novelraw Chapter 119 - 118 - Limits of a Core
Chapter 119 - 118 - Limits of a Core
Lind immersed himself in the creation of weapon cores. The mystery of his sword creation was pushed aside as Master Cain, himself, looked into any precedent for it. Meanwhile, Lind was learning the intricacies of making a core at the 2nd floor forge.
Normally, only a senior apprentice or an elder would be entrusted with the job of making a core depending on the grade, but Lind was allowed to skip to this step due to the unusual result.
The crushed crystal powder was the key to the grade. The beast cores were matched but the overall structure was supported by the powder. The pale white crystal was stunningly quartz. It was not called quartz but when Lind saw it, he remembered it from some of his projects in his old job. The name now was yarrow.
Lind wondered how this had been discovered but focused on trying to blend the ingredients. He tried to replicate what Cain showed him at first, but immediately he felt his elements trying to break free once more.
He then tried a different approach but one that was very familiar to him. He used the technique of gathering essence from each part aside from the crystal and brought it together into the center of the cauldron.
Sweat was coming off of him in rivers due to the heat but Lind was stunned at how well it worked. He had no issues but then the final core hardened and found a problem. He had a grade 2 core, but it was very weak. The essence did retain the elements but it was not as effective as the heart of the beast cores.
What followed was Lind just examining beast cores themselves. He learned how to crack them open very carefully by hand and saw the pure element heart but it would quickly disperse once exposed to the air.
Still, it showed there were other methods to crack open a core rather than the process of making a weapon core. Lind also looked over materials that spoke of several techniques that hinged on having certain elements in a dantian, but he had them all.
He then modified the techniques, yet unlike the Soul Arts, these were not as forgiving when being changed. Weapon refining was a precise process. Once the freed up power flowed into the manufacturing techniques, they no longer worked correctly.
Unlike the frustration with the inscription failure, Lind was invigorated as he was not at a dead end, just figuring out the shape of each piece to the puzzle. The more he picked apart each piece of the creation of a weapon core, the more he felt something was wrong.
Lind finally succeeded at the end of his first month at the Sunlit Forge. Lind was able to crack up to 2 beast cores and combine them into a low grade 2 weapon core. It was far stronger than the essence experiment but he found it lacking.
It was like comparing his soups he made to the true elixirs later. While both were technically in the same vein of creation, one was a primitive, barely passable, concoction while the other was a miraculous substance.
"If these weapon cores are like my soups, what would be the correct process?" Lind mumbled but he could not find an answer. Master Cain had not found anything like the sword he had created either. Lind sighed and submitted his weapon cores for Poe to look over. He would be starting at Myriad Treasures tomorrow.
****
If the Sunlit Forge was a powerful but straightforward building for its purpose, the Myriad Treasures was an artistic dream. Lind saw artifacts set up that displayed formations of light and shapes to draw in the eye in delight. Fish flew through the air and dragons blazed fire without harm to anyone.
Colors of all over the spectrum were tastefully woven to please the eye and draw a person to the entrance. It was complemented by formations to make that entrance stand out. Lind smiled at the use of both formations and artifacts. It showed a simple way to advertise their quality and show off their power.
"You are here at last!" Unlike at the Sunlit Forge, Master Harold stood at the entrance stroking his beard. Lind bowed and followed the old man into his shop. A massive ground floor had 5 stories above it.
The ground floor was a massive shop where customers could browse by category. Defensive artifacts were all together while the mere entertainment artifacts were far over on the other side. Lind noticed there were few offensive artifacts but likely those could be on higher floors.
"My shop is well known enough to avoid using an auction house as my main source of income but custom jobs are taken on the 3rd floor. I have heard from that old fool Cain about what happened." Lind nodded and relayed his own revelations since he awoke but he was nowhere near any answers yet.
"I am now truly curious at the differences between weapon refining versus artifact creation." Lind had been mildly curious before but now the mystery behind the sword and his own loss of control of his abilities drove him to see if artifacts were any better.
Harold smiled before clapping his hands.
"Mya! Come meet your new junior apprentice!" Lind waited politely by Harold before a pleasantly round woman came towards them smiling. Her aura was very warm and Lind appreciated it. "There you are, please show Lind to his station and walk him through our core creation methods!"
"Hello my new junior apprentice brother. Follow me to the 4th floor!" Lind bowed to Master Harold and followed Mya. They went behind the main counter and then he saw her infuse her Qi into what seemed to be a wall decoration but separated to reveal an entrance into a stairwell! A concealed door!
He almost froze to closely examine it but Mya pulled him onwards with an understanding smile. He was with a fellow lover of puzzles!
Lind saw that the 2nd floor was as expected. The more offensive artifacts were here under tighter security but they kept going up. The 3rd floor had several closed off tables and what looked like small forges.
He wondered why there were not large forges as some artifacts could be as big as a chestplate, yet he assumed that would be addressed later. For now, they finally arrived on the 4th floor which held very fine tools and work stations.
"I know weapon cores are similar to ours but they are restricted by the size of handles or other small areas while we can make much larger ones!" Her dark eyes danced with joy as she led Lind over towards a table with a few buckets of powder and beast cores.
