Lurona city [southern shores of Fuminao Legacy Kingdom], local time [1793.12.24]

Zeph woke up with the first light, refreshed for the first time in a week.

Sadly, it wasn’t the morning of the next day. He could see that clearly on a simplified Wadokei sticking from a pipe near the ceiling. After the meetings with the pilots and the Library Goddess, he slept for almost 20 hours… Earth’s hours, that is. It would be 24 Corora’s hours or almost 10 out of 12 cycles of a day.

Yes, he was tired enough to sleep for almost a day, which wasn’t a surprise taking into account his latest sleep deprivation experiments. Not to mention, it was already late morning when he returned from the Library.

He felt a little guilty for skipping the negotiations on the partnership contract with the twins, but he had to start preparing for leaving the city and getting rest was an important part of them. At least the confrontation with the Goddess took care of one of the more problematic tests of Willforce. He was still a little upset at the scheming duo, but he didn’t have the mental strength to keep at it. The way their minds worked was beyond his capacity to understand and they meant him well. Probably.

He stretched out and looked around lazily, but his surroundings were still the same, boring affair. An underground room without any furniture except a comfortable bed and a big garderobe, encompassed by smooth, almost black rock and nothing more. At least the automatic lights were working now.

The construction project wasn’t even half-done yet, but at least he could use a safe bedroom.

A glance at his Interface told him nothing changed there, too. The Willforce Morphon still had the same [Unknowns], and he still didn’t get any reward for the plane prototype. He suspected that they had to create a full-sized aircraft before getting any rewards.

Which wasn’t unreasonable, taking into account that many people before them tried to use wings in their own designs. Also, the toy version had its own, very different applications.

He sighed with resignation. What a pain in the ass… No wonder technicians and engineers are so scarce. On the other hand, I didn’t get anything from the plastic and modified DMSA because I didn’t help in the development process… Although, the DMSA performance is still unconfirmed, I think. Maybe I will get something for it, after all… Shit, I had forgotten about the Barringstone problem. I hope the cure can help… I liked those people.

He sat up hesitantly, deciding that it was enough rest for him.

“Grrummm!” his chest vibrated in greetings.

“Morning. Sorry for the long wait,” he said, yawning.

“Gruuu,” it shrugged.

“Well, that should change soon. Real fights should be more interesting than dry training…”

Makani would arrive in the city in days, but Zeph still had much to prepare.

Speaking of which, he smiled while opening the new functionality of his Interface, the glorious notepad. Truth be told, it looked quite primitive in comparison to the rest of his Interface, but it had enough ‘memory’ to store more text than he would ever need. Right now, besides his own notes, he had two restricted great works of literature – exchanged for two books he was able to transcribe from the ‘Memories of the Earth’ Skill with a little help from the Goddess. He wasn’t sure if they were worth anything, he hadn’t even read the contents nor asked about the place and period of their origin, but one could hope they would turn out useful. It was a recommendation of the Goddess, after all, and he refused to believe that collector’s plague omitted Corora’s civilization in their expanse through the universe. Or universes.

As for the poor design of the Notebook’s interface, it should change in the future, as the Library Goddess quite liked his idea of user-designed visual styles and a sharing function. Mostly because she would have to do a fat nothing besides setting up the functionality, only to receive more Mana from people paying for an opportunity to work on the designs for her. The lazy schemer.

SCHEDULE:

As soon as possible:

* Read the manual of the Notebook Interface upgrade.

* Prepare leaflets for Library Goddess.

24.12 – Alloy selection should be ready. Check on P’pfel’s progress with spear and consumables. Don’t forget to learn the structure of the newest explosives!

25.12 – Administration work. Orphanage sleep-over visit. Take and study the Lurona Region map and ask Aisha for more details on mercenary work.

26.12 – (…)

Right, Ghrughah should be ready to test the latest alloys! Excitement flooded him at the thought.

With a spring in his legs, he jumped out of his bed and skipped to his closet. Simple work clothes should do, he thought merrily, taking out form-fitting underclothing and a leather work set. There was no time for a shower, especially because they weren’t fully functional yet, or to eat breakfast. His full-body enhancement could be bothered with the lack of nourishment for a few more hours.

Actually, I should start testing starvation effects, Zeph thought, putting on his memory amulet. After sending a short Mana pulse into an enchanted chain, the amulet immediately connected to the metal framework at the ceiling.

