Chapter 16: Installation

  “I really don’t think it will matter that much, its about quality, not necessarily how compressed it is.” Obby’s illusion body shook its head at him and pointed a tentacle-fingered appendage at the circular plate on the ground resting in front of them both.

  Well, then why are they called ‘liquid’ and ‘solid’ foundation stages if its not about compression?

  “That’s just how your squishy flesh brain is interpreting the information given to it by The System. You are a grade schooler, and the teacher is dumming down the concept of gravity for you, because you’re too dumb to understand space-time and euclidean physics.” Obby shook his head again, this time mockingly. His single eye rolled about comically in its socket, well... it would be comical, if it wasn’t so damn eerily creepy.

  Fine, explain it to me then.

  “Look, each Tier is a large qualitative leap in aether energy potency. As you’ve noticed. But the interim stages for Adept Tier are also small steps in quality as well. Gaseous, Liquid, Solid stage, is an easier way for your brain to understand the quality changes, so that’s how it receives the information. But its more complicated than that.”

  Okay, I get it, so I need to get a different aethergem if I want to make two of them? I can’t just use the mortal grade aethergem and hyper compress my aether to have it fit? I get it. Alex sighed and picked up the small metal disk from the ground.

  The disk was the item that Obby and himself had painstakingly been brainstorming and work-shopping for the last two hours. After going over [Glyphcraft] and [Alchemy] updates, and planning some things for his Wyrm-heart constitution, Alex had focused entirely on his new project.

  What he had going now though, was a rather large endevour which forced him make constant references to the scroll Sylvaris had left him, as well as the newly unlocked knowledge that Obby got access to thanks to his increased wisdom stat.

  Obby began drifting in slow circles around Alex as he worked, rotating around him like a crazed, lovecraftian fucking moon.“Yes! More than likely you could trade one with one of the mercenary teams. The gems are expensive, for sure, but they are also very useful in powering many, many different enchantments. So they probably have one.” He suddenly stopped orbiting and moved closer to Alex, nearly pressing is single large eyeball into Alex’s nose. “Or you can just kill them and take the aether gem, including all their other loot. It’ll be super easy, barely an inconvenience.”

  No random murderhobo-ing, we talked about this.

  “Fiiineee”

  Alex ignored Obby as he began pulling out his many tools; Glyph stylus, Echo Lens, mortar and pestle, and many various resources and ingredients. All was laid out carefully on the ground around him in a precise order, everything arranged exactly.

  He had done this enough times it was almost becoming a ritual, an obsessive arrangement, to the point Alex wondered if he would have become a serial killer in his previous life had he not had such great parents.

  The disk rolled over in his hands, and he could feel the faint hum of etched glyphs thrumming against his palm. To anyone else at Alex’s cultivation level, it was junk, an old “Basic Essence Siphon” barely good enough to charge a mortal-grade aethergem if you babysat it for a couple hours. He’d traded for it with Lance some weeks ago—back when survival meant grabbing whatever scrap of magic he could find—and he was trying to basically hand off resources and materials to his friends to make sure they could try keeping up with his growth. Now, though, with Obby whispering more advanced [Glyphcraft] knowledge in his mind, and Sylvaris’ scrolls finally making more and more sense, the Siphon Plate was going to be molded into something else entirely.

  “You do realize,” Obby purred in his skull, illusion-body orbiting him like some eldritch planet, “that this is the part in the story where the protagonist either ascends gloriously… or his chest explodes in a shower of meat confetti.”

  Alex pinched the bridge of his nose. Encouraging as always. Thank you so much Obby.

  He set the disk down, stylus in hand, and began scratching new glyphlines across its surface. The design wasn’t just random sigils, but tight, interlocking channels; the same pattern he’d forced onto his bodygate when he applied his [Lattice Spiral] enchantment. Except now he understood aether differently, and had far more knowledge on [Glyphcraft]. He tailored his added lines to mesh perfectly with his [Condensing Spiral] gathering technique.

  If it worked, the siphon wouldn’t just sip at aether like a broken straw anymore, he could effectively create a brand new bodygate from scratch. Artificial, yes, but functional. Another anchor to pull in aether, and more importantly, a way to force open one of the meridian points the System had been keeping stubbornly sealed. At least, that was the plan.

  “Of course, the meridian charging process is known to kill nine out of ten idiots who try it,” Obby added helpfully, his single eye twinkling.

  Alex didn’t look up from his work. Then it’s good I’m not an idiot.

  “That’s exactly what all the idiots said.”

  The stylus sparked against the plate as he burned in the last line of glyphwork, the pattern glowing faintly before sinking through the metal and settling into the disk like veins beneath someone’s skin.

  Around him, his tools still lay in careful order: echo lens, mortar and pestle, powdered reagents already blended into an alchemical slurry that would fuse the siphon plate to his body. Everything neat and precise. If someone walked up on him right now, they would think he was either inventing something brilliant, or preparing to carve a hole in his chest for shits and giggles. Honestly, he wasn’t sure which was more accurate.

  He exhaled slowly, lifting the upgraded siphon in one hand, the faint aether currents around the item tugging at his fingertips. It wasn’t finished, not yet, but the shape of it was there. It was the beginning stages toward crafting a second gate, a chance at more power. Or, worst case scenario, his ribcage exploding like a bad experiment in Devon’s [Glyphcraft] work.

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  Obby floated closer, tentacle-fingers wiggling together. “You know, I’ve always wanted to see what your heart looks like on the outside.”

  Alex glared at him. Not happening.

  “We’ll see.”

  It was now time for the big performance.

  Alex sat cross-legged, the disk gleaming in his hand, now coated in the alchemical mixture he had prepared. Every instinct told him not to do this. Every sane bone in his body screamed at him to put it down, bury the disk and the whole idea itself, and walk away. Which was exactly why he raised the disk behind him, and pressed it to the base of his neck, directly over his first meridian.