He noted a lack of a forge but waited for Mya to reveal the next step. She gave a similar introduction as Cain to how cores work but then there was a difference. The crushed crystal powder was there, some beast cores, but the center had no array plate.
Instead, she began to lay out an array herself with some elemental crystal powder that aligned with the cores she chose. Lind also noticed something that inspired him. It was stacking the arrays into a full formation.
Weapons and armor, grade 2 and above, required Qi to be infused to work. The cores align the flow of elements to produce the desired results, but an artifact was different. Artifact cores retain their Qi. In other words, they do not drain away, they instead store power to be released by entering the correct sequence required for triggering the formation within.
Lind worried he would have to become a formation master but then noticed several diagrams laying around. He almost was distracted but the flow of Qi from Mya brought him back and he saw the various ingredients begin to glow brightly.
The white crystal powder finally melted but seemed to draw in the formation effect and Lind was stunned to see it was a mirroring effect. The elemental power was burned into the core with the arrays until all the power was drained from the ingredients.
A glowing core the size of a ping pong ball now sat in the center of the workstation. Lind examined it and was stunned. Like the weapon cores, the item in front of him just made sense. The innate understanding told him this core was to be the heart of a projection formation.
"Of course, this is the heart of the artifact but the outer shell and design guides the details!" Mya smiled as Lind understood. Despite his failure to create inscriptions, Lind understood the concepts behind them.
The argument from over a month ago came back to LInd and realized the source. In a weapon, the inscriptions were critical while the core was more of a guide for the Qi of the user while an artifact used the core to create its effects.
Both needed a cultivator to respond, but each method used a different route to achieve it. Lind felt like something important was trying to grab his attention but he could not bring it into focus.
"Now, try and make a 5 elemental core." Lind was stunned. He had only seen the process once and while he was attentive, it was a vastly different concept compared to weapon cores. His panicked face made Mya giggle but she cleaned off her workspace and stepped back.
Swallowing his worries, he picked from the piles of materials and found only mono-elemental cores. A frown crossed his face but he shrugged and arranged the cores in the slots and added the white crystal powder.
His limited formation training and study showed there were very fine tracks in the surface to lay out arrays as he wanted. It was highly detailed but Lind had no idea what to do. He went to reach for the elemental crystal powder but then deeply frowned.
He repeated what he saw Mya do and looked at the possible paths and now it was a puzzle to him. His mind ran various scenarios until he came to the inevitable conclusion.
"I can't." He turned to Mya to see her nod with a smile. She then stepped forward and he then saw something stunning. Mya was a 5 elemental! She was only missing water, but even so she guided elemental crystal powder not just on the work table surface but in the very air itself!
Lind was fascinated as he had never considered such a possibility. The surface was a guide but its limit was 4 elements at most from what he determined. To go beyond that, the core process had to enter 3 dimensions to properly setup the arrays!
"Amazing." Lind let the word slip out as Mya maintained a very fine control over the floating crystal while the rest was laid out before she triggered the workstation again. The glow was brighter and took longer but the result was the same. A new core was formed successfully.
"Now, you might wonder why I can't use that technique to make a 6 elemental core?" Lind was truly curious and Mya did not make him wait. She quickly chose all 6 elements and now all the slots were full.
She repeated the process but when she tried to float the array paths for more than one element, something went wrong. The 2 floating paths began to react with Mya trying to keep it stable but Lind saw it completely fly apart and ruined the ingredients into a charred mess.
"What happened?" Mya shrugged and looked forlornly at the ash on the workstation.
"No one is quite sure. Many powerful masters have tried to solve the riddle but much like 6 elementals themselves, no one seems to really grasp their issues accurately." Lind could understand that. He had been plucking away slowly at the normal cultivation world as he learned how to wield his dantian finally at his tier 8 power level.
"What about–" Lind was about to ask but Mya waved him off and pointed to him to try. She seemed to like him to dive right in and he did not mind at all.
Lind cleaned up the surface and slots before trying again. His Sky Touch was immensely helpful compared to the technique Mya employed but just like before, the floating paths started a chain reaction that burnt out everything on the workstation despite Lind having all 6 elements. His talent made no difference.
His Eyes had seen the Qi in the cores had set loose for some reason while the powder floated but he did not understand why. He started running scenarios after watching Mya and experiencing the process himself.
Lind reviewed the 5 elemental core and suddenly he felt it. It was just barely stable. It was forced to reach a balance by Mya but it was still just barely made to work.
"The process is not perfect?" Lind turned to Mya and saw her smile at him. She laid out a set of grade 2 and grade 3 cores. He carefully felt them out and now that he knew what to look for he was stunned.
The only fully stable cores were the 3 elemental ones. The 4 and 5 elemental cores had a tremble of instability he barely saw now that he knew what to look for.
"There are some Ruins or Inheritances that have much better cores, but we are unable to replicate their superior process thus far. Master Harold was the one who pushed the boundary of 5 elemental core power in the last 270 years." Lind was stunned. He knew 5 elementals had some similar issues to his kind but he had no idea they had been skating on thin ice like that.
"So, I want you to practice making grade 2 cores with what I laid out here up to 5 elemental for the next week. Let's see if we can break this bottleneck together!" Mya cheered at him and Lind could only smile at her enthusiasm. He looked at the piles of material and wondered if he could also break through his bottleneck here.