Chapter 457 - DIY resolution

“AAA a a a aueughk-” Sofia’s voice cracked in the middle of her improvised vocalization exercise.

Crap… Manually controlling bone lungs to speak is harder than it sounded in my head. Getting there, though. This should be enough if I meet someone, but I might as well keep training as we go.

She turned to her skeletons, Pareth had downsized to the smallest he could go, putting him at almost the same size as Alith, and he was teaching Bookie how to properly avoid sword attacks.

“Let’s get to woOrk, guys. We ha–ve two hearts to upgrade.”

Before going, Sofia re-read everything one last time.

[Nascent mana heart of Knowledge]: /C tier/

Imprint progress : 1200/ 1200

Small Catalyser : 0/1

Effects (on use) :

• All stats +45% (C rank base)

• Health +8500 

• Mana +21 500 

• ??? Skill shard (5/10) (Sunless Amalgam Skill)

• [Relocate Core]

• [Arclight]

[Destroyer’s Nascent mana heart of Aphenoreth]: /B tier/

UNABLE TO CALCULATE SETTING TIME

Imprint progress : 2000/ 2000

Small Catalyser : 1/1

Medium Catalyser : 0/1

Keystone : 1/1 

Effects (Stats will be doubled) :

• All stats + 70% (B rank base)

• All stats + 50%

• Health + 10 561

• Stamina + 10 000

• Mana + 159 439

• Slashing resistance + 5%

• [Relocate Core]

• Destroyer Signature Skill Modifier

• Speed shard (1)

[Quest: Upgrade both hearts to SSS Rank

Requirements:

• (1) Forge a small catalyser for Pareth. (Focus on this step for instruction)

• (2) Fill Pareth’s imprints, be sure to finish the Amalgam skill.

• (3) Forge two medium catalyers. (Focus for instructions)

• (4) Travel to designated location and fill imprints.

• Later steps are a work in progess]

If nothing else, we really got a lot of mana imprints from Everelle’s dungeon. Too bad we couldn’t get the catalysers… It took Mr. Scribe three hours to come up with these steps 3 and 4. Don’t overwork yourself, alright? We’ve yet to complete step one.

The instructions for step one were not as hard as Sofia had feared them to be, the crafting of the small catalyser was relatively simple, in theory at least, she was just missing some reagents and a proper setup. The main ingredients, perhaps unsurprisingly, were a single piece of small Sunless debris and a lot of mana. The crafting instructions also ended with the precision that there were alternative recipes if this one failed.

Let’s get down from this tower and make a small base of operation. I’ll prepare the bone walls and tools, Pareth you flatten a good spot and gather the lumber, Bookie, send the birds to fond the missing ingredients. We need the two plants I gave you sketches of and one of those rustlicker slimes we encountered on day one, preferably alive.

“Understood! Uh… Sofia, how much of the plants do we need?”

A handful of the glowing berries should be enough, I think, for the weird leaves it says about 300 grams, and they look quite small, so probably a lot.

“Alright!”

A swarm of skeletal birds and rat soon spread around, all managed directly by Bookie, and Sofia got started of building a giant blessed bone furnace following Mr. Scribe’s instructions. Night soon fell, and she switched to the construction of a fortified camp while bolting any approaching Sunless drones from afar. In the afternoon of the following day, she was finally ready to start forging the heart catalyser.

She slathered the small Sunless debris with a thick paste made of rustlicker slime goo, gold dust and a bunch of crushed plants, and wrapped that into several layers of oil-soaked bandages.

What a waste of good cooking oil. It wasn’t cheap either. 

I don’t really understand how that’s even supposed to help, but I don’t really have a choice except to trust the process…

The oily ball was placed in the middle of a complex ritual circle, which itself had been carved into a blessed construct bone plate. Brightly burning blue-wood logs were already heating the huge furnace, with a skeleton Firebird managing the fire. Sofia stared at the small piece of orichalcum scrap she had thrown into the furnace. 

More fire.

