Another arrow followed from another spot along the tree line, Axl barely dodging to the side, his Perception enough to detect the attack, it having made more noise from a sudden stillness in the wind.
It was barely a few minutes in this latest round, and Axl already felt overdrafted, his attention faltering at the strain of keeping his Attributes as balanced and effective as possible, often shifting [Mana Shroud] from boosting to simply detecting, not to save internal Mana, but to compensate for his inability to focus properly.
This was the latest iteration of the various forms of "sparring" he and Alifren had experimented with, the one that strained his resources to their fullest in the shortest amount of time. He had to stand within a defined area—a circle barely as wide as his outstretched hands—only wearing simple cloth trousers, and no [Filial Deathshroud] or other weapons. He then had to dodge the arrows that Alifren fired at him, with her being able to do so from anywhere just outside his ability to detect her Mana. This way, he had to detect the arrow itself after it was coming for him, and couldn’t move around much to avoid it either. Furthermore, each successful hit would have to be fully rebuffed by his own Endurance without much time for the Attribute to activate, while not letting him slack off on his Perception and get hit by the next arrow.
A melee battle was always a foregone conclusion, Axl able to win the moment he got within range, and being able to see the attack before it was launched gave him too much time to dodge, as well as rally Endurance to resist the attack.
Still, it was impressive how Alifren's arrows managed to tear into his body, despite her being at the early F-Grade. It was the result of her Rare skill letting her make Sharproot arrows from her chest, which synergized well with her Denseroot Core, the closely linked Mana attunements turning into a voracious weapon, the Skill keeping the roots alive even as the arrows struck, and more than able to actively dig in.
At first, Axl thought he'd be able to weather such an attack quite well, but it turned out Bilesong and Vitality were useless against it, only Endurance being useful to fight against the onslaught of roots. Not only that, but Alifren had the Intent of the Piercing Arrow, which made the attack even more formidable. So formidable, in fact, that Axl had almost died the first time he took the attack to the chest, entirely unable to stop the roots from spreading. The churning roots almost reached his heart before Alifren rushed to him and willed the arrow to stop its attack.
It was a sobering reminder not to overestimate his power, and it was more than clear that Alifren could've easily killed him by simply letting the attack continue. Any doubts he had on the orc woman's intentions and possibility for betrayal had evaporated, since she obviously had an instinctive sense for the kind of damage her arrows were inflicting—she knew how close she came to killing him. After that, Axl had to take a long break, since he couldn't focus and his hands kept shaking at the thought of how vulnerable he'd unknowingly made himself.
This is the true power of specialization, with a cultivator's core, Rare Skill, and intent all focused on a single form of attack. What if one day he encountered a party with each specialized member so well-attuned to their role? He didn't even need to start thinking about the question before realizing the answer was obvious—they'd be able to easily steamroll him. How could a group of cultivators in the Balanced Path ever match that? He understood more viscerally why Quelling and even Suliana seemed utterly unimpressed with his Path.
After another few rounds of their modified sparring, Axl took a break, letting Alifren get back to her meditation over the spiritual obsidian roots. Moxlin was in the middle of her array, the oddly peaceful Mana of temperance swirling about her, the eggs neatly in a tight circle around her. He tried not to focus too much on what was happening there, since it would just distract him further.
He took a quick meditative rest, cleaned up, and then got back to sparring with Alifren. His grasp of his Attributes improved quickly, and in barely a day felt he had as decent a grasp of his new Attributes as he did of his old ones before he got into the rift. This did still mean he had a lot of progress to make, utterly unable to use all of them at once to their absolute fullest, even for a moment, and [Mana Shroud]'s empowerment often being lopsided to some sets of Attributes or others, despite his best efforts to make them even.
"It's completely deranged that this is the kind of problem you're having," Alifren said, exasperated. "Most have the issue of actually getting the Attribute improvements, not having to keep up with their increase. I've never even heard of this possibly being a problem before."
"I just got lucky with a pair of rifts, is all." Axl turned to Tem nearby, focusing on his Charisma to its utmost. "Killing that C-Grade mountain helped."
"I'm sure it was quite the battle," the bird politely replied. "Fighting an entire mountain sounds like a real bother."
Pivoting quickly, Axl turned back to Alifren. "Will you help me? I couldn't do anything without you."
She threw an arrow at him. "Too vague."