  “Just so we’re clear,” Obby hummed cheerfully in his mind, “again, the mortality rate for DIY meridian activation is—”

  Shut up.

  Obby and he had gone over the meridian charging process in quite some detail as Alex nailed down his artificial gate design. Each person had six meridians, which were specific cluster points of the soulgate aether lines, now Alex’s aether channels due to his re-purposing efforts. These meridians offered a high risk, high reward option to those in the Adept Tier.

  If one “charged” the meridian fully, they would receive a choice of a boosting ability from The Heavenly System. It sounded much more simple than it was, though. Charging a meridian point meant filling the clustered lines with aether energy, and filling the meridian until it is “broken open”, thus fully activated.

  The sheer amount of energy needed to do this seemed to be rather large, and required a certain potency or quality of energy as well. Someone who was freshly in the early stage of the Adept Tier, and had not managed to reach a base 20 intelligence, would essentially have no means to activate a meridian, for example.

  Alex, on the other hand, was in the middle stage, and had a rather high level of control on his aether. So he had a decent shot at completing the process.

  His problem wasn’t the quality of his aether, it was quantity. He didn’t have a mage core, and thus didn’t have the sheer aether pool that other mages did. It was why he had focused so much on efficiency and control in his spellcasting.

  So the aether siphon plate was his answer to this problem.

  It had a dual purpose; being his artificial gate, and also helping in supplying the meridian with the amount of aether he would need, hopefully.

  Failing this process wasn’t just about missing out on a power buff, but actually had serious potential consequences. Once someone began the process, they had to see it through, and failure was, as Obby had mentioned, usually a death sentence.

  The more aether put into the meridian, the higher the resistance and back-pressure the meridian would have, meaning it was harder and harder to maintain the further along one was in the process. Should one’s focus slip, or they fail to break through the resistance and complete the process, the backlash would be immense, as the meridian would eject all the infused aether back outward, only far more explosively.

  In totality, failure would mean exploding the meridian, resulting in death. And if by some miracle, death was not the result, the sheer resulting damage to their soulgate would leave one wanting death instead.

  So, all in all, Alex was going to be trying for not one, but two very risky, and utterly insane, procedures back to back. All in the name of getting more powerful.

  He goes nothing.

  He bit down on a strip of leather from his armor, braced his other hand against the aether siphon, and shoved.

  The edge of the disk wasn’t sharp, but the alchemical slurry he’d smeared along its underside burned like molten lava as it sank into his flesh. The muscles up and down his back all locked, every nerve shrieking at him all at once. Blood welled around the disk instantly, hissing as it mixed with the glyph-ink and alchemical slush.

  Keep going. He encouraged himself, fighting through the pain. His jaw ached against the leather as he forced the siphon deeper. The ambient aether around him, as well as the energy in his body, shivered in unison as a response, both energies drawn to the siphon like water through a drain.

  The disk settled completely under his skin and touched against the metaphysical line-cluster that was the meridian. At that moment, the glyphs on the disk flashed, merging the metal to the meridian through a complicated aether bond.

  A rush of alien clarity filled him, a clean pull of aether from the air around him, like an extra lung opening for the first time. The siphon locked in place, no longer a foreign object but part of him, a new gate humming in tandem with the old.

  Agony ripped through him as the siphon’s spiral lattice lit up, fusing the two halves. The integrated [Lattice Spiral] activated automatically, pulling ambient energy, as well as his own circulating aether into the new gate. His body bucked and convulsed, his heart skipped, then hammered twice as fast to keep pace with the sudden strain.

  “Ha! Look at you!” Obby was practically dancing in his head, eye dilated wide. “Like watching a slug get electrocuted. You’re beautiful.”

  Focus. Alex dragged air into his lungs, riding the pain, biting further into the leather between his clenched jaw. The siphon was drawing, pulling, gathering up energy and running it through the compression sequence carved in the siphon disk, then being dumped directly into the meridian.

  It had started to crack the meridian open, but the aether current wasn’t steady. It shuddered sporadically, it fought him, trying to collapse.

  So he had to give it more.

  His focus went to his new gate, his sixth sense spreading around him as he gathered up every bit of ambient aether he could, more than that even; all of it, he pulled on all of it.

  He couldn’t perform a nine-fold version of his gathering technique, but he had access to two gates now, so doubling up on the [Three-Fold Condensing Spiral] would have to do instead. Six braids formed behind Alex, three at his standard bodygate, and three forming at his new creation. When both condensed braids touched the energy surged in, feeding the implant with a steady torrent of aether. Aether circled, compressed, then shot into the siphon like bullets chambering into a rifle before firing them into his meridian like a machine gun. The metal disk groaned under the strain. His ribs and neck burned.

  He felt the meridian swelling, filling, but the pressure against him also grew, quickly rising to reach the strength of the aether he was pouring into it. He needed more, so he swiftly drained both of the aether gems in his bracer.

  Something deep inside him popped, not his bones, something else, a barrier or wall of some kind.

  And then it happened.

  The meridian point bloomed. Alex sagged forward, blood dripping from his neck and down his back, sweat soaking his shirt. His vision swam in hazy lines. He spat out the leather strip from his mouth, chest heaving. “It worked,” he rasped.

  “Oh, it worked,” Obby crooned, delight practically bubbling from the little pebble. “You just stapled a magical battery to your body and wired it into your soul. I think I love you, flesh-sack. Never change.”

  Alex wiped a trickle of blood from his chin, wincing as the implant pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. It wasn’t a clean, perfect procedure. But it was an increase in power. A second gate, another step forward;

  He pulled up his notifications.