“Be careful,” Nestor warned as Leon lowered the thin needle he held down toward the target of his latest experiment.

Leon rolled his eyes and kept going. He knew how this might affect him, having already lived through it once before; he didn’t need any reminders to be careful. Instead, he focused on the task at hand and, with extreme care, touched the tip of the needle he held that of the Iron Needle itself.

A mortal could’ve heard a pin drop in the lab from dozens of feet away; neither Leon nor Nestor made hardly a squeak. Nestor had soaked this mundane needle in the magic-rich juice of the Hesperidic Apple that Leon had given him, so both were expecting some kind of reaction from the Iron Needle in response to coming into contact with the stuff again.

But the Iron Needle didn’t do a thing. Not a single spark of power—at least, any more than it already emitted—emerged from the Universe Fragment, let alone the kind of power that could grow a ninth-tier mage’s soul realm by more than seven thousand miles. The Iron Needle simply sat in its containment module, treating the mundane needle as if it were naught but air.

Feeling almost let down by the lack of reaction, Leon started poking the Iron Needle, but the Universe Fragment stubbornly refused to do anything but sit there and sparkle in the light of the lab.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Leon said. “Hardly too much of a surprise at this point, though…”

“Hmm,” Nestor hummed in agreement. This wasn’t the first test he’d run with the Hesperidic Apple and the Iron Needle, only the first that featured contact between a tiny bit of the apple and the Iron Needle. “I’d expected more of a reaction than that. Or maybe ‘hoped’ would be a better term to use.”

“Does it have to be in a soul realm?” Leon wondered aloud as he retracted the apple-soaked needle. “If that’s the case, this mystery might go unsolved.”

“You’re not going to try?” Nestor asked a little teasingly. “Not even in the spirit of learning? Not even a single drop?”

“I just ascended to the tenth-tier,” Leon replied with a cool tone and an even colder look. “I’m not looking to be laid out for months again. Let’s just be happy with what we can learn with the Iron Needle outside of a soul realm for now. Even no reaction is notable, after all, as it narrows down the number of variables we have to test for.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me,” Nestor grumbled. “I just thought you’d have a more adventurous attitude. You gained much the last time you were ‘laid out’. The only reason you’re tenth-tier right now is because of the power that the Iron Needle infused you with. And you don’t seem that committed to trying to figure out if that can be reproduced.”

“It’s clear to me that the Iron Needle has its own thing going on,” Leon retorted. “It reached out to me during Sunlit’s ambush. It then boosted my power when I ate a Hesperidic Apple. It might not have a conscious mind that we can communicate with, but there’s still something going on with it, and until I have it fully under control, that kind of sensitive testing is off limits.”

Nestor made a sound not unlike clicking a tongue but said no more. Together, he and Leon continued to run the Iron Needle through additional tests with the Hesperidic Apple but found little noteworthy from the experiments. However, after they were finished testing the Iron Needle with the apple, Leon found that he was a bit too into the experiments they were running and insisted on additional attempts to replicate the power-infused fulgurite from the Iron Needle’s crash site in the Forest of Black and White.

Unfortunately, that too was met with failure, though of a lesser sort. Leon was able to use the Iron Needle well enough to melt most of the kinds of sand they ran the tests with, but the resulting glass-like substance wasn’t able to hold any magic power. Still, the increase in ability to control the Iron Needle was something Leon found encouraging. He just had to finish his weapon and he felt like the Iron Needle would respond to him much more willingly.

To that end, when he left Nestor’s workshop, he had Gaius cancel the rest of the duties he had for the day—they were mostly ceremonial anyway—and made his way down to his brand-new workshop.

It was a fantastically well-appointed space with all the enchanting and smithing tools he could ask for—and as King, he knew that he only had to snap his fingers and the finest smiths, enchanters, and any other artificer in his Kingdom that he could ever want would be brought to the palace for consultation.

Not that he would involve anyone else in so personal a project, but the thought alone was a balm to his nerves as he took out his sword design to pour over it again.

It was a standard design as far as such things went. His sword would be just a bit more ostentatious than the Thunderbird’s weapon, passed down through his family for so many millions of years. He was told that back in the days of the Storm Kings, the weapon had been far more decorated, with the hilt and guard being almost grossly ostentatious. It was only after Jason Keraunos’ fall that the blade freed itself of those flamboyant trappings and was set in a much humbler hilt.

