Page 78

Emily immediately sets to work, clearing her workbench before taking out potion making supplies and setting up. She collects the potion materials from shelves and her spatial storage, gathering them in preparation.

She carefully follows the same process as with Ivor, quickly forming the dangerous mix of venom and flesh. However, as she counts down the seconds to the final step and reaches out to grab an ocelax tongue, her sleeve catches an empty beaker and knocks it over. The beaker shatters, showering the tongue she prepared in glass shards and ruining her brewing attempt.

“Urgh,” Emily groans. “What a waste of materials.”

She pulls out The Clock and presses rewind.

***

Returning to the evening of the previous day, the first thing Emily does is check her system quests. The requirement on Alchemical Aspirations remains errored out, as she expected, so gathers supplies and tries again. This attempt fails even faster, when the imperfections in the mixture form slightly too far apart one too many times, ruining the mixture when she fails to destroy them all.

“Third time’s the charm,” she mutters with resignation as she activates The Clock again.

***

Her third attempt bears fruit, and she manages to brew the potion without any significant issues. Breathing a sigh of relief, Emily checks her quest log and finds the requirement on Alchemical Aspirations has been satisfactorily completed again.

She continues with her evening, cautiously waiting for something bad to happen again. The night passes without issue, though, and she cruises through the next day without running into any of the same annoyances as before. In the afternoon, she replaces the pin in her boot, before it breaks, finding a small scratch across its midpoint that was the failure point. The scratch was too small for her to even register as an issue in her previous scans, and she’s certain it wouldn’t usually fail so dramatically.

Then, in the evening, Marco never appears, so Emily and Juliana pass the evening together happily.

***

Time in The Dome moves slowly for Emily after the expedition. She signs up for a few different courses of study but discovers most of them to be unhelpful and that it’s faster to explore the subjects with her own research. She soon runs out of interesting classes and spends most of her time gathering information in the library or experimenting with spells and machines in her room, finding endless interest in observing the Spellweave.

Her progress in meditation slows down drastically after leaving The Glade, and even with the help of the training room’s high density mana gathering array, she struggles to increase her intelligence stat. After four months, she starts spending the majority of her day focusing on meditation, and even takes on a few strange requests from Agnes, to make her some non-conventional weapons, to help alleviate her boredom and restlessness as she runs out of new things to grab her attention. She spends a lot more time with her friends and Juliana, celebrating together when Hester reaches second circle ten months after awakening, a sizable achievement for a commoner mage.

When Emily’s seventeenth birthday arrives, she spends the day in meditation and experimentation as usual. But, in the evening, Juliana drags her out of The Dome to visit a restaurant together for dinner.

Eventually, Emily enjoys the fruits of her labour. Three months after her birthday, on the tenth month of the year five hundred and thirteen, whilst sitting cross-legged in the centre of one of the training rooms, her intelligence finally hits 75.

ˉˉˉˉˉ

[Status]

[Name:] Emily Coldstone

[Race:] Human

[Age:] 17

[Magic Circle:] Second Circle

[Machina Cortex:] Second Stage

[Attributes:] Strength 12 15 (21), Dexterity 35 40 (43), Agility 27 31 (36), Vitality 13 14 (19), Intelligence 61 75

[Health:] 220/220

[Stamina:] 380/380

[Mana:] 4500/4500

[Machina:] 4500/4500

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Progression]

[Circle/Stage:] Second

Requirements:

-Intelligence 75/75 (Complete)

-Create 5/5 unique E rank machines (Complete)

-Learn internal casting (Complete)

-Create 3/3 second circle spells (Complete)

-Slay 1/1 third circle beast (Complete)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Progression requirements met.

Would you like to begin stage ascension? [Yes]/[No]

(Warning, it is recommended that User finds a safe area with a high mana density to ensure the best results of ascension)

_____

Emily grins at the system windows floating in her vision.

“Finally!” she cries gleefully. “I wonder if I’ll get another reward for progressing to third circle only a year after reaching second.”

Letting her excitement flow out of her, she takes a few deep breaths, settling again in the centre of the gathering array and clearing all unnecessary thoughts in preparation for the oncoming pain. After a few minutes of quietly gathering mana and calming down, her heart is still, so she agrees to the ascension.

