Chapter 35: Mana Gun
The forge was an organized mess, its walls lined with tools, sketches, and half-built prototypes. The air smelled of oil and metal, a testament to months of relentless work.
The magic gun lay on the workbench, its sleek frame of gleaming under a mana-powered lamp. Its barrel, etched with faint runes, housed a intricate mana conduit, and a slot at its core awaited the final piece — a Magic Crystal, pulsing faintly in Adrian’s hand.
The past two months had been grueling. The gun’s design demanded precision beyond anything he’d tackled before.
Starsteel was stubborn, resisting the forge until Adrian perfected the heat with custom bellows. The mana crystals shattered if the conduit’s alignment was off by a hair.
Adrian had burned through countless failures, each one a lesson, but the Tech Core’s [Blueprint Ascension] skill had been a game-changer.
Applied to the gun’s design in the first month, it refined the mana conduit, boosting efficiency and reducing crystal strain. The result was a weapon an overall better weapon with much greater expected performance.
In the second month, Adrian used [Blueprint Ascension] on the Communicator, elevating it from a basic voice-transmitter to a marvel.
Upgrading it to a 3-Star Magic Crystal extended its range to 20 kilometers — far enough to reach the Borin estate from Tulia.
But the skill’s true genius was in the redesign: the Communicator could now detect multiple devices within range, allowing group calls or connection to a central receiver.
Each unit had a unique ID, translated as a name, with signals encrypted by the Tech Core’s mysterious logic. Adrian had stared at the blueprint for hours, awed but baffled.
He could build it, but the system’s tech was leagues beyond his understanding.