This was the second time I had lost my shell. I was starting to see a pattern here, and I wasn't a fan of it. Maybe I should store a shell in my Inventory as a backup to swap to.

While I regenerated, I reviewed how many levels I had gained after first instructing my system to consolidate all the level-ups into a single notification. That way, I didn't have to deal with a half dozen notifications every time I killed a bunch of enemies.

I was fairly certain they split the level-ups into groups so that you could tell how much each kill or action was worth. But that would become obsolete at some point. Hazel had mentioned that at some point, system users could detect how close they were to gaining a level. I would ask her about those, but all I was hearing over our connection was static.

Class Level (Neophyte Conduit) Increased +9 (69) +18 Wit, +27 Spirit, +18 Fortitude, +27 Arcana

So close to another Skill, what a shame. At least the Stat boost was pretty good. Combined with this, and leveling my Profession, I might have enough Wit for my mind to process what actually happened when I used a regular Avalanche, instead of it looking like the affected objects practically teleported.

Then I had the Event reward.

[Zone Event Cleared] Name: [Merfolk Migration] Description: [Merfolk have begun their migratory cycle to the Island of Broken Tales. Every day at noon, a wave of merfolk will arrive and do their best to secure the Island. Survive daily, increasingly powerful waves of merfolk until you are able to purchase passage on the Frightened Mare or find another way off the island.] Reward: [1000 Eidetic Coins] Performance Bonus: [No Deaths: two-day break while the Merfolk prepare.]

Oh, apparently, I've been doing pretty well.

I wasn't sure if the performance bonus was good or bad. Did it mean they actually prepared more, or was that just background lore to explain the break? Was I going to get stomped in two days?

I wasn't sure, but this would give us time to get started on the boat.

My body was done, but I was still regrowing my clothes when I stood up. I wasted no time heading over to the orb attached to the tortoise.

I touched the orb and connected to it, quickly noticing that the circuits were far longer than I had expected them to be. Or at least they were at the moment, because they were shrinking for some reason. The very ends of the wires were slowly disintegrating into nothing.

After taking a moment to commit the entire design to memory, I began sending pulses of Mana down each wire, trying to see how the shield functioned before it entirely fell apart. Eventually, a push of Winter through one of the paths caused one of the tortoise's feet to freeze.

Was the orb built into the tortoise? Something like cybernetics, but made for Mana?

Leaving a cable connected to the orb, I hopped down to the frozen foot and carved it off. Inside, I found... nothing. It resembled the inside of a tortoise's foot. Sending another pulse of Mana, I finally understood what was happening as part of the flesh began to glow.

It seemed the orb was being powered by Mana drawn from the tortoise.

The tortoise had the Mana Veins Catalyst, which was attached to the artifact. After the tortoise's death, those veins had immediately started breaking apart because they weren't actual material pathways. This suggested the existence of a spiritual layer that Mana travelled through. It was very fascinating, but I had no idea what use I could make of this discovery.

I knew bodies had some kind of innate resistance to Mana being remotely manifested within them. Even if I managed to shove my aura inside a living being, I couldn't pump Fire Mana into its flesh. I figured this out when killing those weird inside-out dogs, I think they were called Skrith. Was this effect caused by the spiritual layer that held Mana Veins?

I needed someone whom I could conduct some tests on.

My eyes landed on Autumn, who was drinking the blood of the merfolk they killed.

"Why are you smiling at me like that?" Autumn asked.

"Oh, I was just curious. Have you ever considered installing a set of Mana Veins?" I asked, turning back to the orb. "Actually, maybe I should have asked you before, do you know what a Catalyst is?"

Autumn froze in place, and for a moment, I thought I had unlocked another one of their memories. However, that frozen state ended far faster than usual.

"So what was that about?" I asked as I pulled the orb into a simulation and tried reversing the Mana flow; instead of from the orb downwards, Mana would have come from the ends of the wiring towards the orb.

"I'm not sure, my Lady wasn't able to finish… Something unexpected happened, and the plan didn't work," Autumn said, turning to look out over the ocean.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"What plan?"

"The creation of the Runaspriggan, things weren't supposed to go this way." Their words carried an undercurrent of worry that I hadn't really heard from Autumn before. "The rest of the memories were just a muddled mess…"

I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. It had always annoyed me that Syladine was somehow able to see what I was doing through divination or some other means.

"Well, obviously, does this look like what was supposed to happen?" I asked, motioning towards the ocean we were standing in front of. It didn't make any sense for their special project to be dropped and left to die in the middle of nowhere. "Did you at least learn anything about what a Catalyst is?"

"Yes," Autumn replied.

"You gonna elaborate? Or are you looking for me to start guessing?"

