Ebony's Fable

‘The way to level and increase natural potential is through core skills and improving on what our classes do. I don’t know about that stranger Elf but Vent is capable of regenerating mana while utilising it, I saw that when he flew us over to Tidal. That can only mean he has a higher tier meditation or more likely, he compounded two types of mana regeneration skills.

But meditation types skills are the only ones I know that can naturally increase mana regeneration. Even if I found a distinctly different meditation type skill to learn, it would just meld into my current meditation either through refinement, mutation or even evolution.

I’ve been sleeping on Mana Adjudicator. What are some other ways of restoring mana? Runes? The most obvious one would be to absorb, convert, purify and compress which I have a few formulas for that Dusk is already using but that is dependent on ambient conditions and it's too unstable for me to use on my body. I can make a version for my Models but not for myself.

What about something similar to Xin’s ability to convert mana to vitality? Can I make a rune that converts my excessive stamina to mana? It wouldn’t be efficient enough but that is possible since I have more stamina that I can use even after the reduction from my Physique change. But that’s not enough, I estimate that to be a tier 2 skill at best.’

Ebony continued to ponder similar trains of thought for the umpteenth time after he decided that he simply didn’t have enough mana to run Dusk and even himself at full potential.

External methods were completely ruled out. He didn’t want to be put into a situation where he couldn’t use capabilities that he should be able to. It had to come from within but the only method he knew was meditation. The source of mana was a person’s mana chassis. At least for him, he hasn’t confirmed if other people’s brains are where the mana chassis was.

Meditation dipped into this source and somehow sped up the stream of mana it produced. As for how, even he couldn’t pinpoint the exact working principles.

Ebony hasn’t completely given up on learning or creating a mana capacity-increasing skill but he was resigned at all the ones that he had access to because human methods seemed incompatible with his body or the way he as a mana-being was constructed.

There was another straightforward method. Find another ingredient or material not unlike Ful’s sap, use its energy and further refine or mutate his physique. But from Ebony’s estimation, although high rarity materials worked and could be used to mutate a human’s physique they were less effective for him and Ning Xin.

Simply because their bodies already had extremely stable or resilient genes. They were already born efficient and specialised. It might be why even Ancient ranked ingredients like Ful’s sap or an even higher grade that Ning Xin used only changed them as much as it did without killing them or changing them to a less human form.

And Physique refinement was supposedly something that could be done just through training and the usage of skills. That was how the first-generation physique came about.

Just like how stat numbers didn’t mean the same thing for people of different races thanks to the base values or multipliers which were technically summed up in the term ‘physique’, daily training that unclassed children underwent wasn’t defined in numbers they could see but they were growing stronger as they grew up.

This was something Ebony knew since he was a journeyman.

But it wasn’t easy and not something that happened within a short duration. After all, it hasn’t even happened once for them. They used rare treasures for their physiques so far.

It was said that enhancement magic was the fastest method to observable change to one’s physique, but after years of constant use, not once has a physique refinement occurred naturally for either of them. And they practically ran enhancement magic all the time in combat.

Ebony had actively pursued physique refinements whenever he augmented himself so it shouldn’t be a psychological rejection like a few skills.

Mana Meister wasn’t a particularly rare Profession, many combat and even non-combat Elves had the same Profession that later evolved differently from one another. Mana compression, expansion, and capacity were the bread and butter of the Profession. Putting aside Ebony’s Coagulated Mana Repository which had the name of a mana capacity skill but one that he used like a compression skill, he was technically missing a few types of skills in this Profession.

He didn’t need a perception skill with his core skill and sub-class handling that. His range was steadily increasing by the day and he didn’t want a low tier-range increase that tossed away the advantage of absolute control over his mana.

In his search for more ways to regenerate mana from the Piercing Tempest Academy’s library, he already made a few thousand variations of the mana absorption, conversion, purification and compression runic formula for his Models. But they didn’t mesh well with the Stalwart Foundation. He could layer them like a golem wearing human skin but the other layers would be weak since the outer layer had to be the one in contact with ambient mana.

When he concurrently ran changes in 7 Models and changed the runic formula every few minutes, he gave up on the endeavour and changed his goal. He would redo Stalwart Foundation to include the mana sustainability capabilities.

That way, his Models would only run out of Will and their lifespan would increase if they had to fight. However, Ebony personally didn’t want to make any more of the old generation Models.

Everything he would produce from the end of 38,889’s life onwards was going to receive the same treatment as Dusk. He would stuff their mana vessels of ice till his Will saturated and started leaking before any of them were considered operational. No longer did he stand for mediocrity, even for copies of him that cleaned the house or trained children.

The only exceptions might be versatile tool usages like recorders or messengers.

It was just a pity that the Models were unable to be the central core of a Domain like Dusk was.

From his growing understanding of Will and Domains, he had a feeling that Dusk would sooner or later be forced to be transfixed in space. He could still strengthen it quite a lot before it required a permanent fixture to space. But that was just his assumption and he knew nothing was absolute. For example, if a domain was transfixed to space, could a space mage of a greater proportion simply rip away the same space, they could easily outrange the entire reach of his Domain. Who could say they couldn’t move my entire domain elsewhere?

‘Can I increase the amount of mana chassis I have? That would fall under meddling with physique, not a skill.’

Ebony made sure to keep some level of awareness of his surroundings. That meant talking to his classmates. It was an unexpected outcome.

Not all of his classmates were that serious in training or they wouldn’t have such an even win-loss rate. They were all under ten years old, there was only so much more experience in combat their opponents had over them.

However, they were too passive and couldn’t do much against their opponents when their lightning zap failed to elicit a response. Less than 10 of them did well enough to use the centre of balance to trip their opponents. Even fewer could counterblow using their opponent's momentum to deal damage. It was a pity.

Faelk won his duel with ease in his age group. A close-range fighter’s instincts flowed in him and Atticus. Fabian did well but only because he was fit to begin with, he wasn’t particularly good at close-ranged combat. Since he was aiming to be a tamer and mid-range specialist, his proficiency was acceptable.

The only good point that was the entire goal of the training session was that all of his classmates who took his exercises came out relatively unharmed. Those who lost simply ran out of energy, weakened, and got knocked out easily.

Many of the children’s family members were present and the parents or siblings of his classmates were apprehensive before the competition. They probably felt like they just signed their children up for a beating but the results said otherwise.

Not getting hit was a ranged fighter's top priority until they could take a hit or two and Ebony was proud to say that his classmates managed to pass their own expectations.

Thanks to them, he was aware of how his Will affects people around him. It was an exchange worth his time.

Ebony made no headway in terms of creating a new mana regeneration skill immediately.

The clockwork continued.

He studied in the Piercing Tempest Academy’s library.

He gained access to Kong Jing’s library once again, which was far more rewarding. But he still couldn’t open the door inside her library. Not even forceful methods worked. The good thing was that he was making progress in deciphering the universal language Gia by himself.

Reworking Stalwart Foundation was not easy. He didn’t even create Stalwart Foundation, Mark did. All he did was buy the formula off of him and use it actively enough to turn it into a skill. Ebony also got into contact with Mark, getting his help with upgrading Stalwart Foundation past the limits of a tier 3 skill. To add so many functions to an existing human shaped formula that was already compact and filled up wasn’t going to be an easy task.

As good of an academic as Mark was, Ebony was more than familiar with how the runes worked. It was too bad Mark seemed too busy to come over to Tidal. Kong Jing had given him a task and it was taking him literal years to complete it. A test of some sort.

At least he was contactable nowadays and always up for a conversation about runic formulation. Also, if he was within range of Ebony’s callstone from Tidal then he was likely pretty close by anyway.

Ebony did his part as pest control. Not actively killing hordes of them like Ning Xin did but training all his new but weak skills, especially sealing and lightning magic.

Sound and gravity magic experiments were going very well, both during pest control and during his day off at home. They changed their cycle to 3 days of work and 1 day of rest at home. During these times, Ebony learnt that people struggled in the fight with the Tetramyths as if-no, their lives were actually on the line.

It was hard to wrap his head around. Many if not all of those people were individually stronger than dozens of Tetramyths combined, they shouldn’t have been struggling. Observation told him that soldiers didn’t have the issue of their lives at risk unless they were surrounded by King-ranked or a few Emperor-ranked ants and were only in trouble when they were far away from the fortress without support.

However, for the freelancers who stood out enough to be sent here, they struggled. Being in small parties was one thing but, the problem was always them going too far away from the fortress to get out of the army’s range. Then an extended fight without proper management of their stamina caused them to be unable to get back to safety while being weak and dried up on mana.

The Tetramyths' greatest strength was their numbers but they also won in terms of inexhaustible energy. Ebony hasn’t seen any one of the subspecies of Tetramyths lose strength no matter how long a fight extended. As long as they were still moving, they were always at full strength discounting missing limbs.

It was for that reason that there were casualties. Other than these reasons, the army had casualties in their large-scale battle too. Those attacks were led by Emperor-ranked ants, who although unbelievably weak for Emperor-ranked creatures were still not something Grandmasters could shrug off.

