Path of Dragons - A LitRPG Apocalypse (BOOK TWO STUBBING AUGUST 15)

Isaiah peered at the monitor, which displayed a maze of tiny conduits. Some blazed with the current of ethera, while others conducted electricity. In a perfect world, the two would have worked in harmony, but anywhere they clashed, sparks flew. Thankfully, the system was designed for that, taking the best parts of both worlds.

There was a problem, though, and one Isaiah needed to fix soon or things would go extremely wrong very quickly. Even as he guided his tools – which resembled platinum tweezers but were actually made of inert metals that wouldn’t interfere with anything – he wished he’d taken the Tradesman archetype. That would have made his current task so much easier.

Instead, he’d picked Scholar, assuming that knowledge would equate to power. Then, he’d become a Technomancer, giving him a hybrid class meant to intertwine ethera-based technology with the machinery of the old world. So far, he’d managed it to a great degree of success, not only improving himself via a robotic leg and an artificial heart, but also by ushering Seattle forward and helping his people recover from what could only be called a rocky start.

And it put him on the radar of the mechaniques, who’d given him an elder core, increasing his power by no small degree. In a lot of ways, that was as important as any other benefit of his class.

But for a mechanique – which was what he’d become the second he’d gotten one of their cores embedded within him – progression was slightly different. He still had all the same lines on his status, but for him, cultivation was a more active process. No sitting around and meditating. No breaking the body down via various poisons, only to rebuild better and stronger. For a mechanique, cultivation was about active self-improvement. Slowly altering their inner workings until they reached the perfection of transcendence.

It would be a long process.

So far, Isaiah had only managed to reach the second tier on three out of the four aspects of cultivation, with only his Soul lagging behind. Considering that taking the next step in that category would require him to extend a complex pattern of wiring throughout his body, he was still stuck on the planning stage. If he proceeded too soon, he wouldn’t survive the implementation of those plans.

For now, though, he was working on something that would give him more power. Specifically, he was tinkering with the wiring of his artificial heart, which was the physical representation of his core. A complex piece of machinery that ran off his body’s naturally generated electricity as much as ethera, it was already a work of art that far surpassed the artificial hearts of the pre-transformation Earth.

But it needed to, with the strain that came with increased attributes.

Finally, he found what he was looking for – a miniscule stretch of burned circuit, no larger than a hundredth of a millimeter – and began his repairs. In the old world, doing so would have taken specialized tools, but for Isaiah, he only needed to use one of his abilities: