Chapter 694

Chapter 694

Getting home that evening after a far too eventful number of days away, the first thing they found when getting back was Sonya, passed out on the couch after having finally made her own return from the hospital she’d been working with, making Thera hold a finger to her lips.

“I’m sure she’s been worked hard this whole time so if she’s asleep, I’m going to turn in early too. If you’re going to stay up, can you try and keep quiet?”

“No worries,” He whispered back. “I was thinking I’d head back to the shop after you went to sleep anyway so I’ll just go now to get some work done. I’ll come back to cook breakfast in the morning.”

“Mmh, you really do need to rest too, you know.”

“Who needs sleep when I’ve got stamina for days? Besides, I’ve seen I’ve made progress on my job so I want to get back to working on my materialization and I have a few other things to test too.”

“Just make sure you take a break from time to time or I’m dragging you back.”

“Yes ma’am, no worries. It should only take me a couple weeks to finish this, less if I really push myself.”

And man do I plan on pushing myself.

Sure, the more mana he pulled into himself to make souls with, the better the odds that he’d injure his own but with the progress it offered him, how could he resist?

A question Thera could see that the answer was clearly he wouldn’t.

“Just try not to get injured in ways I can’t heal.”

“You got it.”

He kissed her goodbye from there and ran off, making his way to the shop despite its late hour and immediately sliding back into his jacket, feeling well at home.

“Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” He muttered to himself before beginning the far less enjoyable act of connecting with it, pulling the mana it held to start materializing thousands of souls for the experience it would give him while the question of how to otherwise spend the night stayed in his thoughts.

He had his projects of course, from the summoning spell to Inux to the more recent one he was failing at in the form of creating a tool that could materialize by itself, but he’d come across a more recent problem he wanted to look at first. Namely, testing the limits of some of his skills.

It wasn’t always the easiest thing to do, either from the ethical reasons that stemmed from how hard it was to use hive mind on anyone for any reason other than trying to help the former prisoners of Oaun to the more practical problems of either not knowing what to test or how to expand on areas in the case of his soul source.

That meant he was going to be continuing to rely on Thera for any and all future clones but a living body wasn’t the only way to hold a soul, something he was already well aware of as he actualized the molecular structure of rainbow mana crystal as he understood it, another question coming with it.

“Is this thing going to absorb mana?”

It was a casual mutter, not something he expected to get a positive answer to but still one worth testing as he materialized some moribusial to set it in attached to a simple light enchantment, getting nothing but surprise when it actually worked.

“...I have no clue what to do with this piece of information.”

It seemed like it could be handy in some way, leaving only the question of how. He wouldn’t need to have any of the real crystal on him in an emergency to take advantage of it but considering he could already materialize it that wasn’t the biggest issue.

Perhaps if he needed an unreasonable volume of it that exceeded the limits of his mana then it would be worthwhile but even then he had some in his spatial rings, leaving the discovering feeling more like a novelty than anything else as he filed it away for later, moving on to his next test from there as he materialized a soul within it.

And again it worked, defying his expectations as the soul he materialized held within the barely existent crystal as it began absorbing mana from the environment, letting him grab it for himself.

“Okay, this could maybe be useful? God, I don’t know, we’ll see so next test.”

With what felt like the stranger idea out of the way he moved on, trying to actualize all sorts of things to see if there were any limits there and finding none, even with something else piquing his interest.

Making a cube of ice, his conception of such a thing detailed down to its molecular structure, he let it melt in his hand, watching as it changed to water while his flesh chilled under its touch until he thought he’d gotten everything he’d wanted from it and felt he was done, letting it vanish but losing something else with it, the feeling of cold that had transferred to his flesh.

“...That demands some more experimentation.”

The fact that he’d just lost the sensation of cold with it told him there was even more he didn’t understand about what was happening when he used the skill and switched to trying to actualize boiling water, maintaining it while he dipped a thin iron wire into it and feeling the heat travel up until he once more released the actualization, the temperature vanishing with it yet again.

Again it left him confused with more tests following. Actualizing just plain water and boiling it left the things that were boiled within it losing their heat when he stopped and he couldn’t use his actualization to change the temperatures of items that genuinely existed, all of it leading to only a single conclusion.

“This skill is weird as hell.”

It continued to fit the name esoteric to a T, with those few discoveries showing him some of the finer rules the skill played on, even if it lacked the underlying logic behind it and with him already so far he continued on his testing through the night, looking for what secrets he might unlock.