Ebony finally saw the Guardian Knights at work.

He could only describe them as stalwart.

Never backing down, never bending back. If they pushed forward, the ants moved back. If the ants charged, they held the line. They were hyper-specialised in defence, group defence to be specific.

They had tactics to counter 1 extremely strong enemy or many strong enemies. That included being able to hold an Archduke back in a training session. Ebony had sneakily watched that session that was conducted in a camp within their fortress. The Archduke in question was the Dwarven one who was a bonafide King-ranked individual.

Although Archduke Gerrot Mallet had the strength to move mountains and should have greater power than Ebony, he was of the mind that he could probably do better against the Guardian Knights than the Archduke. The Dwarven man used metal magic but he was a close combatant through and through, nothing too divergent from any other dwarven warrior. In other words, he was easy to read and didn’t have special elements that made things difficult for people or monsters.

And even though Ebony sneaked his senses into their camp, he still hasn’t seen the shadow of the Empire’s titled Emperor. It was almost odd how the man escaped him for so long.

The battlefield was large and he wasn’t able to see everyone but he did hear about many notable ‘heroes’ that were the talk of the fortress. Ebony’s working area was never far from Dusk.

Dusk got recognition but not much, it was covering too small a range for many people to find out about and he placed the tree pretty deep into Tetramyth territory. The tree focused on sealing and resealing ants, beating some up, healing them, and beating them again. All while playing the piano and trying to recreate playing music with emotions. It was holding a very small area because Ebony only fed it 50% of his daily recovery of Will and as much mana as he could offer. The rest of his Will was used for other training and experiments.

Excluding the piano playing. Ebony was using sound magic…music, to increase Tetramyth’s Wisdom and Vitality. He hasn’t given up on the organic brain for Dusk but it was true that feeding millions of them with sustenance just wasn’t plausible.

Ethereal Form Arts was able to take full advantage of its low-level and non-human opponents giving him fresh insight into the flow of combat and movements from numerous directions.

Ebony was considering Woven Frostblaze Cladding or Augmentation as his third Core Skill. It was a direct buff to all attacks that used flames and he could mutate it more easily to be a passive buff to all frozen flame spells and abilities. He could probably even merge these two, one supports his body and one supports all external flames but they technically did the same thing.

The second choice was Coagulated Mana Repository for obvious reasons of compatibility with his current desires.

Third choice was slightly out of the pocket, his General Skill Preservation Bubble. A Vitality based mana capacity-increasing skill. But it was a bit silly to depend on the Core Skill advantage to improve this skill when he wasn’t that good at manipulating Vitality.

Fourth, was sadly, Ethereal Form Arts that he didn’t like but had come to terms with having.

But his third Core Skill could wait, these skills just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like these skills were...him.

With his quickly increasing range of control and senses with mana, Ebony’s ability to wield a greater amount of gravity mana skyrocketed.

The elemental mana that he couldn’t spawn out of nowhere discounting the conjuration of ice or direction usage from the mass of his mana.

What is the mass of him compared to the mass of the planet?

Simply inconsequential and this directly impacted the strength of a gravity mage. That was Ebony’s conclusion after more than 5 years as a gravity mage. Gravity magic completely depended on how much mass was around and the limits of the castor’s mental range. The mass of his mana or the elements he could conjure simply didn’t hold a candle to the mass of the object he was standing on.

Conjuring gravity mana directly was something he hadn’t accomplished. With his ever-increasing mental range, he had exponentially more gravity mana to wield. Opening up more possibilities.

Ebony’s home hasn’t been attacked again and they didn’t bother changing locations.

Spy girl visited to drop a letter once every week. So far, all it said was that she hadn’t found out the whereabouts of Mr. Kidnapper and she left an imprint of her metallic mana.

And finally, 2 weeks after the attack on their house Ebony finalised and mastered his second-greatest creation yet.

“Hello. Ebony One.”

“Hello Ebony.” A ‘Model’ that mimicked his body temperature and utilised discolouration runes with Frigid Distorted Refraction to copy his skin and clothing colour and opaqueness replied.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Mmm. This is an interesting feeling.”

“Yes, when you’re in my range I still feel like I’m of 1 mind. Let’s try going out of range.”

“Lets. Then we’ll both do something different and come back in a minute.” They floated above their walls together.

Both Ebony’s Flicker went in opposite directions but they had to go a lot further thanks to the skill evolution and his recent improvements in range.

Ebony bought a few skewers of squid drizzled in chilli oil roasted over charcoal.

