Universe's End

Chapter 208: Kiaber

Oh, the sweet, sweet joy of the rewards from a hard-fought battle.

Was it eight years late? Sure, but Rory couldn't be mad as he nearly skipped like a child on his way to his main lab room. The 'lab' was essentially an empty room with some modifications for damage control, but that wasn't the important part.

No, the important part was the two items placed upon a workspace off to the side. The first, a black orb, the 'Heart of Cooled Deep Magma', which had apparently been the result of the queen's heart fusing with an item given to it to increase its power. Every time Rory's eyes landed upon it, he felt a sense of giddiness. It was, by all classification, a monster core, but unlike any he'd seen before.

And yet it was the less exciting item compared to the second item, a piece of jewelry, appearance-wise it was similar to glass but with the coloration of rusted iron.

Ring of Perpetual Destruction

Grade: Unique

A ring formed from the paradoxical fusion of stabilized destruction in the form of the Oblivion element, alongside the remains of manifested reality in the form of domain fragments, before finally being given shape through the will of the world itself. As a unique, first-time reward, it allows for the wearer to aspect trace amounts of neutral pneuma into stabilized Oblivion.

It was difficult to convey how truly amazing the ring was, and the only reason Rory wasn't constantly wearing it was that he wanted to study it further before verifying its safety.

Putting the ring on, Rory instantly felt the energies within the ring. They were small, so small that it wouldn't be helpful in battle, but that didn't matter to Rory. Being able to create stabilized oblivion energy for projects passively would allow him to do things he had never even imagined: he could utterly cleanse concepts painlessly or perform precision erasure of physical matter.

Glancing at the extra-special monster core, Rory briefly considered whether he should use it for Ehkorrus, but he threw the idea aside instantly. First off, it was clearly not a neutral core, and given that Ehkorrus had already been aspected with the Renewal concept, it would likely lead to bad things.

But more importantly, Rory wanted to keep it for his own purely self-driven desires.

And another thing.

Pulling an item from his inventory, Rory placed it upon the workspace, looking between it and the core. It was the shard of the sky that he'd obtained many years ago from his and Zoey's joint efforts in slaying a Dactyl Supreme –a giant monster that had hilariously swallowed Zoey whole.

It had seen some use here and there over the years, but never as anything more than a conceptual paperweight, a representation of something sharp.

Looking between it and the queen's core, the color of the darkest obsidian, Rory was beginning to have ideas.

A blade. Or something.

Rory needed a truly killer weapon, and in honesty, the last time Rory felt like he'd made a weapon he'd consider anything close to a masterwork, at least when adjusted for his skill at the time, had been Apostolos's scythe, which still outshone just about every weapon he'd made to date.

In fairness, it uses material from my bane, not a facsimile of it, but the real stuff.

There was also the fact that Apostolos's scythe was a custom-fit weapon, meaning it could only be used by people with affinities similar to his.

Yet Rory knew he could go a step further, perhaps even two. First, Genesis-bound equipment, gear that was made only to be used by its creator, and then blood-bound gear, of which he only had two items so far, his hammer and his knife.

Visions floated before Rory's eyes, but he eventually shook his head with a sigh.

No.

The problem was, Rory could tell he needed something more. A blade made from the shard of the sky would be horrifically sharp, sure, and the core from the queen could be used for some serious oomph. Yet, just slapping the two on an otherwise basic promethium, Night Copper, Vermillion Titanium, or Ensouled Crimson Steel, none of them were what Rory was looking for.

With the weapon of his dreams project temporarily shelved, Rory lowered his expectations by one. If he couldn't craft such a powerful weapon for the time being, he could at least practice with something of a 'lower' tier.

But before then.

Spinning up the energy within his ring, Rory flexed his intent and attempted to coax it out. Which went fine for all of five or six seconds before he was launched backward from an explosion directly in front of him as the stabilized oblivion energies destabilized.

Groaning, Rory dusted himself off as he pulled himself out of the now-slightly-indented stone wall.

"See, that's why I reinforce stuff," Rory grumbled. He'd been launched with so much force that the wall, without reinforcement, would have crumbled at the impact.

Stabilized Oblivion, my ass.

