An Unbound Soul

Grover boggled at my request.

"Please tell me you haven't tried to build something like that on your own?"

I briefly recalled the crater where my new house had once stood. Or, more accurately, slouched.

"No..." I answered honestly. After all, I'd only used a level one monster core.

Grover narrowed his eyes in suspicion.

"Well, maybe I built something that bore a slight resemblance. I used a level one monster core."

Grover sighed. "That won't have made any difference. A higher level core won't increase the maximum rate at which the decay crystal can process the mana. It would theoretically let it run for longer, but without some very careful design work—which I doubt you did—the crystal would consume itself with its own decay field long before the core's mana ran out."

... Oh.

"If I were to build this to the best of my abilities," he continued, stroking his beard as he pondered. "A high level core, multiple crystals, throttled mana pathways to avoid the crystals overloading, dissipaters and projectors to shield the device from its own decay field... The result would likely be capable of erasing a small town. It's too big a risk. There's no way it could be used safely."

"I wasn't intending to use it on this planet," I pointed out. "And things are very safe from accidental detonation in my [Inventory]."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that. Everything you've built so far has required an external mana source. This wouldn't."

... Oh, again. That was valid. And it wasn't like no time passed in [Inventory], however large the dilation. What would happen if one of these devices went off in there? Probably not the sort of thing I wanted to find out.

"Could the monster core be made detachable, so one could be inserted immediately before use?"

"I suppose, but even so... Whatever do you want something as dangerous as that for?"

"If anything hostile tries opening a portal, I can toss it through to close it. And make sure they don't open any new ones for a while."

Destruction on the scale of a town was more than I was aiming for, but I couldn't imagine they were running their operation from anywhere populated. Hopefully, it would wipe out whatever facility they were opening the portals from, and little else.

Grover's frown was easily visible even through his prodigious dwarven facial hair. "Fine. I'll build one. One. You are to keep it safely within your [Inventory] at all times, never to be removed except for immediate use. You are not to use it short of lives being in immediate danger. You are not to detonate it anywhere near people, on either world. And by near, I mean ten kilometres minimum. Swear that to me."

Woah. That got hella serious all of a sudden... Never before in this world of Law had anyone demanded I swear something. "I will not use it unless forced to. I swear," I promised, carefully leaving out the bit about not detonating it near people. If I ever was forced to use it, some people on Earth were going to find the remainders of their lives as brief as they were unpleasant. "But this is a little premature. We need to confirm they work on Earth first. Can you rig something with a low-powered water crystal that would prove if a full-powered decay version would work?"

"Aye, I can do that. When do you need it by?"

"A couple of days."

Grover nodded and turned back to his anvil, which I took as my signal to leave. Having that sort of weapon available wouldn't exactly make me feel less stressed about the idea of nefarious players with portal technology, but it would help me feel less helpless.

A couple of days passed, which I spent with Cluma continuing our training on floor thirty of the Obsidian Spires' dungeon. We were getting highly proficient at taking out pairs of the monsters, but a single attempt at a room of three had resulted in near disaster, ending in another self-immolation with a flame grenade and an emergency burst of spatial affinity that I couldn't completely defend myself from, finally teaching me what happened when a human got caught by raw spatial mana.

It was only an arm, thank goodness, because it turned completely to mush. Arteries, nerves and tendons were displaced, not quite hooking up to what they should be hooked up to. Blood pumped out into my flesh, flesh bulged through skin, the whole thing twisted and warped despite no bones being broken. [Regeneration] quickly stabilised it, once the affinity mana had gone, but it still dangled numb and useless, forcing us to abort our training session.

And that was why I found myself back at the Dawnhold hospital, with Cluma in a foul mood.

"Peter!" exclaimed Carys happily. "What have you done to yourself this time?"

"Do you really have to ask that with such glee?" complained Cluma.

"I accidentally my arm," I answered, ignoring the cat-girl.

"Accidentally what?"

"Haven't got a clue. Raw spatial affinity was involved, and now I don't think it quite qualifies as an arm any more."

"You really need to be more careful," she said while wearing a facial expression that made it clear she hoped I wouldn't.

"It was kinda an emergency. It was that, or be stabbed in the face by a level thirty monster."

"I told you we weren't ready for three at once," complained Cluma.

That was probably true, but we'd spent over a week not only stuck on the same floor, but not being able to increase the number of monsters we could simultaneously fight. It felt like our progress had completely stalled. The problem was that training on its own didn't achieve much. We were training to increase levels, but my skills were mostly maxed out already. I could train as much as I liked, but without another class change, I wasn't going to get significantly stronger. I really had stalled. The most I could do was boost [Weapon Style: Relentless Erraticism], which I'd gained one level in after that fight, along with one of [Extended Health Pool].

"I... Well, you were right," said Carys as she prodded my arm and invoked [Heal] to no effect whatsoever. "You have certainly your arm. I'm going to need to fetch Raymond."

Cluma's field of unhappiness intensified as Carys left.

"Seriously, you need to stop getting so dour whenever I get hurt," I complained. "It's going to keep happening if we keep pushing. It was our decision, and we knew it would happen."

"Yes, but you have other responsibilities you're neglecting. You're supposed to make contact with Earth again tomorrow!"

... Right. As usual, I much preferred throwing myself into a dungeon than worrying about invaders from Earth, or what lengths even our 'friends' would consider to prevent encroachment of the Law.

"I know. I haven't forgotten. And I do have plans."

Such as the magical make-a-town-go-away device Grover was building for me. Drop that in the middle of a city, and I could kill tens of thousands. At least.

It was perfectly understandable for me to not want to think about that, right?

Raymond turned up shortly after, stared at my deformed arm, cast his diagnosis spell and stared some more. "I can't heal that," he admitted eventually. "I'm not even sure what 'that' is."

