Chronicles of the True Wizard

Felix channeled mana into his pocket home marble and pressed it against the wall of the town hall then stepped through. He illuminated the area with a simple light spell and held himself to the ground with a force spell. He also quickly grabbed the Demitium chunk that had floated itself into the air and brought it back to the ground. He didn’t have straps or anything to hold it down so he just left it and decided he would figure it out later.

He mentally made some notes on how he wanted his future gravity spell to be adjustable in case he had to deal with heavy objects like the Demitium. Ideally he would be able to turn it off for specific objects, but he wasn’t sure how that would work. He also realized he would need some sort of heat source along with light though he wasn’t sure where the heat was leaking out. In theory it was a closed system so the heat should remain in the pocket dimension but every time he walked in, it was a few degrees colder.

He tabled all that for now and resolved to look into it more thoroughly outside of the integration. Felix headed towards his tower and up to the library where he sat down in the most comfortable arm chair he had and entered his soul garden. He found Grim sitting on the circular wooden platform that floated in the pond reading some book.

Felix walked up to the edge of the water, “So how do I do this?”

Grim didn’t look up from the book he was reading, “Do you really want to practice on the souls you have now?”

“Oh shit. I was so excited to finally start doing this. Ugh… I’ll be right back.”

Felix immediately exited his soul garden, then his pocket home, the Atalus council building and finally Atalus itself. He flew upwards towards the massive forest to the north and immediately dropped down to the forest floor when he spotted a small pack of Uncommon Dire Wolves with levels in the low 200s. He made quick work of them with Lightning Bolts so they had no chance to dodge. He gained a single level which was disappointing but expected considering how trivial it was for him to kill them.

Felix stood on the forest floor with a dozen corpses, activated his soul and blood ring then simply watched. He stood in awe as streams of crimson red and golden white from each body entered the rings on his right and left hands respectively. He knew he could have moved around, he knew he didn’t need to stand still, but he did anyways. Regardless of how the rings actually worked, Felix mentally commended their creator because they did look damn cool.

Felix quickly touched his pocket home marble to the surface of a large tree and walked back up to this tower, leaving behind nothing more than dust in the forest. He once again settled himself into the most comfortable armchair he could find and entered his soul garden. He found Grim exactly where he had been when he left, though holding a different book this time.

Felix nodded, finally prepared, “Alright, mind walking me through this?”

Grim shrugged, though still didn’t look up from his book, “I can guide you through the basics. I don’t know much more than that unfortunately. In my universe, everyone did this to some degree with varying techniques. The knowledge wasn’t really forbidden so it wasn’t recorded in me.”

Felix shrugged and sat down, “I’ll take what I can get.”

Grim placed the book on the platform in front of him and looked up, “Alright first things first, you need to shift your attention or, consciousness rather, into the soul ring. Focus on one soul and try to rip out what you can. You know the basic structure of a soul, try sifting through it and separate out what you can use and what you can’t. In theory you could just take the entirety of their souls and incorporate them into yours but that would be problematic.”

Felix nodded, “Wouldn’t be fully responsive and I’d have more wolf like emotions and reactions?”

Grim nodded, “Among other things, yeah. The art is taking some while not taking too much. Even with your monstrous soul, you don’t want to be getting weird feedback from your outer soul or have it react in a weird way. It might add a bodily instinct you don’t want. Try to avoid that.”

Felix nodded again, “Gotcha. How do I know how much is too much?”

Grim shrugged, “You don’t, most people from my universe erred on the safe side taking only what they absolutely knew what safe. Getting as close to the line as possible, that’s how you get really good at it.”

Felix cocked his head, “Or you could just absorb a lot of souls right?”

Grim shrugged again, “Yup. That becomes exponentially harder the stronger you and they are though.”

“Gotcha, thanks.”

Felix sat down in a meditative pose in the sandy area of his soul garden, next to his conviction monolith and focused in on the ring on his left hand. It took him a few minutes to figure out just how to make it comfortable but it was so similar to his own soul space, that Felix was able to pull his attention into the ring faster than he had expected.

