chapter 75
The noise of work all around me assaulted me, yet it wasn’t something that distracted me. Instead, the sounds were wonderful. It was the sound of electric motors pushing air to keep the drones flying. There was the constant sound of grinding and sparks crashing onto the floor, all types of assembly machines making different kinds of noises as they continued to work.
And I sat surrounded by all of that. It had been a difficult journey to get back from the surface of the planet, to once again be surrounded by everything in this universe that is mine.
The power, after all that killing inside the portals, had reached a certain threshold and started to be painful. It wanted to do something, but when I tried to concentrate on it, it didn’t seem to listen to me.
Now, that is no longer true. Finally, I could take a deep breath in and out without feeling like my lungs would burn, which I didn’t even know I was capable of feeling, because they are artificial.
Now, every breath I took felt like I was empowering myself, fueling myself up for something. My bonds around me seemed to reinforce whatever was happening to me. The core inside me seemed to want to expand and compress at the same time. From what I’ve read, I needed to compress it first and then let it expand, so that’s what I did.
I do not know exactly how much time passed, but it felt like an eternity. The core compressed, and I continued to do so until it felt painful. Then I finally let the power coursing through me start to expand the core.
It seemed that the compression stayed the way it was, but now the core was simply growing bigger, and when it reached its previous size, it stopped.
For a moment, I thought everything was over, as there was no longer any of that power left that wasn’t integrated. Then the core pulsed. From it, magic started to flow through me, improving everything. It was a wonderful feeling, but also so exhausting. I tried my best, but I passed out.
“Captain, can you hear me?” I heard Lola’s voice.
My eyes snapped open, and as I tried to move, I moved faster than I wanted to, trying to get up.
“Take it slow,” Lola said as I felt her arms on my shoulders, trying to steady me.
I sat back down, trying to understand what I was experiencing. Everything felt overwhelming, like there was too much going on. My heart was beating far too fast, so I gave it an order to slow down, which it did. That helped me focus on my sensors, dialing them down a lot to once again feel normal.
This time, when I opened my eyes, I didn’t see blooming colors and lights that were way too bright; instead, I saw the world as I should, with Lola close by, watching for my reactions.
“I think I’m better now. But… what’s this god-awful smell?”
She didn’t say anything, just looked down. As I did so, I saw a puddle of black and white ooze that seemed incapable of mixing. It seemed that I had produced this awful thing, the black part coming from my biological parts and the white from my mechanical.
“It seems that I need some cleaning,” I said to Lola, and headed off to get myself cleaned up.
The shower was nice, but it took far too long to get myself fully clean. As I did so, my nano machines started to report back strange errors.
It was my own fault. In my current programming, many parts of me were operating well past their maximum limit, which would normally cause damage, but it seemed that this was normal now.
So, during the shower, I took the time to adjust everything so I wouldn’t constantly be flooded with useless error notifications.
As I walked out, I saw Bob and Sam using what was basically flamethrowers to clean the puddle of ooze I had left on the floor.
As I thought of them, my mind snapped to the bond I had with them, and information started to flow, information that normally would have taken me conscious effort to access and at least fifty times longer than it did right now. That was going to be nice.
Lola walked toward me and smelled me, then gave me a thumbs-up. “It’s acceptable, but you’ve always been a bit… let’s say careless about your hygiene. At least you seem to clean up nowadays when you meet others.”
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“Ha ha, very funny. It seems that I finally achieved F rank. The power it has given me feels… a bit intoxicating.”
“I will want a full report, so I think it’s time to start testing your new capability,” Lola said while taking her tablet out and seemingly starting a list.
“Why are you doing that manually?” I asked, actually a bit confused. I had seen her do that before, but I never got the chance to ask.
“You try being without a body for over a decade, you’ll find that being able to do things manually feels nice.”
What followed was nearly three days of constant testing, and then the three skills finally arrived that I had ordered. As expected, the database here wasn’t wrong, and all of the skills did work for me. It was easy enough to absorb them, but now Lola and Sam wanted to do another round of tests to see how well these worked.
So once again, I was an experimental subject to those two mad scientists. It surprised me that Sam was so into this, but it shouldn’t have. He was always interested in skills, and obviously that would include how skills affected someone.
I took this time to observe myself with mana sense as well. That helped put all the data we were seeing into context.
All of me had more mana density in every part of my body, but the way that density was represented was different.
For my biological parts, the mana moved as if it had its own vascular system, bringing a constant cycle of mana throughout everything, with larger concentrations around the main pathways.
For the mechanical parts, they had more of a uniform pattern. It was like different molecular structures overlaid into the material of these parts.
