bands and chuckled. There were 32 runes per band and 8 bands. Which added up to a stupid number of pockets. Without hesitation, he soul bound himself to the item then began playing with it. It seemed the only thing left out of the identification was the exact directions on how to use it. It gave a general idea, but no specifics.

It took him a few minutes to figure the item out, but he was very satisfied with it once he did. Channeling a small amount of mana into the item, the runes on each band began to glow blue. He spun the inner bands outwards like a gyroscope and spun them individually at random. He closed the bands again and channeled more mana into the bracelet then reached through it, his hand and arm disappearing into it. Reaching around, the pocket was just a bit large than his hand in any direction.

He pulled his hand free then aligned a few more runes, each time one was aligned, it's glow disappeared. When he closed it this time and channeled more mana into it, the pocket was much bigger. He tested spinning the inner most band and found that if he spun it, it wouldn't stop, as if there wasn't any friction at all. He closed the bracelet while the band was spinning and reached into a comparatively massive pocket.

This might be the coolest item I have ever seen.

Ouch.

You consider yourself an item?

Well… No. What about the cube?

This is more usable, functional. That was a fun puzzle but it's a one use one purpose item.

That's fair. Not gonna lie, that item is awesome.

What the hell was it doing in that Merchant's vault?

I don't think he put it there. Pretty sure the merchant only used the storage room, bedroom and the ring room. Everything else he just left as is from when he got it.

So the dragon cult put it there?

Yeah or someone in the caves even before them.

Still seems too good of an item for them to have had. This is miles better than the fire ring for example.

Yeah so either they got lucky finding or stealing it or it was already there before them.

It really wasn't hidden that well though. I guess they found it and just stuck it in a vault or something.

Yeah, that did seem a little too easy. I'm leaning towards someone before them. That lock system didn't seem like their style.

Not enough dragons?

Yeah that and they seem more like the active defense rather than passive vault, trap or puzzle types.

Maybe. So the identification ring and the protection necklace were the merchant, the fire ring was the cult and the bracelet was already there from long ago? Why didn't Erolan take it when he captured the vault?

That is an excellent question but I think the simplest answer is he either missed it or didn't look around very hard.

What if the merchant put it there?

Possible. It makes sense given how it was hidden.

And he didn't wear it around because he was worried Erolan or someone else would steal it from him?

Yeah. I bet the lock mechanism was there originally then Erolan took whatever was originally stored in it.

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The merchant oiled the pins and maintained it then put the bracelet in it.

Ok that seems to make the most sense. So where the hell did this low D grade merchant find this thing?

Luck?

Meh… maybe?

Or Erolan stashed it in there when his city was under attack.

Actually, yeah that makes the most sense.

Onto the next vault?

There's something I want to try before that. You read through Erolan's experiment log, right?

Yes…

Which one has the strongest skin?

Hmm, you don't want to get too far away from human I assume?

Correct. Not ready for that yet, maybe not ever.

Number 7 and 53 then. You'll want to combine those two.

Felix found a house that had already been looted, with Devoured corpses sprawled about and a locked vaulted. He walked into the house and into the kitchen then pulled experiments 7 and 53 from his inventory. The first looked like a troll except it's skin was a dark blue and grey color. The second corpse was a humanoid creature that looked like a lizard man with four arms except it had no scales whatsoever. It was an odd sight because Felix expected there to be scales. Instead, it's skin was leathery and tough.

Felix morphed his staff into a scalpel and put the rest aside then cut out small chunks of the trolls skin. It was much thicker than he expected but it wasn't too difficult to cut through. The Lizard thing on the other hand, was nearly impossible to cut through, very similar to trying to cut into the Devoured. With a handful of samples from each, Felix stowed his staff and scalpel then sat down on the counter and meditated. He followed the samples into his soul space then focused on the troll samples.

One of the advantages to having things in his soul space was that he was essentially the god of his own soul space. Felix cast a simple light spell and bent the light so that he could see the sample as if he were looking through a microscope, then he compared the structure and cells of the troll to his own skin. Though Felix didn't have any formal training in medicine, his new race allowed him to essentially feel and see his individual cells.

When he had been severely burned back in the last vault and he was healing himself, he had essentially watched his cells regrow themselves so he had a general idea of how it all worked. It was enough that he could compare his skin to the troll's skin and find some differences. The biggest difference, other than the completely absent hair follicles was the presence of a different layers in it's skin. Unfortunately, without a way to, for lack of a better word, turn on the skin, Felix could only really guess it's function. Luckily, Erolan had taken detailed notes on his experiments from when the corpses were less dead.

Grim gave Felix the gist of the experiments so he didn't have to read through what was apparently a couple hundred pages worth of information. Erolan's high dexterity meant his notes could be ridiculously dense so the experiment log actually contained far more information that Felix had expected at first glance.