Looking around with his soul senses, Felix saw 12 small balls of what felt like golden white smoke. He could feel a bit of what the souls experienced and he got a lot of what he had felt from Nova before their D grade evolution. Separated by distance, just a short ways away from the 12 Dire Wolf souls that were grouped separately, Felix saw the remainder of Erolan’s soul.

From what he could see, it looked to be damaged. It wasn’t quite like his soul had a bite taken out of it but he could tell a decent chunk was completely missing. The edges of the soul were jagged and the sensations, emotions and instincts he felt coming from it were stunted and incomplete.

Even though it was clearly damaged, Felix could easily tell it was significantly stronger from even all of the Dire Wolf souls combined. He quickly confirmed it didn’t appear to be degrading then left the remainder of Erolan’s soul be for now and instead looked towards the Dire Wolf souls. He pulled one of the souls away from the others and just focused on analyzing it as best he could. The soul consisted of the core soul at the center followed by 3 other layers.

Felix had a hard time seeing through the outer layers so he started examining them from the outside and figured he would just peel them back one by one. The outer most layer seemed to be a layer that was just one step removed from ambient anima. It was soul matter that was essentially just stuck to the outside of the soul.

As Felix focused on and examined it, he started to form a pretty good idea of why. The outer most layer of the soul seemed to be ambient anima that held beliefs and experiences that resonated with the core soul. As the Dire Wolf walked around, this anima would stick to the outside of the soul like a magnet.

He had no idea if there was any value to this layer but he couldn’t find anything that indicated it had any and Grim didn’t know so he simply peeled it back and let the ring absorb it. The next layer was more of a natural defensive layer. It wasn’t overly complicated and was more like a layer of fat to protect the next layer than anything. As Felix pulled it back, it didn’t fight him or consciously resist him so Felix mused at it’s effectiveness as a defensive layer.

He thought about making a defensive layer for his own soul but he already knew it wasn’t necessary given the nature of his soul. It would also be clutter that Felix didn’t want around. He wasn’t sure if it would actively hurt him to have it in any way, but he also didn’t want any defensive layers like this one. If he was going to create a defensive layer, he wanted one that actively defended him or one that was more offensive and fought back.

He wouldn’t have used any of the Dire Wolves defensive layers anyways though so he simply tossed it away to be absorbed by the ring. The next layer, the one encasing the core soul, Felix knew had value. From his conversation with the Guru in the desert of the second quest dungeon way back in the tutorial, he knew this layer was supposed to hold all the relevant stats. The core soul would then hold other things like core experiences and the personality of the wolf, which wasn’t useful to him.

Felix carefully examined this layer and poked and prodded it until he had a rough idea of what it was. He took a look at his own soul and started to compare the two so he knew how to incorporate it properly. His own soul was a little different than the Dire Wolf’s, it was both simpler with less layers but at the same time, so much more complex.

He had his anomalous core soul at the center, the densest soul he or Grim had ever seen. The layer outside of that was similar to the Dire Wolf’s, he could tell it contained some of his stats, a lot of his dexterity and a decent amount of his vitality. It also contained some of his endurance and agility but only a small portion of his intelligence and a miniscule portion of his strength. It seemed to be warped through from the conviction he knew about and possibly others he didn’t.

From what he could tell, this layer of his soul was responsible for the will power to do things and his control over his body. The ability for his body to heal and not give up was strongly rooted in his soul while his ability to lift something heavy required a lot more of his body and only a modicum of willpower by comparison.

The biggest difference between his soul’s second layer and the wolf’s was structure and density. The wolf’s second layer was uniform in density and flowed around a little bit almost like it’s core soul was a planet and the second layer was the ocean covering it. That ocean flowed and moved with the winds, growing thicker and thinner as it morphed around the core soul.

Felix’s second layer, was almost like a solid. It did not morph or move about, as far as he could see. It was also structured such that the layer grew gradually thinner towards the outside. The densest area was right against his core soul but he had no what the structure meant or if it held any tangible benefits. Lastly, there was something he couldn’t quite pinpoint that simply felt different to him, he assumed it was his convictions though and just hoped they wouldn’t hinder the process.

The last layer of Felix’s soul was much like the Dire Wolf’s, consisting of mostly ambient anima that had stuck to his soul. The difference was that Felix’s layer was massive. He wasn’t sure if he should be considering it part of his soul at all but it was there.