Those molecular structures were different depending on the composition of each mechanical component. The mana moved more like a wave through these structures, with each wave or pulse, perhaps a better word to describe it, as it happened every heartbeat of mine.
During my slow advancement, everything I was had gotten better, including my mana capacity. Now, after the breakthrough, that capacity had risen threefold. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean everything else also got three times better. Although some things got an even bigger boost, mainly in the mind department.
After the breakthrough, my physical durability rose about 80%, with the new skills boosting that to nearly 100% in the specific attack types they covered. So I was basically twice as resistant when it came to piercing, impact, and heat damage.
It was so strange to see how the numbers showed that the metal my mechanical parts were made from now performed so much better than they should have been capable of. This truly was magical. All of this didn’t mean I could shrug off bullets, but it would certainly help.
It was fun to be able to move faster than I should be able to, but all of this would require practice to get used to.
“It never stops being amazing, seeing what advancement can do,” Sam commented as we were finally wrapping everything up so I could get back to building.
“It is a bit unfortunate that we could never get stronger like this. I think it would be quite amazing to have some magical skills,” Lola answered him.
My mind was already on the ship. The structure was basically complete, but quite a few things were still left undone because we needed those openings to install everything inside to actually make the ship functional.
“Captain, it finally arrived!” Bob yelled as he dragged a pretty big box behind him.
We were all a bit confused, but then I saw the markings on the box, it was the mana locator device. This was a piece of mana tech that was basically mandatory for every adventurer ship.
You needed someone who could sense mana in some way to use it. It was designed to not store any mana, so when someone searched for you using a similar device, they wouldn’t find you unless you were actively using it.
The thing about mana and magic, especially when it came to sensing it, was that it worked faster than the speed of light, it was basically instant. That seemed to be the main reason why mana tech wasn’t normally used on ships as light speed delay was so important for defense.
Mana inside people couldn’t be so easily detected from far away, but if it was inside machines, it was basically like a beacon for someone who could sense far enough, and this device made it possible to detect mana from really far away.
Normally, this type of device was used to locate space portals. With my current rank of mana sense, I should be able to detect a space portal about eight light-years away, and a space monster at about one.
The information about detecting ships was quite sparse, but I was fairly certain that inside the solar system, if someone was using ship-grade mana tech, I should be able to pinpoint their location.
Unfortunately, I would only have the capacity to run this at maximum strength for about 5 minutes before I was out of mana.
We all rushed towards Bob and started to tear through the box that was around the mana locator device. Bob protested the whole time, saying something about getting it to the right location before opening this up, but none of us cared.
The device itself came to about chest height and was the size of a round table that would go in a kitchen. There were seven places where someone could place their hands or appendages. This thing was meant to be used by multiple people so you could use it for a longer period. There was only one main interface.
Immediately, I grabbed ahold of it and channelled mana into it. I kept the range as low as possible, and as I looked around, the world turned into vivid colours and, in my mind, I could sense all sources of mana.
The way I was using it wasn’t its intended way, but for short distances it gave me a glimpse of what my mana sense would be capable of at higher ranks.
I myself seemed like a sun with three different colours. All of my bonds seemed to have a mix of these three colours. It was so interesting to see the bond lines so clearly. What surprised me was that I could now sense everything I was connected to, and they also seemed to have just a hint of my mana.
Then I found something weird. Some of the electronic communication lines seemed to have black mana tendrils connected to them. As I tried to focus more on them, all of them seemed to fade away. Quickly, I sent what I saw to FH. She went through her database, quickly finding a match to what I described.
It seemed that it was a type of skill that would allow people to tap into electronic communications magically. So, they were spying on me. At least they were competent enough to do so. This means they weren’t naive, which was good news.
Now we had a way to see if someone was magically trying to spy on us. It seemed that this device was more useful than I expected. One thing I wasn’t going to do was try to sense further out using this device, as that would probably break some laws.
Stepping back, I looked at this device. It took quite a lot of mana to even do this, and it was fascinating to sense inside the device to see all the different structures that looked completely alien to me, as none of it worked like regular technology.
We could get more use time out of this if I were to buy mana batteries, but then we would be giving away our ship’s position. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.
Overall, this was something needed and would help me start understanding how mana tech worked. There was no way I was going to start adding more mana tech to our ship as most of it required mana batteries. Also, I had no idea how to even go about fixing tech like this.
There were places where mana tech was incredibly useful. So, there was a market out there to sell mana tech if I ever figured out how to build it. This device alone cost quite a lot, nearly 62 million mana credits. Who knows how much even better mana tech costs.
Building a decent ship really made you feel poor.