His new sword’s blade would be a nearly identical copy of the current weapon—a straight sword long enough to be wielded with either one or two hands, as the situation required. The hilt would be primarily function over form, but he planned on a talon-shaped pommel and wing-shaped guard—and even that much ornamentation strained his sensibilities. Finally, there would be space amidst the ‘feathers’ of the guard where small sapphires could be inserted.

Regardless, he poured over his designs again and again, the sketches already being about as perfect as he could make them. He’d included all of the enchantments he’d need, from strengthening the blade and himself, to amplifying his magic, to using the embedded sapphires as magical batteries that would help him sustain himself in battle.

In short, there was simply no more to add or change; the sword’s design was about as perfect as he could make it. Any more time spent messing with the design wouldn’t allow him to squeeze additional efficiency out of it.

So, his bottleneck was material, not theoretical. He needed true Adamant, but his efforts on that front were hardly praiseworthy. Since returning to the island, there had been one natural storm big enough for use, but like the last time he’d tried, no Adamant had resulted from his efforts.

He was missing something, he could feel it, and he had a theory on that front. After another quick check on his sword design, he began going over the kit he was using to make Adamant. He needed a not insignificant amount of his own blood, as well as steel of sufficient quality. He needed a crucible to mix it in and a forge hot and sturdy enough to work the resulting material.

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His crucible and forge were adequate for his purpose—as far as he could tell, anyway, given he’d yet to actually make any true Adamant. He’d contracted the Ten Tribes as a whole—and the Spiders, in particular—to bring him as much Titanstone as they could spare for use in repairing the Director’s arks, and at the same time, he’d arranged for enough raw ore and metal to be brought to him for experimentation. He hadn’t yet bled enough to go again, but that was something solved easily enough with magic. He’d be ready for another attempt within a few days.

So, he had everything that was required to make Adamant—according to the Thunderbird, at least—but he was still failing. He hadn’t yet tried as a tenth-tier mage, but he didn’t figure that the additional power would help him too much; his problem was technique and the missing piece to the mix.

After finishing his examination of his tools and equipment, he retrieved a few recent reports on Valentina’s collaborations with the Ravens. Her research on his blood was already proving fruitful and held Leon’s attention captive whenever he received a new report, and now that she could work with the Ravens, she was delivering results even faster than before. And from all of her work, Leon was most interested in her working theory that someone like him, someone with two bloodlines, had a ‘dominant’ bloodline.

Unfortunately, she could only work with his blood since even amongst the Ten Tribes, those with dual bloodlines were essentially unheard of, and there weren’t any known Tribesmen alive running around whose blood she could study.

But she insisted that she had ‘enough’ to work with, even if she wanted more.

So her theory essentially boiled down to the fact that mages couldn’t use any more than one element of magic at a time. Even Leon, whose Thunderbird blood gave him affinities for lightning, wind, and water magic, could only use one of those elements at a time. With that in mind, Valentina theorized that a mage could only use one bloodline at a time, and that bloodline was ‘dominant’ in that moment.

For Leon, that presented a rather distinct problem. He had two bloodlines in his blood. His blood had to be used to make Adamant. He could only control some of the power in his blood at any one time.

He theorized, then, that his problem was that he needed to somehow use both of his bloodlines at the same time in order to succeed at making Adamant. If he didn’t, then he believed that he could only make the pseudo-Adamant that his armor was made of, which only properly channeled his Thunderbird blood. If he attempted to control something like the Iron Needle with pseudo-Adamant, he had little doubt that even that tough metal would shatter instantly.

Leon hadn’t yet brought that theory up with anyone. This was a personal project for him, one that struck at the core of his identity. He wanted to solve it himself, if possible, and only if he faced an obstacle for too long would he bring others in on his theory.

On that note, he had one thing going in his favor: he believed that it was possible to use both of his bloodlines at the same time. Maia and his retainers had told him—and he had no reason to doubt their words—that he’d assumed the form of a black eagle during his final fight with Jormun in the Serpentine Isles. He had no doubt that he was channeling both of his bloodlines at the same time then, but he wasn’t sure how that might square with Valentina’s ‘dominant’ bloodline theory.

At the very least, he had a place to begin looking: the original transformation enchantment that the Primal God Krith’is had used on Jormun, and which both of Leon’s transformation enchantments had been based upon. His later transformation enchantments had only seemed to target his Thunderbird blood, but the very first enchantment, as dangerous as it was, had called upon both within him.

And Leon didn’t make much immediate headway. His knowledge of enchantment had progressed quite well in the nearly twenty years since the campaign in the Serpentine Isles, but not enough to properly analyze the work of a Primal God.

However, comparing it to the later transformation enchantments proved to be fairly enlightening. From the way it worked, Leon got the idea that the transformations worked based on which bloodline was dominant—or rather, whichever bloodline was being actively used at the time. So if he wanted his Great Black Dragon blood to be dominant, he only had to use it.

He immediately put that idea to the test, calling upon his black fire and then channeling a bit of power into his latest transformation enchantment.

The results were disappointing. He didn’t start transforming into his Thunderbird form, but neither did he start transforming into any kind of draconic form either.

He had the power in him, he could use it, but it seemed there were still some blockers in the way somewhere in his blood preventing him from using it as naturally as he did the Thunderbird’s power.

That was something he’d railed against before. He’d often felt like the Great Black Dragon’s blood was somehow separate from him, that using it was invoking some other being when he should’ve been trying to invoke his own power, for it was his own power. Getting past that mental block had been key to using black fire at will.

‘Perhaps there’s some kind of block that’s remaining?’ Leon wondered. ‘Is the Great Black Dragon still trying to withhold something from me? Is he still trying to restrain my blood?’

He had to solve this. This was the key to making Adamant, he could feel it. He had to find some way to once more call upon both powers at the same time. They were in his blood, after all, and with his blood would he create Adamant. If he didn’t have mastery over his blood, then he’d have no true Adamant. If he didn’t balance the power in the Adamant, then the refining process would fail and he’d be lucky to have pseudo-Adamant left over.

And so, he threw himself into work, consulting every report that Valentina had sent him, absorbing every errant note and every reference she made to Raven research and cataloging it away with what he already knew of his blood and the elements it gave him command over.

So into this he became that his ladies and assistants both had to come and retrieve him when the sun rose the following morning, time having almost ceased to exist for him as he immersed himself in his research. He didn’t make much progress in that one night of study, but he remained encouraged and made more time for it as the days progressed.

Eventually, he got around to practical experimentation. He tried to use enchantments to ‘hold’ some of his power, then used that power to direct the blood that would be mixed with the iron to make Adamant. The results were less than encouraging, to put it mildly.

However, his next experiment was more promising. After extracting enough blood and mana for another try at making Adamant, he extracted a couple additional vials. These vials were extracted while he was using his bloodlines—allowing the Thunderbird’s lightning to arc between his fingers for one, and the Great Black Dragon’s fire to ignite over his fingertips for the other. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make a noticeable difference in the aura that these vials radiated. To Leon’s senses, the mana in those vials was far more ‘active’ in that it gave off a stronger aura and was more obviously packed with magic, but the mana also felt incomplete, like he was subconsciously expecting to sense something that wasn’t there.

Still, he tried to use these vials of mana as focuses of sorts that could help him control the less active but ‘complete’ blood that would go into refining the Adamant. If he wanted it to succeed, he had to balance these powers.

With these vials of active power, he started seeing more promising things. He could channel element-less power without actively using either of his bloodlines through the active mana, and that power would take on the characteristics of his bloodline, effectively allowing him to use both bloodlines at the same time. Hardly a practical battlefield strategy since it wasn’t letting him use lightning and fire at the same time, and he was sure no one else could do the same with his power—he was channeling his own power through his own blood, after all—but it might allow him to properly forge Adamant.

What was more, it could potentially serve to aid him in furthering his understanding of the original transformation enchantment and using both bloodlines at the same time.

But for now, he believed that if he could channel both bloodlines using the vials, then he could finally forge his weapon, and in turn, assert his control over the Iron Needle.

With that theory in hand, Leon only had to wait for another storm to arrive. Fortunately, Lake Ontarii was hardly placid, and not even a week passed since he began formulating this theory before he sensed the weather out in the middle of the massive lake begin to turn.

Just such a storm was brewing. Without hesitation, Leon prepared himself to try once more to create true Adamant.