Evan released a deep breath as he rested in the cultivation chamber of Iron Guard. There were only a few such chambers in the building at all, and even that was only because the outpost had been around for many years.

He glanced around at the walls of the chamber – it was smaller than the one he had enjoyed in Starspire but was otherwise much the same. The same drab walls and almost completely empty room surrounded him.

They didn’t have anything as luxurious as Starspire proper, and much of their food was simple rations – nothing like the expertly prepared meals from before. It felt a little lacking after what he had enjoyed previously but had no real complaints – it had also been comparatively cheaper.

His purchased Substance had arrived, and he was glad for it. It was finally time to get stronger. Already his mind was filled with all sorts of ideas that he could try out once he had the strength to give it a shot, and he was glad to be able to contribute to his own safety a little more.

Additionally, his money-making potential should greatly increase, and while he still couldn’t start saving to escape his service, the amount he was quoted would be just that much easier to get a hold of.

Reaching for the nearby canister, he unscrewed it and allowed the Substance to begin filling the room. It was already sealed, and he had opened the bottle a little more this time.

With his larger soul, he would be able to cultivate a little bit faster.

Evan threw himself into the trance of cultivation, sat in a comfortable position in the center of the room.

Myth – 0.00%

He ignored the thought.

***

He was close – he could feel it. The entirety of his being felt restricting, as if the body was a vessel that he no longer fit. It was decidedly uncomfortable, but he grit his teeth and continued – there wasn’t much left, he felt.

***

Finally, his soul could hold no more – it was full, and instinctively his soul closed without his input. He could force the issue, but that was a terrible idea for obvious reasons.

He pulled together his everything, his soul straining under the weight of his cultivation. Flexing his will in a way he never had before, he pulled. Visibly his soul shrank, but after a moment his focus wavered and his efforts were undone.

Master Isaac had told him what to expect before entering the chamber, revealing a secret that only those who reached their first Collapse were allowed to know.

Cultivation was dangerous. There had been hints of it before, of how humanity just didn’t sit squarely into the rest of the universe, but he had never tried to put the dots together before. Why would he?

Humans didn’t generate Substance. Substance needed to be processed before it could be cultivated. The body grew resistant to change after cultivating. They couldn’t sense Substance like beasts could, and could not absorb Substance from other humans.

Only a select few had the ability to manipulate and imbue Substance without cultivation.

The soul, an enigma, grabbed onto Substance like a starving animal, no matter how large, until it was full. Then, it stopped – utterly and completely.

A careful foundation was required, lest cultivators find themselves starving no matter how much they ate, tired no matter how long they slept.

The status that came with each Collapse.

Together, the pieces of the puzzle painted a bleak picture: humans weren’t meant to cultivate. Humanity just wasn’t built too; for whatever reason, heavenly mandate or a fluke of nature, humanity struggled where nothing else did.

For humans, cultivation was dangerous, and every Collapse was a life-or-death battle against their very nature. Collapses were known so well because they weren’t natural; it was yet another way humanity defied their circumstances and elevated their limits.

Once a cultivator filled their soul, they must Collapse their soul and reach higher limits, or die trying, their souls Collapsing under their own weight, perishing beyond any ability to fix. Even when the body died, souls simply move on, burning their cultivation as they fell up into the Void, like a fishing bobber rising to the surface.

Failing a Collapse meant this never happened – whatever came after death, failing a Collapse meant this never had the chance to happen.

Despite having been told this, Evan sat here, challenging his first Collapse despite possible soul-death. This was the easiest Collapse he would ever experience, and it was hard.

All of these thoughts flashed through his mind as he lost focus yet again, and pain began to wrack his soul. Urgency gripped him as he tried again.

Slowly, every so slowly, he once more pulled, bringing the might of his will to bear as his soul shrank bit by bit. He squeezed his soul in an iron grip, his body sweating, heart pounding, and a headache rapidly forming behind his temples.

Eventually, he could squeeze his soul no more, and he let go, collapsing onto the ground with exhaustion. His soul remained as he had left it, stable in its new density and size.

I did it. I actually did it.

Time passed as he laid on the ground, regaining his breath and massaging his pounding head. There was still a little Substance floating about the room, so he couldn’t leave immediately. Evan refused to allow any of his wealth to escape him.