The Firebird’s spells kindled the flames. Only when the large blue flames escaing from under  the furnace started to grow taller than the furnace itself did the bit of orichalcum finally start to melt. Using [Bone Dominus] Sofia hastily sent the ritual circle slate with the oily ball into the furnace. She sent a bunch of mana straight into the ritual circle to quickstart it, and started to feed a slow and stead stream of mana to the Sunless Debris in the middle of all this.

After ten minutes of careful mana-feeding, Sofia smothered the flames with a bunch of summoned blood, the nauseating smell of which made her instantly regret this move, and she pulled the slate out of the furnace.

In the middle of the ritual circle, only a small lump of what looked like black coal remained.

Bookie stood on his tiptoes to get a look at it, “Did it work?”

Sofia scanned the black lump with her mana senses, the Sunless debris was still in there, it had become a lot smaller and was radiating a small quantity of mana.

“I think we got it,” Sofia answered, “But we won’t know before the last step. Pareth? YoOur turn,” she said as she left the slate behind, grabbed Bookie by the hand and walked away.

Pareth grew from his current human size to his maximum size of fifteen meters.

While the taller size gave technically did not give him more strength, his both allowed him to summon much larger weapons of light, and allowed his swings to accumulate a lot more momentum. He aligned himself correctly, activated his [Consecrated Grounds], and raised his arms. A giant flat-headed hammer of light appeared in his hands, and it came down on the small black lump like a falling meteor.

According to the ‘recipe’ a bright flash of light should occur after hitting the black lump and breaking the catalyser out of it, that would signify the catalyser was ready.

The hammer crushed the black lump. There was no flash of light, when Pareth dispelled the hammer, there was only black dust left under it.

Bookie ran up to the slate, sounding shocked and disappointed, “Did brother Pareth hit it too hard?”

“No, the instructions say that the harder the hit the better. I would have even added the third tier [Runeforged Overlord] boost if I had any mana left. This must mean I messed up somewhere… Sorry, let’s start again…”

It took three more failures before Sofia understood where she was messing up. The flow of mana she fed to the Sunless debris through the entire cooking process was just not stable enough, and it showed when observing the ritual circle with her mana senses, the unsteady flow of mana disturbed the ritual.

The reasonable solution to this would have been to train for a few days until she was capable of supplying a smoother and steadier flow of mana, but was Sofia opted to do instead was to use a long bone rod as an extension to her already bone-made arms and to feed the mana through direct contact. Had she been a bit more confident in her fire resistance, she might have even jumped directly into the furnace instead.

Finally, when Pareth hit a black lump for the fourth time, the flash of light occurred, and they had finally created a viable something. A small shiny rock.

[Small Crushing Heart Catalyser]: A contraband heart catalyser crafted by a rag-tag team of bone-people. Allows one to upgrade their Mana Heart from rank C to B once sufficient imprint power has been collected. Gives the Mana Heart the added attribute : +5% Blunt force damage resistance. 

“We did it!” Bookie exclaimed, jumping around the camp.

Sofia picked up the catalyser, it looked just like the one from Tarren’s dungeon. Smiling to herself, she passed it to Pareth along with his mana heart.

Not bad for a first-timer.

Sofia immediately turned around to face the man who had just spoken from behind her, almost completely out of mana, she brandished her dagger. Bookie and Pareth were instantly ready to fight.

The stout man who had appeared behind the trio without anyone noticing raised an eyebrow. He was human-looking, and taller than Sofia, wearing only dirty brown shorts and a worn-out leather apron over his hairy bare chest.

That’s a nice knife you got there. I get why the others found you so hard to find, he said with a lighthearted smirk, his posture completely open.

Sofia could not feel a single speck of mana from the man, and trying to Identify him got her no response at all.

“Who are you? Why were you looking for us? How did you find us?” Sofia asked in a controlled but accusatory tone, without lowering her dagger. The core member privacy mode should have made her completely invisible to the system like it had done for Hugo, and VPPV protected her from things like divination, so, considering she was in a random spot on a vast, mostly uninhabited planet, someone finding her so fast was just unbelievable.

Me? I’m just an old craftsman. Been looking for you three on behalf of Kyle. As for how, I just followed the essence you’ve been feeding me all afternoon. Was quite simple really, since there’s no one else out there.

A God…

Hoy, I don’t like those eyes. Are you done here? We’re going.