With the ability to move around so well and the dungeon that would help him with getting his core setup clearly pointed out, Axl was now unsure if he should go back to the longhouse at all, or if he should go to the dungeon to get better leads on improving his core, or even if he should try to find the void treasure, if he gets any hints from the multiple rifts.
Basically, it all hinged on how well he could develop his core and Mana on his own, and now was the time, having just obtained not only his new Lineage, but an upgrade to [Gastric Cauldron] specifically dedicated to manipulating metal.
Before starting on the organ itself, Axl took out his metallic hoard, splaying it out before him. Top of the pile was the solid slab of ulmric tungsten, the narrower shard of helkan silver, and the branch of lunar fulger. He kept the fulger in its closed box, for now, afraid that the unexposed lightning-related ore could further build up his tribulation. Also spread around were the five shortswords and shields that were in the dead orc's ring, in addition to the single set of armor, all solidly in the middle of F-Grade. They were all made from a dense, red metal Axl didn't know the name of, but could identify as one of the more difficult to mine ores from Gildear's garden. He didn't bother with any of the G-Grade stuff from Olkan's dimensional pouch, wanting to focus only on F-Grade material. I really need to sell off some of this crap, so much of it is basically useless now.
He took one of the swords, wanting to practice with the less valuable metal first, and set it on his lap, and immediately realized his first problem. How the slit was he supposed to get this into his spiritual organ? Eat it? Focusing with [Mana Shroud], Axl tried to enwrap the sword with Mana and move it in, somehow, then he held it close to his chest, focusing more on getting something to happen, but nothing.
Maybe it was too much, too large a piece, so Axl used his mining technique to extract a single finger's worth from the armor set. The moment it snapped off, he then felt a slight tug from his [Gastric Cauldron] to it, and without much work, he managed to get it to phase in, the metal floating past his chest's flesh and entering the transmutation forge.
Focusing his internal Mana and will on it, the forge awoke, the metal finger deforming into a nondescript red chunk as the alchemical compartment seemed to glow to Axl's internal sight. He kept the pressure up, wanting to examine what the forge would do without further instruction, and soon the red chunk started to compress into a ball, his Mana adhering to its surface, the ball slowly growing.
He continued this for what felt like hours, the chunk of metal slowly expanding from barely a large droplet into an overflowing handful. Feeling it reached the limit of what his forge could hold, he extracted the metal, holding it in his hand with a heavy, solid feeling. This felt casually miraculous, creating more matter from nothing more than his internal Mana, and he instinctively knew this was the first ability of transmutation, metallic duplication.
Taking the metal ball back into his forge, Axl continued focusing on it, this time not letting more of the metal build up, but forcing the metal to get smaller and smaller, feeling the forge compress as he burned through internal Mana to press it closed. This was far harder than simply making more of it, requiring constant will and much more Mana. He was barely able to condense it by a third before he had to stop, not wanting to use too much of his internal stores, avoiding the use of [Mana Shroud] for the craft before getting a sense of it with his own Mana.
Extracting the dense orb of metal, it felt heavier and more solid, the red hue slightly dimmer. Axl even felt that its Mana was more aligned with his, as if he had a resonance with the metal that he had helped create. It was a version of the refinement that his alchemical organ did to its other reagents in the refinement corona, but specialized for metal, and one that didn't remove impurities, but was instead focused on condensing the material further than would otherwise be possible. This was the second function of his forge, metallic concentration.
Already making more metal from a small sample and concentrating it would be great, especially if he lost access to longhouse's ore garden, but there was a third and final use of the organ, its namesake. Setting the red ball aside, Axl took another finger's worth of the metal and an equally small amount of Helkan silver, then brought both into his forge.
Slowly, he let his internal Mana build, turning both metals into two halves of a single metallic ball, half red, half silvery-white, the intersection between them uneven and jagged. He then concentrated the metals further, forcing the forge to tighten, pushing the metals together, then expand, letting his Mana infuse within, forcing the very Mana of the two metals to integrate.
He started slow, deliberately focusing on each step of tightening and relaxation, taking turns between concentrating matter and concentrating Mana. Soon, he sped up, letting one cycle bleed into the other, the alchemical furnace taking on a slow, steady heartbeat, or like a hammer steadily hitting an anvil.
With each cycle, the boundary between the metals grew more indistinct, sometimes snaking into each other, other times blurring, until after countless rounds, a single metallic product remained, its composition and Mana indistinguishable from its base components. Axl felt the moment it happened, when the material turned as fully as he could make it, and gingerly slowed down his alchemical furnace, stopping the process.
He was sweating profusely, his body hotter than he'd ever felt it, as if he had become a furnace himself. Using the rest of [Gastric Cauldron] felt like an exercise in finesse and precise control, even if the internal Mana he had to use was at times high, but the transmutation forge was more of an exercise in sustained power. Again, the image of beating metal with a hammer upon an anvil was strongly imprinted in his mind.
With a shaking hand, Axl removed the metal from his chest, looking at his transmutation output with surprise. It was nothing like he expected, a soft, light grey material streaked with green and a strangely aggressive Mana, even if it was so soft that he could make an indentation into it with his fingernail with barely any pressure. As much as he felt the odd Mana aligned with his, it didn't help him figure out what the metal could be used for, and after a while, he simply squeezed it into a potion vial to examine more closely later.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Checking the time in his Terrania quest, he was surprised to find he'd spent nearly two days with this whole process, most of it in the transmutation step. The only other concrete output from this effort was that he'd gained two entire steps in Glyphic Alchemy, from the 6th to the 8th.
Technical Arts: Glyphistry: Glyphic Alchemy (G.8), Glyphic Spellcasting.
