Tristan worked on covering as many different cells as he could at a single time. At first, his process was slower, only accomplishing a tenth of what he had originally been able to do. The extra step of extracting the essence to decrease what got infused was not natural yet. It also could not become natural in the two weeks he had. What he noticed was that it could become rote.
Within a day, he no longer had to dedicate much brain power to the process. That was when the real process and pain started paying dividends. When he had yelled at Vulcan earlier he would have claimed he had a migraine, however, he had only experienced it once. Now he believed he had been so very wrong. The vastly reduced essence expenditure coupled with the near elimination of any reason to take a break forced the headache to such levels that his nose and eyes started bleeding.
Thankfully his healing alloy amulet had little trouble handling the blood, but he found that the amulet did very little to heal overexertion. If the pain was not also an injury, the amulet was useless. Tristan would have started swearing at the amulet if there hadn’t been a drake sitting just a few feet away from him.
Taking a deep breath, he got back to work. As he did he got faster and just like anyone who started out practicing hard, he improved rapidly. Soon he was doing in a minute what took him an hour before and had eliminated almost any need for a break. One hundred thousand a minute, he felt proud of himself, until he checked his math. He had narrowed the completion time from nearly eighty-five years to a still unmanageable twenty-four weeks. Tristan could not sit here for five and a half months, but the rate of improvement let him know that this process was indeed possible for someone skilled.
He considered how he specifically could move faster. That rich kid Vulcan had compared him to would not have the advantages or disadvantages of doing this process. They would be in a safe location with nothing but time on their hands, they would have specific tailored forces for their goals, what they would not have, was a spread of forces good in nearly every situation. Tristan almost always had something, whether it was decay, consumption, architect, or growth, he had something that worked in most situations.
The answer was sitting right there. He had used architect alloy to copy bolts and screws and to make a walker with hollow bars. It took the manual shaping out of the process. Tristan had already noticed the patterns that allowed him to infuse large batches at a single time, and he already needed to use architect alloy as an ingredient for the infusion. Tristan tried it, and it worked.
Again he slowed down for a good half hour while he incorporated the different steps into his method. But after that, he sped up threefold. It was not just that he was able to make the templating process automatic, the focus used was now free to be dedicated to other areas like ignoring the pressure in his skull. This was good, but it still only brought the total time from twenty-four weeks down to eight. That was a reasonable time frame and if Tristan did not have limited supplies he would have just worked with this number.
The issue was that Tristan had nothing else to shortcut the process. He needed to go faster, but he was out of tools. A master or even someone with a well defined habit could reasonably be four times faster than a novice. Unfortunately, habits took at least three weeks to build, and becoming a master took years.
He took stock of the process, he needed to gather essence from his kern. It moved around with his bloodstream, and while he could accelerate it by moving the essence, it still was not instant. Tristan found himself waiting on new essence quite often as his ability to use up the circulated supply was higher than he could draw on now that he was using architect to speed up. It was raw essence that he needed, he had the forces ready, he just lacked the essence.
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Tristan frowned. He did have a large source of his own metal essence, but he was loath to use it. Eight weeks, that number was too high. When it comes to survival, everything is a viable sacrifice. He reached for his dagger. Pain exploded through his arms. He hadn’t moved them this whole time so he had not realized how painful moving would be. It felt like he had put millions of tiny knives in his arm and now they were carving him up from the inside out.
“What are you doing?” Vulcan said, breaking his silence.
“I need to go faster,” Tristan rasped. He fumbled for his dagger and almost dropped it on his leg when he finally got it out.
Vulcan seemed to comprehend what he wanted, for a few moments he was quiet, then he gave a warning, “That reservoir has adamance in it, do not use it on your muscles. Only use it on bones and tendons. If you use it on your muscles, you will lose the ability to tear them.”
Tristan was not in the correct head space to understand why tearing muscles was a good thing. All he knew was that he should do what Vulcan said. He had already completed most of the muscular structure within the first week. It had come as a surprise at how little muscle was in his forearms. Much of what he had called muscle was, in reality, tendons. The muscle that bent his fingers was in the meat of his forearm with what he could only call rings of tissue forcing the tendon into the correct position.
People like Cole had such huge muscles with veins standing out everywhere. They made muscles appear to be bulging from every part of the body, but looking back, Cole’s wrists and hands were only large because he was a naturally large human.
Removing the reservoir from his knife, he swapped out the healing reservoir for the metal one. He grimaced when he set the knife down beside him and that was enough force to snap the thin blade. It truly was held together by adamance alone. Sighing, Tristan continued with the reservoir as well.
A full tier five’s worth of essence was enough to speed up his progress dramatically. He worked his way through the bones first. Having the essence on site already made the process much faster. With the minuscule amount of essence he used, the new pool covered all of the bones and most of his skin.
Tristan had always wanted adamant skin. Invincibility was every young man’s dream after all. This was much too diffused for even adamance to have a large effect. Likely the tissue would be as tough as well made leather. That was great at tier zero, but almost pointless at tier four. However, adamance was still adamance.
He hit the two week mark not much later and was not done. He had made substantial process and could finish before dehydration set in, but finishing the infusing was only half the process. Salvation came from the drake of all things. When Tristan looked through a gap in the two steel plates blocking the entrance, he saw a wall of white.
It took him a moment to recognize the snow for what it was. Two weeks of mountain winter had blown a snow drift up against the drake, who was sitting right beside the hole. Tristan could only describe what it was doing as a type of hibernation. It had given up on him coming out and decided that was as good of a place as any to take a nap.
Snow was water and it was enough to keep him going for the third week he needed. Every joint, ligament, tendon, muscle, and scrap of skin was infused. His hands throbbed like they had been sunburned and then stung by a swarm of bees. Tristan would have probably focused more on that if his head didn’t feel so fuzzy. It had stopped hurting quite some time ago, though it was less because he was able to ignore the headache and more because he had pushed those particular nerves too far. That probably was not healthy, but Tristan couldn’t make himself care.
When he laid the last particle of essence and infused the last cell, Tristan collapsed. He did not bother attempting to inspect how well he had done, his brain was mush. Upper tier four made his mind a good seven times more resilient than it had been at tier zero, but he had pushed it for a bit over three weeks with only a little sleep. It demanded that he shut down for as long as it took to recover and Tristan did not care to resist it.