Beastforged Bond

B4 Chapter 42

Converting Essence into liquid turned out easier than expected. I took my sweet time studying Sapsie as she feasted on crystallized bark, focusing on Lifesight and our connection to learn how absorbing Essence should feel.Next up were Lea’s Soulkins. She fed each of them with an apple or other objects imbued with Essence. Studying their life sources and how they rippled and changed, I was convinced I was in for a ride.

Then I took a small bite out of a crystallized apple as well. It was crunchy but not nearly as tough as I first thought. The piece of apple crumbled in my mouth first, yet it didn’t take long before the pieces melted away on my tongue.

Essence trickled down my throat, its taste surprisingly sweet.

Eyes closed, I felt the movements of Essence within me. They flowed smoothly for better than a minute, only to seep into the nearest pathway of the weave.

Once attached to the weave, the Essence clung to it. It didn’t move for a while. There was no momentum, and I wasn’t all too sure what I was supposed to do next when the weave rippled and…tried to absorb the Essence? There was clearly too much Essence to absorb, yet the weave was trying nonetheless. And it succeeded, which resulted in hairline cracks.

The potency of Essence was too much to handle for the weave’s smaller pathways. I could have used Sapsie’s nectar to work against the deteriorating effect Essence seemed to have, but the fire-attuned ether circulating through the weave was already upon the Essence. It surged through the Essence, melted the substance before it could harden properly, and pulled bits and pieces along.

The weave’s circulation system removed the potential danger it’d been exposed to, all while continuing to move like nothing ever happened. The Essence, exposed to fire-attuned ether, dissolved slowly in the meantime. It rippled and fell apart, resulting in tiny explosions of highly purified ether. The ether created in the process melted into the circulation system, expanding the streams of ether swirling through the weave significantly.

That was until they passed the World and its core, and I had a decision to make.

You may imbue Essence into your core. Foreign Essence is not easy to absorb for non-bestial creatures – ‘races’ as you would call them – but it is possible, just a little taxing on your respective power system.

Volix explained sagely. He even went as far as to provide images depicting how easily beasts would absorb Essence and how dangerous it was to humans and other races.

He even showed a memory from centuries ago where the Elemental Phoenix watched a four-armed humanoid man die from absorbing Essence too greedily.

I felt like vomiting, but that wouldn’t help anything. The piece of apple had already dissolved within me.

Do not worry. Your soul is strong. So is your mind. Your World will not crumble that easily, especially not with that Insignia of yours.

The Elemental Phoenix called out calmly, which was actually enough to calm my wildly beating heart.

Pressing my eyes even tighter shut, I added more fire-attuned ether to the weave’s circulation system. Minutes filled with tension and the occasional burst and explosion of ether – when Essence converted into a flood of pure ether – until only a few traces of half-dissolved Essence were left. All excess ether had been infused into the core and an Ether Gate, whereas the leftover Essence was guided toward the World.

The Essence pressed flat against the World’s outermost barrier, which rippled before going transparent. Foreign Essence entered my World. And it erupted in golden sparks as soon as it passed the threshold. The sparks didn’t look or feel all that different from unoccupied soul energy. They were the same, yet not exactly.

The golden sparks were clearly far less potent than my soul energy, but there were a lot. After making sure that close to 99% of the Essence I’d acquired from the piece of apple had been melted into ether, only a fraction of Essence entered the World. Yet that fraction turned into a myriad of golden sparks, which hovered seemingly mindlessly through the air.

There didn’t appear to be anything special about the golden sparks. No intent. No guidance. Nothing. Hence, I did the only thing I could think of.

I practiced the Blastor Refinery technique using the golden sparks.

And, against all odds, it worked. It actually worked! Sure, the efficacy was abysmal, all while the strain on the core remained the same, but it worked.

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Even better, the etchings of the Insignia lit up, accelerating the process and lessening the strain. Or…did it accelerate the core’s recovery? One way or another, the Insignia was active and the core didn’t look all that battered.

Using nectar, it should be viable to use Blastor Refinery to refine my World dozens of times in a single day. Sure, the efficiency would be low and the strain would be high, but with nectar…

That should work.

