"You think it's meaningless, right?"
After ten years, Edward stood before him once more.
"
'Whatever I do, the rock doesn't move.'
'After ten years of trying, I'm still in the same place.'
That fact should be ironclad in your head by now."
The last time it had been vague, but Ashen could see it clearly now. Edward was getting haggard.
"On the physical side, I reckon you've also hit a wall. So even the last bit of meaning was lost."
Despite his usual confidence, despite the way he still stood tall, Ashen was sure he wasn't alright.
'So I'm not the only one suffering here.' Ashen thought with an emotion that should have been… amusement? After ten years of suffering, he wasn't so sure how that would feel anymore.
"But."
'There it is.'
"...Is that all?"
Ashen knew what was coming before it was said. Edward had said the same thing the last time he visited.
"So what if it's purposeless? If you're going to falter here, you might as well falter when you meet them."
"You've already met one of them, right? Those incomprehensible phenomena that one can only be helpless against."
"To be honest, I still don't understand how you were able to triumph over it. But one thing is certain, the current you cannot do that."
"Not without at least overcoming this feeling first."
"The endless struggle against meaninglessness here mirrors the struggle against the incomprehensible, after all."
'...Something incomprehensible.' Ashen was reminded of Secrets; the helplessness he'd felt when he first laid eyes on him. That endless mana, paired with its almost childish malice. It still sent goosebumps down his spine whenever he thought about it.
The only reason he was alive today was that he had combated that unfathomable existence with something equally impossible.
"..."
As always, Edward left silently when he saw Ashen contemplate his words.
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'Haaah…'
Edward was slowly but surely becoming a substitute for his conscience. Every time Ashen decided to accept this new life of his and stop trying, he came.
And despite everything, Ashen found himself igniting his will once more.
Even without Edward, he was sure he would have stood up again on his own eventually. There was always that stubborn, tiny will in the corner of his mind that kept fighting with everything it had.
It was unextinguishable. But how much time would he waste until it pushed through the haze and made him strive again?
Edward's words were nourishment for it. And by the end of each reminder, Ashen found himself willing to keep fighting the meaninglessness once more, against all odds.
'Let's see.'
He kept staring at his physical level until he honed in on his mana level.
Mana: E+.
'Let's try fixing that.'
To fight meaninglessness, the answer he'd arrived at was straightforward: find meaning in anything available. And there was plenty of meaning in raising his mana stat. More mana meant more power behind the physical enhancement, which meant a better chance of lifting the rock off his shoulders.
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'I said that, but this looks like it's easier said than done.'
The problem that had haunted him from the start of his journey had come back to rear its ugly head. His half-crippled mana circuits.
This was also the reason why his mana stat refused to rise accordingly despite ten years of mana gathering.
Most of it was just lost due to half the circuits near his heart being damaged.
In fact, parts of them had already healed due to Somatic Autonomy. The physical parts, at least. The problem is that running mana through them was the same as running mana through regular blood vessels.
They didn't act as magic circuits' pathways. It was as if he were manually running mana through any other part of his body.
The only good thing about this is that there was no pain anymore in those parts when mana passed through, aside from a slight ache.
As for the reason they didn't regain the capabilities as adapted pathways, Ashen could only theorize that, due to the circuits being in an ethereal state between the material and the spiritual, he would have to fix both sides for it to count.
For now, Ashen knew that he didn't have the tools needed for it, so he approached the problem from another angle.
'I'll just work on my mana gathering technique until it compensates.'
4.3 Other skills:
Heartforge Cycle (Skilled+)
The base of this technique was built by the Kingmaker himself, and its core was efficiency.
Edward knew of the state of his circuits back then, so he built this in hopes that the little mana he gathered every time he breathed would be utilised to its utmost.
But that thought had become redundant with his Mana Authority in play. At least in the compressing and cycling stages. Breathing had nothing to do with how he manipulated mana.
