Magical Engineering

Somehow, by the time I finally felt full, I had easily eaten five dozen eggs and a few loaves of bread worth of toast. I kept eating until I felt my core stabilizing with energy. It didn’t seem entirely full, but I finally felt like myself again. The exhaustion was entirely gone. The part I considered the strangest was that I didn’t even feel I had eaten too much. I certainly hadn’t been any sort of competitive eater prior to coming here, so where did I manage to fit all? Did some of it just get converted into energy for my core? Wait, how did refilling my core energy work? I should have read more on that as well.

“Hey guys, I can tell I’m refilling the energy in my core by eating, but it doesn’t seem to be doing it completely. What’s going on exactly?” I asked, not sure if they even had a full answer.

“So, other than some very special items and skills out there, your core won’t directly take any energy unless it comes from your soul. Only your soul can provide the right energy, and then your core turns it into mana when it releases it out into your internal channels. That part you likely knew.” I nodded at Elicec’s explanation so far. I had known the part about the Soul-Core energy reaction. “Well, when you nourish your body, you nourish your soul, which helps, in turn, speed up the recovery of core energy. Now, it’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to push it much above halfway full with food alone. Sleeping will help with the rest, and the bigger your core gets, the longer it can take to fill up entirely, but I wouldn’t worry about that. As long as you’ve got enough energy in there to supply your mana channels and your orbs, you should feel perfectly fine.”

“Guess that means I need more core reserve then if I want to use more than one orb at a time. I wonder if I have enough energy now to unlock another skill,” I said, then immediately tried. Within seconds, I received the message that I had unlocked the Soul-Core Bonding skill, and I felt my stomach rumble hungry again. That seemed to have taken about half of my current core energy or a fourth of the total. That was something I would need to start tracking.

“Did it work?” Cecile asked after my stomach had finished its noise.

“It did. I can now use two mana orbs, well, once I can use skills, at least. Now I need a few dozen more eggs, I think.” I picked a few more off the menu, digging in as they appeared in front of me. After I finished my second breakfast, we met up with Mel for the promised monster hunt. ᴛhis chapter is ᴜpdated by ɴovelfire.net

“So, ya boys are going ta like this. I found the dire scorpion that attacked ya. It’s been bothering some folks trying to set up an outpost in the desert. Now that ya know more about it, willing to try and tackle it?” Mel asked with a smile. I was sure Mel knew there was zero chance of them saying no.

“Absolutely!” Cecile yelled while Elicec nodded.

“Perfect, and this time, ya get a much more reliable teammate. Transport is ready ta take y’all out there. Dave, make sure ya go through yer System messages on the way, don’t skip anything. Ya got some travel time, so ya should use it. Ya got a core now. Make sure ya understand everything about it, as that’s as much ya as yer brain is now,” Mel said. He was right. I did need to check through my System menu. At the very least, I had a quest complete, but it had to be more than that.

“I can’t believe I haven’t done it already. Honestly, thanks for everything, Mel,” I said.

“It was a rough day, happens ta a lot of people. Now get yer asses out there and take out a monster,” Mel ordered, and we obeyed.

“How do these things work anyway?” I asked once we were seated in the cabin of the transport. From the outside, it looked like a boat made out of a child’s blocks, one pyramid and one cube, with the pyramid pointing towards where the thing moved. The driver sat in the front pyramid while we sat in the back cube. It was comfortable seating, plenty of room and no real turbulence, but that added even more questions to how this was possible. Was magic actually able to decrease the turbulence on an aircraft, or had I just not been in one long enough to hit any?

“No idea, really. I mean, I know the driver has a specialized class built for it, but neither of us were ever interested in any sort of driving or pilot life. It’s not a bad living, don’t get me wrong, it’s one of the professions where you can skip the danger of the Arena, but you’re also never going to push yourself level-wise,” Elicec explained. It made sense that there would be plenty of non-combat-related builds out there for people. In fact, I would assume that was most librarians and that Elody was just an exception.

“Fair enough. I’ll probably look into it at some point. Alright, guys, I’m going to dive into my System changes, so I may be quiet for a while. Don’t be afraid to get my attention if it’s anything important, though,” I said before pulling up the interface and seeing if there were any changes. I now had an option for Core on the main menu that just told me what I had already learned when I initially examined it, so likely useful once I upgraded it a bit, but for now, nothing special.

I moved onto my quest menu and selected the newly completed Esoteric Core Creation. I was rewarded with a thousand experience immediately and instantly shot up to level thirty-one. So much for worrying about when I would hit level twenty-five. I had a lot more to do on this ride than I had expected. A new box popped up asking if I wanted to apply the System modification. I figured this was tied to my new strange core, so I selected yes. A small bit of pain shot through my head before a new message popped up saying that the upgrade was complete. What had that done exactly?

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Before checking the main menu I saw that I had another quest called “Can You Really Control Six Orbs at Once?” Which, point taken, I very much doubted I could. So far, in toggling the switches, it took me about a second or two to swap them. There was no way I could switch orbs in the middle of a critical moment. That was something I needed to work on as well. The reward was another System modification and now was as good as any time to see just what that meant.

I returned to the main screen and spotted the change. The option that had said core before now read “Core Integrated Circuit.” My design was a little simple, but I supposed it did fit the definition, especially if I ever did any future modifications. The submenu was just a diagram of my system, showing the ranks of each of my orbs, my core, and the affinity. So far, all my orbs were rank zero, which made sense as I hadn’t used a single skill from any of them yet.

My unexpected increase in my level meant that it was something I could look at as well. I finally had access to the skill menu. It was time to see what all I could do.