I didn’t have enough nectar, but by turning enough Essence into ether, I could also feed Pond of Life with enough to produce more. That, too, should be feasible. All I needed was enough ether. Enough Essence to produce more nectar, to feed my Gates, and both Essence and ether to practice Blastor Refinery.

As long as I pushed enough, I shouldn’t have a problem testing the 8th volume and learning enough about the Insignia to finally understand what exactly it was in the first place.

It was like Volca’s Mark in a way, just better. Volca’s Mark had to be used actively. It would strengthen phoenix fire and nothing else. Sure, the empowerment had been genuinely useful. It saved my life more than once, yet that was all it could be used for. Combat.

The Insignia was always active. It strengthened the core and aided the use of soul energy and further improved my control of everything pertaining to the World. In a way, it felt like the Insignia was a better version of a World Aspect. For it was permanent, but also had an active ability. And it was still growing.

Using it actively helped me defeat the Spawns. I still didn’t know what exactly it did to turn my phoenix fire into pristine-white flames, yet it appeared to counter the greatest advantage of the Devourer’s Spawns. That alone was already enough to make the Insignia more valuable than Volca’s Mark.

Focusing back on the task ahead, I took yet another small bite out of the crystallized apple. In the meantime, I also watched Cosmo nibble on a small berry while Nox joined Lea’s feline Soulkin to hunt yet another fish.

As much as I feared them growing too quickly, I was now confident I could manage.

I told myself, only to hear a series of laughs in my head.

My Soulkins knew as well as I that we wouldn’t stop right there. We were all-in on this. And that was probably for the best. Because we needed as much power as possible.

***

Several weeks passed in the blink of an eye. At least, we thought that several weeks must have passed at this point. It was not all that easy to tell for sure.

Even if more or less than that had passed, it didn’t really matter. We were all so busy that even one year seemed like a time crunch.

Turning Essence into liquid ether came naturally to me at this point. All it took was some fire-attuned ether or phoenix fire. The others used lightning or brute-forced their way through Essence, but they made it happen one way or another as well.

After spending the first few days with experiments to test the limits of Essence as well as my World and weave, I came up with a fairly simple plan.

First, I spent weeks siphoning some liquid ether to fill a few more Gates. Neither was full yet, and they wouldn’t be for several more weeks, months possibly, but that was the point. A full Gate had to be linked to the weave fairly quickly. Other Blessed would do so without hesitation, but my Gates started to leak as soon as I linked them. Hence, I waited until I crossed the threshold that’d force me into keeping tabs on yet another leaking Gate.

On another note, I’d been replacing the ether of my linked Gates with the Essence’s liquid ether. Initially, I wanted to wait until I reached the 8th volume of Blastor Refinery and could produce liquid ether on my own, but the difference didn’t matter all that much. If anything, using liquid ether early on strengthened my body greatly, including my senses.

Enhancing my senses further did help me push even further with the Blastor Refinery’s experiments. I was still nowhere near reaching the 8th volume, but the gap was shrinking. Slowly, but it was shrinking!

Infusing more of the Essence’s golden particles into the core came much easier to me at this point. It was also no longer as strenuous to keep liquefied ether in the core. That had been somewhat of a challenge since it put a heavy toll on the World’s core. The difference of being full of ether and being filled to the brim with liquid ether was quite big, yet the pressure subsided slowly as days turned into weeks.

The Insignia helped the core adapt quickly. It glowed brighter than before, the lines etched on the core spreading further.

The Insignia etched on my core was changing as the World expanded. So was the marking on my chest. It spread further than before. Something else about it had begun to change over the last few weeks, but it was only apparent when the core finally adapted to liquid ether. Something about the change seemed to amplify the Insignia’s power.

Blastor Refinery’s 7th volume no longer required my full attention either. Hence, all the testing that’d followed.

And I was not alone with the experiments. My friends had fallen into the same trance, their desire to grow stronger burning as fiercely as mine. I couldn’t quite remember the last time we had taken a long break or talked for an extended period, but it didn’t look like any of us cared about that.

We had the same goal and worked toward it together.

So, I wasn’t particularly surprised when Nox mutated. Nullblade had already evolved, and an Elemental Resistance trait had formed in the last few weeks, yet Nox was nowhere near done. He was just getting started. Just like the others.

We were just getting ready. To deal with the Ruler of Fire and all those trying to take away what belonged to us.