Jace tried to cycle Aes, to push something through his core, but the advancement process had used it all up, and now, he had nothing to move around his channels. He explained the same thing to Kinfild.
“Precisely,” the Wielder said. “Though ‘used’ isn’t the term I would use. You forged it into your core and emptied your channels, and you must accumulate a higher base of Aes. That happens when any Wielder advances. It would not be proper to use Foundation One Aes at the Foundation Two stage.” Kinfild snorted softly. “Just be thankful that none of your techniques expel Aes at the moment.”
“Some…will?”
“Yes, indeed. Some techniques will consume it or use it and cast it out of the body, and if Wielders push themselves too hard, they can temporarily regress a stage. But for the moment, all of your abilities keep your Aes firmly within your body.”
First, Jace prepared his body to accept the new attributes he had earned. He liked to think of the stat as a limit—it helped his body overcome its natural bounds, and set a new limit to what he could achieve.
His Vital and Resistance attribute ceilings were now thrice that of a regular human, and Agility and Strength were slowly improving. To push his Agility to its newest ceiling, he ran a few self-imposed courses through the Luna Wrath’s hold, dodging cargo crates and leaping over boxes. But after four or five runs of the course, he didn’t feel like he could take the turns any tighter or move through it any faster. The twitching of his nerves didn’t get any stronger or faster—he had hit his newest limit for agility.
Resistance and Vital were more difficult to train. For Resistance, he practiced his stance, widening his legs and allowing Kinfild to hit him, trying to knock him off balance. Kinfild struck with his staff, tapping Jace in the centre of the chest.
The first few times, the impact made Jace stagger back, but the next few times, he stayed upright. His grounding was stronger, and he wobbled less with each hit. He doubted he hit the peak of his Resistance attribute yet, though.
“A consistent workout regime would improve your Vital attribute greatly,” Kinfild said, “much like your Strength attribute. Only Vital makes your skin harder to cut and muscles harder to tear; bones won’t shatter so easily and tendons will not rip.”
But Jace would do that later. He had an Aes base to accumulate still, and he wouldn’t let Kinfild forget the promise of a new card.
He activated the Vault Core and fought darklings—giant carrion birds in a nighttime desert. He had to cut down three of the rotting vultures and accept the infusions of Aes before he had enough to begin a cycling technique.
But killing them wasn’t as difficult anymore. With his vastly enhanced Resistance attribute, none of the vultures even came close to knocking him off his feet or breaking his stance.
He slashed through their wings with the Whistling Blade and hacked their heads off, cycling Aes all the time—he needed to bend the Aes to a hyperspace aspect, working around his hypercore.
Then he activated his hyperjump card, just to see what would happen.
He didn’t have as much Aes, so he didn’t achieve as great of a distance as he had hoped. His Aes output determined the distance he could travel. He fell halfway short of the ridge he had targeted. Thirty meters instead of sixty. It was still the furthest hyperjump he’d ever managed, but not as far as he had hoped.
When he defeated an abnormally large elite vulture, the Vault Core ejected him, and he pulled himself out of the dreamspace. It earned him a small infusion of Aes—according to the reader, it put him up to point eight-seven percent advancement progress.
But, as Kinfild explained, the limiting factor of the jump distance was not Jace’s total Aes base, but how fast the Aes could travel through its routes and how much volume he could pump. (That was the true meaning of ‘limited by Aes output’.)
“The purity and quality of the Aes is most important,” Kinfild explained. “The more pure it is, the faster your core can output it, and the faster it can travel through your channels. Advancement will always help increase the quality of your Aes, and thus, your output as well. This first advancement was a half-step of sorts, improving your Aes quality and improving your core. Since you have more control of your core now, cards won’t immediately activate when you socket them.”
Jace rested for a few minutes, then said, “We have a card to…make, right?” He opened his backpack and pulled out Lessa’s engraving needle.
[Basic Engraving Needle (Fuel Aspect: Pure Aes)] read a tag above it.
“It’s almost out of fuel,” Kinfild said. “Pass it here. I should have some spare pure-Aes fuel-cells around here. Picked them up from the general store last time I was in the Vultt system. Get out all the cards and templates you have. I’m not Lessa, and I won’t be able to alter the card’s specifics, but if we hit it right, we might imprint something onto the blank template.”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Jace passed the engraving needle and the tethered fuel-cell over to Kinfild. As Kinfild searched through the drawers for another fuel-cell, Jace rummaged through his backpack. He pulled out all his technique cards: his Cleanse card, the Blackvein card, and the blank, technique-less template he had stolen from the Hanging House. Lastly, he ejected the Hyperdash card from his core and set it down on the table.
Jace focussed on the Blackvein card. He hadn’t had a chance to read the technique description yet.