"Sorry… I think I just remembered my Lady's last moments," Autumn said with the spriggan equivalent of a sniff. "Before every Ascension, there is a Catalyst to acquire in order to maximize the effects of your Ascension. The first is a Mana Vein system that you should already have built into your body. The quality of this Vein system will help determine your choices during your Ascension. She didn't have time to explain any of the rest to me before…"

They tossed the merfolk to the side and started walking back up the bluffs. I decided to give them some time alone to deal with whatever that was.

What they said gave me some ideas, though. I currently had two Catalysts, or technically, only one and a half, since I only had a single Strand of my Conceptual Lattice. A 'Lattice' implied multiple Strands interwoven to form a whole.

Also, one of [Argent Bastion]'s effects was to make forming subsequent Strands much easier.

That was besides the point, though.

What I realized was, why should I settle for [Repaired Mana Veins] when even Hazel had a better version? And if I were already going to try and upgrade my Mana Veins, well, why not incorporate my Strand as well?

The only problem was that if my hypothesis was correct, then my Mana Veins were inscribed on that spiritual layer. The fact that I retained the benefit of them even when my shell had been entirely destroyed suggested that this was true.

Normally, I wouldn't even think I had a chance of being able to alter them now that they were in place, except for the fact that I had my Strand.

My Strand increased my control over myself immensely. Given that the 'spiritual layer' I'd discovered was probably the soul overlayed through the body, I couldn't think of a better aid in manipulating it.

I didn't have Hazel's instinctual talent for designing her Mana Veins to her own liking. But I was sure I could get it to work. Especially after finally comprehending Argent Bastion in totality.

Before any of that, I'd have liked to get the shield orb working, though. I had already been working away at it in a simulation, and I was fairly certain I had figured out how to turn it on, even if some of the functionality wasn't quite there yet.

The main problem was that it was in an entirely different Mana-based language than the one I was familiar with. Instead of plant-like growths being used as wires, the ones connected to the orb seemed to flow like rivers. It also contained multiple Symbolic Weaves that I was still decoding.

The only way I could figure out what each symbol did in the weave was to remove it and see what happened when I turned the shield on again.

It took a little while, but eventually I figured out how it worked. All I had to do was replace the symbols one by one with Argent Bastion, and I could have my own personal shield.

"Hey, I see you've got a simulation open at three hundred times acceleration, but do you want to get started on the next material we were going to make?" Novi asked from the ground next to me.

I hadn't even realized that I had sped up the simulation. It felt like only a few minutes had passed since I started. But then it didn't really make sense for me to have completely reverse-engineered the artifact in such a short time, either.

"Yeah, sorry, I can do this later. You saw that we have two days until the next invasion?" I picked up Novi and put her on my shoulder and headed up to the house.

"Yep… is that a good or bad thing?" Novi asked while she curled up against my head.

"You know I have as little information as you do, right?" I replied.

"Okay, but would it be better for us to have a larger invasion in two days or one that's the size of what we'd expect if we had one tomorrow?" she asked.

To that, I didn't actually know. With the new insights I gained today, I was certain we'd be better off in the future. If there were a stronger wave, it could be even better as well. But we'd have to survive it first.

So I just shrugged in response.

"No use thinking about hypotheticals. Are we still going with the Very Easy material that we had planned before?" I asked.

Novi hummed in uncertainty and opened up the menu for both of us to look at.

While reviewing the options, Novi pointed out that a new one had appeared now that we had access to Whisperash. It used both varieties we had access to, which was interesting.

[Rimeshrouded Cambium] Material Components: Silver Whisperash Bark + Night Whisperash Bark + Scorchbranch Husk + Glacivein Muscle + Energy Absorbent Blood Dew Process: Mana Gradient Pressing + Void Crucible Forging + Vital Liquefaction + Chloromantic Column Refinement Mana Requirements: Various Features: Extreme Durability / Natural Mana Processing / Hoarfrost Aura

I was a little bit hesitant to try taking natural Mana into my body, but the material was supposed to be able to handle it up to a certain degree. I'd just have Novi do it first. She was the one who suggested the material, after all.

"I barely produce any Space Mana, do you think we'll actually have enough to perform Void Crucible Forging?" I asked.

We were able to create Void Mana by running Space Mana through the inversion rune that Eryx provided as the first puzzle reward. Void, being the lack of space or something, I wasn't entirely sure about the technical details.

"If you read the specifications, it says using too much is something to avoid. Only a tiny bit of Void Mana is actually needed for the Crucible," she read from the instructions.

It was certainly an undertaking. There were a shitload of steps and we'd have to build several pieces of what seemed to be extremely complex and precise artifacts just to process some of the materials. But we could probably do it. We had two days after all.

"Yeah, alright. Let's get started," I said, looking over the top of the bluffs.

We were going to have to clear some space.

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