He dodged the half-hearted attack, then turned back to the bird. For quite a while, he continued this practice in Charisma, rapidly switching between the two, straining his use of the social Attribute to lie convincingly. It was by far his least favorite form of practice, but perhaps the most necessary. At least he was much better at detecting lies, being able to catch the two whenever they tried, no matter how minor or subtle, even catching most instances of lies of omission as well.
Apparently, a more advanced use of Charisma would even let him mask his Attributes or even Grade, and he was very eager to get to that point, finding many instances where that could be quite useful. It was actually shocking to Alifren and Tem that he didn't know how, it being possible with a far, far lower value than he had, which only highlighted how weak his use of the Attribute really was. Frankly, he thought it would be easier with [Mana Shroud], like how he used the Skill to detect how strong cultivators were, the subtle currents of Mana wafting from their bodies a damn good indicator of not just their level, but how powerful they were. Seemed at least more reliable than something as strange and subjective as Charisma, but he clearly had a long way to go on that front too.
Cycling between the various forms of training, Axl eventually reached the very last pair of hours left in the cultivation grounds, and Moxlin finally finished her body refinement. To [Mana Shroud], the Mana coursing in her body felt markedly less chaotic and quite denser. Axl was poised to stop her from revealing what she got, but she was strangely quiet about it, to his surprise, and simply crawled into his backpack to rest from the experience.
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Soon, they were all standing around the open rifts, Alifren looking at Axl with an uncomfortable intensity. Still, he forced himself to match her gaze.
"Don't get yourself killed out there," she finally said.
"If you say so."
"And don't you dare die again either, freeloader!" Moxlin waved her forelegs accusingly. "You owe us big time for all the stuff we gave you, so you have to pay us back!"
Alifren reached out to Axl's shoulder, letting the small spider lean against her hand. "You won't get rid of me so easily, little sister."
"Be careful," Axl said. "And don’t show anybody those roots or the array that Moxlin made for denseroot concentration, they might be too tempting. If things get bad at the longhouse before we manage to get word back to you, just get out. Even if Suliana and Soffal decide to stay."
She nodded, reaching into her pocket where she kept the dead orc's ring. Axl had told her about the body he found, and together they decided to tell Suliana about it and hand her over the ring with most of its contents untouched, with Axl only keeping the red gear as material for his transmutation alchemy. He wasn't sure revealing the death was the smartest call, but it felt like the right one, and he owed Suliana better.
With a wave and a broad smile, Alifren turned to the rift opening. "This is the last time you see Alifren. I look forward to you both meeting Lifren soon."
She crossed the threshold and quickly ran to the side, weaving between the tree trunks, her movements alert and efficient, a root-entwined arrow notched on her bow.
"I miss the other orcs," Moxlin said, her fluffy body leaning against Axl's neck.
"I miss them too," he replied, staring at the empty forest Alifren left behind. "I thought I wouldn't, but I really do."
Soon, Axl turned to another rift, the one with the strongest pull to Call of the Void. Tem bowed deeply next to the exit.
"It was a pleasure to offer you the limited assistance I could provide, my lord."
Axl returned a shallower bow, the gesture Tem previously mentioned was appropriate for their difference in peerage. "The pleasure was all mine, and I look forward to seeing you again when I establish my fief."
Before stepping through the rift, Axl reflexively checked his sheersilk armor and the [Webcutter] to the side, and took out each of his twelve [Venombite Fang] from the ring on his left hand, quickly turning them in his palm. His orbital storage and the flask nucleus of [Gastric Cauldron] were each filled with his F-Grade healing potion, and he was fully healed, his soul as pristine as it's ever been, fully protected by its 12-point mental defense from [Mind-Soul Bulwark]. He also had three sets of F-Grade illusion arrays ready to be used, two on the ring in his left hand, one on the ring inside his chest. Moxlin was also similarly prepared, triage talismans topped up and ready to go.
Without further hesitation, Axl gently empowered his Attributes with [Mana Shroud] while keeping its detection range maximized and stepped forward.
The area beyond the rift was dense with large stones jutting from the ground, interspersed with large trees. They were at the top of a small hill, and once Axl climbed onto the top of one of the large stones, he saw reasonably well to the other rocky hills nearby.
