"So, how’s the work going?" Gale asked after leaving Agnes in the dark chamber of his soul domain.
Even in the cold environment, Jenni’s face was full of sweat. Her condition had healed completely, and it was about the first time since the inheritance ground that she was doing heavy work—a task that required her to invest all of her expertise.
"This is awesome," she said, clutching a few pieces of clothes she had already worked upon. "Look at them..."
Gale took one and pushed his awareness to see all the intricacies. Dawn’s cultivation skill had already reinforced the cotton cloth to Tier-III material, which was further enhanced with Jenni’s runes. Well, if not for Jenni’s ability to improve the cloth, none of her runes would have even worked. Any Tier-III script would burn through common materials like that within seconds of their usage.
The equation became a lot different after Dawn’s manipulation brought the cotton to the realms of Tier-III ingredients. A Tier-III material would last for years of wear and tear unless you dungeon dive regularly as your religion.
Gale infused his essence into the cloth to find out the actual output. Jenni hadn’t engraved all the runes she intended, as this was merely a way to get used to the materials and see how far she could go with it.
"This is looking good," Jenni said. "Obviously not as good as Ghost Spider silk, but I guess this will make the product more popular."
Gale nodded and turned to June. She was learning the cultivation art and seemed to have already grasped the basics; she just needed more practice to get as good as Dawn.
"I’m confused though," Jenni said again, wiping the sweat from her face. "If there is a way to raise the quality of a material, why haven’t people tried it yet?"
"Oh, they do everything to raise the quality of materials," Gale said. "But it’s mostly for metals, and materials that come from the dungeon... For some reason, they aren’t big on materials like cotton. I guess that art is not easy to get one’s head around."
Cultivation required a very steady grasp and an overwhelming amount of control to raise the quality of materials. In most cases, it augments the growth of the materials, but for materials like cotton, they would need to infuse more of the material together and reinforce it to a better material, which was far tougher than the usual method.
Still, it wasn’t something a wealth load of money and time couldn’t accomplish. Most of the spirit arts could be learned through simple repetitive exercises. Yes, it might take years, or decades even, but he would have thought organisations like Dragonforge would have a team full of masters of this art.
Apparently, that wasn’t the case. He guessed they specialised in metal for a reason, which didn’t leave much room to get into another market.
"How is it going for you?" Gale turned to June.
She handed him her best product. "Easy to learn the basics," she exhaled, "but it gets astronomically hard from there."
"It’s hard from the beginning," Jenni commented. She had tried the art too, and hadn’t been able to go deep into it. All her reinforced materials had no balance in the properties, not even moving higher than Tier-I materials, which the cotton was to begin with.
"I guess we have more affinity for this art than most people," June said. "Though I’d be damned if I manage to master this within a year."
"This is great for your first try," Gale said. He began working on the material, infusing it with radiance essence to work as the catalyst. He infused more cotton together, raising the quality of the materials higher than Tier-III within a few minutes.
Everyone stopped their work and watched him. Within a quarter of an hour, he had taken in half of all the cotton they had lying around and condensed it into a slightly thicker cotton silk cloth.
"What tier is it?" Jenni gasped.
"Tier-V at best, but I did waste a lot of materials," Gale sighed. "Anyway, I wanted to let you see what is possible."
"What does this gate lead to?" she couldn’t help but ask. "And why are you all keeping it a secret from me?"
She didn’t like being left out. Gale was about to make a quick jab but stopped himself; perhaps it wasn’t the time to make her feel any more down.
"I’ll show you someday so long as you grow at the speed you’re going," he said instead.
She snorted and watched June disappear into the gate. "I don’t want to go into the suspicious gate anyway. Keep all your secrets."
"Finish the food," he said at last, before moving into meditation.
*****
Only about three hours passed when Dawn woke him up with a serious expression on her face.
"Quick, we need you!" she cried. "Jenni is going through an advancement."
"What?" His eyes split open as he looked around to find her. He didn’t see her anywhere nearby, so he activated Void Sense. Within a couple of minutes, everything became clear to him.
She was lying on the ground of her room, squirming in slow pain as a swirl of essence surged above her.
"That stupid girl..." He didn’t finish his sentence as his body flew towards her room.
He entered through the window without waiting ceremoniously to open the door. Without wasting a moment, he stooped down beside her to check what was going on inside her channels.
He sighed in relief, finding it wasn’t as serious as he thought. The advancement probably came as a surprise, and she wasn’t prepared enough to follow through with it without a hitch.
Dawn entered through the door shortly after. "Is she going to be alright?"
He nodded and touched her head, drawing his silver radiant essence to infuse into her body.
"She’s having trouble opening her third aperture," he said with a sigh. Why wouldn’t she be without any help? Yes, his own apertures opened without him doing much, but that was mostly because he had been a high ranker before. Her case wasn’t the same for her, or any of the rankers. Even Agnes hadn’t had it easy opening her apertures.
"More so, it’s the Mind place," he clenched his teeth. That was one of the toughest apertures, considering it was connected to the brain. "All I can do is make sure she doesn’t hurt herself too badly..."
He used the silver essence to steady the surging power within her channels. The little healing training May had helped him with and his experience were enough to resolve that within a few minutes. Now all that was left was the aperture...
"No, no, no, she’s doing it wrong," Gale cried to Jenni, but she wasn’t listening. "You do not hit it with your everything. You should know that already."
But in panic, it was easy to make the simplest of errors.
"Call the elf," Dawn said. "She’s a mind mage. She can help her."
Gale didn’t think hard about it and opened the gate to bring June out.