[Technique Card: Blackvein (Rare) (Fortification) (Compatible Class: All) (Compatible Aspects: Shadow, Void)]
And the full description read:
[Once every thirty (30) minutes, allows the caster to gather Shadow-aspect Aes and temporarily doubles the limbs Strength and Vital attributes of the affected area. Affected area scales with caster’s Potency.]
Kinfild let out a soft exclamation, then pulled out a fuel-cell from a cabinet. “Here!” He untethered the old fuel-cell and plugged a new one in like he was replacing a battery. “They pay low-level Wielders to make pure-aspect fuel-cells, and though Wielders might be rare, they can make lots of little fuel cells. Single use, of course, but it suits my purposes well enough.”
Jace took the engraving needle back, then placed it down on the table. “How do I make a new card?”
“Let’s see…” Kinfild muttered. He sat down beside Jace. “We don’t want to get rid of the Hypderdash; that’s your most useful card so far. The Cleanse has been helpful, too, and I figure we could later modify it to a wide-reaching support technique if we could ever find a proper cardsmith again. But the blackvein technique you stole from the Watchman? That’s not useful to either of us. It’s incompatible with our aspects.”
Jace nodded. He picked up the Hypderdash and Cleanse cards and tucked them back into his bag, leaving only the blackvein card and the blank template.
“Most cards can be imprinted and reversed,” Kinfild continued. “We just have to use the engraving needle to hit a central script in the blackvein card, and we could tune it to the opposite effect—and opposite aspect.”
“Light being the opposite of shadow?” Jace asked.
“And hyperspace being the opposite of void,” said Kinfild. “Void is a subset of shadow, and hyperspace is a subset of light.”
“So I can turn it into a fortification technique? Something to immediately boost my Strength and Vital, like the Watchman used it for?”
Kinfild sighed, tapping the card with his finger. “Not exactly. The opposite effect of a fortification technique would be an offensive attack technique.” He picked up the engraving needle and held it over the blackvein card.
It was very similar to the other cards Jace had—a clear plastic sheet the size of a playing card—except its veins weren’t rusting and its embedded wires weren’t frayed. A central rectangle of copper had two calligraphy circles engraved on it, and a pitch-black crystal filled every crevice of the calligraphy circles. Condensed shadow-aspect Aes?
Kinfild pointed the engraving needle at the top circle. “This is the circle that controls the main purpose of the technique.” He moved it down to the circle below. “And this one controls the main aspect. The imprinting process is crude, but it should allow us to consume this card and imprint the opposite on the blank template.”
“How?”
“Layer the two cards atop one another, making sure one is facing up and the other is facing down,” Kinfild instructed. Jace did it. “I will provide the heat with a flame technique.”
“And I use the engraving needle to copy the two main calligraphy circles? It’ll create a mirror image?”
“Precisely. Step back, please.”
Jace hopped up from the couch and stepped behind Kinfild. The Wielder held out his hand, then activated his Hollow Dragon’s Bite card, blasting a bar of orange flames into the two material cards. The plastic heated up, turning malleable, and the metal glowed red-hot.
The technique appeared and cut off in the blink of an eye. Jace jumped to action. He flipped a switch on the side of the engraving needle, causing the tip to vibrate. A glow of pure golden Aes manifested on the tip of the needle. He drove it into the soft, malleable metal, tracing both script circles of the Watchman’s card.
His calligraphy wasn’t anywhere as neat as Lessa’s, and he couldn’t copy all of the card’s runes and circles—according to Kinfild, those didn’t imprint in reverse in the same way as the central circles.
For a little while, the card would be stuck in an intermediary phase, where it caused spiritual strain and pain to use, but it would still work without killing him.
Jace clenched his teeth and pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, concentrating on the second circle and trying to make it as neat as he could. He had to punch straight through the metal and plastic of the blackvein card to sear it into the template.
Most of the wires of the blackvein card melted into the plastic of the template card, filling out any gaps in the wiring that hadn’t been present before.
When Jace finished the script circles, the metal had nearly cooled. With nowhere to go, the crystalized black Aes burst off the blackvein card, ripping apart the remaining plastic and metal.
It left only a single card imprinted on the template:
[Technique Card: Wanderer’s Banishment (Rare) (Attack) (Compatible Class: All) (Compatible Aspects: Light, Hyperspace)]
With a description that read:
[Once every thirty (30) minutes, allows the caster to launch an object through hypserpace. Object will interact with other realspace objects. Distance travelled scales negatively with object’s mass and positively with caster’s Resistance.]
Jace peeled the card off the table. The melted plastic had bonded with the table as well, but the flat surface kept the card from deforming too much.
Jace held it up to Kinfild and smiled. “I think it worked.”