As Rory suddenly found himself housing another person, some growing pains popped up, to say the least, growing pains that he'd never had to deal with in Ehkorrus.

"You're really going to lock yourself inside all day?"

"Yes, now leave me alone."

"But it's a beautiful day, we could look for unknown areas?"

"First off, it's a smoke and haze-filled day like every other day, and second, all the interesting areas are guarded by high-tier seven monsters, which we are not equipped for."

"But if we work together-"

"We'll be eaten together, yes, sounds like a wonderful plan."

On and on, day after day, there was some variation of the same conversation. The people of Ehkorrus had all looked up to Rory as some pinnacle figure, a peerless leader that was rarely questioned, an icon of enigma.

His fellow founder? Not so much. She viewed him not as some grand figure, but just another guy.

It was nice in some ways; it had been a long time since anyone had been so flippant with him. Even Apostolos still viewed him through the lens of a younger brother admiring their older brother.

In other ways, it was infuriating as she never.

Stopped.

Annoying.

Him.

Or maybe she's just that sort of person?

Either way, Rory's patience was continuously tested.

As for what he was spending his time working on? Ironically, it was gear for his fellow founder, the same fellow founder who was continuously distracting him from working on it. Forging promethium was always a bit of a pain in the ass. Furthermore, if True Folding stabilized steel was tough, then promethium was damn close to impossible.

Close, but not literally impossible.

If he could forge a sword in a day, and when he added True Folding into the mix, it became a week, provided he was being efficient with his time.

And when you had another founder jabbering your ear off? Not quite so efficient.

Even with the woman damn near harassing him with her incessant conversations, eventually Rory completed the task he had set out to do, forging a complete, matching set of +1 promethium armor.

Fire-Souled Promethium Hauberk +1

Grade: Rare

Akashic Record: Flame-Souled

A hauberk forged from extra dense +1 promethium. Heavy as it is, only those with high levels of strength or a similar degree of ascension bonuses may wield such armor.

Akashic Record effect: Utilizing latent, background energies saturated with fiery concepts enables a slow rate of automatic repair. When fully repaired, excess energy instead builds a small amount of stable energy overcharge.

While the armor was a proper rare grading, it had less to do with being some immaculate creation than it did with the starting grade of promethium already being sub-grade rare. With the use of True Folding, Rory managed to bridge the difference between being sub-grade and a proper rare grade. Aside from True Folding the promethium bars, Rory hadn't done much to the armor aside from just making it.

In fact, Rory had gone as far as to avoid bothering with Inscriptions of any form. As he had learned with his armor, once an item passed a certain level of potency, it required advanced runes to 'stabilize' the rest of the runes, lest they degrade and force only basic inscriptions to function.

The result had been that nearly every piece of the armor had ended up with the Flame-Souled Akashic record.

Interesting.

Rory hadn't spent much time investigating Akashic Records in… a long time, the random nature making them hard to study.

Except, the fact that so many pieces of the matching armor set all ended up with the Flame-Souled Akashic Record suggested that it wasn't as random as he had initially assumed.

Interesting.

There was definitely more to be learned there, something that had piqued Rory's attention enough that he removed it from the shelf where the study had been placed for years.

But not this instant.

Once the gear had been completed, Rory had waited in the main workshop as Zoey had left to do… whatever it was that she did with most of her time.

She says exploring, but can you really explore for that much in a day, and hasn't she already basically scoped out this entire place?

Rory wasn't sure how much he believed her, but she also hadn't given him any reason to doubt her.

While waiting, Rory conjured threads of pneuma, manipulating them as his mind freely wandered. As a side project, Rory had been attempting to further enhance the potency of his projection magic; there were stages involved in magic that could be achieved to increase its power. First was a basic understanding, next was visualization, and third was framing the knowledge in terms of visualization, essentially serving as a visual mnemonic device.

In other words, the first stage was simply a matter of understanding the mechanics of how exactly you wanted to conjure a fireball. The second stage was then visualizing a fireball as it was conjured. The third stage was taking that same mental imagery and instilling every single visual imagery within it with a 'blueprint,' every single 'image' containing a 'packet' of information.

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The third stage had been one that he had been stuck on for years: the crossover from understanding how something worked and visually interpreting how it worked, to vesting that visualization with so many 'packets' of instant, comprehensive information, was a lot. It was like looking at a forest and attempting to instantly recall the entire textbook's worth of information on every single thing you saw.

As far as the likelihood of accomplishing the goal of 'evolving' his magic to this third stage of potency, Rory was confident that it was well beyond his current tier of power and knowledge, even with his high level of cognition.

That didn't mean he wouldn't practice anyway.

While the flexible usage of such 'evolved' magic was beyond him, Rory could always attempt to 'preload' specific 'spells' that he'd painstakingly mapped out beforehand.

Which was precisely what Rory was doing with his threads. Pneuma threads were perhaps the simplest form of projection possible, so in theory, they would be the 'easiest' to overlay visualization and comprehension as a singular form of 'thought' empowering his threads to the point where even the simple threads could potentially be used even against powerful foes that would ordinarily rip through them without even trying to.

A laudable goal, but one that Rory wasn't going to accomplish today as Zoey finally returned with a bang, dropping onto her face the moment she entered the main workshop.

"Found an interesting spot. What I didn't notice was that a colony of level seventy Ashen Wolpertingers happened to call it home. One? Not a problem. Four or five? Doable. One hundred pissed off, flying, fanged ash spewing rabbits from hell? Not so much."

"Is that why your armor looks like it was put through a belt sander set to max?"

"Never used a belt sander, so, sure?" Zoey said as she slowly pushed herself up from the floor, with her level of durability smashing her face straight into the hard stone ground, hadn't so much as tickled her. "You seem to be in a good mood."

"Why do you say that?"

"Usually you harumph and ignore me," Zoey said with a straight face.

"Being asked, 'Is it done yet?' or 'What do you think keeps these islands floating?' a thousand times eventually gets tiring," Rory countered.

"Ehh, either way," Zoey said with a shrug. "So, what is it?"

"You know how you love to ask if it's done yet?"

"Yeah?"

"It's done."

"Wait, you mean-"

"Yes, now follow me."

Following Rory like an excited puppy, a bounce in her step that Rory rolled his eyes at, they meandered through several tunnels before at last appearing inside a room filled with several mannequins. Each one was empty of any adornments, save for one, which was clad in dark red armor.

"Holy crap," The Vanguard darted toward the armor, her eyes wide as saucers. "This is for me?"

"I mean, it's not for me," Rory said with a shrug.

Examining it, Zoey leaned in before turning back, confused.

"What's an Akashic Record?"

"You know, the magical effect items sometimes naturally get."

"Never seen one before," Zoey said with a shake of her head. "News to me,"

"Damn," Rory whistled. "Y'all were a bunch of broke peasants."

Zoey made no effort to dignify that remark, instead shooting him a withering glare before looking back at the armor. "Can I try it on?"

"Again, it's not for me."

Taking it as permission, she quickly strapped on the greaves, a slight frown on her face.

"What's wrong?" Rory asked after noticing the expression.

"Heavy."

"Well, yeah, each piece weighs roughly twice what they normally would, and promethium is a pretty heavy metal to begin with. You're A7, it shouldn't be too much for you."

"It's not, but that doesn't change that it is damn heavy."

"Well, that's part of the point of these," Rory said as he stepped forward, a gem appearing between his fingers that he quickly slotted into a nondescript groove within the greave. "Pulse a bit of pneuma through those."

Doing so, Zoey's expression changed once more. "Wow. It's like the weight was suddenly cut."

"You'll want to practice with those float gems; they cut the effect of gravity on the affected item. It can increase your speed, but it takes some getting used to."

"Is that why you feel so artificially fast whenever we brawled?"

Rather than respond, Rory instead lifted a single eyebrow, letting her put two and two together.

"Damn, tricky. I would accuse you of being a cheater, but considering crafting seems to be your thing, that would be like accusing me of cheating for not taking damage."

"Glad you aren't a poor sport."

"That would have been more of my sister's thing."

Always the mention of this mystery sister. She must miss her.

