Chapter 149: Active tempering

Chapter 149: Active tempering

Lissandra is built differently, oh, I don't mean her current state she is in right now. Nope, the woman shares with me multiple ways to manipulate my mana to be able to go through what she called active tempering.

I don't understand at all.

She continues to dumb it down more and more to the point where she complains that even animals could do it.

I won't refute that. I know multiple deer, bears, and one corgi that would totally be able to do that. I've long known that the most dangerous mages will be from the zoo.

Lissandra then tries to explain and I can hear her getting more and more annoyed. I would expect her to be a lot more patient, being as old as she is and as powerful, but she has absolutely no patience with her students.

She is impossibly powerful and talented beyond belief so for her something like moving mana on a subatomic level sounds like basics.

“Okay, I'll dumb it down even more, little pup. You will activate the thing you call Kinetic Mana Heart, then you need to use the thing you call Mana Regulator to feed it as much mana as you can handle. After that I want you to weaken your passive skill otherwise it will weaken the effect of tempering. First, we will temper your body with kinetic energy. You will have to change output a bit, frequency should be like,” she says some mumbo jumbo difficult terms I do not understand, “Then you will use different frequency on your bones, but at the same time you have to temper your muscles too, also with different frequency.”

It all sounds reasonable and the results she promises are all amazing. Nothing too excessive for first active tempering, but I can continue to improve on it.The debut release of this chapter happened at Ñøv€l-B1n.

“You will have to keep infusing your body with your mana, but not as you usually do. That's what amateurs do, you need to be more precise and not just throw it around uselessly. You are wasting so much of it.”

It's all good, but damn, somehow she pisses me off. Is it because we are so similar?

“Your tone pisses me off,” I say out loud.

Short silence.

“Would you say that to me when I had my body?” she asks, annoyance clear in her voice.

“No, you would beat me up.”

“... I would.”

It takes half a night and enough testing to make my head spin, but I've somewhat taken a grasp of that and we will try it on my arm first before going at it with my entire body.

So now, I'm taking a short break to relax and calm down before we get to it. All while the air still rages outside and the room continues to be lit with a mana orb filled with thermal energy that I made a bit bigger.

From past experience, I know that there are barely any monsters so close to the wall, even during the night we didn't meet any so the entire process shouldn't be interrupted.

“Why are you so slow? Move your mana faster.”

Yeah, the mighty used-to-be-absolute-but-is-now-creepy-brooch-made-from-flesh-and-bones continues to complain.

“Again, you are controlling it like a kid doing its first mana exercises. Be more delicate and do not waste so much of it.”

Are all the geniuses like this? Is it because she is a grumpy old grandma? Actually, is she even a grandma? Ruby was close to one hundred and she did look barely over twenty. Could even Lissandra look to be twenty years old if she wanted to?

“Actually, I might even have seen kids better at handling mana than you,” the brooch made of flesh and bones continues.

Is she not going to stop? I'm staying quiet in hopes that she will stop, but unsuccessfully.

“This is better, now make it a bit more dense and even. You can start sending kinetic energy through your body, do not forget about the frequency."

Right now, only me and my body exist.

Deep breath in. Hold. Deep breath out.

Let's go with 40 percent.

I change the regulator once again and focus on infusing my body with mana in ways I just learned, while also grabbing hold of kinetic energy and collecting it in my body, which starts to react to the pressure much stronger now that I'm not strengthened by reinforcement and the passive is weakened.

As soon as I feel my body is infused properly, I grab hold of the kinetic energy and start sending it, this time not out of my body, but through my body. I adjust the kinetic energy slightly and also alter its frequency.

Immediately, I feel as if someone started pummeling my body with a massive hammer while shaking it impossibly quickly. It's getting hard to focus, and the pain feels omnipresent and constant, and I get bruised even in the parts where I feel I'm doing it perfectly. The energy just continues to pummel, to temper my body, putting a lot of strain on it. Only thanks to my body being properly infused with mana and thanks to the special frequency of kinetic energy, my body absorbs some strain so I do not get torn apart. Yet, it hurts, it hurts so much.

I keep getting more and more wounds every time I lose my focus even for a split second, but I force myself and continue.

A minute passes.

Two minutes.

Three minutes.

One of my eyes explodes because of me losing my focus and the frequency of the thread of kinetic energy changes for a second.

Four minutes.

Five minutes.

Lissandra said five minutes is a good start and the maximum I should do on my first try.

Six minutes.

Seven minutes.

Another wound that feels somewhat serious, but I continue.

Eight minutes.

I change the setting on my Mana Regulator again, but this time I'm not even sure to what percentage. The world for me becomes just my body and two energies I have to handle - the kinetic energy that can kill me at any second and the mana that I use to infuse my body with.

At some point, I notice some imperfections and change the frequency a bit, and use a bit less mana to infuse my body.

The pain strengthens but the efficiency improves.

Good.

Then, who knows how much later, I stop. Right after, I set up my regulator again and at the same time turn back on Reinforcement and the passive, as well as start to strengthen my body with Symbiotic Transference.

I open my eyes... my single eye, and turn it to the fleshy brooch still lying there, on the ground in front of me.

This time Lissandra doesn't say anything.