He revised his theory about how that last layer was formed because if it just had to do with walking around, his wouldn’t have been so big. He figured it must have had to have something to do with strength of the soul. He ignored that for now and tabled it to think about at some other time.

Looking back to the Dire Wolf soul he had been working on, Felix started to more aggressively poke and prod the Dire Wolf’s second layer. He wanted to try and rip out all the emotions and instincts he could before he even thought about incorporating any of it.

He found areas that gave him the impression of a fight or flight response and how it would react in those situations, he removed those entirely. He found areas that cared for it’s pack, he removed that. He found another portion that held it’s experiences of being hungry, tired, angry and afraid. He completely removed those too.

He continued to sift through the layer until he found no sensation or experience at all and was left with a small piece of it’s soul that Felix pulled out of the ring and into his own soul. It was a small enough piece that Felix felt confident he could deal with any minor mistakes he had made.

He was easily able to push the small piece into the second layer of his own soul and then he watched. The small piece was quickly crushed and compressed against Felix’s core soul and slowly, the line between the piece he had just added and the second layer itself started to disappear. He quickly checked his stats and saw that he had netted himself a single point in dexterity and vitality. He wasn’t sure if he had gained nothing in the other stats or if he had simply gained less than a point. Overall though, he wasn’t dissatisfied with the result.

Though the stat gains themselves weren’t awesome, Felix wasn’t too concerned. This was his first attempt and he was pretty sure he could up his efficiency tremendously. He also considered how trivial it had been to kill the Dire Wolves and the fact that he could simply let his skills do the harvesting for him passively.

He was pretty sure the stat gains wouldn’t be linear, at least not for the same creature, just based on how everything else he was doing worked. It also just didn’t make sense to him, simply incorporating more of the same thing rather than increasing the overall strength, density and quality. However, that wouldn’t be an issue for him either as he was easily capable of killing large swathes of different enemies with his spells and absurd mana pool.

He did make a mental note to cultivate in a sense at some point in the future where he would compress and realign his soul so it didn’t become too inflated or bogged down. He didn’t think it would be an issue necessarily, it was more of a desire to keep his soul, the core of his being, as elegant and simple as he could.

With the rest of the Dire Wolves, Felix gradually increased his efficiency until he didn’t have any creative ideas to improve it further. He also compared his own efficiency and stat gain to that of the Soul Reap skill. The Soul Reap skill seemed to have the exact same efficiency as him simply harvesting them manually. The big advantage being he didn’t have to actively harvest them. He ended up getting to about 20% efficiency by the end which was a huge improvement over the 10% or so he had started with.

The stats gained from the dire wolves started to shrink drastically as he harvested them, as expected, but Felix could feel himself getting better at separating the souls from their feelings. He found that he didn’t need to be too careful with the feelings because even though he accidentally incorporated some errant experiences, his own soul seemed to slowly degrade them. He knew he couldn’t just incorporate the entire second layer of the creature’s soul, eventually it would build up, but he was comfortable with letting a little bit through for the time being.

He figured he would check his second layer every once in a while and make sure there wasn’t anything lingering, but so far it seemed like any leftover experiences would eventually disappear. He wasn’t ready to waste Erolan’s soul just yet, at least not until he was certain he had made the process as efficient as possible.

Felix returned his attention to his body and exited his pocket home then ran through the forest and collected some more Dire Wolf souls so he could keep practicing. He wanted some other creature’s soul to test as well but it seemed like the area around him was dominated by the Dire Wolves and he was too focused on the task at hand to travel too far.

He didn’t manage to get his efficiency any higher than 20% but he did manage to build his own confidence. He was certain by the 53rd Dire Wolf soul that he hadn’t absorbed anything more than he wanted to and that his efficiency was as good as it was going to get for now.

He had gained 2 more levels which was a nice side benefit as well.

He thought about holding onto Erolan’s soul until he had time to get more information hopefully in the capital city of the multiverse but ultimately decided against it. Anything left over from his inefficiency would simply be absorbed by the ring which meant it wouldn’t be wasted at all. He was also worried that the soul might degrade over a longer period of time so the sooner he did anything with it, the better.

Before he touched Erolan’s soul though, Felix looked into the blood ring. The inside was much the same as the soul ring except instead of souls, it contained blood and cells. He didn’t need light to see as the blood ring, when soul bound to him, gave him similar control to his own soul space. Inside, he sensed multiple balls of cells being stored. There was a ball of blood, a ball of muscular cells, bone cells and every other tissue, organ and component of the Dire Wolves. He let the ring absorb most of the Dire Wolves since he didn’t see anything interesting in their cells that he wanted to incorporate into his own body.

The next thing he did was sort through all the garbage he had stored in multiple places. Felix had the bodies and limbs of Erolan along with the corpses of all the world bosses in his inventory. He also had the world boss’ souls in his charm. Now that he had the Blood and Soul Devouring Rings, he wanted to move everything around so they were all where they belonged. Once all that was done, Felix consciously entered into his Soul ring once again and started manually examining the world boss souls along with Erolan’s.

He was looking for anything that was significantly different or anything that would give him pause but found nothing. Were he to harvest them himself, Felix would have done little to nothing differently from the Dire Wolves. Erolan had a few more defensive layers to his soul but nothing Felix was impressed with.

Erolan’s soul actually reminded Felix of Erolan’s body. It gave him the impression that it was an amalgamation of many different souls. Unfortunately, that also made it a bit incohesive and Felix started to doubt how much he would actually get out of it. To him, it seemed like Erolan was taking many shortcuts to keep himself progressing that Felix was not happy with and never would have taken himself.

He finished examining all the souls then activated his skill to passively harvest them.

Ding You have become more proficient with the Class skill: [Legendary] Soul Reap (Novice I => Novice II)

[Legendary - Novice II] Soul Reap

Processing of 11 souls started.

Estimated processing time: 7014 seconds.

Oh, Novice II now? Nice.

He returned his consciousness to his own body then started working on other things. He planned on looking into the persona ability of the rings but before that he wanted to identify his rings again to see if anything had changed.

[D - Ancient] Blood Devouring Ring

[Set Piece][Growth][Soul Bound][Currently Bound]

This ring is one of three parts of the Devourer Set. The set itself predates The System and nothing about it’s origin or history before The System is known.

This ring can be soul bound allowing the item to grow alongside the wielder. While equipped and bound, the ring can be used to absorb the bodies of defeated enemies. These bodies can then be harvested to bolster the wielder’s stats. The leftovers of harvested bodies will then be absorbed by the ring to upgrade it’s abilities or be stored. Stored organic matter can be transformed into usable material and be used to replenish the wielder’s body, healing and restoring them.

[0/2] Set Bonus: Persona.

With at least two pieces of the set bound and equipped, the wielder may use the leftovers from harvested bodies to craft a persona. This persona has separate stats from the wielder that grow along with the user. With the Blood Devouring Ring, the persona will have separate stats for STR, AGI, VIT, END. The persona is effectively a separate body the wielder may possess while theirs is held within the ring. This completely hides the wielder’s body and can act as a form of protection when equipped. Some skills may be inaccessible while a persona is active. Should the body sustain too much damage, the wielder’s body will be forcefully ejected from the ring while the persona recovers.

[D - Ancient] Soul Devouring Ring

[Set Piece][Growth][Soul Bound][Currently Bound]

This ring is one of three parts of the Devourer Set. The set itself predates The System and nothing about it’s origin or history before The System is known.

This ring can be soul bound allowing the item to grow alongside the wielder. While equipped and bound, the ring can be used to absorb the souls of defeated enemies. These souls can then be harvested to bolster the wielder’s stats. The leftovers of harvested souls will then be absorbed by the ring to upgrade it’s abilities or be stored. Stored soul fragments can be harnessed to launch attacks directly upon a living soul.

[0/2] Set Bonus: Persona.

With at least two pieces of the set bound and equipped, the wielder may use the leftovers from harvested souls to craft a persona. This persona has separate stats from the wielder that grow along with the user. With the Soul Devouring Ring, the persona will have separate stats for DEX, AGI, PER, VIT, END. The persona is effectively a separate soul wrapped around the wielder’s soul. This completely hides the wielder’s soul and can act as a form of protection when equipped. Some skills may be inaccessible while a persona is active.