Subjectivity was an important concept. Back on Earth, buying a new car would have been expensive for Rory, but that same car would have been cheap for a wealthy business owner.

In the same vein, stabilized Oblivion was stable, at least compared to how it usually concentrated. The issue wasn't even really the energy itself; it was the act of trying to manipulate it with the fine-tuned control he would need if he were to incorporate it as a tool into his regular crafting that was the problem.

See. Subjectivity.

Sighing, Rory willed himself to start again, before moments later, he was again launched into the cavern wall.

Again.

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For anyone who passed by, they would have heard the interesting chorus of an explosion, followed by a man cursing under his breath, silence, and then the chorus repeating.

Again.

And again.

And again.

The passage of time was an odd concept. Back in Ehkorrus, even a few days could be eventful as Rory had Roxy to anchor him in the present.

Now? Back in his… still unnamed volcanic base?

Three years passed in the blink of an eye.

The crafters spent their time honing their skills. When not honing them, they physically strengthened themselves by working the mines as free labor, which Rory gleefully capitalized upon.

What? Rubedo, Nigredo, and every other valuable ore or material weren't going to dig themselves out.

Flair and Kai Rong earned the right to hunt monsters throughout the slopes and rungs of the mountain, though never higher than level seventy-seven. The rest of the adventurers also earned the right to hunt the slopes as a team, though they never punched up past seventy-five even as a group.

As for Rory himself? He spent those three years pivoting between three projects, though one project bled into the other two.

First and foremost, mastery over the fine-tuned manipulation of stable oblivion energies that were granted by the tiny particle-collider on his finger, the ring of perpetual destruction. It wasn't actually colliding particles, but the way that neutral pneuma was spun about and slowly converted into oblivion pneuma reminded Rory of the technological marvel of the now non-existent Earth.

The efforts to master, or at least become adept, at stable oblivion manipulation were rough, to say the least.

By nature, it simply wasn't a 'creative' force. Most conceptual or elemental concepts could be stubborn if one tried to 'force' them into behaving opposite to where they existed from a conceptual standpoint.

But Oblivion took that to the nth degree. As far as 'abstractness' went, Rory was confident that it was of the same caliber as his foundational quasi-affinity.

Thus, Rory spent a very long time getting launched into walls, to the point that he'd been forced to relocate to a new lab as the old one was beginning to lose its structural integrity.

His second project was to create a link to Ehkorrus. Without a handy-dandy Null Window just lying around, the best method of traversal through space was literally exploding himself out of a volcano while using the items from Zoey. That…. It wasn't really sustainable.

With the addition of the ring of perpetual destruction, Rory had eventually concocted a method. Using the item 'A Stage in the Palm of a Hand.' Rory could create a direct 'link' to a location. That had already been proven by the fact that he'd managed to make it back to Ehkorrus successfully. The problem was that such a link meant nothing if there was no way to stabilize it and then travel through it.

It was sort of like a canal. If you had two locations and dug a canal between them, that still wouldn't do anything if you never filled the canal with water or provided boats to sail on it.

The link formed via the Stage in the Palm of a Hand was a map upon which the canal would be dug. Oblivion pneuma would be how he actually dug the canal, and his Coordinate affinity would be the 'boat' upon which people could sail between. Oh, and then there was the regular pneuma that would be the water, but at that point, the analogy had started to spiral in Rory's head.

As far as Rory was aware, only he could construct such a 'network.' Still, before he ever hoped of even starting, he required a certain degree of mastery over stable oblivion energy.

Finally, there was his third project, which had nothing to do with the spatial network but everything to do with the stable oblivion energy.

He still didn't feel ready for a magnum opus creation, but that didn't mean he was going to make something average, far from it. If possible, he wanted to craft a weapon that was similar to Apostolos's scythe as far as significance went, with his eventual magnum opus exceeding even that.

The weapon itself was a 'regular' sword. It had taken Rory thousands of mental sketches before he settled on precisely the shape of the sword. Rory wasn't a master swordsman, far from it, which was precisely why he wanted it to be a sword in the end, a new challenge to grapple with.

