"How's the smithing going?" Kestra asked as two happy people entered her cook room.
In the lead was an older seeming man, his skin a brown as dark as forest loam, with silky black hair pulled into a top knot and a bare face. His eyes were composed of black sclera surrounding yellow irises. His was a square build and thickly muscled, the man standing close to a meter and a half tall, with shoulders only a little less broad. This was Ralouf the Sage Wyrm in his humanoid shape.
Behind him, his happy apprentice in the smithing arts grinned, holding up a new frying pan. "It's a Low Journeyman pan!" Her black-furred vulpine ears were forward pricked, the hand holding the pan had the end joints -- complete with her short, black claws -- regrown, and she had not one, but two bushy tails wagging with her pride in her triumph. Her skin was the palest of the people in Kestra's personal retreat realm, a highly faded reddish ochre, but her hair was a darker black than Ralouf's. Her eyes reminded Kestra of the green of the common jade used for magical containers.
"That's great, Su'ami! What are the effects?"
Novice grade gear might as well be called mundane as it had no special effects. Apprentice grade meant the crafter had drawn out a minor effect by aligning the mana of the object. Journeyman grade items had one major or two minor effects, and that was about as high as a crafter using mundane materials could aspire. At the Expert grade, those effects complemented each other, and could have more complicated conditional triggers, with Master grade technically more of the same, but requiring more finesse and control to work with more esoteric and highly magical materials.
"The base has Even Heating and the handle has Cool Touch!" Su'ami declared.
"Oh, wow! Did the Inorganic Assay spell help?" Kestra asked, snatching up the pan for her own inspection.
"Like a floor boss!" Su'ami agreed.
Ralouf sniffed. "It's utterly unfair you Ascended can just cast spells like that at your ages."
Kestra glanced over at him long enough to give the man a side hug. "Aw, you're just sad that you've already intuited it, so you don't get a new toy to play with, aren't you?"
He pouted, smiling around the corners of his lips. "I'm not a child to play with toys."
"Toys, tools, whatever," she loftily waved away the distinction. She gave the pan a quick wash to take off the forge dust. "Sit and I'll cook up something for us, inaugurate the pan as it were."
The smiths sat.
While Kestra got out ingredients and started up a pan fry, heating and holding up the pan with a combination of her Control Flames and Control Gravity spells, she asked, "I haven't seen the Elementals except for Graemire lately. Ralouf, do you think we need to find more cores for them? Graemire says that since he's already lost so much of his cultivation, he's not in the same condition they are, and he's not a great judge anymore."
He rubbed his lips while he considered the question. "Mm. That's probably better asked of Yorgin. He and Vostler have been cultivating breath together a lot of late, and Eilith and Ambrose are more resilient together with their own paired cultivation. With your mana well and the fact they all worked to put the elements of this personal realm together, they're in a very mana-stable place. I think it wouldn't be a bad idea for a dungeon run, but that leaves the question of which realm to seek that dungeon out on."
Kestra dropped a bit of water in the oil she was heating, and kept on chopping up chunks of looted monster meat. "Well, I'm not going higher than the High Mortal Realms until I'm ready to try some solo runs on a Trial of Force. We may have discussed a few different strategies for the Realm Sea Crossing Tribulation, but I don't want to be stuck relying on them and be unable to take on the Tribulation in the traditional way. That said, Graemire planted anchors up to the Low Immortal Realms. He says his cultivation is no longer sufficient to reach XiTian without using one of the anchors in the cities, and he doesn't want to risk that until he doesn't need to."
"Where is he, anyway?" Su'ami asked.
"Graemire?"
"Yeah."
The water in the oil started to pop so Kestra put the food in, waiting to answer until the noise died down to savory sizzling. "I just gave him another of the random seed boxes from our last dungeon run to get a bit of time away from his cultivation lessons. After food, I plan to lock myself in my lab and get through a few more of my experiments."
"Trouble in paradise?" the vulpine asked, her twitching ears betraying how nervous potential conflicts still made her even as she grinned playfully.
"No, I just can't remember my name when he gets all determined, and that makes trying to do anything else very difficult. Ralouf's one of the most time-conscious of the immortals among us." Kestra winked at the man in question, who shrugged.
"Well, that's setting the standard for a walk-over," Su'ami teased.