No wonder strong cultivators are so rare and valued – even I feel an urge to stop here, cultivate to my new peak, and stop there to enjoy the rest of my life.

He wouldn’t, though, and he knew it. Crafting had grown on him, beyond simply the luxurious life it would let him live. When he reached the peak once more, he would battle his nature once more. He had too many ideas, too many visions of grandeur to give up at the starting line. How could he build a Voidship in his current state?

He simply couldn’t, and that wouldn’t do.

Eventually, he managed to open his soul once more from his position on the floor, though his headache made that a difficult task.

Myth – 0.00%

His soul looked similar to before, a perfect sphere, though it was now smaller but brighter. In size, it was now only slightly larger than it had been when he first became a cultivator, but he could feel how much stronger it was than before.

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Cultivation proceeded a little faster than just the size of his soul could explain, the density increasing how easily it could pull the Substance into itself. He looked at his newly forged soul with pride, and thought of the benefits of being human.

For one, he found that monsters were after humans for more than just the evolution it could grant them and the easy meals.

Beasts, and essentially everything but humans, had limits, much like the limit of a human’s soul. This limit was much greater than that of a human, and they lacked souls – their Substance was physically bound to their bodies and was the reason why they changed with influxes of atypical Substance.

When a beast consumed a soul, they didn’t truly consume the soul itself – it slipped away at amazing speed, leaving behind parts of itself – its cultivation – as it did so.

There was nothing a human could do with this remnant, but beasts could devour it by consuming the fresh body. Somehow, these pieces of the soul would elevate the limit of the beast, much as a Collapse did for a cultivator, but with none of the risk or difficulty.

So, in a way, humans had no predefined limits they couldn’t break, unlike beasts, who required humans to do so.

That… was just about it. Was it worth it? …Maybe.

A few more hours passed as he finished his cultivation. He didn’t know when his next session would be, but he couldn’t wait to explore his new limits.

He could understand why mortals, and cultivators below their first peak, weren’t told about the dangers of cultivation. If they knew how dangerous it was, it was very possible that some would swear off ever attempting a Collapse before ever beginning cultivation, and cultivators of all sorts were essential to society. The miners of Iron Guard were a good example – even they were mostly past their first Collapse, and that allowed for a massive increase in productivity compared to a mortal miner, and lower overall expenses.

It was a lot harder to completely forgo further heights of power once you stood at the edge, after all.

Still, he found the gatekeeping that was so prevalent in society to be frustrating – it always seemed like as soon as he felt like he understood something, everything was overturned with new information. What misconceptions were he already under without even knowing?

When would he?

Dispelling his unproductive thoughts, he opened the chamber once his cultivation was complete and returned the Substance canister after getting a good look at it. He wasn’t supposed to do that, but nobody was any the wiser that he had.

It was still far beyond him – not only was it able to store so much Substance inside, bound to the harmless particulates within, but it was very efficient at doing so, demonstrating the boundless strength of its creator. Other than that, it was actually quite simple, being made to simply be incredibly durable and reliable.

Nobody knew when – or if – he was leaving secluded cultivation, so there was no one to greet him as he left but the same staff as when he entered.

He found that five days had passed, less time than before but also a little longer than expected, but he must have grappled with his Collapse for longer than he thought.

Cultivation was a private affair, so none of the staff was aware of his success, but he was given congratulations all the same on, if nothing else, growing stronger. Evan didn’t dissuade them otherwise but kept his Collapse to himself – no need to go spreading that around.

Part of him wanted to rush home or to the workshop and tell Arnav, Iliana, and Master Isaac of his success, but an even larger part demanded he try out his new capabilities immediately.

Thankfully, he had thought ahead for this part, and was able to pick up an order he had already made previously – or rather, he convinced some nearby soldiers to pick it up for him and haul it back to the workshop for a generous tip while he only toted the Substance containers.

His order was of course more beams, and while he did want to work on something where the result would be a little more… immediate, the miners needed the beams more than anything and he had an idea to help solve their problem, for a more expensive price of course…

Making so many weapons had also bored him – especially the swords. He hated that they were the optimal product, but it was what it was.

Evan already knew he would only be picking this order up after he finished his cultivation, so he had spent days coming up with a better solution to the problem of the beams.

Currently, he knew that the miners would intersperse the imbued beams in with mundane ones, a task that took up lots of time and wasn’t particularly safe, but necessary given that the military only gave them so much of a budget.

This was because even with great strength, the tunnels were quite long and required lengthy trips back and forth, not to mention the installation itself, which was a pain. Most of the miners cared more about strength and stamina than speed.

At the moment the mining was stalling because while they had a ready supply of imbued tools, only Evan was making the beams in Iron Guard, and only a few arrived from elsewhere, no longer enough to keep up with them.

Even if he was able to make better beams, it wouldn’t truly solve the issue – it still took him quite an amount of time to make each beam, and while his cultivation allowed him to make stronger imbuements, they didn’t let him do it any faster – for his first Collapse, he had gone all in on simply maximizing the capacity of his intent, figuring that was more important for securing his safety at the moment, and ignored adding any Substance to enhance his mind for faster imbuing.

He didn’t think he was wrong, but with his schedule already full, his output wouldn’t increase. Instead, he intended to change the imbuement of his beams, and inscribe his own inscriptions on them using a small carving knife. It would be his first original design, and he was excited to get started.

This was also one of the reasons he liked working on the beams so much – being so large made them more difficult to imbue, but it also gave them much more surface area to inscribe onto, and being made of wood meant it wasn’t too difficult if he used an imbued carving knife built for strength.

It was a carving knife he had imbued himself as well, as already it was better for him to use his own tools – with the imbuement being his own, he could manipulate it on the fly, allowing him to exchange efficiency for strength as needed. This also helped him save a little money.

Master Isaac had impressed this idea upon him, saying that not only was their pride in only using tools made oneself, but that it virtually became a requirement. The tools were made by other crafters after all, and as one climbed the scale of power it became rarer and rarer to find tools on the market, as they could in some way be considered part of the legacy of a crafter, and why help the competition?

For that reason, getting used to making his own tools was an important habit Master Isaac had worked to ingrain into him.

Back in the workshop, he got his knife and prepared to start carving into it. This would be his most complex inscription to date, and his first original one.

Evan’s first idea was to create a much more powerful imbuement by filling the beam with Substance, then using all it to imbue it into holding more Substance, a technique that allowed one to infinitely pile Substance into a single object through layers.

This idea was quickly discarded though, as it required the imbuement be active at all times, and any decay from this use would lead to parts of the next layer also detaching, creating a cascade of failures rippling outwards in ever greater amounts, losing all of the Substance to Void where all Substance was somewhat anchored.

Using that technique would allow a crafter to create an incredibly powerful final imbuement, but the whole thing would be a time crunch, with the expiration date linked to the very first imbuement, with a short lifespan and an incredibly high price tag.

Considering the requirements of the mine, this was a non-starter. The technique was mostly considered a last resort, or a great way to build unearned fame. It only took moments to discard the idea.

Or, a “mythical” item? Food for thought.

That was unfortunate, as he would need a lot in order to get the imbuement right. When he was finished, he imagined a beam that could be used to stabilize a much larger space, with imbuements to not only handle that strain but also to greatly lighten the weight of the beam.

In this way the owner could take the beam with them into the mine and set it up by itself. Then, they could go about their mining, and when they were done, take the beam back with them, letting the newly opened space collapse behind them.

No – that wouldn’t work. Cave-ins were likely best avoided altogether, but at the end of the day the beam would be quite expensive, so it was critical that it served some important purpose.

Evan amended his idea; instead of working all by its lonesome, the device would instead offer a safety net to the miners – that sounded like it would be much more convincing.

He would add a simple toggle inscription to the beam, and once they reached an area with plenty of ore, they could set the device up and mine away, adding in other beams as per usual.

With the device on, they wouldn’t have to worry about the rocks coming down on top of their heads, and what was more valuable than that?

Yes, that was a much better application, and since they could rely on his device to hold the ceiling up, at least temporarily, they could build most of the mineshaft all at once instead of piecemeal – a productivity boost!

He could already imagine how much of a hit this would be, so long as he could actually figure out how to build it. There was paper and pencils stored in the workshop for just this sort of thing – he grabbed a handful of sheets and a pencil, and started madly scribbling out inscriptions, a trance not unlike that of cultivation settling over him.

At some point, he needed more paper.