Unlike the trees near the longhouse, the ones in this area had fully visible trunks all the way up to their patchy branches. It was enough to make the area only lightly wooded, the sky above always visible from below, often with large patches of open ground. The trees did not seem to grow from rocks or otherwise be merged with stone like before, but instead had rocky vines or moss growing on them. In fact all small plant life was very clearly made of stone, even its Mana decidedly attuned to different aspects of rock or inanimate minerality. Still, these smaller plants were clearly trying to take over the larger trees, and many of the large irregular boulders in the area had distinctively had tree-like features to them, as if trunks and branched had collapsed into a clump and somehow turned to stone.
These rocks dominated the environment, forming large protrusions regularly, as if the uneven fingers of giants were rising from the earth. This was a very different potential battlefield than the previous area, since the stone was quite opaque, even to Axl's combined Perception and [Mana Shroud], meaning his visibility was rather limited, with many blind spots created by the irregular terrain. Going above them was an option, but that would expose him in turn.
Strangely, there was no glyphic translucence above, but he saw in the distance an obelisk of ephemeral glyphs rising over one of the nearby hilltops, roughly in the direction he should go. These glyphs and their underlying array were denser than the uniform canopy array from the longhouse area, especially closer to the base, and he was curious to see the difference that would make in how this region of the sanctuary operated.
Returning to the ground, Axl took a moment to re-familiarize himself with the dense, multifaceted ambient Mana, slowly getting [Mana Shroud] to start matching it as best he could, and he started towards his Call of the Void, aiming first to a natural treasure likely in the way. He could barely see the top of the object that gave off that sensation, more its presence stretching up from the ground, as if beckoning to him with the vague concept of sharpness. This was very clearly an opportunity being widely advertised by the vale, so clear he didn’t even need to really use [Mana Shroud] to see it.
It only took him a pair of hours as he carefully navigated between the large stones, a few times startled by the jetting birds that effortlessly maneuvered between the large rocks. They seemed very similar to the ones near the longhouse, and all looked at least somewhat like Tem, clearly the little minions of this subsystem, doing this or that to maintain the area.
Axl felt like he could perhaps match their Agility now and catch one, but he felt that might not be the best idea, not wanting to piss off the vale administrator. He was sure the Deep System would probably allow something like that, maybe even giving him a quest to become a serial swallow killer, but Axl preferred avoiding antagonizing the subsystem and instead working on the nobility title thing as a way forward, at least for now.
Soon, he reached the top of the next hill, and found an area clear of large rocks, even if the ground was full of shattered, broken stone. At the very peak of the hill was an obelisk, its surface a tangle of glyphic arrays. It was only two meters wide at the base, and rose sharply another twenty or so, and clearly the source of the sharpness he’d noticed even from several kilometers away. The Mana in the area was also very different, at the edge of the clearing turning very sharp, as if manifesting the very notion of cutting.
Axl was very much drawn to the Mana, since it closely matched how he used his curved sword, and he had to actively keep himself from drifting into meditation. What stopped him was the tantalizing notion that the Mana was much denser near the obelisk's center, as well as what lingered at the middle of the clearing.
Twelve kobolds sat in a circle, looking out in a defensive formation, almost touching the obelisk base. Six were heavily armored melee fighters, three were some matter of mage, and three archers, with heavy bows. Whatever they were doing here, they were on high alert, and they looked fresh out of a fight, with fresh blood spattered on armor and shields of the outer ring of defenders.
He remembered the creatures from Roken's memories in Piril. They were rather rare for the city, but very distinctive, with their scaled skin and elongated snouts, with sharp teeth giving them a vicious countenance. They tended to be shorter as well, almost half the height of the typical elf, with a long tail dragging behind them. Unlike elves, who could be attuned to almost anything at birth or Orcs that had very Mana-neutral bodies, these all had similar alignments to a mixture of stone, metal, and other related concepts. This meant they also tended to have less varied forms of cultivation than elves or orcs.
They hadn't noticed Axl yet, but still he quietly retreated, only stopping several minutes away.
"That was purely physical Mana," said Moxlin, whispering to his ear. "It's quite rare, usually they are mixed up with other things."
"I wonder what those kobolds are doing," he said. "Perhaps waiting for a natural treasure to form? They didn't look like they were meditating, even the ones in the middle of the formation."
As if he had tempted fate, a message answered his question.
>>Timed area quest activated (Shrouded Crescent Valley):
>>Whetstone of Sharpness (F-Grade) will form in 22 minutes, 12 seconds.
>>Defending party has choice of: one-on-one duel, full party duel, unlimited deathmatch
>>Challenge the defending party? Yes/No