The plan was a simple, if ambitious one. In the past, Rory had made plenty of weapons that could weaponize concepts of heat or sharpness, repair themselves through varying means, or even channel pneuma for magical attacks. What Rory had never done was create a weapon that could invoke the concept of Oblivion.

Now, Rory wasn't that arrogant to believe he could genuinely make something capable of acting as a conduit for the real stuff.

Not yet, at least.

What Rory thought was possible was instead making a weapon that could embody aspects of the oblivion aspect, like an echo of a much louder sound.

His final design ended up something based not on historical legacy, but on futuristic fantasy.

But once more, it would require a mastery of oblivion energies that took quite a while to hammer out.

Three years were barely enough for Rory to feel as if he'd become adept enough to begin working on the secondary projects of his new weapon and spatial linkage to Ehkorrus. Of the two, the link to Ehkorrus was more critical. So he'd focused on the sword first to gain more direct hands-on practical experience with the complex concept.

First, the blade itself. It was meant to be less of a 'blade' and more of a conduit for the powerful concept, meaning that it had to be highly robust. With that in mind, Rory had initially set out with the assumption that promethium would be his material of choice.

That assumption was challenged when, after countless failures, Rory finally realized that being tough wasn't enough; no amount of strength would be enough from a mere rare-grade material. If toughness alone wasn't sufficient, Rory soon pivoted to using something that was both strong and capable of repairing itself.

Ensouled Crimson Steel.

Rather than a flat blade, Rory had designed it as a slightly tubular shape, from which Rory inserted a tube of glass-like material with countless tiny holes poked into it, making it porous in nature. The tube had been designed so that a vial could be plugged into a normally capped 'nozzle' just above where the hilt would be. From there, it would technically accept any fluid, but that would be like looking at a car and saying it could take any liquid, not just gas. No, the specific liquid that it was meant to be filled with was blood-affinity liquid pneuma. Unlike liquid renewal pneuma, blood-affinity liquid pneuma was as simple as slashing his wrist and slowly concentrating the pneuma within a bound space.

Was it exhausting, and did filling up that much liquid pneuma from his own blood take something like a week's worth of time?

Yes.

Was that still easier than creating liquid renewal pneuma?

Also, yes.

Next up was a degradation buffer. Even using blood-affinity liquid pneuma to enhance the self-repair of the Ensouled Crimson Steel massively, even the echoes of oblivion energy would tear through the material far too fast for the repair to keep up with. So, a degradation buffer, something that could share the burden of the destructive energy. It technically wasn't his first rodeo with a degradation buffer; he actually used one in the creation of his void vambrace, even if he hadn't yet needed to swap it out, just due to how irregular stepping through space had been.

In the case of the prototype of the Oblivion sword, the buffers ended up as nothing more than monster cores converted into pearlescent cores and then mapped into a mix of room and barrier gems, placed within the hilt of the 'blade.'

And finally, the hilt itself. As Rory had already said multiple times, a pure oblivion-using blade wasn't possible. Still, you couldn't carry echoes of the back of nothing. He needed a 'primary' element that the oblivion energies could 'hijack' or override. Thinking back to the first time he'd ever encountered oblivion energies, when his bane had basically set off a nuke at the climax of their tier six battle, they'd barely survived the null light that had sterilized the entirety of the battleground with the combined efforts of himself, Apostolos, and Eia.

Light.

For whatever reason, light seemed capable of acting as a vehicle for oblivion energies.

Thus, the hilt of his blade was made from the scraps of Daybreak metal, and Rory then carefully neutered the 'solar' aspects by utilizing the stable oblivion energies harnessed from his ring.

The final result was a hilt crafted of Daybreak, bleached of its solar aspects, turning the entire hilt a gaunt grey.

With everything put together, Rory held the prototype weapon, a 'sword' that appeared thicker and more tubular than usual, a smile dancing on his face.

If this works…

Taking a deep breath, Rory gripped the handle, injecting pneuma into an interfacing gem.

Moment of truth.

For a moment, nothing happened.

And then the entire blade erupted into a red light, promising violence.

"Holy shit," Rory said, eyes wide at the fact that it hadn't exploded in his face. But even more importantly, his inner child was cackling with murderous glee.

"I've got a mother fucking light saber!"