Eh, a better quality of life, indeed, he thought, snickering as he was reminded of Ghrughah’s sales pitch. I need to pay tax for yesterday… how much was it? He looked down at the star-shaped, enchanted piece of metal.

In contrast to the aerostat’s amulet, it lacked an artistic touch but was quite practical. Each of the eight arms of the star had a miniature knob at the arm’s base. It would flip to arm’s top if he fulfilled the quota for one day, showcasing his progress in the context of the eight-day week. The knobs were working independently of the internal mechanism, only showing his progress, so meddling with them would not change the real count saved inside. This internal counter had the capacity to register up to half a year's worth of Mana tax but lacked an in-built clock, so it just synchronized with the city’s Mananet when plugged into a dedicated slot. It wasn’t a problem, as almost every building in the city possessed the infrastructure necessary to make use of the amulet during the night; when the owner was sleeping. Public locations for synchronization also existed.

Of course, that meant that a person had to plug the amulet at least once a week if they wanted to have readable knob positions, and once per half a year for the amulet to function at all. The latter was also the timeframe for reporting to the tax office. If a person wanted to wander beyond the city’s walls, at least using legal means, they would have to deposit the amulet at a security gate. This way, the tax wouldn’t be charged during their absence and the timespan for the annual report would be prolonged accordingly.

Huh, I am still a day ahead? Good to know, he thought. Those 24 hours of sleep were worth more than I anticipated. Anyhow, it seems that I don’t have to spend my Mana regeneration today. He nodded to himself approvingly. He would be able to use his Mana extensively today, it seemed.

The amulet joined another three under his shirt, and he fastened the bracers of his leather apron. It probably wasn’t necessary for today’s work, but his quarters were quite a distance from Ghrughah’s workshop, so he would rather not waste time coming back for it. Well, spatially, they were close to each other, but connection tunnels were still under construction, so Zeph had to use a roundabout way, going aboveground first.

He snatched his backpack from the closet and walked back to his bed. He lifted a metal cube from the floor, the remains of his late armor, and packed it securely among a few other things inside. After making sure nothing was loose, he placed the container with Phleya on top of everything and closed the zipper. The container was already covered with thick fabric for safety, so it fitted neatly inside. Then, he finally started sending the Mana from his Veil, now encompassing the whole room after the night, through the medallion, making sure to leave enough to cover the backpack to keep up the Mana saturation in the items.

After checking the room one more time to make sure he didn’t forget anything, it was time to leave.

The staircase to the upper levels was connected to his empty living room. It was rather small, the same as every room in the strategic area, but not so much to feel cramped. The whole apartment had around forty, maybe even fifty square meters, which was more than enough for Zeph.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

After two stories worth of steps, he finally emerged in the hidden room of Kwan’s headquarters – the same big building that also functioned as a luxurious hotel. For now, the room was empty, but in the future, it will be used as his main office. After touching a certain spot on a wall with a bracelet on his left wrist, a nearby metal door opened silently. He was glad the giant voted against using medallions as keys, the four in Zeph possession were already becoming a hindrance.

After a short walk through a few more corridors and staircases, those fully decorated in Asian-like style in reds, blacks, and silver, he entered the main hub of the ground floor.

Guards in black and red populated the vast hall, which looked like a cross between a canteen and a meeting hall of the troops. It was filled with elegant tables and luxurious but sturdy armchairs. Floor lamps and potted plants put in lanes made for a cozy atmosphere despite the size of the room. A long bar occupied the wall to the right, with doors leading to kitchens behind it. A podium was set up ahead, empty as of now. A series of doorless exits took up the wall on the left, most leading to Kwan’s people’s quarters.

Zeph ignored the compelling smells coming from the kitchens, and begrudgingly headed out through the central, largest corridor to his left, entering the more opulent part of the hotel. He wasn’t going far, though. After passing a few rooms, he stopped before enormous double doors made from blueish metal.

He put his wrist near a black plate on the wall, sending a little of his Mana to the bracelet, and the sliding plug doors of an oversized lift moved to the sides. The platform didn’t have walls or a ceiling, only high guardrails. Metallic ropes keeping the platform up were partially hidden in the groves of four runners made from the same metal, set at the corners of the shaft.

The doors closed behind him as he stepped inside. Zeph entered a code on a black plate in the far corner by switching on certain nodes, and the platform started to descend slowly.