"Huh?!" exclaimed Cluma, panicking.

"So, chop it off and grow a new one?" I suggested, keeping a far more level head.

"It's either that, or pay a visit to Jason."

"Fine. At least I can use [Detach]."

I peeled my armour off down to my waist to expose my arm—thankful that the rank five comfort enchantment let it stretch over bends that may no longer have been entirely three dimensional—and used [Detach] to sever it above the injury.

"Want to keep it as a souvenir?" I asked Carys, which was probably an inappropriate thing to say in front of Cluma, but it wasn't as if she'd want to keep it herself.

Carys looked at me weirdly, then scooped up the dead, warped arm anyway.

Raymond blasted me with [Major Heal], resulting in my stub wriggling and expanding as it synergised with [Regeneration] to help me grow back the missing limb.

ding

Skill [Regeneration] advanced to level 9

We managed to regrow it to my elbow before the spell waned in effectiveness.

"You'll need to return tomorrow to finish it off. Or do you want an overnight room here?"

"I'm... likely to be occupied tomorrow with institute business. I'll stop by the day after."

"If you say so. It's your arm," shrugged Raymond.

I could still use [Redistribute] to switch to the metal version if I needed both hands for something. Delving was off the menu, though, so we returned home instead, where I attempted to placate Cluma with enchanted steak.

... Wait. My monster-core-powered decay grenade had been significantly more powerful than my regular battery-powered version. So, what if, instead of inscribing mana batteries into the steak, I plumbed it into a monster core instead?

"What the hell was that? Are you okay?" exclaimed Cluma, throwing open the kitchen door in response to the resulting explosion. A lump of raw steak, weakly adhering to the ceiling only as a result of being flung at it very hard, chose that moment to detach, splatting on Cluma's head.

"The next level of enchanted steak. It... didn't quite work out."

Cluma poked the top of her head. It squelched.

"I can feel that," she muttered, removing her new hat and tossing it at me. "Now I have blood in my ears. I'm going for a shower. Then I'm going out for a walk."

"Sorry," I apologised as she turned around and stalked off, leaving me to ponder my failure.

Meat was certainly a poor medium for enchantments, but why? I was made of meat—one arm currently excluded—and I was fairly sure I was pretty good with mana.

I had a flashback to the very first time I'd tried to increase my mana regeneration rate, when I'd tried to shove mana through the walls of my thauma instead of through the valves. I likewise had a mana circulatory system. My mana wasn't uniformly dispersed throughout me, but ran through veins. Were animals and monsters the same? Was I making the same mistake as back then? The meat was kobold, which was both tasty and—here in Dawnhold, with a kobold-filled mana field on our doorstep—cheap. Monsters lived off mana, so surely they must have a circulatory system of their own?

I poked at the knowledge installed by [Disassembly], or rather, [Advanced Crafting] now. It had nothing to say about a circulatory system, but I did note no monsters had a thauma. Not that they needed one; they had monster cores. Didn't they more or less do the same job? Monster meat was supposed to have a core plumbed in.

I spent the next few minutes running ambient mana through a fresh lump of raw meat, trying to figure out how it worked. There were definitely pathways that mana flowed through more easily than others, but I couldn't see anything physical there. I supposed that made sense; in all the times I'd cut my hand off, I'd never noticed tubes sticking out that carried anything other than blood.

A few more minutes, and a monster core connected up to those points caused another explosion.

"Again?" called Cluma from upstairs, the volume of the detonating meat easily audible above the running water.

"Sorry!" I shouted back.

There had to be a way to do this... Maybe if I just turned the power down? I made a third attempt with the finest prick I could manage piercing through the monster core. And then a fourth with finer wiring. And a fifth, sixth and seventh, thankful for how much meat we had stashed in our preservation-enchanted food storage.

On the eighth, nothing exploded.

How did I ever reach the point in my life where I considered it a success if I was cooking steak and didn't blow anything up in the process?

Cluma, who had already left the house and returned in that time, poked her head in, sniffing.

"That smells... almost alive?" she commented, sounding confused. "Kinda nice, though."

"Are you sure you want to risk setting foot in here again?"

She pointed down, where she was standing in a deep shadow, presumably with [Shadow Strike] on a hair-trigger.

"Fair enough," I agreed, trying to fry the steak without the wires pulling out.

"And now it doesn't..." she added. "Alive, that is. It still smells nice."

Why had it smelt alive? Because there was mana running through it? If her sense of smell had been tainted by her new mana senses as well as her sight, she'd be used to living monsters being connected to a monster core. But if it smelt nice...

"Do living monsters smell nice, then?"

"Depends on the monster. Kobolds, yes."

"Have you ever tried eating one alive?"

That question earned me a Look.

"Flowers smell nice, don't they?" she snapped. "Why don't you go out and eat a field, then?"

"Sorry, I thought you meant nice as in tasty."

"No, I meant nice as in..." she paused and switched back to confusion.

"I mean, you obviously like mana-dense foods, and while they're alive, they're properly connected to their monster core. Me trying to artificially fill them with mana is kinda just copying their natural state."

Her head tilted to one side as her tail swished behind her in time with her thoughts.

"No, that's just gross. I am not eating raw meat. Cook things properly."

"What if I find you a fire affinity monster that comes precooked?"

Cluma vanished, activating [Non-detection]. I spun to face my own shadow, cast by the light crystal in the room, only to get a face full of water.

"Whulb?" I spluttered as I involuntarily leapt into the air, my tail puffed up behind me.

Cluma reappeared, holding some contraption that shone with water and air affinities to [Mana Sight].

"Wow. So it's not just the purring, but this works too!" she happily exclaimed. "Well worth going out to fetch. I should have asked Mum for it ages ago."

Wait... did I just get spray bottled?!