He knew this would be useful later, but frankly, he was a bit disappointed. The practice took a lot of time, and the result of the transmutation was so oddly unpredictable, it made him hesitate on his plans to merge the three metals he had planned for his Core—what would they even make together? Unfortunately, getting the alchemical organ didn't help him out at all on that front, and the [Selsin Clan Glyphic Compendium] had very little on transmutation, only incredibly elaborate arrays to perform the simplest metal duplication and concentration, with only vague indications on transmutation itself. Maybe the book considered that beyond the scope of the F-Grade?
Getting up with shaking legs, Axl left the arena building, barely making it to his bedroll beside the firepit before he collapsed in exhaustion, the strain of the past few days finally catching up to him.
He woke up with a start, not having expected to have slept so deeply or for so long—nearly eight full hours. With a grimace, Axl realized he'd burned through most of his time in the cultivation haven of the rift, with only 49 hours left before he and his party had to move on.
"You smell like a latrine," Alifren said, handing over a plate of food. "And bear in mind a living corpse is saying that."
Axl grunted, remembering he was still wearing his backup armor, the one that didn't have a self-cleaning function that helped keep that particular problem at bay.
"I set up a barrel behind the building for you," said Moxlin. "Good thing I bought a bunch of cheap create water talismans, if you're going to get sweaty like this all the time."
Axl moaned as he reached for the food, his body oddly sore in his chest, as if the transmutation effort strained him in some intangible way. He ate in silence and focused [Mana Shroud] on boosting his Vitality, even taking a sip from one of his F-Grade healing potions to further help him get back to normal. The food helped the most, however, and he ended up eating a truly prodigal amount, chasing it down with more water than his body could actually hold.
"You keep forgetting to eat," Moxlin waved a forepaw at him. "It's so dumb, we stocked up on field rations to last for a year—you need to eat more often!"
"Lots to do," Axl shrugged, "so it keeps slipping my mind."
Alifren chuckled. "I just can't believe you were just a shopkeep before. You have the determination of a legendary berserker. If it weren't for your bizarre ignorance of the most basic stuff, I'd think you were really a secret clan elite in some heaven-defying quest."
"That sure would be convenient," Axl said, taking a moment to remember Roken's humble beginnings. For a second, he wondered if he should tell them about who he truly was and his real goal, maybe just Moxlin. But he hesitated. Maybe once Terrania's nexus was actually established, or at the very least when the vale administrator's bird wasn’t listening to their every word.
"So what's the plan?" asked Moxlin, "I want to get my array running soon, it should be up for a day, maybe a day and a half before I'm done with it, but I wanted to check that you didn't have anything that could use my help."
"Glad you asked," said Axl. "I thought about it and think I need to mostly catch up with my Attribute gain while I'm in a safe area and have you two to help me with that. I can replicate most of Suliana's drills myself, but not all of them."
"Some sparring?" asked Alifren, excited about the idea. "I have to admit I would like to check out my new Skills against yours."
Axl nodded. "And practice on Charisma and Limerence, which is one of the few I can't do by myself."
"Limerence?" Asked Alifren. "Just how many different Attributes do you have?"
Axl returned a self-satisfied smirk. "A legendary berserker should have some hidden tricks up his sleeves."
Moxlin rolled her eyes. "Oy, you two should flirt later, we only have so much time here, you know!"
"Don't be jealous," said Alifren. "I come from a very sharing family, little sister."
Axl resisted the urge to simply get back to work, and kept listening to the conversation as Alifren and Moxlin kept talking, trying to focus on honing his Charisma. He explained to Alifren more details on his [Filial Deathshroud] and Limerence that he previously withheld from the orc party, which would be necessary if she was going to help him train with it, anyhow. Then the three of them sketched out a rough plan for joint training that let Moxlin use the [Temperance Egg]s right away, since it was important for her to get that done when she was in a safe place.
Eventually, it really was high time to get back to it.
Before anything else, Axl opened the rift portals and examined each one, ignoring the wonders and varied environments within, instead focusing hard on Call of the Void, the odd feature of his Last Human of Luna title that somehow allowed him to detect the Void. He'd only been able to use it near Nox's nest, and he held onto the vivid memory of that feeling as he went from rift opening to rift opening.
Soon, he actually got an impression, but not from Call of the Void, but Call of Undeath, but he decided to ignore that information for now, unsure what he could do with it. It took him nearly half an hour to find the first gentle tug onto Call of the Void, which filled him with relief. A part of him feared that none of the openings would be close enough to trigger the detection effect, that his search for the natural treasure would be much more difficult after all. But he felt a distinct tug from one of the rifts closer to the middle of the vale, and when Axl went to the nearby rifts, he found two others that had a similar tug, one much stronger.
This was beyond lucky, because this let him roughly triangulate the location of the treasure by mentally drawing a vector from each of the three points, with the strongest pull being much shorter than the other two. It wasn’t quite exact, but it was more than enough to get a strong starting point and direction to then let Call of the Void itself do the rest.
Finally, some good luck. After what felt like an endless array of setbacks and life-threatening difficulties, he'd finally caught a break and at least found the damn thing he was supposed to be hunting for all this time. Of course, he fully expected things to go back to their normal difficulty soon enough, but he let himself enjoy this easy win before turning back to Alifren with a concrete plan, confirming with Moxlin that she could start with her concentration array.
Axl decided to set aside working on transmutation for a while, and instead focus on regaining the use of his Attributes, with a good deal of emphasis on Charisma training, and generally getting himself as battle-ready as possible with what he had on hand. It was time to see how close he could get to the void-attuned treasure. Who knows, maybe his luck would keep on going, and he'd be able to swipe it without much difficulty and get Terrania's nexus thing sorted out before the week was over.
He barely finished the thought before picturing the Deep System laughing long and hard.