chapter 108
I managed to stay away from doing anything productive for nearly three hours, but my legs started to get restless, bouncing up and down constantly, until it annoyed Lola so much that she finally gave me mercy and allowed me to start at least looking at what we got from all the portals we raided.
While I had been able to loot during the state I was in, it was still less than optimal. It was clear that we needed to take things a bit slower in the future.
We ended up with eight skill stones. None of them were probably anything special, but for half of them, we had no idea what they actually did. The skill stones that called to me weren’t actually useful. The best one was a resistance skill stone, but I already had that particular one.
FH has been trying to track down a skill stone tester, but no luck so far. We do have one way of getting one, but that would require us to have a lot more adventurer guild points, so we could buy one that they offered in their exclusive shop.
We would have to clear about 270 water dungeons, which would be a long time but doable, so eventually we will have one.
We also had literally tons of monster and gathered materials that could be processed. We would need to go through everything and see what we should use as is and what we should refine further.
The calculus of that was pretty simple. A perfect example was the extremely hard scales we got from our first outage. One scale that was about the size of my palm would turn into a tiny nugget of metal after being processed.
Now that metal wouldn't be that much stronger than the scale, although a lot more flexible as to where you could use it. So instead of using up that extremely good scale to get a bit of extra metal, it’s a lot better to just use that scale as armour plating for our combat units.
From this portal run, a lot of what we gathered we were going to be using to upgrade our current units. This would improve their survivability tremendously with very little extra work for us. Everything leftover would go into the refinement process.
There would always be exceptions, as some of the materials we get, especially if they’re from monsters that use skills, would go into storage. Those could be used to upgrade strong units or kept to be sold later on, as they would be more valuable as they were.
Bob was going to handle most of that. It’s something he really enjoyed doing. Lola would be working closely with him, as she would have her own projects that required portal materials.
Bob has already sent me quite a long list of portal materials to be looted. The amount of credits we were bringing out like this was stupid. If things continued like that, it would soon be time to start upgrading even the ship.
Still, we shouldn’t stop pushing. Thanks to FH, we have quite a good understanding of the political situation, as she is quite tapped into this city as a whole, but especially this town. We have already made some quite powerful enemies here, so we need to continue to strengthen ourselves.
“Bob, get everything offloaded. Maintenance, run full diagnostics on the ship and every combat unit. The deadline is five hours. After that, we will head out to clear more portals.”
My command was sent out to everyone. Lola immediately stopped what she was doing and looked at me displeased.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“I thought you were going to take it easy for a while?”
“We will be taking it easier. We won't be rushing as much as earlier.”
“Captain, before you go, come visit me,” Bob communicated back.
“Will do,” I sent back.
“Lola, I will leave you here. I will need to go see what Bob wants. Afterwards, I’m going to go and do some easy skill training, nothing strenuous.”
“Just don't go overdoing it again.”
I gave her a nod and left, heading down to the first floor of the ship and out towards where Bob had set up his command centre.
Bob’s command centre was filled with screens, with many drones looking at them, and at the central table, he sat surrounded by at least a dozen.
“Wouldn't it be better to use virtual displays?”
“I have them too, but it’s too much micromanagement. Having a physical screen seems to do a better job.”
“So what did you want me for?” I asked.
“I have managed to get a few more skill stones that might help us. See if any of these call for you,” he said while pulling out seven skill stones.
Unfortunately, only one was calling for me. “Only the Extended Command skill seems to work for me.”
“Well, at least that one works. I really thought that Extra Range was going to work, but I will try to find more. Maybe ones with the extended prefix will work better,” Bob said while tossing me the one skill stone that I could absorb.
“How many skill stones have you already been able to get us?”
“Altogether about 70 now. It's quite hard to find good enough ones that we could use or sell later on, but this being a border town, there's a pretty decent amount of supply coming in.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. I saw the latest report FH uploaded. Almost 1000 portals cleared a day in just the area associated with this town. Those are some impressive numbers.”
“They really are, and about 8000 a day for the entire moon. Although that number pales in comparison to how many portals are run down on the planet. I’ve looked into how much we could get from a single supply run down to the planet. It's easily 40 million at the minimum.”
Bob seemed quite excited about that, and I could see why. That’s a lot of credits to be gotten for about a day's work, where only a few hours were possibly dangerous.
“Still a lot of upgrading to do before we reach that point.”
“That is the case indeed,” he said with what I could only call a shit-eating grin. Damn, he was really enjoying all of this immensely, but so was I.
I headed back to the meditation room to crush the skill stone to start absorbing it.
It was always interesting to absorb a skill because you would then understand so much more about it. Extended Command did exactly what the skill name suggested. It now allowed me to command directly from further away that including a proper bonded command.
It did need proper testing, but it should allow me to gather mana from my combat units from further away, with many other benefits as well.
This fitted nicely into my mind affinity, although I could have put it into my mechanists as well, but I didn’t. Hopefully, I will be getting better skills for that affinity.
As always, before I started my skill training, I tried to use my Sense Aura skill, immediately expecting my 6th sense to warn me not to use it. To my surprise, that didn't happen. It seems that my mind had gotten strong enough to not cause a backlash from using the skill.
As I activated it, I understood why I needed to wait to get stronger. Even now, my mind was straining from the flood of sensory data. The world that I knew changed shape. It was somewhat similar to when I used mana sense fully, with the world being a lot more colourful and a lot of regular visual data disappearing.
Instead of there being swirls of colours like with mana, most of the world was dark. The colour that was there came in the form of burning flames. My own flames burned quite strongly.
There were many different colours my flame emitted. There didn't seem to be any color pattern that I could recognise. When I looked around, I could see distant flames coming from the surrounding buildings where I knew other people were.
As I concentrated more, I could see flaming trails that were so faint as to basically not exist. The reason why I could even perceive them, I suspected, was because they followed the same pathway as my bonds did.
Unlike my bonds, only a few of them were lit up like that. The strongest one was going towards where Lola currently was. As I looked towards that location, I also saw a miniscule flame, barely there, constantly flickering out. As I continued to look at it, it looked like a miniscule version of my own flame.
Then my 6th sense warned me, and I quickly stopped using this skill. As I once again came back to the regular world, I found myself thoroughly exhausted, with sweat running down my forehead. My inner sensors were screaming at me, as I was quite close to getting overheated.
That skill really wasn't a joke. It confirmed to me the suspicions that I already had. My mechanist affinity was lumped into the general mechanic affinities. Even with all the information we have gathered, the specific name of this affinity of mine still hasn’t been mentioned anywhere.
It seems to help impart a spark of my own soul into anything that I was bonded to, but more so into the truly complex AIs.
The implications of that were quite extraordinary, and I really hope that it would allow some of my bonded AIs the ability to use mana itself. Artificial life only differs from biological life in one aspect: they do not have a soul. But if I can lend them my spark, we might be able to sidestep that limitation.