The technique was composed of these three stages. Breathing to gather mana in a certain manner, cycling it through the upper and lower veins of his circuits, then gathering it in the heart for refining.
In the next cycle, one would have to compress the mana previously gathered in the heart to increase one's capacity. That process would repeat until compressing any more becomes impossible with the possessed mental strength and mana manipulation level.
'But I've got both in spades… so let's see how far I can push this.'
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The first hurdle was unsurprisingly the disgustingly low amount of pathways leading to his heart.
But Ashen wasn't bothered. If the gathering rate of mana was low, so be it. He had all the time in the world right now.
But he couldn't say the same about compression.
His heart was able to only hold 10% of its normal capacity as the other 90% were crippled.
'Then I just have to squeeze that 10% to its utmost,' he decided.
The space where mana compressed was circular, so Ashen took a page out of nature's book and mimicked how sunflower seeds worked. He made the incumoing mana into his usual thin thread shapes and stacked them into a spiral packing pattern using the golden angle.
Then he started compressing more and more threads, and to his fleeting happiness, the idea seemed to work as any overlap was prevented, while the threads were perfectly even.
He spent days doing the same thing with utmost care and precision, until eventually…
Ding—!
[3. Physical Level]
Mana: D-
Ashen looked at the new improvement but remained unimpressed.
'Well… this is good anyhow, but upgrading it from here on is going to be harder. Since there is no more space in that 10%.'
After thinking about it for a whole day without a lead, Ashen decided to shelve the thought and concentrate on something else.
Regeneration.
The Mana stat wasn't only capacity, it was also how fast you could regenerate that same capacity.
Ashen's idea was to shape the breathed-in mana into countless screw shapes to reduce friction as it traveled through his system.
The second and main idea was to infuse his intent into the unrefined mana. The task was a hundred times harder than doing it on mana refined personally by him, and that would have stomped the old him.
However, for the current him, after manipulating a billion mana threads, a breath of unrefined mana was almost funny in comparison.
And so… with each breath, he ordered the new energy to move faster.
Unrefined mana was known for its random and haphazard movements, so even with his intent, it still looked sluggish in its execution.
But Ashen remained steadfast.
Day after day, he kept at it. But the meaning behind his intent deepened. At first, it was a flat 'go faster', then it was coupled with a 'do not wander'.
'Stay in line.'
'Follow the path.'
'Do not misbehave.'
'Be obedient.'
It was like dealing with a naughty child. His intent evolved from ordering it to coaxing it, bit by bit. And as the days turned into months, something new happened.
The previously refined mana moved on its own. Guided by his persistent intent.
They gathered on checkpoints of his functioning pathways and dragged the unrefined mana by combining with it and influencing it to go faster.
This also made controlling it easier for Ashen since a seed of his refined mana existed within the unrefined screw-shaped energy.
Like worker bees, the threads spread out, caught the breath of mana, and came back to the hive that was the heart.
The process was fast indeed; what had taken ten minutes to refine took a one now, but it looked too inefficient in Ashen's eyes.
'But don't I have something for that as well…?'
He looked at the newest section of his status.
[5. Conceptual powers]
—The concept of Sloth Efficiency (Glimpse)
And so… he went on to make the process an ordered mechanism instead of a spontaneous one.
He gathered the threads by groups, gave them paths, and sculpted a complete system based on his circuits and the quality of his breaths.
All of this was guided by the extra sense he gained when he ascended to the sixth step. The one that allowed him to always choose the shortest path by instinct in anything he desired when he fused with the concept of Sloth for the first time.
He didn't stop and kept refining the process until the system worked like a well-oiled machine.
Unnoticed by him, the points on the smiling spear's shaft grew until they represented fifteen years.
By that time, the system was so smooth, so efficient, that it didn't look natural anymore.
…and of course it wouldn't. A foreign concept had influenced it after all, making it supernatural in nature.
And when infused with a concept, a skill has no choice but to… ascend.
4.3 Other skills:
Heartforge Cycle (Masterful-)