Holding it tight, he Flickered back to low skies above his garden.

The moment he got into the range of Ebony One, before he even saw the clone, he already felt the vibrational and gravitational data being sent to him.

‘Not sent…connected. But it is indeed me.’

Ebony smiled and so did Ebony One. Ebony One had a paper bag full of large crab legs, cooked.

“How many more of me are you going to make?” Ebony One vocalised.

“Do we have to talk?” Ebony could feel himself ‘think’ twice. It was very odd. The lag between transmission from Will was close to zero when he was so near his clone.

“I mean, I’m always talking to myself when thinking so this shouldn’t be any different.”

“Can you see the skill details?” Ebony vaguely asked his clone.

“Notifications? No, I suppose I’m still just a clone made of ice. Read it, oh by the way, it seems one way. You can read me but I can’t read you-me?” Ebony One replied before getting confused as to how to talk to himself.

“How about now?”

“Mm, I got the data. So Ebony can control whether to transmit updated data to clone me but clone me can’t or maybe won’t hide stuff from real me?”

“That’s debatable but for now, I think ‘can’t’ is more likely than ‘won’t’. Your vessel doesn’t allow you to take up any more Will. I have more. It is interesting to see if a clone can grow stronger than me and if it can override me. That is not considering what ‘main’ refers to, maybe I’m always the main thanks to the presence of a soul? Do clones have part of my soul?”

“Is that interesting? I thought it should be fearful. Isn’t it easy to test if I have a soul? Just use the roar and if my mana which is also my health drops, it means soul attacks hurt me. That means I have a soul.”

“Why? That just means a stronger version of me will be in charge. Oh, no damage.”

“That’s right. Well, not an issue we have to think about now. So clones don’t have a soul, hypothesis proven.”

It sounded like a mess when one usually had multiple lines of thought at the same time and could vocalise them at the same time.

Veritable Ice Clone - Create a clone made of ice that mimics your appearance, vitals and mana. Saturated and condensed Will is placed onto the conjuration of a Veritable Ice Clone. Range of will that connects you and your Veritable Ice Clones increases by 600% + 5.0% per level. Veritable Ice Clone’s retention of Will increases by 500% + 5.0% per level. Has static 95% of your Intelligence stat.

Consumes MP

Classification: Ice Magic

“Oh it’s pretty much tier 4 any moment now. Also, your magic is 95% of my full strength. Static. It’s very different from the time of Models but 95% seems very high. Model has effective strength that surpasses 100% of my intelligence but you can directly use that much Intelligence. I wonder what’s the difference and you can’t scale up any higher?”

“Thank 38,889. I wonder. Maybe effective strength only refers to spells? Or perhaps it is capped out but the skill description doesn’t mention it?”

“Mmm. You can figure that out.”

“Alright, so you’re going to keep producing me? My general goal is just taking quests for the mage association, building up credit and gaining access to more secured books.”

“Yes, Ebony 2 through 15 is planned to get into other academies. Since they are just our clones, people shouldn’t be framing them as Grandmasters. I might alter their looks to a younger, shorter version of us.”

“Then we can get the recommendation for Tidal Academy? No, we can just ask Navin or Mallory and they would probably let us in so no need for the trouble.”

“Then Ebony 16 through 100 is planned to just experiment with skills, possibly mass combined skills like those artillery mages. Even better, like that special party of 5 mages we saw the other day. That was an amazing combo and use of magic.”

“How long did it take to make me?”

“A week of trial and error to get the kinks out, excluding that, the Will required to make you will take me 10 days to accumulate since I still have to keep Dusk going for the foreseeable future. 10 days is a range depending on Dusk’s condition. Mana isn’t a problem.”

“That’s slow…it would take 2.5 years to get to Ebony serial 100. But this is preferable compared to the mass-produced Models. Side note, it’s weird that our Will’s range is skill-dependent? Did your range with Dusk increase along with this skill evolution? If not, then Will is even weirder than we thought.”

“We’re too high up, I’ll check. Right, amendment, Ebony 2 through 5 will be guards. 5 through 10 can guard Dusk. Dusk is still using Models and I probably wouldn’t give it the ability to use so much Will, I’ll update the models but won’t let it create clones for now.

“11 through 15 should be like 38,889. Let them explore on their own, and grow apart from me. Then when they come back, we might recreate the increase in total Will capacity or even recovery. They say Will is all about life experience and that completely depends on how long we live.”

“So we just have to divide and conquer--experience life faster.”

With that, Ebony planned his coming routine by talking to himself.