While Felix had expected the changes he saw, he was still somewhat disappointed to see two entire set effects just vanish from the items. He didn’t dwell on the lost effects though since realistically, he didn’t really think he ever wanted to use them. He also wasn’t sure if he really had a use for the Persona effect but he figured he might as well use it.

He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with the Persona, what body he wanted to take on so he entered his mental library and started sifting through different components he thought were cool or useful.

While Felix would never modify his body to the point Erolan had, becoming unfamiliar with his own body and visage, the Persona was a different story. He had no qualms with making the Persona wildly different from himself because from what he understood, it was just a suit of armor, in a sense.

He also figured the Persona was a great way to test modifications before he made them to his own body and soul. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t have a brain or mind he could test from what he could tell, which was where he needed a testing ground the most.

Thinking through different bodies and parts he had seen in the past, Felix isolated everything he wanted. As much as scales, wings and tails were cool, they didn’t add much value to him that he couldn’t easily replicate with spells. What he really needed were three things, a strong and durable suit of armor, a disguise, and a testing ground for body modifications. Other than that, he didn’t have anything in particular he wanted. The body that fit that description for him was simply a large and strong human body.

While he could have made the cross between a dragon and a human, he wasn’t sure how the scales would perform and didn’t want to risk being hunted down. He also wasn’t intimately familiar with scales and how they were produced and attached.

Instead, he mentally pictured a large male body, making it just short of 3 meters tall, with large muscles all over. He gave them messy dark brown hair cut short so it would never interfere and a trimmed beard, just to differentiate it from himself.

The other huge advantage to having a large muscular body was that Eretheas, the axe, was the perfect weapon for it. He had no intention of using the body to seriously fight with the axe, but the axe gave it more credibility. If the disguise was just a large guy with nothing else, Felix suspected it would seem too out of place.

At least with a weapon, they just seemed like a barbarian that decided against armor. He could have bought himself a set of plate armor but he really disliked the idea of armor restricting his movements and it really wasn’t necessary for him. He was also partially counting on being able to figure out a more thorough Mage Armor spell once he had more shaping nodes from the capital city.

Creating the body itself really wasn’t complicated. He simply took cells that were stored in the Blood Ring then reused what he could and reconfigured what he couldn’t. He was planning on using the Persona as a testing ground anyways, so he went a little wild at first with the modifications. He had a lot of source material from all of the world bosses she he miniaturized the Kraken heart and used it’s blood then used the Turtle and Griffin’s body for the muscles. He threw in a little of all the other world bosses and even some of Erolan’s body as well.

In the end, the body was completely non functional and a total mess. He was somewhat expecting that to happen, but at the same time, he was hoping he wouldn’t have to worry about it’s viability. Instead, he scrapped the whole thing and just made a large human body using his own as a template.

The entire process was much easier than he expected because the Ring’s ability didn’t make him do it all himself from scratch. It wasn’t like he had to play god and literally make a body from scratch. It was more like he was picking and choosing parts then it fit them together.

In this case, he simply willed it to recreate his own body then made it bigger, made the bones much denser and used some small samples of cells from the world bosses. He also swapped out a lot of the muscular cells with the Turtle and Griffin’s cells then with a few other changes here and there, he was done.

None of his modifications were significant so, what he ended up with looked exactly like he had imagined it. He modified the face as much as he could while keeping it normal looking so it wasn’t just his own face with a different body. The body was inert and dead but functional, according to the ring. The ring seemed to preserve the corpse despite being essentially dead so, with all his worries quelled, he exited the Blood Ring and moved his consciousness over to the Soul Ring.

Crafting a soul for the Persona was a far easier process. It was more manual, but he didn’t have to look at anything at a cellular level. He was also so much more familiar with souls and their structure, and they were far less complex, so he was able to do more with it.

Since he knew this Persona’s soul would essentially wrap itself around his own, Felix started with a layer that he made from his own soul. He pulled out a large portion of the outer layer of his own soul, the one made up almost entirely of ambient anima, and fed it to the ring. He used that to craft as dense a layer as he possibly could.