"Well, either way, you can think of these bad boys-" Rory flashed another gem between his fingers before it vanished a moment later. "-as magical batteries, except instead of electricity they store an 'effect' that burns out over time."

"Got it," She said with a nod before raising her hand, the typical sign she had a question.

"Yes?" Rory asked, holding back the temptation to roll his eyes,

"How do you make things appear and disappear at will? Is that some skill you have?"

"Oh, no, not at all." Rory chuckled. Raising his arm with the Vambrace of the Early Void, Rory gave it a quick shake. "Inventory."

"Like… from a video game."

"Exactly."

"How?"

"Lots of hard work."

"Can I get one?"

"Maybe?"

"Maybe as in yes, or maybe as in no?"

"Maybe as in 'Can I figure out a way to make another one more easily than the last because master quality items aren't just freely scattered around to use?' That sort of maybe."

"Oh," Zoey said, looking downtrodden. "So, it's a maybe."

"Gah," Rory wanted to pull his hair out for a moment before sighing. "Just put the armor on already."

Giving his fellow founder some room to do exactly that, Rory soon turned back around to see the shorter woman decked out, looking like a blood knight.

"Intimidating, right?" The Vanguard asked with a grin on her face.

"You look like a bloodthirsty chihuahua."

"That's redundant, all chihuahuas are bloodthirsty."

"Fair," Rory said, conceding the point.

"So, now what?"

"Now, you need to go get some practical experience with that armor," Rory said. "If we try to head straight into battle with some stronger monster when you're not yet used to that armor, you'll be switching between flailing around helplessly as the float gems take you off guard, or more sluggish than you're used to due to the weight of the armor."

Considering the armor weighed several hundred pounds easily, even with their high level of natural strength, it could still be enough to throw her off, if even by a single percent. While that may not seem like a lot, in a fight against a mid or even high-tier seven monster, that could be the difference between life and death.

"So, you want me to do what exactly?"

"I don't know, go fight stuff. Didn't you get your ass handed to you by a bunch of rodents?"

"I mean, I don't think rabbits are technically part of the rodent family,"

"Semantics." Rory countered. "Go, do… stuff."

Shooing the woman away, she sighed as she trudged out from the room, grumbling under her breath about 'grilled rabbit.'

Most others would have needed at least a bit more time to recover. Zoey was unlike most others; her durability was top tier, and the woman had recovered remarkably fast, already ready for a round two now that she had new and improved armor. The only thing he hadn't given her was a pair of gauntlets, given that Eon had her covered in that department.

Alone once more, Rory sank to the ground, cross-legged as he thought.

She has a point, even if she didn't state it directly.

His gear had given him a direct advantage, sure. The issue was that a lot of that advantage would vanish as others began to acquire gear of even moderately comparable strength. Rory wasn't so egotistical as to believe that none of the other founder factions would ever find themselves with crafting types amongst them. It could be five years, or fifty, but eventually it seemed inevitable.

I need more personal strength.

His projections had been his answer to that same problem in the past: his lack of personal strength. Chants to empower his projections were an attempt to delay the immediate glaring problem. But slowly, the need to expand that arsenal was growing. His paradox bomb had been another attempt at solving that problem– the name was still being workshopped – as it was an exceptionally powerful addition to his arsenal. Still, it was also essentially a suicide attack that he would have to leave locked up, only to be revisited at tier eight.

The externalized aura of self was another helpful tool; however, the problem was that it was less of a defensive or offensive tool, instead it was closer to a utility tool to help overcome inherently esoteric and gimmicky abilities.

New idea time. Alright, brain, do your thing!

Shaking his head, Rory sighed.

Hah. If only it were that easy.

He did have one idea, but as far as he could tell, it wasn't something he would be pulling off anytime soon, an attempt at pulling others within his Mental Palace, a world of his creation. The fact that he had nothing more than the concept of a vague idea alone told him it wasn't anywhere close to fruition.

Man. If only I could summon attacks like Dragon's Fall faster.

The problem was that the need to draw out anywhere from one to multiple bound circles all at once just made the attack infeasible.

If only there were a way to… huh.

Rory glanced up, looking at the stone ceiling as he crossed his arms.

"That just might work."

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