"Hey!" Ralouf protested.
"You've been sculpting the same bench for a week now," Su'ami said. "I can't even tell what you're doing!"
"Just because your senses aren't properly developed doesn't mean I'm unaware of the passing time," he pointed out.
Kestra weighed in. "Crafting is different. ... Kind of. It's getting caught up in details ...." She sighed as she realized she wasn't doing a good job of arguing her point, not when it could be argued that Graemire's current craft was cultivating with her.
"Oh, no, continue," Su'ami encouraged her, grinning.
Kestra stuck her tongue out at the vulpine.
"What heavenly cuisine are you making now?" The question preceded a man nearing two meters in height with a snake of living flame wrapped around his neck. The man was Yorgin, and the living flame the Divine Elemental of Fire Vostler. Yorgin was also a broad man, though he looked slim compared to Ralouf's proportions. Yorgin's skin was a human shade of tan under the shimmer of fine green-tinged reptilian scales. He was bald, but had a pair of crystal-like brown horns that curled up, back, down, and then forward until the tips jutted to the fore just over his shoulders. Sometimes Vostler draped himself over those tips and sometimes he went for a wider embrace of his cultivation partner.
In his humanoid shape, Vostler sported flame-colored hair and blue eyes, his skin a true yellow. Lately, he wore a forked beard. The Fire Elemental was still getting used to having a humanoid form. He hadn't wanted one, but there had been a Metal Elemental named Nicada who had been domineering enough to badger him into forming one. Nicada had been trying to convince Vostler to be her cultivation partner, after deciding that she and Yorgin weren't as great as she wanted.
Yorgin freely admitted he offered mentoring and cultivation help to Vostler to antagonize Nicada, but even after she got herself executed for rampaging, the pair just fit. Now that Nicada wasn't around to berate him into her ideal of what he should be, Vostler was more willing to explore human shape.
Vostler had been the one to speak. Eating cooked food was one of the things that came with a humanish-shape that Vostler enjoyed. In their natural forms, Elementals ate mana, whether ambient or from mana stones or a defeated creature's elemental core -- or exchanged with cultivation partners.
"It's just a fry, but I'm using some of the Celestial Boar meat and some of the veggies Natspri's been growing near the far side of the mana well. The books say that just cooking with higher grade ingredients will help my Cooking skill level. I just wish my stoma and papri spice bushes would mature already!" They were seeds that had come with her from Moh when she transmigrated to the Myriad Realms, and it had now been a little more than two long months since that had happened.
"Your Brumi tree's fruiting," Vostler pointed out, with the sound of someone offering a brilliant consolation prize.
Kestra laughed. "I'll lay off the complaining. Speaking of eating, I was just asking Ralouf how needful time in the higher realms or a dungeon run will be for you, Eilith, and Ambrose?"
Vostler chuckled. "Those two have settled into seclusion. They'll be trading orgasms for a year or more, and happy for the excuse. The mana your well makes is really tasty, but maybe a dungeon run would be good. We could get cores for Graemire to consume." After a short pause, he asked, "Are orgasms really that good?"
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Ralouf laughed, more because Su'ami blushed so bright a red she fairly glowed with embarrassment, her ears pressed flat to her head. Kestra grinned at the other woman. "I can only speak for myself, but when they're part of making sacred energy, yeah, they're awesome."
Yorgin sat at the kitchen table, his hand reaching up as if he could steady the Elemental curled around his shoulders. He and Vostler had reached a proficiency in the Shared Breath paired cultivation technique where they didn't need to face each other to flow their mana back and forth, but Kestra noticed that the Divine Serpent seemed to unconsciously seek more mana-to-mana contact with Vostler when he was trying to maintain the cultivation while going about normal activities.
"Is this sacred energy a transmigrator thing?" Yorgin asked.
Kestra shrugged. "Sapient children on Moh are taught that physical instinct, emotional feelings, spiritual readiness, and mental intent and trust have to align for an act to become sacred. Absence of any of these Four Agreements renders something mundane, while profane energy is made when you act, or are made to act, against any of your Agreements. The sacred builds and strengthens one's soul, the profane harms it. The concept is fairly simple, but the expressions of it and the way it all plays out can be quite complex."
Despite herself, Su'ami perked an ear forward. "What about when your instincts say one thing and your mind says another?"
