Following a period of evaluation, Rune had concluded that this dangerous ground he had found was pretty dangerous.
A continuous damage of around 30 health per minute existed, and it was after being resisted at the same time by his cohesion and health regeneration. Or maybe it ignored cohesion? He wasn’t sure, but it shouldn’t.
The result was that he had to adapt and create an alternative farming method: Going into the red ether ground, gathering every crystal he could on his way, and absorb them when he was out.
With only 2 minutes to farm and still remain safe, ecured, and alive, he put his diving limit to 1 minute and a half.
That led to the situation where Rune was plunging into the red ether ground and exiting after a minute with 2 or 3 ether crystals in his hands.
He didn’t dare train casually or split his awareness with his avatar death being so near, so he put his entire awareness except the 4% he used for listening to music in his avatar, and he even used his recently learned awareness trick to use his awareness at a greater efficiency by cutting things an avatar didn’t need.
Rune had known that avatars were fundamentally different, so when he tried to cut the senses of sight, smell, hearing, or touch, nothing happened, but the truth was that, in fact, they were all just in different places. And what he had discovered over his journey of trying out the effects from deactivating them had given him much thought.
The perception sphere was, in fact, an omnipotent perception center that could transmit smell and colors if he so desired, except those “add-ons” that allowed that were naturally fed with only an inkling of awareness, effectively making them quasi-turned off naturally. Only awareness manipulation could help in reactivating them.
With the awareness manipulation level he had reached, he could now reactivate them like switches, and the results were beautiful.
The Void Dimension sometimes showed glimpses of what ether was capable of, with all colors and shapes passing by.
If those rare ether phenomenons weren’t so rare, he would pass all his time just admiring the Void Dimension’s flowing ether.
Whatsmore, once he told everything to Utopia and let him inquire about the spread of a perception sphere’s secondary senses, he got a surprising return.
In the end it really hadn’t been common knowledge, and after he shared it, some high graded psychic union’s bigshots reached out to him for him to contribute and describe his process of doing it.
“Fortunately, I let Utopia do it for me. Phew~~’
Exhaling a breath in relief at his own hidden genius that let him be completely unrelated, Rune continued with his dangerous farming.
…
After less than 2 days of farming and raising his health regeneration stat, Rune finally became able to scout the dangerous ground deeply without fearing for his life and try looking for his first special resource.
However, the place being so rich made his travel speed slower overall, as he couldn’t just keep accumulating ether crystals. He didn’t have a bag or dimensional pocket to stock them, neither nor the former were available, and the latter didn’t even exist.
So he could only absorb what he got progressively as he entered deeper and started to do a sweep.
As he had planned previously, he tried to split his awareness, sending a lot more than necessary to his original body’s side now that he was safe.
Multiple tries and data exchanges led Rune and Utopia on what they presumed to be the good orthodox path, they had already pulled off moving both of their bodies at the same time multiple times.
The only thing to note was the time-consuming manual awareness sending effort. It took hours to send just 4%, and it wasn’t possible to accelerate it without more experience as it just activated the switching process.
They tried to change the process used to the one present in the psychic union guide, but it seemed that awareness ended up in a completely different state depending on whether it was “stopped” during the switching process or “sent” voluntarily slowly.
So until they became used to it or found another way, the two had to practice ambibodyterity, or ambibodyxterity? Or simply mirror body control, in addition, to keep their training effort on manual awareness handling.
Utopia already did all the experiments having to do with the awareness percentage division, this ended up as a farming efficiency scale they could use that reported avatar efficiency with different awareness percentages attributed to it.
Like Rune had thought and expected, not using all your awareness to “focus” on absorbing an ether resource lengthened the time needed by how much of it wasn’t being used.
But compared to his estimation of 45% efficacy for 50% awareness, Utopia found after true and tried optimization on the avatar side that only 30% of one’s entire awareness was needed to accomplish a 50% resource absorption efficiency.
2 minutes per resource. That was the result that made them focus a lot more on the awareness manipulation fundamental.
It also meant that currently, while Rune’s avatar was farming, his original body was training.
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But while the theory was all good and fine, the practice was not.
Controlling two different bodies at the same time took time to get used to, there was no way to make one side automatic after all. The two bodies only had one controller, one ether soul.
Farming was more of a “chore” activity than training, it was undeniable, but unless some breakthrough in awareness manipulation took place, and from what Rune thought about it, something like automatization clearly belonged to tier 2 or above manipulations, it was something everyone had to do.
And it also had been implied many times that once anyone reached tier 2, their avatar shouldn’t exist anymore… So, yeah.
With his current level of ambibodyterity, he could only comfortably focus on perception sphere manipulation training, the easiest training to do without being able to move.
He could also have just worked on sending his awareness back and forth between the 2 sides, but he had a reason to focus more on this training.
After learning that his perception sphere's unmovable boundaries were probably so hard to transform because it was his “ether soul specialty”, he wanted to understand it more before it truly activated and his perception sphere's boundaries became truly immovable like they already appeared to be from his amateur level.
His training was however really different from the norm.
‘Push! Relax… Push! Relax…’
He was literally trying to bend his sphere, he wanted his wall to become dough, but even with that level of intensity, only petty ripples spread before he realized that he did nothing at all.
So he continued, and continued, and continued again.
Without the prior spiritual training he did that had reinforced his spirit, he felt he wouldn’t have been able to do this sort of training at all.
His spirit was already divided up, and now he tried to use a little more than half of his spiritual power to do what his full power couldn’t.
‘If only I could make them understand the hardness, the unfoldability, and the unbentability of my perception sphere’s boundaries…’
He couldn’t transmit to his friend’s brain the degree of force he was exerting, but in his own opinion, it was like their perception sphere manipulation training was lifting a 1-kilogram weight, while his was lifting a 100 kilograms one.
And he didn’t have any alternative, 100 kilograms was the minimum available.
If his ether soul awakened the true specialty of his perception stat, he probably would have no alternative but to try and train with a 1-ton weight.
‘Push! Relax…’
For 7 days already, he hadn’t stopped rhythmically trying to manipulate his sphere, but even then it only went from a perfect sphere to an almond-shaped one, and every time he thought he could relax, his perception pushed actively and tried to return to a perfect sphere shape.
‘Push! Relax… Even if it's exhausting, I’ll still do it… Push! Sphere manipulation isn’t an option anyway! Relax… For spiritual fundamentals and ultimately tier 2… Push!’
His unique rhythm of pushing and waiting was for better effects and endurance. That was the only method he had at his disposal he thought of that could allow him to do continuous efforts over a long period of time.
And effects were truly starting to show after a week. At the beginning, nothing happened, but now at every spiritual push, a ripple appeared, and even if there wasn’t any visible deformation that took place, he just had to continue and he’d eventually succeed.
As he continued, a smile appeared on his lips before he continued training his sphere bending ability.
‘Special resource, here, come to me…’
…
In another dimension, in a dangerous ground characterized by its red ether, an avatar looked at a smooth stone. Only with a perception sphere could one see the dense ether light being emitted from it.
The avatar then closed its eyes and absorbed it.
Once he was over, he checked his gathering log and was satisfied.
Absorbed ‘Tier 1 Perception stone’, gained 500 000 EP
His perception stat being maxed out, special resources couldn’t help him break the ceiling, so they had transformed into EP that he could invest anywhere.
‘Seems to be a pretty rich ground, at only 50% efficiency I gathered 683 853 EP in a week, hehehe! And now with that single special resource, I nearly doubled my weekly yield.’
How could Rune not be happy after finally finding his first special resource, even the system congratulated him by offering a modest 10 000 EP reward via the Void Initiation event.
‘Let’s continue to invest in physical stats, I’ll either need to grind other grounds or enter the Deep Void Dimension later.’
Avatar (Basic Rank) (Tier 1)
EP: 19 202
Stats Total: 1 406
Health: 100
Health Regeneration: 71
Strength: 40
Cohesion: 100
Energy: 10
Energy Regeneration: 65
Purity: 10
Affinity: 10
Momentum: 500
Perception: 500
Having gained 1 193 853 EP in 7 days, it was like he had finally become a bigshot, so his mood was very good, and his determination overflowed.
‘Let’s not relax! Push! Relax… Push!’
…
It was the first time in his life that Rune felt so exhausted. His revitalization spell’s effect was for sure coming to an end soon, but it should still have allowed him to be active for 2 more days. It hadn’t been 1 month since his last sleep, he was sure of that.
‘Is it due to training intensely in a spiritual fundamental? So training in the spiritual fundamentals accelerates exhaustion?’
As the perception sphere manipulation training had progressed, Rune had only allowed himself some hour-long periods of break which his perception sphere then actively used to go back to a perfect sphere shape.
‘Though, now, even if it becomes stronger and firmer, I don’t think I’ll become unable to move it. I think I can move on to the next training.’
Thinking about the following step of his training plan, he inadvertently remembered Utopia’s detailed plan.
‘It’s identical in this part…’
His next step was physical path training. His recent training with his friends should have given him something to work on in the fighting department, and he wanted to lean on it.
‘I just need to take a shuttle and go to the martial supreme dojo in the 4th district and I’ll see.’
It really was that easy when he thought about it, he had already adhered to the 3 path organizations and was accepted as a member of the three.
‘But first, sleep, I don’t care about those 2 days. I think I’m even going to sleep for an entire week with this exhaustion.’
Rune recalled all his awareness from his avatar’s side and cut the energy loop, but he didn’t need to wait for fatigue to appear and accumulate like how it should have happened.
He just slept.
And so ended the 9th month of Rune’s life in the new Interdimensional Era.