Chapter 92 92: Amber of Life
"Halt your strike! Desist from liquidating my automaton!"
Ranni's voice exploded through the twilight of the vault in a frantic, surprised cadence, her silver-gloved fingers lunging forward to aggressively lock around Lucia's arm plate before his lightning could clear his leather.
As the towering mechanical shadow glided out from the absolute dark of the research hall, Lucia's tracking visors naturally mapped the all-too-familiar, horrific structural geometry of the machine—the truncated bronze chassis base, the slightly forward-leaning black iron torso cast in the silhouette of a weeping nun, the pale, completely expressionless porcelain face mask, and the multi-jointed iron arms extending outward from the flanks.
Yet, the critical tactical divergence separating this machine from the execution nightmares patrolling the volcanic rifts was the reality that this specific unit's limbs lacked the gargantuan, blood-stained chain-scythes hanging from its frames. It commanded a specialized, four-armed configuration engineered to mimic human structural movement, its wrists terminating in four impeccably carved, fine ivory hands. Its lower abdominal armor panel emitted a pulsing, deep blue glintstone glow, venting a series of freezing, localized wisps of alchemical frost into the air.
The massive automaton brought its tracks to a smooth halt directly fronting Ranni's slippers, a crisp mechanical click reverberating through its copper base. The heavy iron plates protecting its torso systematically popped open to the flanks—laying bare not a sequence of rotating spiked wheels and rusted caltrops designed for human bisection, but rows of meticulously cataloged, glass-bottled courtly beverages that had been thoroughly chilled by the internal frost mana.
The machine deftly extended its ivory fingers, harvesting two frosted flasks from its internal storage to respectfully present the assets to Ranni and Lucia's plates. It executed two rhythmic, rigid courtly inclines with its four arms before spinning its axis to swiftly glide back into the deep shadows, reclaiming its silent sentinel post within the dark corners of the laboratory.
"Honestly," Ranni muttered, her gloved fingers un-clapping the flask to draw a sip of the chilled starlight tea, her inner focus still registering a lingering fraction of aristocratic alarm. "Has your outland database never logged the data files governing a standard Carian domestic puppet? If that Ancient Dragon Lightning miracle had completed its discharge cycle across my floorboards, the ministries would have conformed my ledger to expend at least five thousand golden runes strictly to patch the chassis!"
"My apologies," Lucia muttered, scratching the silver scales flanking his horns with an awkward, genuine embarrassment. "My processors initial simulated a script where your house deployed these specific execution virgins strictly to enforce a military line across a battlefield. My senses suffered a microsecond lapse; my calculation assumed the machine had suffered a systemic logic corruption and gone completely out of control."
"The theater of open warfare comprises nothing more than the simplest, most primitive application for high-level cosmic sorcery, Prince. If the wheel of time turns to a watch where your boots clear the highways to enter the inner courts of Liurnia, your visors will log the metric stating that the magical puppets and advanced astrological machinery we engineer for state warfare account for less than one-fifth of our gross industrial inventory. The grand palaces, the casting workshops, and even the private apartments of the populace comprise the exact coordinates where these automated assets should administer their labor."
Tracking the path toward a heavily insulated storage quadrant, the Moon Princess muttered beneath her breath, her blue robe shifting. "Regrettably, the absolute majority of mainstream astrological matrices engineered across this epoch remain rigidly conformed to rely on raw glintstone crystals to maintain their active loops. Even the lowest-tier Glintstone Shards carry a market premium entirely too steep for the lower baronies, rendering a continent-wide distribution mathematically impossible for the current economy."
Monitoring her roll up the silk cuffs of her mage robes, her small hands aggressively rummaging through a dense mountain of iron-bound cedar crates, Lucia's curiosity sparked. "Identify the asset class. What specific target is your hand hunting across the storage?"
"By what manual of arithmetic could my fingers be chasing any alternate variable—" Ranni rolled her clear blue eyes toward his visor, her tone thick with a scholarly exasperation. "—The Primal Amber of Life!"
Predicting with absolute certainty that this dragon youth's internal libraries remained entirely bankrupt of basic astrological science, Ranni immediately pushed a sequence of clarifying data across his station: "Among the massive directory of raw glintstones capable of processing cosmic mana, if the standard Glintstone Shard scores as the lowest-ranking slave of the matrix, and the Comet Crystal represents an ordinary commoner of the realm, then the rare Sun Crystals and Pale Moon Shards comprise high nobility commanding a pristine, restricted bloodline index. Concurrently, the legendary Starlight Amber Nodes—which compress the absolute peak volume of un-filtered cosmic magic power within their cores—undeniably occupy the rank of the Imperial Royal Family."
"And nested deep within those Starlight Amber repositories, there manifests an exceptionally tight, logic-breaking tier of anomalies that have permanently absorbed the baseline aura of the world's primeval Vigor. They command the most abundant, terrifyingly pure concentration of primary mana power logged across civilization. If my lips must forge a baseline analogy your mind can parse: these nodes comprise the mathematical equivalent of us demigod heirs who occupy the absolute summit of the sovereign dynasties."
While delivering her academic lecture, Ranni's fingers finally unearthed a heavy, masterwork mithril chest secured at the absolute bedrock of the storage row. Her palms un-latched the locks, swinging the lid back to expose a colossal mass of radiant, golden starlight amber—measuring the precise dimensions of a human skull—resting quietly upon a plush velvet cushion.
Even with his internal magical pathways locked in a state of absolute, non-responsive stasis, the exact watch the lid cleared the chest, Lucia's sensory grid registered an immense, suffocating tidal wave of pure primordial power and un-fused vital energy vibrating across the gap.
"This solitary piece of Primal Amber of Life out-values the aggregate material treasury Her Majesty Queen Marika hand-delivered to my palace servants this week by an infinite premium, prince. If my mother's guild masters wove this exact core into the central engine of a thirty-meter-tall Gargoyle War Golem, the machinery would possess the constant voltage to enforce a defensive perimeter for fifty winters without requiring a single maintenance watch," she said, her voice carrying a small, genuine shard of aristocratic heartache at the expenditure.
"Very well... the parameters are finalized—" Ranni gritted her small teeth, forcing her focus past her financial pride as her palms carefully lifted the golden amber from its silk bed, migrating the mass to settle atop a claw-shaped bronze stand forged from an un-cataloged meteoric metal in the far corner of the room. "Align your boots to my center."
She escorted Lucia toward a massive, permanently solidified geometric array etched deep into the limestone flags of the laboratory floor. "Your chassis is conformed to drop its center of gravity directly onto the central node of this circle. Within a briefwatch of the clock, my pathways will initiate a full-voltage channel to discharge the raw mana clutched within the Amber of Life directly into the circuits of the grid. Your intellect must then deploy the exact methodology your spirit relies upon to sense and aggregate Erdtree divine grace—mobilizing your internal mental focus to forge an absolute harmonic resonance with the external currents. If the equations preserve their compliance, the un-bracketed cosmic power clutched within this amber will be successfully compiled and transformed into your personal Primal Sorcery Core."
"Hold the line—" Lucia interrupted, his boots freezing before the boundary line of the array. "Your own vocabulary just stated that this Amber of Life comprises an irreplaceable, world-class asset class. My intent was simply to isolate a baseline methodology to trigger a standard magical awakening. Squandering an absolute treasure of this magnitude across my adolescent pathways comprises a catastrophic waste of state resources."
"What specific data does your primitive mind command regarding high-level sorcery?!" Ranni glared at his visor, her blue pupils flashing with an un-yielding, fierce courtly authority that refused to concede a single inch of the floorboards. "The gross volumetric mass and qualitative purity index defining an operator's Primal Sorcery Core carry an absolute, non-negotiable importance for every aspiring mage across this continent—the metrics verified during this initial awakening window will mathematically dictate their ultimate developmental ceiling across the remainder of their history. Regardless of how preternaturally massive a sorcerer's genetic talent scores, zero champions can bypass this rule of the cosmos."
"The watch my twin brothers and my own frame initial opened our internal pathways, our houses systematically sacrificed a duplicate piece of the Amber of Life to lock our baseline cores. Although the historical records state that the absolute majority of the Ancient Dragon breed command zero biological capability in the sector of glintstone processing, your scales still represent the solitary, un-diluted Ancient Dragon Empyrean drawing breath within Farum Azula. Perhaps your system possesses the necessary variables to violently shatter the ancestral shackles of your racial talent?"
Monitoring her defensive, highly reluctant facial expression, yet tracking the absolute, un-chipped resolution vibrating through her voice, Lucia registered a deep, genuine warmth shifting through the channels of his heart.
Backed by the automated, law-overriding progression frameworks of his Memory Battlefield, his modern consciousness clutched a hundred percent certainty that neither the biological limits of his draconic genome nor the qualitative parameters of his primary mana base were worth a single point of strategic anxiety. His cheat codes would permanently engineer a path to resolve any bottleneck simulated by the setting. Even if his future training loops genuinely demanded the integration of Starlight Amber, it would be entry-level work for the supreme ministries of the Sky Temple to hunt down a handful of pieces across the outer rifts.
However... right at this specific watch of the clock, locked against the irresistible, fierce intensity characterizing the adolescent Ranni, his memory channels inexplicably replayed the adorable, haughty phrases articulated by the tiny porcelain Witch Ranni doll during their high-stakes dialogue lifetimes down the future timeline behind the screen: "Your actions have hand-delivered a distinct shame to the name of the Witch Ranni... my authority is mathematically forbidden from permitting your jaw to articulate a refusal."
He dropped his silver eyelashes, his analytical engine turning the variables over for a brief watch, before lifting his face to lock his silver eyes squarely back into the girl's beautiful, abyssal blue pupils, his voice emerging in a serious, deeply respectful cadence. "My system accepts the layout. Proceed."
Ranni's rhythm caught for a handful of seconds, her processors momentarily stunned by the sudden, near-monolithic solemnity mapping the dragon youth's courtly posture. Shaking her blue robes to break the spell, she executed an impatient wave of her gauntlet. "In that event, desist from expending further watches across the floorboards. Secure your station at the center of the array—if your pathways fail to trigger a stable magical awakening after my hand completely liquidates a premier piece of my family's amber, your outriders had best prepare to auction the deed of Valeria Hall to settle the administrative debt you carry to my house!"
Watching Lucia drop his mass onto the central node of the geometric array to regulate his internal respirations, the princess wove her robes across the flags to approach the claw-shaped bronze stand, her slender palm dropping flat against the smooth, cold surface of the golden mass. Strings of high-density indigo glintstone mana poured from her fingertips, and the entire gargantuan block of the Amber of Life instantaneously ignited with a blinding, incandescent golden solar radiance!
HUMMM—!!!!!
An incredibly dense, rich, and terrifyingly pure cosmic energy began to violently churn and bubble inside the crystalline matrix of the amber, its currents screaming to rupture the molecular boundaries of the core to escape into the atmosphere. Right within that microsecond of volatility, the meteoric bronze support—having absorbed the regulatory frequency of Ranni's sorcery—flared its runic circuits, projecting an absolute, spherical kinitic barrier that tightly insulated the amber's perimeter.
A few seconds later, the immense, explosive magical payload blasting outward from the core smashed head-on into the inner face of the spherical seal. Achieving zero progression points across several consecutive expansion attempts, the raw mana was systematically conformed to redirect its velocity, flowing along the carved alchemical channels etched into the bronze support to pour directly into the limestone circuits mapping the floor, before violently cascading into the primary energy-gathering array beneath Lucia's boots!
Lucia had already mobilized the full mass of his mental focus, weaving a highly sensitive, microscopic sensory network around the perimeter of his nervous system. Suddenly, his internal tracking grid registered an external energy field of an extraordinarily high, logic-breaking qualitative purity index—an asset class that shared zero wave-lengths with the natural Divine Grace of the Erdtree—wrapping around his flesh like a massive, liquid silkworm cocoon that had instantaneously formed across the space.
At this exact cross of data, his newly harvested High-Tier Magic Perception Talent finally encountered the necessary environmental voltage to ignite its processing loops.
His spiritual energy wove through the incoming currents, establishing an absolute, flawless harmonic resonance with the ambient mana streams in the span of a single microsecond—looking exactly like two world-class musicians raising their palms in perfect alignment to execute a flawless, zero-error orchestral concerto across a grand theater!
The immense volume of mental power that had achieved resonance was rapidly, systematically refined into his own Primal Sorcery Core, before the active mana columns surged wildly into his primary venous pathways, establishing its territory as a monumental, third independent energetic force operating directly alongside his Vitality and Divine Grace.
Amidst the roaring, cataclysmic waves of magic power expanding through his channels, Lucia's focus suddenly registered a violent, sharp distortion tracking the coordinates of his consciousness. The next microsecond, the absolute dark defining the underground research vault vanished from his tracking networks in a blinding flash, and a vast, boundless, familiar gray starry sky completely saturated his optical centers.
This coordinate... his modern processors blinked in absolute shock. My consciousness has been forcefully thrown back into the primary interface of the... Memory Battlefield?
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