Instantly, the pressure inside her bursts like a dam. Pulses of machina flood her system and hold her still for the pain to come. The mana around her vibrates with power as she’s slowly lifted into the air, wrapped in a cocoon of lightning. Emily grits her teeth, trying to remain conscious as pain overwhelms her mind.

Mana ceaselessly flows into her, mixing with her internal energy flow and forming two vortexes of wild, unrestrained energy around her heart and cortex. She’s unable to appreciate the power flowing into her though, as her attention is held completely by the all-encompassing torture assaulting every fibre of her being. Emily feels her muscles burst, her skin rip, and her bones shatter. The dizzying combination of sensations and pain wears on her mind as she silently wishes for the experience to end, unable to control her body to even release a scream.

FUCK! THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN BEFORE!

A chorus of consciousness screams in her mind, but she doesn’t even notice the duplicated internal monologue. Still held in the grasp of misery, Emily bears witness to the world falling away around her once again. The enchanting cosmic stream of energy that’s revealed to her fills her with a sense of wonder and more pain, as her mind races to comprehend its workings and extract every scrap of understanding it can.

As the ethereal vision starts to fade, something clicks in her mind. The internal screams for the suffering to end vanish as all her physical pain is numbed, and she focuses on the sense of control brought by understanding a fraction of the cosmic wonder revealed to her. She pulls on the cocoon of crackling mana around her, feeling more connected to it than ever before, dragging it into her body to accelerate her ascension.

She guides the energy through her body, splitting it between her cortex and circles, condensing the energy into them. Her cortex finishes first, completing its remodelling and reeling in the violently flowing machina filling her body, forcing the energy back into a calm but powerful flow. She focuses all the remaining energy on her heart, increasing the rotation speed of the mana vortex around it, pulling the energy into a condensed ring.

The moment her third circle clicks into place, Emily emits a wave of power, revealing her new strength to the world. A loud thundercrack sounds, echoing through the halls of The Dome and out into the city around it, announcing her successful ascension.

Emily slowly falls to the ground, still holding her lotus pose as she observes the changes within her body, reconnecting her cortex with her pain receptors. Her eyes snap open, machina dancing across her gaze as she lets out a slow breath, crackling with the power of lightning.

I probably shouldn’t ever use it in a fight, but it's helpful to know I can cut off pain now.

She notices the new voices in her head, four internal monologues where there should be one, and quickly disables them.

Set core one as primary consciousness. That should do it.

She smirks at the new method for managing her cores that she instinctively understands after reaching third stage. Excitedly, Emily commands her inactive cores to show her any important new information in her system, and several system windows pop into her vision at once.

ˉˉˉˉˉ

Congratulations! Ascension successful.

[Status]

[Name:] Emily Coldstone

[Race:] Human

[Age:] 17

[Magic Circle:] Second Third Circle

[Machina Cortex:] Second Third Stage

[Attributes:] Strength 15 20 (26), Dexterity 40 64 (67), Agility 31 50 (55), Vitality 14 17 (22), Intelligence 75 118

[Health:] 270/270

[Stamina:] 520/520

[Mana:] 15930/15930

[Machina:] 15930/15930

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Sub-system updated: Progression

[Progression]

[Circle/Stage:] Third

Requirements:

-Intelligence 118/180 (Not Complete)

-Upgrade [Basic Mana Manipulation] to [Intermediate] grade (Not Complete)

-Create 0/1 unique D rank machine (Not Complete)

-Complete 2/3 C rank quests (Not Complete)

-Kill 0/2 fourth circle mages (Not Complete)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Insight gained!

[Skill upgraded]

[Intermediate Spellweave (active)]

[Cost:] 200 Mana/Hr

User can gaze into the truth of runes to form spells.

-Upon activation, user enters a trance-like state to use mana to experiment with new or known runic matrices.

_____

“Woah!”

Emily’s mouth falls open as she stares incredulously at her stat increases.

Almost 16000 mana. That’s insane! No wonder third circle mages can cast ritual spell level attacks repeatedly. Though, my strength and vitality don’t appear to be increasing much. I guess it’s not surprising, I’m already physically stronger than Agnes when she doesn’t use enhancement spells. I don’t think mages bodies are affected very much by their cultivation. The improvements to my agility and dexterity seem to come from my mechanic progression. Otherwise, they’d both probably be just as low too.

