Tristan sat in the darkness breathing heavily. He could still feel the drake pacing around above his head. Fortunately, it did not try to dig him out, it made sense for a creature of this size to lack those instincts. Its food would typically be too large to hide in burrows. What did something that large eat? Maybe cows were its natural food source, it was half again larger than a bull in mass, though not in height.
“What do we do now?” Tristan asked. He knew it was a stretch to ask for help after what had just happened, but he needed it.
Vulcan was silent and for a brief moment, Tristan feared the soul tool would choose to ignore him. Eventually, Vulcan answered, “You need to decide whether you’re a boy or a man. What I just saw is what children do. Being angry is fine, but throwing a temper tantrum is not.”
Tristan gritted his teeth. Being called a child was infuriating. But he refused to yell again - not because he didn’t want to, but because the adrenaline from seeing the drake had dissipated, and he felt drained. There was also the fear that a giant lizard would hear him and start digging.
So he bit back his anger and sullenly asked “What do you want?”
Vulcan gave Tristan the feeling of an older man folding his arms to give a lecture, “I want you to remember that our relationship is transactional. I am not helping you because I like you. That is simply a nice side benefit, most of the time. I am helping you because I want you to bring me to the plane my descendants should be living on. To do that I need you to be alive and strong enough to get me there. You might have noticed, I don’t have legs.”
“Consider what I say, do it if you can’t find a reason not to, and never throw a temper tantrum like that again. Do we understand each other? Seriously think about it. If you can’t honestly say yes, I will break the soul tether and find someone else.”
Tristan slowly nodded. While he was still angry, he could recognize that Vulcan had saved his life multiple times. He did not need to be happy with his circumstances to try to survive them.
“So, what do we do now?” Tristan sighed.
“We keep doing what we were doing before you decided to leave,” Vulcan said, “You get back to augmenting your arms and I’ll explain why you’re poor at essence control.” Tristan bristled at that, but only glared at Vulcan, so he continued, “You have been hyper-focused on tier three’s essence construction ability, however you completely forgot about the tier four ability.”
“Infusion?” Tristan asked, “Doesn’t my infusion alloy do that better?”
“No,” Vulcan said flatly, “Were you not practicing because the Caldera used the same word as your force to describe it?” Vulcan did not wait for an answer, “It is simply the ability to build constructs within other structures. You all have just been using it to push essence into things almost like you thought everything is a sponge and essence is water.”
Tristan frowned. He struggled to think of any good reasons to build a construct inside something else. Unless the object was hollow, the process would be irrelevant. He would either be exchanging one type of mass for another or it would not work at all, but either way, the object would still be solid. Just solid metal instead of whatever it was before. Tristan could bypass that step by simply making a normal construct.
“Instead, use it to distribute the essence through your arms. Using a force manually like that is almost as bad as manually breathing. The tier four ability is perhaps the most important one you need to learn. At tier two you get true control over your essence, at tier three you can make constructs, at tier four you can control your construct's density, and at tier five you can affect your essence’s state of matter - to some degree.” Vulcan paused to take a breath. That very unlamplike gesture threw Tristan out of the conversation for a few moments. By the time he refocused Vulcan was already speaking, “Density goes both ways, use your tier four ability to reduce the density of your essence. You are not mudding a wall, you can apply it extremely thinly, the kharkodine only needs something to bind to. Remember you’re trying to usurp a false god’s kern, it has plenty of essence to finish off the process.”
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“If the tier four ability allows us to control essence density, why hadn’t anyone used that before,” Tristan asked. He would have used it to pack more metal into his weapons. As it was now, Tristan could swing a twenty-five pound lumber maul like it was a hatchet. Much of the weight was in its handle though, if Tristan could put all the mass in the head, he might be able to crack the drake’s scales.
“Only warriors got the ability,” Vulcan stated simply, “Humans weren’t made to be optimized for carnage. We were made to build things, it should come as no surprise that almost every ability we get has its optimal use set in construction, cultivation, or art.”
Tristan wanted to argue that point. If people were not made to kill things, then why did they do it so well? They had just fled a genocide, not even two weeks ago. However, he would never win this particular argument against Vulcan, after all, he still held that belief after getting murdered by a cult.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Tristan attempted to follow Vulcan’s instructions. He had utilized the tier four ability so little that the action was hard to do at first. It was like a muscle that had atrophied with disuse. Tristan made a coin, a replica of a parce, then he tried to compress it in his mind.
Nothing happened. That made sense, he never possessed control over the metal outside his body. Second try, however this time he tried to make a second construct inside the first parse. He expected to be left with a coin that was twice as dense, what he got was nothing like that. The parse bulged at the edge and was deformed where another coin had been formed. Tristan growled in frustration.
“Do it before you create the construct, what you’re doing could charitably be called an attempt at nuclear fusion with heavy metals,” Vulcan paused. Tristan got the feeling that this was supposed to be a joke, but he did not know what nuclear fusion was. Vulcan sighed, “You can’t do fusion like that with heavy metals, they are the result…Ah, never mind, explaining it doesn’t make it humorous.”
Tristan shook his head to clear the feeling of emotional whiplash from the experience. Not five minutes ago Vulcan had been rebuking him and now he was telling what Tristan assumed were jokes. Tristan narrowed his eyes at the lamp post. Did the lack of a body affect how long the soul tool could hold onto an emotion? Maybe, Tristan would not complain about the change this time.
He turned his mind back to creating a parse. As essence gathered in his palm, Tristan started creating another in the same location. This had an ever so slightly different result. It formed a coin that pushed the other out of the way. Tristan had used this ability before, at least he thought he had. Why couldn’t he get it to work?
His next attempt saw him trying to copy the fire kern and compress a ball of metal. He pushed until he felt some resistance, which he only answered by attempting to shove more essence into. The resistance did not stop him, it only increased the more he pushed. It was some sort of elastic resistance on his ability to push essence together. When it became too difficult, Tristan stopped. A marble the size of his pinky nail fell to the ground.
Tristan picked it up and inspected it. The metal construct was heavy for its size, weighing about a quarter pound. Drawing his knife he attempted to cut it. To his surprise, the marble put up resistance, quite a bit. His knife relied on physics to cut, having an absurdly narrow blade profile. This revelation made Tristan smile, he was finally getting to the tiers where physics would be a strong suggestion.
“There you go,” Vulcan cheered, “Now try making it less dense.”
Nodding, Tristan put his blade away and tried a second time. The first marble had taken nearly a twentieth of his essence, this time as the construct was forming Tristan pulled back the essence. There was a similar resistance, but it only took effect when there was almost no essence left. Just like last time he pulled until he could no more.
Tristan could not quantify how little essence had been used. It was near enough to zero to be the same thing, not even outpacing his natural recovery rate.
Excited to see the result Tristan let it fall into his hand. Only it did not fall, it shot up like a bubble in water. Tristan didn’t even have the time to try catching it. The small metal sphere smashed into the roof and shattered into moats of metal dust. It did not even make an audible sound on impact.
“And that’s what happens when you make something less dense than air,” Vulcan explained, “I’m surprised it wasn’t transparent.”
Tristan could do this, leaning back against the wall, he started back up on infusing his arms. The new variable made it harder, but at least it was now possible.