51 - Chapter 50 - Day 2160

  More than 10 days had passed since Adya’s meeting with Rory. She had spent that time on her research priorities. It was surprising what could be achieved in ten days when they were hyper focused. The first major change was that Adya with the help of Sai had started on the road to tier 3.

  It was not a pleasant process. The passive skill that had been temporarily created and was running using one of the cores was designed to make the process as painless as possible, but even then there was only so much that could be done when the process necessitated creating multiple new circulatory systems in the body. The actual process of creating the tier 3 system was relatively straightforward, if slow. The problem was the physical anchor that was required. By necessity the anchor was on the existing veins, arteries and capillaries. Part of the process was to turn off the pain receptors, then draw the new energy conduits, compress them into place, then turn on the pain receptors. This cycle was continuous as it slowly moved forward. The issue came from when the pain receptors were turned off and then on. The changes caused acute pain, and though Adya could adapt pretty fast, it was like someone was poking her with hot needles constantly with the location changing.

  It had reminded Adya of her lives when she had suffered through drawing her meridians for the first time. It was a truism that the brain was designed to forget certain kinds of pain. She remembered hating it the first time around too. Now she would have to suffer this for over two years as the meridians suffused her being. She just hoped that she would not have to go through this again. Still the process was underway, it would get her to the peak of tier 2 without her having to spend the entire time in meditation. That left her free to improve her energy control. She would need to substantially increase her capabilities in that area if she wanted to continue to grow her capacity.

  Once that process had been successfully automated, and initiated, Adya and Sai had turned their attention over to the next challenge. How to create artifacts directly. The first step of the process was actually very simple. The Formation Scribe skill allowed Adya to etch any material with the formations. That included anything that would be considered a quill/ink combination. She had tried it with an etching iron, a version of acid, with various types of ink, even with mana, stamina and willpower directly. They all worked, and with some refinement for the slight difference between processes, the quality all reached the same level.

  However that was only the first part of the process, though to others it would be the more challenging aspect. Adya had also worked on various shaped plates that proved the skill was versatile enough to work on any two or three dimensional shape. Sai had posited that there should be a version that would allow her to move into other dimensions, but again that idea had been shelved for the time being.

  The next step was to create the actual shape of the items. Adya found that using her Environmental Dominion she could make certain changes intuitively. She could use her control over the energies to cut and join different pieces of the same material to create a shape. So she could put together multiple steel plates to create a box for example. This quickly started to change as she pushed her skill’s abilities to the limit. Using simple pressure she could increase the malleability of the materials to the point she could then reshape them. Different materials reacted differently to the different energies, and that required a lot of testing to work out a baseline for the different materials that Rory had provided. The only saving grace was that Adya was able to recycle the materials, another use case that trained her skill.

  This combination of processes had allowed her to iterate through thousands of examples. Where her processes failed was when she tried to integrate multiple different materials. The issue was that in the normal course of events the materials would require either special adhesives or processes to complete the process, and Adya had neither to hand. If she forced two different materials then she ended up creating an alloy. Though Sai had details of how to create alloys and layers plating, her manual manipulation was still rudimentary at best. The limitations also seemed to be counter intuitive. The training had given her skill gains with the Environmental Dominion skill reaching level 86. Still pushing the skill was getting harder and harder and Adya felt that another evolution would be required to gain the finer level of control she needed. Each level also took increasing amounts of trial and error, and more practice. To get down to the molecular level or atomic level would require a complete rethink of her current approach.

  Still she could create shapes from single materials, and that still gave her the flexibility to try a few versions of her artifacts. Without a void metal in place, the core was not shielded, but it did allow her to test her ideas with physical attempts. She found a few issues that were not obvious in the design that stood out in the physical recreation. If nothing else, it gave her the ability to rapidly prototype any future artifact designs. It would also allow her to rapidly create formation plates.