He exited into a lobby manned by Ghrughah’s workers. It was decorated in the style of his own workshop – oversized clockwork-like mechanisms decorated the walls, some showcased on glass-enclosed pedestals dotting the floor. Most of the furniture was made from different types of metals and glass, while the floor and walls were tiled with something reminiscent of marble. Polished surfaces reflected the warm light, adding to the very modern, Earth-wise, elegance of the place.

The clerk at the counter waved him through without a word and Zeph walked down a large corridor to their right. A few security checks later, he found the workshop.

Because the Blacksmith finished moving his belongings but didn’t have time to sort everything out yet, the place was cluttered even more than his old workshop in the Production District. The hall was multileveled, though, and the giant choose the highest level for his current working space.

Squeezing between strange machinery, stacks of materials and tools, and mechanical parts stacked up in the area was quite a challenge, so it was to nobody’s surprise when a few things joined their brethren on the floor, clanging loudly from the fall, before Zeph managed to find the staircase at the end of the room.

After ascending to the highest level, he was greeted by a wide smile of the Blacksmith, surely alerted by all the clamor he has made. How the giant managed to navigate this mess himself was a mystery.

“Good! You are just on time!” he guffawed.

“Morning. I get everything is ready?” he asked in anticipation, stepping up the last step.

“It sure is,” he said with pride and waved at him to get closer, turning around. “Come, take a look.”

“How were the negotiations?” Zeph asked, coming closer.

“As well as you could expect. The twins agreed to work under our Head of Aeroplanning and Ingeniators Department, be it Makani or someone else. Our technology is what they were looking for all this time. They will move their workshop here, but the situation isn’t that easy. Their deals aside, we don’t have suitable space for aerostation or dock of any kind. Roaming Onsen Village is planted deep in a valley, after all, almost at the level of the sea.”

Zeph stopped beside the giant, looking down at the broad table. Three metal plates the size of his hand were lying in a row. Behind them, three stone-like, cylindrical containers with liquidized metal stood on Mana-powered heaters. Glass-like cubes isolated the heated materials from the environment, while metal tubes pumped some kind of dense gas inside.

The first plate was dark green in color, with silver shine reflecting the light of two lamps affixed to the mechanical arms of the workbench. The liquified sample was brown with specs of violet mixed in, producing a minimal amount of light. If the cylindrical container wasn’t white-hot from the temperature, he could swear the liquified metal was barely warm.

The second plate was sparkling obsidian black but after taking a closer look, Zeph could see microscopic gold spots that weren’t just a reflection of the light. The material was coarse like small-grain sandpaper. He could see miniature crystalline protrusions on the surface, twinkling weakly with reflected light when observed from certain angles. The melted metal, if it was a metal at all, was still mostly black but long strands were gleaming in rich shades of purple.

The last plate looked like marble. Different shades of brown, most coming very close to black, were split by yellowish cracks snaking all over the surface, giving an impression of a wild thunderstorm immortalized in stone. But its texture was strange. The canvas of brown wasn’t smooth but cracked like a dry desert. Those flaky protrusions, independent of the long, yellowish traces, had a size of a nail, making the whole plate look fragile. The melted version was red-hot, shining brightly like a melted rock.

“Kwan and Aisha were present during negotiations?” he asked, glancing at the Blacksmith.

“Yea. Both started working on those problems already.”

“I will talk with them later, then.” He nodded to himself and turned back to the samples. “We should focus on the issue at hand.”

The giant nodded. “Agreed. Let’s get to it.”

He bent over and took out a triple beam balance from under the workbench. It was a simple weighting device with a pan and movable weights on a beam to its side, although it worked slightly differently than Earth’s equivalent. “It took me quite a while to work out the best additives for those alloys, not to mention the hardening and tempering methods. The differences in microstructure can be quite drastic for those three mixes.”

Zeph nodded in understanding. Even if he wasn’t learned in metallurgy, he at least knew about carbon microstructures in steel and how they changed depending on the concentration and tempering. With Mana stabilizing the matter, strange isotopes and unexpected combinations of elements were possible, making the whole affair exponentially more complicated.

“To be accurate and clear, I will summarize everything from the beginning.”

“As always, I will make notes,” Zeph smiled, opening his Interface Notebook.

For a moment, Ghrughah waited for him to take out his writing instruments, until he remembered what place Zeph had visited yesterday.