His hope was just that his own soul would be less likely to rip this one apart when they made contact. It was possible his soul bond would prevent that, but he figured it was a good starting point. Outside of that, Felix started pulling components out of the left over’s from the harvested souls that he liked. All he had on hand were the wolves, since the world bosses and Erolan were still harvesting but he figured he would work on it later as well.

The most prevalent thing he could find in the leftovers of the wolf souls was bloodlust. He liked the idea of bloodlust especially with the body he had already crafted for it so Felix refined that as much as he could and formed a layer from it. What he really wanted was a layer to the soul that was offensive, something that could fight back if need be. He was not familiar at all with soul attacks but he had a decent idea of what he wanted based on his experience ripping souls apart.

Sifting through the wolf souls, Felix found the fight or flight response and stripped out all the experiences that indicated flight as best he could. What he was left with was a tiny portion of pure aggression that would attack anything it came across. He molded this with the bloodlust and fostered it as much as he could so it wouldn’t get overwhelmed then left it alone. Unfortunately, he couldn’t really test it because it wouldn’t attack him.

Once he had the leftovers from the world bosses’ along with Erolan’s soul, he would be much closer to done. He also planned on going out and hunting for specific components he wanted to incorporate, but he decided it wasn’t the time for that now.

Lastly, Felix tested out his Persona. Activating the ability was a simple exertion of his will into the rings. Once activated, Felix watched as hundreds of thing crimson red and glowing white streams poured out of the rings and wrapped themselves around him. He instinctively panicked a little as they closed around his mouth, nose and eyes but forcefully calmed himself down and waited. It only took a few seconds in total and once it was complete, Felix had to visually look over his own body to make sure it had worked.

The Persona was completely seamless, it was a perfect transition from what he could tell. He couldn’t feel his real body inside so he checked the Blood Ring then immediately looked away as looking at his own body was a weird experience. He stretched and moved around in his Persona so he could get a better sense of how it felt. He ran, jumped, and even swung Eretheas around.

The sensation of being in a much taller, larger and stronger body was a weird one but Felix quickly got used to it because it wasn’t too different from his own body. He silently thanked himself that he hadn’t created a dragon body or something wildly different then looked towards his soul.

Though the layer was weak, his Persona did in fact add two outer layers to his own soul where the outer one radiated bloodlust and aggression. He was pretty happy with the souls structure though, not it’s strength. The body on the other hand, was the opposite. He was pretty sure he had gone overboard with the muscles.

He reverted back to his own body and started tuning the body so it was more mobile and less restricted by it’s own muscles. As he was fine tuning the Persona’s body for the third time, Felix was interrupted by a screen.

[Legendary - Novice II] Soul Reap

Souls Processed!

11 souls you previously harvested have been processed. The harvested parts have been integrated into your soul, strengthening and improving it.

Stats gained: 957 STR, 569 DEX, 560 AGI, 151 PER, 2 INT, 1098 VIT, 991 END.

Holy shit.

Felix quickly looked through the break down and saw that the majority of the stats came from Erolan’s soul, the vast majority. There was a decent amount of vitality from the Kraken and a few points from each of the other world bosses but overall, not many.

He wasn’t complaining though because he did some quick math and realized he was already beating what he would have gained per level from choosing the custom class. Coupled with the skills that seemed like they would become far more useful later on, Felix was very happy with his class choice.

Over time he was sure the stats would even out because he wasn’t going to be reaping a peak C grade soul, again, anytime soon. It was still a nice boost and a good head start. It also made him feel a lot better about the last few months of essentially stagnating with his class.

He quickly used the leftovers from Erolan’s soul along with the world bosses to grow his Persona’s soul. He isolated then integrated the bloodlust and aggression from the leftovers then looked for anything else of value.

The last part that he ended up fixating on was present in each and every one of the souls, domination. Each of the 11 souls he was looking through were from creatures that considered themselves far above everything else, they were superior and they knew it. This ended up seeping into their souls to different extents and resulted in a portion that just screamed their desire to dominate.