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  For most people that would already be substantial progress for only ten days, but Adya was not most people. She had also started work on testing the differences between formations and passive skills that she had created. She realised that in essence the only difference was one of language. The skills worked on what could be considered system language. The formations, arrays, runes and other variations all had their own language. The design effectively converted intent into a particular language. She also realised why she was able to create soul marks. Her refined formations had a lot of gaps in the language. Sai had effectively created her own character set, based on the design principles to fill in those gaps. Then Sai had proceeded to create her own combined language, as confirmed by the system itself.

  However, what they had not realised was the system was also able to interpret intent directly. This had led the system to convert some of the instruction sets, like the desire to split the functionality from the formation, and the desire to obfuscate and hide the formation into system language and therefore create a system effect. Obviously without understanding the full language set, this process would be somewhat accidental. Still it was a starting point for further research. Adya and Sai would need a lot of data on the system language itself with the only question being where to start to gather that. Her own passive skills were a good starting point.

  As Adya was thinking through her next steps, there was a knock on her door. Sally entered to inform her that a delivery from Rory had finally arrived. It was too large for her to carry, and so had been placed in an empty room for her.

  Adya postponed her plans and moved to the room to see the artifact. The main part was one large unit on legs. There was an input side that could be filled with mana stones, the other side had a chute for the mana coins to come out. The middle section had a hinged door that could be opened to access the core. There were also a half dozen spare cores placed on a table on the side. The first thing Adya did was to test how easy it was to remove and replace the cores. Rory had added a lock to the design to prevent the removal if required. Given it was the most important part of the entire device, that was an addition that Adya was happy to see.

  Once she had checked the basics, she opened and checked the cores themselves. She took the first core, filled it with mana stones, stamina stones and willpower stones. She sealed the core and tested to see if she could detect anything in the core. Thankfully the layered shielding seemed to work as intended.

  The next thing she wanted to test was the anti tampering part of her design. She took one of the cores and created the formation that would destroy the inside if opened without her permission. She had iterated this design and thought she had managed to create one that would actually use the system to validate that permissions. Since she intended to set the permissions to only her, it was an easy intent to set. The instruction was as simple as it could be. Initiate this formation if the core is opened by anyone who is not her. She could have tried to have the system destroy the insides for her too, but she was not confident in her ability to control that process. She was also not sure if her instructions could be overwritten by someone with a higher tier. So for redundancy she added another formation to work without system input.

  To save time in this iteration she only created the security formation. Once completed, she placed some energy stones to replicate the final set up. Then she called Sally to open the core. The formation was not designed to hurt anyone, only destroy the inside of the core leaving no evidence behind. Thankfully the formation worked exactly as advertised. Though there was one issue. Though nothing survived, not even the security formation itself, what was left was some powdered steel and compressed energy. The void steel layer had stopped the energy from dissipating. That would allow someone to infer her intent, but there should be no way to stop the destruction. It also should not give them much more than the fact she had mana and stamina in the core. It was more than she wanted to reveal, but there would be no simple solution to her issue.

  The void steel was required to prevent energy leaks and protect her designs from scans. The same now left a little evidence behind to point people in a potential direction. Still nothing was perfect. She hoped that the cores would require replacements and thus make their expensive investment worthless would temper some people’s desire to learn her secrets.

  Lastly, she created the full formation on both the outside and the inside of the core to test the final version of her design. It took her some time to create the full core. She also had to create the right sized stamina and willpower stones to power the device. Once she was satisfied with it, she inserted the core into the artifact and started her tests.

  Sai also noticed another issue, the addition of the void steel was really messing with original plans. The formation on the outside no longer had mana running through it. This meant that the formation would not degrade on a schedule. Adya once again had to reiterate the design. In any case the mana for the process was coming from the external mana stones, so minor design changes were enough to fix that issue.

  She also realised that there were a few issues of usability. The first was that there was no on or off switch. If mana stones were added the formation would just start. After thinking through the issue, Adya decided to modify the artifact with a simple solution. She would add a lever opened door that would stop the mana stones from reaching the core. This would stop the artifact from activating.

  Without a design plate the artifact would only use the default design. The test was not successful and no mana coins were created. Her updated core design was stopping her device from interacting with the mana stones. She would need to redesign the entire artifact from scratch.