"Complex, then," Kestra said. "Some of the situations like that are like tempering for the soul, the way body cultivators tear apart their bodies to rebuild them stronger. Others are wounds that need to be healed, and some are warnings, something a layer of your Self is perceiving that the others aren't. The priests teach that when you have a conflict like that, you make the best choice you can in the moment if you have to act, but if you don't, you're generally better off to search for the source of your conflicted Agreements. What you don't know is more dangerous than what you don't have."
She gave a last stir of the pan and then snuffed her conjured flame. A bit of concentration later and she dished up five even portions of her cooking onto new dishes she had made while learning the Pottery skill. The Control Earth spell and a few hints from Ralouf about spinning out her clay to get an even thickness and level surface had gone quite far in making her happy with her Low Novice platters.
The plates floated to places in front of her friends, and she set out the skewers that were popular eating utensils in the Myriad Realms. They used them in pairs and called them chopsticks, and Kestra had to admit that not allowing knives at the table was a good step toward keeping angry tempers from resulting in unfortunate injuries. The Divine Creatures weren't as concerned with how Kestra ate as the staff of the city of Sortalheim's Lord's Donjon had been, but only Vostler among them was less than elegant in the use of the chopsticks. Even Su'ami made them seem like an extension of her body. Kestra, meanwhile, felt like she only managed as well as she did because she had been born with good manual dexterity. It absolutely was not skill.
While they gave the food a bit of respectful silence, Kestra mused on how absurd E.X.P. was. She had a quest to grown her mana well, part of a chain of quests, really, and the most recent one had completed the week before, rocketing her up three levels from the experience award.
On Moh, the skills she had gained and the ones she had gained ranks in would have been the only source of her overall internal power growth. Here? She got achievement awards that gave this E.X.P. for figuring out spells and skill techniques on her own, and she claimed it from those she killed. There was some E.X.P. gain for growing her skills, none for growing her spells or learning them from spell books or consumable scrolls.
Cultivation was another kind of power growth. There were quests tied to it, but the cultivation itself was a way to increase one's attributes more directly. Most of the humanoid races of the Myriad Realms were born with twelve mana foramina in their mana veins, their meridians as they were called in the Realms. The more of these foramina one opened, the faster one could draw mana into their body, which could then be compressed to increase the amount of mana one could hold, and therefore use in one go without drawing on their souls to cast their spells or fuel the more outrageous aspects of their skills.
Body cultivation, on the other hand, involved exposing one's body to greater and greater damage in a controlled manner so that the body that grew back was stronger and more capable of shrugging off damage.
Kestra needed to start on body tempering. The whole idea made her very nervous, and she wanted to gather more information before she started experimenting with ways to "safely" poison her various major bodily systems. One thing Ralouf had warned her about was that there were degrees of tempering, and going back to re-temper her body would be far more painful than just fully tempering her system to begin with. There were quite a few benefits to being fully tempered.
The hairs on the back of Kestra's neck prickled. "I'm going to my lab now! See you soon!" she said, grabbing her plate and running off.
----------------------------------------
"What was that about?" Yorgin asked.
Su'ami chuckled. "She wants to get some experimenting done and Graemire's been very, ah, attentive to their 'cultivation'."
"Having problems with splitting her focus, huh?" Vostler asked with the sagacious air of one a few steps ahead in the same course of study.
The others chuckled.
Graemire looked in. "Have any of you seen Kestra?" he asked.
The chucklers started laughing.
Vostler said, "She is in her lab, running experiments."
The Elemental Emperor of Wood sighed and rubbed the back of his head.
Like all the Elementals, his ears were pointed at the tops and just different enough to be distinctly not-human. His had the rough texture of bark around the edges. He'd had more than enough time to figure out what kind of human shape he liked, and with his Enlightenment into an Elemental Emperor, he gained the fine control to make his hair into silk-fine vines, now with a wash of blue over green in color. That change had also given him his Emperor form as an Azure Dragon, which was reflected in his human form as shimmering blue scales on his extremities. His eyes were both suited to the triangular shape of his head while being too large for most of the humanoid races. They lacked iris and pupil, and were indigo in hue, darker now than they had been just after his Enlightenment, due, he said, to losing so much of his cultivation to creating the Azure Wilds. His hands had two thumbs and four fingers, the thumbs to either side of the fingers, all the digits gracefully long,
Graemire sighed and sat. "That is perhaps for the best. She needs to open more of her foramina so that she can then condense her core and achieve her Reborn Body of Mana."
Su'ami asked, "How are these foramina opened up?"
The Elemental Divines turned to Ralouf. Yorgin addressed his friend. "I never had Ascended children; how do they open their foramina?"
"The different techniques are all in my library." He made a face at the thought, then sipped at a cup of something he had pulled out of his storage.
Yorgin nodded, accepting that as a good enough answer, but Su'ami asked, "That's a problem?"
Ralouf's expression soured even more. "Yes."
"Inniad?" Yorgin asked.
"And Callalina."
Yorgin stiffened. "Both? Oh, no! So you're planning to live here for a few centuries?"
Ralouf shrugged and took another sip, then sent his cup back into his storage.
After the refreshment, he continued. "Techniques aside, circulating mana softens the foramina, and condensing mana breaks them open. There are some special tools that can be used to pierce an occluded foramen, to make the breakthrough easier, but how to make them and what materials I would need are in my library, so of no use to us now. The difference between one open foramina and two is far more tiring upon the body than between eight and nine, but the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth all remake the senses. Rapid growth through those stages has as many benefits as determents. It is good to hold off on the final core condensation stage to open all the other foramina first. In fact, she should temper her body to the Tempered Foundation stage, especially if she decides to tear through the final foramina openings."
Graemire stroked a finger around the corner of his jaw while he mused aloud, "You said something about each foramina taking five years to open. I thought it was about the changes mana makes to a physical body, but she has already made part of herself a mana well. Does that make a difference in the timing of the openings?"
"Eh. Maybe?" Ralouf grimaced an apology for having no better answer. "Forcing the foramina to open when they are still resolute, it sends shards of mana through soft meridians, and the damage can cause the veins to collapse. Happens to enough of them, and the meridians can be crippled.
"With Kestra, well, none of my children had a mana well. I'm not willing to risk my life claiming a mana seed like that. She did say that the well keeps her drawing in mana even when her veins and dantian are full. It may act as circulating mana through her veins, and if it does, then she could be ready much sooner than five years. Were we to try, we should seek out an Esteemed Healer of one of the major healing Houses, and reputable ones won't appear before the High Mortal Realms."
Vostler said, "Oh! That's where the guilds hold sway!"
Su'ami's ear pricked forward with interest. "How much would the help of a healer like that cost? For getting more magic? That's what the open foramina do, right? Make you more magical?"
"Yes, for the Ascended races. You might be able to form an elemental core. I don't know." Ralouf held up his palm, a gesture of uncertainty he had picked up from Kestra. "As for the cost, in the Mortal Realms? Several thousand gold, possibly favors and influence, too. Healers are a fancy lot. The Houses act in many ways like the Associations of higher realms, concentrating the best and the brightest under the protection and authority of those strong enough to prevent them from being enslaved for their skills. Unlike the higher realms, though, few remain in the Mortal Realms when they can Ascend, so the strength is more political."
The vulpine's ears sagged to the sides. "Oh."
"Thinking of hiring one for yourself?" Yorgin asked.
"I was, but I don't have any monies, and I don't know how I would make anywhere near that much," she admitted.
"Bah!" Ralouf said, startling his apprentice. "Your Smithing skill is more than enough! Borrow monies for materials from one of us and sell your goods through one of the auction houses! Weapons and armor sell best, but Base grade iron Alchemy tools are also a good product for the Mortal Realms. I'll show you how to prepare your goods for taking formations, and they'll be even more valuable in the High Mortal Realms and even in the Transcendental Realms. Then you can acquire even better materials and we can really dig in to your lessons!"
Her ears lay flat to her head and her eyes grew wide and wet. "Y-you'd do that? Lend to me and t-trust I could repay you?"
"I said so, now didn't I?" Ralouf groused.
Su'ami knocked her chair over as she sprung at the gruff old wyrm and hugged him fiercely. If not for a reflexively quick bit of magical bracing, she would have sent them both crashing to the ground. She was making high pitched keening noises, her body shaking.
Even as he gently patted the young woman's back and muttered soothing nonsense, something dark and wickedly enraged prowled behind Ralouf's golden gaze.