Felix ripped that out and melded it to the best of his ability with the the outer layer of the Persona and ended up with something he was much more satisfied with. Over time and as Felix reaped more souls, the Persona would become more solid and defined but he was very happy with his initial creation.

The aspects of Domination, Bloodlust and the unbridled aggression were all highly compatible with each-other and together he realized they were all subsets, to some degree, of the greater curse of hunger. He had no intention of making it any closer to hunger itself and he fully intended on keeping it focused and specialized in the future. It was still useful to know though both so he could avoid the curse itself and so he knew what else would and wouldn’t be compatible.

He toyed around with the Persona a little more then spent some time practicing with batteries now that he had a ton of gemstones to work with. He didn’t make a ton of progress by the time he headed back to Atalus but he was slowly figuring it out. He went through a few hundred by the time he decided to check and see if Noah was awake and had managed to make a battery with a capacity of 386, his best attempt.

He had still shattered the vast majority of the gems but mostly because he needed to continue pushing their limits. He needed to get the batteries to a point where they were usable for at least the city and portals then eventually he wanted them to be useful for his own uses. Unfortunately, he would need them to hold a ton more mana for that to happen.

He quickly flew back to Atalus, in his own body, and quickly found Noah using his map. Luckily, he wasn’t at his home so Felix didn’t feel like he was intruding when he purposefully ran into him on the streets. Together, he Noah and Henry reviewed their plans for the portals. They reviewed the anchors Henry had made then went to the site where they were officially placing them. The building had already been erected but it wasn’t complete as Henry still needed to line the inside with more durable materials incase someone tried to throw a bomb through.

Felix tested and tuned the portal anchors then more permanent portal spells between Atalus and Orselle. He mostly tuned the size of the portal, making it 3 meters wide so it could support transporting some objects and larger people through but still didn’t consume too much mana to maintain. Once he was happy with the spell, he worked with Henry to create a permanent platform containing the inlay for the spell. Felix then spent some time with Henry creating large arrays that would collect mana then used long channels to move it to the portal house.

Arranged around the portals in a circle, Felix had a dozen arrays that would collect a couple hundred mana per second each. That mana was then sent down long cables containing mana conductive material to the portals that would use the mana to sustain themselves.

While he could have created the same structure at each of the cities, he decided he didn’t want to waste time on it himself so instead, he had Henry get a friend of his to draw up some schematics. That way, if the other cities wanted it for themselves, they could spend the time making them. He would help tune them and make sure they worked of course, but that shouldn’t take him too much time.

The portal between Orselle and Atalus was operational and they even had a few test runs with people walking through them. It took some convincing but once Felix demonstrated that even if a portal was closed with an object only halfway through it, the object would simply be wherever most of it was. If he pushed his arm through and closed it, his arm remained on his body as if nothing had happened. He wasn’t entirely sure why it worked that way, but he was happy it did.

The last thing Felix needed to do for the portals to be fully operational was to make his way out to each of the other cities and replace their anchors with permanent ones. Then they could simply open the permanent portals from Atalus’ side. Before that though, Noah had Felix create some enchantments and spell formations that he could add to the city walls.

Felix spent a few days experimenting and came up with a very basic set of inscriptions that would essentially allow Noah to erect a shield at a few predetermined locations. The inscription would draw mana from the Mana Engine below the council room and also provided a very light hardening and elasticity enchantment to the wall itself.

It wasn’t a thorough defense and not one Felix would have been happy with if he were planning against an immediate threat. Noah was very happy with it though and said it was a great starting point until more enchanter’s in the city were on Felix’s level and could actually improve or expand it.

They talked about some offensive options too but they ended up agreeing that the city was probably better off relying on Henry and the crafters to make weapons. They had the turtle cannons from the tutorial for now and they were sufficient at the moment but eventually, Noah wanted more.

The last thing Felix helped Noah with was digging out escape tunnels from the city. Noah’s biggest takeaway from the war at the end of the tutorial was that he wanted a way for the innocents to stay out of it no matter what happened. Along with Henry and some massive drilling equipment, they created some long tunnels and multiple portals that could be activated a single time for about an hour for people to escape.

After that, Noah and Felix let Henry work on designing forges to utilize the Forge Heart they had bought. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .