Chapter 160 - High Proficiency

It was already Friday when Jason once again entered the combat arena with hundreds of familiar students standing in front of it and he could only sigh disappointedly as something particular jumped into the corner of his eyes.

A single individual among the more than one hundred students seemed to behave differently than everyone else and Jason's mana eyes immediately detected that he was the real deal.

This caused Jason's sour mood to brighten up and he smiled lightly as he sat down next to Seron who gazed at him weirdly, wondering what was going on in his mind.

Artemis sat on his shoulder like everyday which was already accepted by everyone around them but Jason´s composure changed during the last four days, causing the special combat class students to question what he was doing to have such a sudden change in his composure and temperament.

Unbeknownst to Jason, his mana control heightened by a large margin while practicing to perfectly purify all kinds of ores for the last few mornings over multiple hours.

It was not, that Jason´s temperament changed or something similar like that but the passive mana gathering from his sub-area he created from the unique splitting mind technique more than a month ago was the most apparent thing he changed.

His passive mana gathering was solely following Jason´s orders and throughout the last few days, he changed the characteristics of his mana gathering slightly with his consistently improving mana control as foundation.

With that, not only his mana gathering increased by a lot but also his ability to absorb mana into his mana core.

Considering that his passive mana absorption was already relative fast, Jason was confident in breaking through the next mana core level within the next three weeks, without the need to absorb a single mana particle actively.

Smiling brightly, Jason was proud of his sub-area within the mind he established when he was at the Novice rank, as he entered his soul world to take a look at everything.

Unfortunately, Scorpio was still at the awakened rank with a soul energy of 15 units, as the opportunity to ask Dalia for a purity cleansing didn't come due to Shane's demand for Jason to solely focus on blacksmithing for the time being.

Nevertheless, Scorpio didn't leave the soul world because of its frustration and depression, shocking Jason, as he remembered his second soulbond as an active and a beast full of vigor.

Due to this, it was only obvious what Jason would focus on in the following days, as he couldn't accept Scorpio´s depression, even though he had to fight against Shane´s stubbornness.

Scorpio was more important to him than Shane and it was the only right thing for Jason to ask Dalia if she could enhance his second soulbond´s purity, as long as he provided enough resources, which he possessed thanks to the pseudo-mana grade-3 anvil he sold some time ago.

Other than Scorpio, the black origin flame was still flickering around without having gained a single soul energy unit, which displeased it by a lot, but Jason couldn't afford to supply his third soulbond with soul energy, as long as Artemis couldn't enter his soul world.

Entering the soul world was extremely important for Artemis, even though Jason wasn't sure why that was the case.

Asking her couldn´t answer his questions and Jason could only obey disapproving about her behavior.

As of now, his soul energy reached 129.6 units thanks to his five-braided soul energy helix, Jason inserted into his soul world core three times a day without missing a single opportunity.

It would probably take some time for him to fulfill the requirements of all his three soulbonds at once which required around 145 soul energy units at the moment.

However, in the end, he was getting closer with each day passing.

Having reached the requirements to practice the third level of the Heaven´s Hell technique, Jason was still hesitant to practice it due to multiple reasons.

First, his time was scarce and he couldn't afford to give his Heaven´s Hell practice more of it and second, the focus he would have to provide was said to be multiple times more than before, even if Jason was not sure if this was even possible.

In the end, he had to once again switch to the lower difficulty from the Heaven's Hell technique and he wondered if that was even useful, as his current soul energy increasement could already be considered top-notch.

This caused Jason to ponder for the last few days, but even so, he was still in a good mood with his current achievements.

Shane was satisfied with his results he provided in the morning blacksmithing class and Jason even forgot to join the school's artisan lectures he applied to in the beginning.

In the end, the artisan lectures focused on the most basic methods to forge, brew, and inscribe runes which Jason already figured out thanks to the vast knowledge Shane, Dalia, and the large number of books provided him.

As such it would be a waste of time for him to attend the artisan lectures and Jason wanted to focus on his perfect purified ores he hammered into bars for the time being.

With three days passing since he purified his first jade iron bar, Jason was already much more proficient in it, as he was already aware of the most apparent facts he had to take care of.

His control over mana, the mana sensitivity, accuracy, and even more so his control over the black origin flame were the most important aspects, immediately after the incredible capabilities of his mana eyes, Jason himself was astonished.

In the end, his mana eyes helped him out to hasten up the whole process of perfectly purifying the jade iron ore with time passing and only three days later, Jason could already be considered proficient enough in purifying Jade iron bars from all of their impurities.

Even though Jade iron ore was one of the most basic grade-1 ores and materials, it was still an astonishing feat Jason delivered, causing Shane and Dalia to feel extremely proud of Jason.

Sitting next to Seron, both waited for the students to enter the combat arena, while Jason was still thinking about this one student that stood out according to his mana eyes.

The other special combat class seats arrived only a few minutes after Jason but something seemed off to the two of them, as they heard some gossip.

"Have you guys heard about the Vanguard-main-school dispatching their first students to figure out the strength of the affiliated schools?" a certain 7th Adept rank said.

"Really? Why should they do something like that? It's not like we are at war with them? Can´t they just openly challenge us, as we did it?" Another student said and he was apparently one of the other five affiliated vanguard schools that replaced one of their students.

Nobody answered him and most students that were about to talk with him turned away from the later student, causing an awkward atmosphere to spread around the combat arena.

Jason knew that the competitiveness among the students was high but seeing the later student being ignored was still somewhat weird.

Wasn't it normal to replace the weaker students? If someone didn't like it, just fight back?!

--Read Author's notes please :D--