Flexing her fingers, she feels the fine control enabled by microscopic streams of machina that allow her to control her every move. She feels as if she can control each muscle twitch through the nerves that seem almost too closely entwined with her muscles and tendons.

Hmm. That’s weird. This jump in dexterity is incredible, but I almost feel like my movements are too smooth. It doesn’t feel like my fingers move like a human’s should. It almost feels like all the muscles and bones have been moved and reshaped to flow perfectly. Are my ascensions changing me that much?

She slowly moves her focus up her arms, flexing and stretching everything, adjusting to the drastic changes in her body. She stands up while working through every joint and muscle in her body and, as the feeling of incongruence fades, she starts to appreciate the alterations. The strange inhuman mix of subconscious grace and calculated movements brings a bubbling feeling of comfort: scratching an itch in the back of Emily’s mind that she never even knew was there.

With a satisfied smile, Emily finally acknowledges the rest of the system windows.

“It seems reaching fourth circle will take a while. It took me over a year to increase my intelligence by twenty-one, and now I need to increase it by another sixty-two! Not to mention it was getting harder to increase towards the end. This alone will probably take at least three or four years,” she mutters to herself, completely motionless other than the rhythmic tapping of her fingers on her thigh.

She brings her other hand to her mouth, biting her thumb as one of her cores begins drawing on Technomancer’s Breath to fulfil her goal of cultivating.

Leaving my cores working as secondary consciousnesses is useful. I didn’t even have to make a conscious decision to meditate, they just decided what was best on their own. Now, finally, we have this Spellweave upgrade. It costs more to use, but being able to experiment with known matrices is new.

She sits back down within the gathering array, happy to keep using points on the high mana density. Shutting her eyes, she pulls on her skill, activating it and revealing a new sight. As opposed to before, where the skill guided mana to her eyes and cortex, instantly revealing the mystical weave around her, instead the mana flow from the skill pauses on just her cortex.

Even with her eyes closed, her sight opens up to reveal a blank expanse of empty space.

So, this is the Spellweave now.

She follows her knowledge of the skill, pushing mana into her eyes and opening them, returning to the familiar twisting fractals of colour that she associates with the weave.

I can still use the skill like before.

Having confirmed this, she releases the mana in her eyes and shuts them again, returning to the blank expanse.

Let’s try burning hands.

The moment she thinks of the spell, the intimately familiar magic circle rises to the forefront of her mind. As she remembers the circle, a large, glowing copy burns itself into existence before her mind’s eye.

Woah. That’s new.

She admires the blazing construct, focusing on one of the runes.

Element designation. Fire.

Understanding of the rune flows into her mind, forming a closer, more intimate connection with it, just like before. However, this time, the connection is far more concrete and immediate. Emily can tell that when she drops the skill, this time the connection and understanding will remain.

She quickly runs through all of the runes in the spell, tracing the lines that connect them and the shapes that encompass them, rapidly improving her comprehension. Once she feels like she has gained everything possible from the spell, a thought occurs to her.

It said experiment with, right? Surely, I can do more than just learn about the spell.

Following this thought, she reaches out with her mind, pulling on one of the elemental designation runes. The spell reacts to her will, the rune floating free of the construct and dissipating. Immediately, the warm orange glow of the spell fades to a pale shimmer.

Emily watches with interest, before pulling out the other fire-based rune and watching the construct take on the neutral blue hue of mana. She pulls on the memory of a cutting ice rune that she discovered in the weave before and wills it to form in place of the missing fire runes. The spell shifts, taking on a pale icy glow and letting off a sharp, frigid air.

As the new spell solidifies into place, Emily feels a nagging in the back of her mind. She focuses on the feeling and pushes more mana into her cortex. The image of the spell spins to life, twisting in place as it tries to activate. After a few seconds, the delicate balance of the circle crumbles as several lines intersect, and the entire construct crumbles.

The experiment fails, and Emily opens her eyes, but she doesn’t show a hint of disappointment. Instead, her face breaks into a wide smile.

“This will make spell creation interesting.”