For the Troll, their greatest strength was their healing ability and apparently Erolan had concluded it came from a bunch of different sources. They converted energy in their bodies to cells at all times that acted like batteries. This coupled with a massive energy pool and regeneration results in a ridiculously high vitality. Alongside this, their organs were slightly different. Focusing on their skin, they have an extra layer of skin that was essentially an activatable cancer.

The cells in that layer replicate very quickly but they aren't very strong. Given a little bit of time though, they can morph themselves and transform into any other cell around them. So if a Troll is cut, the cells replicate to fill the gap then over the next few minutes or so the cells morph themselves from the fast replicating variety into normal skin cells. There are similar cells throughout the rest of their bodies but those cells were essentially the key, they could reproduce very quickly and store a huge amount of energy to enable their reproduction.

The prospect was interesting and it didn't seem impossible to incorporate so Felix decided to try it out. He was a little wary of messing with his own body too much but he decided it should be fine if he only changed a tiny portion. He decided to start with a small section on the side of his thigh no bigger than his finger nail. Even though Grim was convinced Felix could regrow a finger, he was far more comfortable cutting or burning a small chunk from his thigh then reattaching them later.

Firstly, he grew cells based on the troll sample. To get the actual template, he removed a tiny sand grain sized chunk from the sample and embedded it into his own leg. From there, his cells absorbed the sample and began recreating the extra layers the troll had in it's flesh.

It didn't take long but it did require him to flip back and forth between his soul space and body a few times for reference. Once he was done, he decided to test it out and using the scalpel, after dulling his pain sense, made a tiny incision in his leg. The cells from the layer below rapidly filled the gap with a pinkish coloration starting from the edges and pulling the cut closed. It wouldn't be nearly as effective on a larger wound but so far it looked promising.

Hopefully the next experiment helped prevent those larger wounds from happening. After a few minutes, Felix looked down and inspected the area and realized something was wrong. It was subtle, but there was a slight line in his skin it looked almost like a scar but upon internal investigation, he could feel the cells. They were troll cells. The cells hadn't adapted themselves to his body, they were still following the instruction set of a troll's body.

Luckily, it was a fairly simple task to have his body kill off those cells one by one. He removed the layer of troll cells and reverted that area back to normal. He was already of the mindset that he didn't want to just implant parts of other creatures bodies into his own body, instead he wanted to adapt their strengths and make them his own.

With the Troll cells, he had gotten distracted by how exciting rapid regeneration was. The basic theory was simple, cells that reproduced very quickly and could store a lot of energy. This time, instead of replicating the Troll cells, Felix carefully took a small section of his own cells and slowly modified them similarly to how the Troll cells worked. It took some trial and error but he eventually got it to a point he was happy with. The effect was exactly the same but now the cells transformed into his own skin, instead of Troll cells.

Felix left the tiny modified area where it was and looked towards the samples from the other creature. He decided that he would spread each of them out at the same time to a larger section, then put them both to the test and spread them everywhere if they passed. Looking at the samples from the other creature, there were a couple of interesting things to note. The creature had many more layers on the very outside of it's skin and it was overall much thicker than Felix's skin. Unfortunately, Felix didn't want to have thick, leathery or blue skin so he couldn't just copy the creature.

Grim summarized Erolan's notes which described it's skin in detail. The big differentiating factors for this creature were the outer layers, and the fibers. The outer layers consisted of a few different kinds of cells but the ones on the very outside were hard and the flexibility came from weaker cells interspersed between them. It was essentially a layer of scales but the scales were tiny. The other factor was the fibers. Running throughout the skin, on the outside and inside, were these fibers made of cells that were strong on their own and very difficult to separate from each-other.

Felix ignored the scales for now, though he did keep it in mind for the future because he thought it had potential, it just required more work than he could dedicate right now. Felix once again cut a tiny section of the sample and integrated it into his skin on the other thigh. His body absorbed the cells, and he sorted through them until he identified the fibers. Then he began morphing some of his own skin cells into the ones he had found and spread the fibers out.

For this to work, he needed the fibers to spread in every direction and act like skin cells. He repeated the process on the outermost layer of his skin then a few more times on the inner layers. On the outer layers he kept the fibers to just one or two cells in thickness then gradually increased their thickness the deeper into his skin they grew. This would make it so that the feel of his skin stayed mostly the same, at least that was the hope.

He spent a few hours tuning the cells until they were just right providing as much resilience as possible without his skin feeling like burlap. For a cut, the fibers were very effective and made it difficult to get through his skin with the scalpel, instead of trivial. Piercing his skin was mostly the same except, for an arrow or crossbow bolt, the skin would be slightly harder to widen. He couldn't think of anything other than creating scales to solve that problem though so he ignored it for now. With his initial experimentation mostly done, Felix began spreading the changes out to a large area on each of his thighs, making both of them about as big as his hand. After that, it was time for more rigorous testing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .