Deep into the night, Leon sat on his sleeping bag with a cracked sword across his lap. He held the formation disk in his left hand and the warm, golden squirrel rock in the right. He pondered on what the final result of transmuting it into the sword would be, but no matter what he came up with, he didn’t really like it.
He used True Sight on the rock again, bringing up the sparse information he already knew.
[Golden Rock(?)]
Unknown golden rock from a mortal squirrel. It appears to release a gentle, soothing warmth.
Many items brought up a similar prompt, including the trees and even the grass. Sadly, it seemed that he needed more information before he could get any handouts from the system. Cheap bastard. Where the hell was the multiversal cultivator internet when he needed it? Sighing, Leon knew he would just have to keep checking until something changed.
Storing the golden rock away, he pulled out a red one from his storage ring. Sophia found it in one of the panthers. Not every creature had one, but those that did seemed different from the norm. The panther was larger than any other he’d seen while the squirrel had outright attacked Sophia. Compared to the normally timid, even skittish squirrels he had come across daily, its behaviour was downright abnormal.
The only common point between the two odd creatures was that they had a rock in their body.
Leon rolled the crimson orb between his fingers, holding it up in the light of the campfire. It was made of red crystal that contained liquid blood. It sloshed around inside the crystal orb, its veined surface reminding him a bit of a heart. He wasn’t sure of its properties, but he knew that he wanted to try it out anyway.
This was the one.
Shadow Steel could store impressions of whatever it came across. Leon hoped that he could use the blood-aspected rock to alter this ability somehow, potentially even creating some kind of cloning effect for techniques. It was a long shot, but the idea of being able to swing his sword and throw out ten blades of Qi was very appealing.
Taking a deep breath, he pulled out his second and final Tiger Soul Pill. He originally believed that the first pill was all used up. Of course, Leon couldn’t really sense his soul on command. Whether he couldn’t find it due to inexperience or was fundamentally incapable of perceiving it, he didn’t know. But what he did know was that the first pill was still enhancing him.
The obvious effects were long gone, but every time he transmuted a mushroom or refined some Bloodroot Berries, his soul force would regenerate stronger and richer than before. There would even be some impurities that would leak out of his glabella - the spot between his eyebrows - when he exhausted all of his soul force. So while he wanted to take another pill to boost his chances of success, he also didn’t want to risk anything until the benefits stopped coming.
Putting it back into his storage, Leon slammed his soul force into the solid wall of the crimson rock. It was different to the other types of objects he’d transmuted before. Unlike the soft, almost living mental barriers of a mushroom or the solid walls of the iron cauldron, this rock combined both of their traits. Not only was it alive, but its mental barrier was completely solid like an inanimate object.
Oh, and it also had some kind of power it could manipulate. Perhaps it was Qi?
That left it to counterattack with strands of bloody energy, each one attempting to pierce into his own mind. It hurt like hell. Having his brain poked felt like someone was pricking him in the face and neck with needles, and that wasn’t even mentioning the strangeness of having something directly attack his consciousness. Every impact made it harder to focus and slowed down his thoughts, almost like he’d slammed back a shot of tequila that only made him drunk for a split second.
Annoyed, Leon used his own strands of soul force to fight back. With a mind evolved beyond that of a regular human, he could split his mind into three and, with each of those sections, control two strands of soul force for a total of six. He thought about mimicking the rock by trying to infuse some of his Qi into an attack, but all of his previous attempts had failed.
He would just have to brute force things like usual.
That left him to sweep the bloody strands of what he thought was soul force mixed with Qi away. His soul force trembled from the impacts, but the rock’s control over the red energy was pitiful compared to his. It could only control three at once while a single strand of his own soul force was equal to one of its own in raw power. That meant he could use two of his strands to decimate any of its attempts to attack him, and with the new idea he had been toying with, its already meagre defence could only break apart before him.
Leon rolled all six strands together into a braid of soul force that almost resembled a rope. With it, he slammed the tip against the solid wall as if it were a spear. The rock tried to use its pitiful strands of bloody Qi to block him, but his soul force was too powerful. He simply dispersed the strands by crashing straight through them before proceeding to slam into the barrier head-on. This continued for what felt like an eternity, the spear flying back and forth until something changed. Finally, a minute crack appeared in the wall, and from there his progress sped up by a shocking degree.
Not three hits later did he shatter the wall and effectively halt all resistance.
Carefully separating his soul force back into strands, Leon wrapped all of its power in a net. He dragged it out carefully - the red orb shuddering and turning to dust in the process - and actually placed it in the cauldron. While his soul force would eventually dissipate, the cauldron would slow the decay long enough for him to handle the rest of what he needed to do.
That left him with the formation disk. As he expected, it was just a normal object with a solid wall. He slammed his soul force against it for another eternity, sweat beading on his forehead and hands shaking from the effort. Each impact would drain some of his soul force, and once he ran out, Leon would faint and fall into a deep slumber until about twenty percent of it recovered.
He experienced that a few weeks ago, allowing him to learn some interesting basics. Any level of expenditure would result in a proportional feeling of exhaustion. If he used more than ninety percent, his mind fogged up and his thoughts slowed down. At fifty, he started to sweat and even shake if he was trying to move fast.
Leon usually exhausted himself after going through ten common mushrooms. Before being nourished by the Tiger Soul Pill, he could only do three before he had to stop, the pill more than tripling his previous reserves of soul force. Now, as he tried to break the defences of the formation disk, he learned that an uncommon item required around twice to three times as much energy compared to a common one.
He might not have been able to break through if he didn’t have the pill, and if the pattern held up, a rare item would’ve been impossible to transmute before now.
With less than twenty percent of his soul force remaining, Leon finally broke into the mental barriers of the formation disk and began to leech out its shadowy essence. The black grains were like tiny black holes, each one cold and elusive to his senses.
Despite the difficulty of just pulling the grains out, he wrapped the essence up and tossed it into the cauldron as well. The disk turned to ash and dust the second he was finished extracting the grains. Leon shook himself clean before hopping into his sleeping bag. Exhausted, he took a quick nap without much of a choice. There was no way to continue if using Flame Control for ten minutes would make him faint.
His soul force recovered by half during the next few hours. Leon’s mind felt sluggish for a moment, but when that faded he was refreshed and ready to go, Flame Control taking the campfire over as he flooded the cauldron with his Qi. The two bags of soul force broke apart. Blood and steel collided, floating together in the pot. They didn’t react so much as ignore each other completely. The shadow steel essence clumped together while the blood essence acted like any other liquid. The two simply existed beside one another, a sea of blood surrounding a black island.
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It wasn’t until Qi became involved that the process moved along.
Black smoke drifted off the island of shadow steel while the blood roiled from the growing heat, its surface a mess of burbling bubbles and bloody splatters. Still, they adamantly refused to merge until Leon took things into his own hands. Soul force merged with the two objects, his mind working to squeeze the grains of essence together bit by bit.
The first grain began to absorb the bloody liquid, swallowing a mouthful of his Qi in the process. It slowly transformed to have a sheen of red. Other than that, it looked nearly identical. Leon continued the process by hand. Each grain had to be manually infused with blood, one at a time, until the entire pot was one big bowl of black grains that shone with the ominous colour of blood.
Leon used True Sight.
[Blood-infused Shadow Steel Essence (Rare)]
The refined essence of high-quality shadow steel that has been infused with the essence and Qi of blood.
The formation disk had only been uncommon, so did that mean the rock was an epic-rarity item? That wouldn’t make sense as it was only about as difficult to defeat as a regular common item. Then again, it did actively attack him and seemed to have some level of consciousness. Perhaps that meant it was of epic rarity while only being as tough as a common mushroom, or maybe he had just done a really good job, the rarity increasing out of sheer luck?
Without any answers jumping out, Leon decided to move on to the next part.
His mind brushed against the mental barrier of the iron sword. It was solid like he expected, only there was a hole in its surface. A spear-shaped crack. Essence slowly leaked out of the hole, forcing him to push strands of soul force into the weapon and grab hold of the grey flakes. They were cold and hard like he expected iron essence to be.
He had no idea if this would work. For all he knew, the entire thing would fail and turn to dust, but there was no turning back now so Leon shoved the rare essence in and began to merge the two together. Unlike with the Spirit Water and iron cauldron, he wasn’t just infusing his Qi into the sword. He was changing the essence within into something new.
The iron essence resisted the change, but with great effort, Leon began to arduous task of merging the grains of shadow steel and iron. It was surprisingly easier compared to before. Steel and iron were versions of the same thing, making him wonder if that was part of the equation. It would make sense that changing a sword into a beer mug would be virtually impossible compared to adding carbon to iron.
After a few scares, Leon finally merged the last grain of iron while using Essence Infusion to pour more of his Qi into the blade. The grains drank in his power until they could take no more. With sweat dripping from his forehead, he opened his eyes and looked down at the monster he had created.
It was the same shape as before, meaning only the blade had changed colour. Rather than the usual grey, it was crimson like fresh blood, the colour fading to black in the shadows of the night. Only the light of the campfire could rouse the blood to appear.
[Congratulations! You have transmuted an Iron Sword (Common) into a Blood-Shadow Blade (Uncommon).]
Leon used True Sight, a little sad that it wasn’t rare.
[Blood-Shadow Blade (Uncommon)]
A regular iron sword transmuted with the refined essence of blood and shadows.
The description was probably lacking because he very little about what had changed. Usually, the System would feed him everything since he was the craftsman, but perhaps it couldn’t do that in cases such as this. Who was to say that the results would always be the same. For all the System knew, it could spew acid or turn blood into shadow aura. That meant he would have to test it out before anyone could know what it was capable of.
Leon started his testing out by slashing the sword. It arced through the air like normal, but as it moved out of the light of the campfire and into his own shadow, it all but disappeared as it turned into a vague outline.
He wasn’t completely sure if that was really happening or if the weapon was just dark enough to naturally blend in the shadows, but Leon suspected it was an effect of the upgraded essence. Everything seemed to be made of essence, and by changing it directly, he had more or less melted the formation disk and sword down before mixing and recasting them back into a sword.
Using True Sight again updated the notification, explaining that it really was merging with the shadow aura in the environment to make it more elusive. That put a fire under his ass but Leon didn’t discover anything else before he ran out of time and had to sleep.
***
Not two days later they came across a small herd of goats. They had long golden fur the colour of tarnished gold and their horns and eyes were a molten orange. The horns in question arched up and back like a regular goat from Earth. The males had horns that were twice as large as the females, and they were also a head taller, standing out very easily in the herd as they searched for threats like the protectors they appeared to be.
Claire and Sophia had spoken at length about them, going on and on about their amazing fur and how delicious their meat was. Not only did their long hair make for a beautiful blanket, but it had spiritual qualities to it, too, meaning it released a dull warmth like a heated blanket.
Tyler and his soldiers had killed quite a few of the goats, the civilians processing them so that everyone could have one. The only reason Claire and Sophia didn’t keep theirs was because they had already laid it out to make a big seating area when the ‘incident’ happened, forcing her to leave it behind.
An arrow soared across the small clearing. Only a few goats managed to turn by the time the arrow pierced into the eye of a large male. There were three huge goats within the herd of thirty females, each one with molten orange horns that visibly glowed. Now there were two. With its brain turned to mush by an explosive arrow, the two-metre-tall beast seized up and simply fell over where it had been grazing.
The other two males charged at the distant Sophia, but Leon and Claire were hidden in the brush nearby for a sneak attack. They ran over to kill a few goats to replenish their food supply. If they had enough meat to last a few weeks then they would be able to make at least half of the distance to the mountain without having to worry about starving to death.
Claire thrust her spear with great speed, Celerity making her move faster than she possibly could’ve. Leon was right behind her. Carefully using Fortify on his upgrades sword, he smiled as his Qi moved so efficiently that it was almost sucked out of him. Many of the flaws in his sword had disappeared and the Qi conduction had doubled or maybe even tripled.
There was very little resistance, too, making it much more comfortable to use as a medium for his skills.
Leon felt around the new weapon before preparing to use Sundering Strike. Three techniques were his limit, meaning Strengthen and Fortify took up most of his mental bandwidth. He intended to use up the last corner of his mind to create an arc of Qi big enough to wipe out a few of the goats before they ran away. They didn’t want to kill all of the males and doom the herd, so Sophia had come up with a plan to draw them away.
He imagined a wave of blood or an invisible shadow flying out of his weapon. Instead, a regular arc of Qi flew out, cutting the heads off three goats as they ran away from him. Leon sighed as he filed away that information. It seemed that weapons - at least those at uncommon rarity - did nothing to directly alter skills that were used through them.
Slowing to a stop beside the corpses, he looked over at the two that Claire had killed. Six total including the male.
Sophia walked out of the forest with Pete running ahead, the male goats likely still searching for her or chasing after their herd.
“Are you happy with your upgraded sword?”
“Yeah,” Leon said, holding the blade up so that it caught the light. “It can hold a lot more of my Qi and is structurally more perfect. It’s also easier to push Qi in, the internal friction or resistance or whatever being much lower than it was before.”
Still, he expected more. Leon stared at the blade, the top half a bright crimson while the shaded bottom was darker than black. The shrouded nature of it could probably be used in some circumstances to catch enemies off guard, but he wasn’t sure how he could leverage that-
Leon almost didn’t notice, but out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a drop of blood on his sword. Some blood had splattered onto him from the goats, some of which must have landed on the blade. He watched in shock as it was slowly drawn into the metal. Devour was somehow working through it, but the liquid didn’t flow into his hand.
The sword had absorbed the blood, possibly growing stronger for it.
“Well, it looks like these changes are more interesting than I thought.”