He cleared his throat in slight embarrassment. “All of those alloys support modulation of your Soul contamination, as we decided. All require the metal from your armor to be produced, but for different reasons. The price of upgrading Phleya to work with them efficiently, before you get your contamination high enough, shouldn’t be high and they all are compatible with methods the colony is using when restructuring and reshaping metals. Because I haven’t found much information about Makrun, so I can only give you an estimation as to their potential compatibility with it. After fusing three of your future contaminations, you are almost guaranteed an Advanced Magicule contamination of generalized purpose.”

Zeph nodded to himself, writing everything in real-time in his Notebook. It was a little tricky without the in-built ‘keyboard’, but he was learning fast.

Makrun compatibility was a problem for later, after he found the material, but it was good Ghrughah took it into account this early. Some complications were inevitable if the material was sure to not work with it. The toughest nuts to crack were the future contaminations that would result from fusing his Alloy contamination, any of the others in his possession, and the new, modulated one. They were planning for the far future, but Zeph wanted to make sure his contamination would be able to support his Generalist Class as much as possible. ‘Contaminations of generalized purpose’ were hard to find and plan for correctly, mostly because nobody used them. Their compatibility with matter was vast in scope, limited more by certain physical properties, but also much weaker. Specialization was pursued for a reason.

“The first one is named Adatium-BX276 by the System,” the Blacksmith said, gesturing at the greenish metal plate.

“Let’s start with compatibility tests first,” Zeph declared.

The giant nodded and placed the plate on the scales. Zeph knew what to do because they repeated this procedure many times in the last weeks. He saturated the plate with Mana, waiting until the amount of Alloy-Magicules from his contamination stopped increasing. Then, using his Willpower to move his Mana, he tried to lift the plate up alongside it.

The far side of the balance’s beam twitched downwards, wobbling up and down for half a second, before stabilizing and steadily climbing back up as Zeph’s Mana either escaped from the top of the plate or dissipated after colliding with its matter, escaping his control.

This was a basic example of manual matter manipulation. From what Zeph understood, because his Alloy-Magicules were partially compatible with the material, they could fit in between its atomic structure, forming something similar to a chemical bond with the atoms. It was, of course, more complicated, as Magicules were just micro-constructs of Mana that burned their energy by generating certain forces, but it was a good enough explanation. Of course, the strength of the ‘bonds’ was much weaker than actual chemical bonds, thus they snapped easily when he tried to move the Magicules, producing only a weak force and either escaping the material—as the compatibility with the material minimized the interactions with the atoms themselves—or disconnected from him and dissipated by interacting with atoms and other Mana inside.

It was important to note, that a reverse interaction was much more effective. Because Mana’s mass was so small, the weak bonds were actually enough to keep it in place even when the object was moved. Primitive enchanting worked in a similar fashion but by forcing the material to accommodate the Mana flow and Magicules.

On the other hand, levitating and freely reshaping a material with Mana was probably impossible. Nonetheless, it was a prelude to manual matter manipulation that Ghrughah was a master of. If instead of trying to move all his Magicules upwards, Zeph concentrated them at the top layer of the plate and moved them around in a circle, the plate would bend because of the difference in ‘virtual density’ such action generated, just as if he was heating the bottom and cooling the top. It was a technique Ghrughah masterfully presented during the aircraft presentation. Such actions, of changing internal properties of matter, were much easier to trigger. Without some kind of telekinetic Spells, Magicules, or Skills—basically, anything that could produce directed forces—it was hard to influence matter in meaningful ways.

Of course, Zeph's Space-mana and Telekinetic Spell would help in the future, but he didn’t have any Skills dedicated to working with solid matter like that. For the same reason, he couldn’t depend on the staple method of empowering manual matter manipulation – liquifying the material beforehand. To achieve that, he would need a few things. Firstly, either specialized cantrips or a very high Soul contamination of exactly the same type to produce Magicules with full material compatibility. Secondly, a second, compatible ‘liquid’-Magicule cantrip or Skill. And finally, Skills assisting in the act.

The duo repeated the process five times to calculate averages, writing down the values and time of desaturation, then proceeded with Zeph changing the speed of pulling his Mana out.

Next, Zeph tried to swirl the saturated, melted metal, pushing his Veil through a vent on the side. They noted the speed of the liquid, which wasn’t much, and tried it again for slightly different temperatures.

The process was repeated for all three alloys, then with the use of Mana-L instead of his Veil. It took them almost four Earth’s hours, if Zeph wasn’t mistaken.

Thus, the tests were concluded. All that was left was to wait for Ghrughah to finish the calculations.

For Zeph, it was finally time to decide on his future.