It was the labour of more than two days before he was ready to start consuming his first soul nurturing treasure.

Name: Divine ray seed (common, F grade)

Apparently, the sunflower seed like natural treasures were called Divine ray seeds, and he had to take a few handfuls of them at once. They had a neutral energy that was similar to the composition of soul cores. These natural treasures were overflowing with soul energy.

These kinds of natural treasures produced more soul energy than mana when they were still alive. In fact, some of these kinds of natural treasures were also obtainable from beasts that had more soul energy than other products of Essence. Only, in such cases he would be using the solid form of the animal's soul core.

When he absorbed the soul energy from the seeds in his belly, he received another shock at first. It was kind of hot, kind of shocking, and he kind of wanted to dance around, kind of like what he imagined someone in an electric chair felt. He had read about this though. It was like rejecting blood of an incompatible type. Introducing any sort of natural treasure into the soul for the first time was supposed to be jarring.

In his opinion, jarring was kind of an understatement, but what did he know? He wrestled with the energy until after a few moments his soul was ready to accept it. It was still hard to move the energy to his prepared reservoir.

This was the first time he was doing it, and he still had about three uses of this particular natural treasure left in his inventory. It was the practice round. Every round after this would get easier.

He struggled with it, the soul energy. He struggled until he had it in his reservoir. A lot of it sloughed off on the way. It was alright though. The soul energy wouldn't dissipate immediately, unless it was next to his soul core, which was not the case.

With an internal heave, he felt the rest of the energy pour into the reservoir. It didn't even seem to be halfway full. He had built it to the manual's specific detail, not wanting to complicate an already more than complicated task. Had he somehow got the whole thing wrong? Was this what talentlessness felt like? Like following the instructions to the last and still coming up short?

He sighed and let the intrusive thoughts out of his mind. Cultivation first. He turned to the traces of energy he'd left in his wake. Now, to get unprocessed Essence…

Rafe found himself freezing, not knowing what to do. It was another moment of helplessness. Was he feeling a bit sluggish? He couldn't tell, but he knew he was not the happiest of campers for some reason. He should not be great at everything, he reassured himself. Not that it helped.

He had overlooked the fact that he couldn't really see his soul's link to the ambient Essence yet. He also could hardly see his core, but his role wasn't to build a new core or anything. All he had to do was force the energy towards the core, and once there the energy would do its thing.

His only job was to form a kind of bubble around the core so that the energy that was forced through the holes kept circulating in that vicinity until it returned to the core. He was thinking of naming it the two bubbles soul cultivation manual because the system name it came with had been so lame.

In anycase, this was apparently part of the information that had been lagged into his brain. The information that caused him such a terrible headache he'd called out for his mommy even at his very mature age.

Rafe thought of something amusing then. He had been sixteen when he first entered the Skyholm trial, and after spending more than thirty years there, he was close to fifty by now. Almost older than his mother. Maybe when he returned, he wouldn't be subjected to the 'my house, my rules' speech.

Once he stopped having his mini-moment of panic, he found the information about getting external essence easy enough.

Farming Essence from the two sides of his soul curtain was a more tiresome endeavor than he'd first thought. He was collecting the Essence rejected by his statistic pillars as they expanded and contracted rapidly. He was collecting the Essence that was part of the mana and stamina leaking out of his reserves, and the Essence that was being spat out of his barely changing life force pillar. It only ever showed appreciable growth during moments of rank breakthroughs, he'd been led to believe, although even those were barely enough to repair any type of big damage or whatever. The kind of damage he risked if he ran out of energy for during a skill upgrade or something of the like.

He collected the Essence he needed and started the job of manually mixing it up with the soul energy he'd left along his path to the general vicinity of his core.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

It wasn't easy, even as he scrambled and tried to move as fast as he could. Some of the soul energy, more than half of it, dissipated during the whole movement process. He was slow and simply struggling with a new method. He would probably get better in time, hopefully.

Once he was finished with everything, he tried to make the bubble around the core. He had to make it larger than the instructions of the manual recommended because some of the Essence-soul energy mixture had already gone quite far from the core area and he wanted to include all of it in the bubble.

Now his job was to wait until there wasn't that much energy leaking from the core anymore, meaning most of the energy is depleted, and the session would be over. Because he'd been forced to make such a large bubble, the process was probably going to last a lot longer than necessary. And he did not have the patience for that, Rafe did not. He did not have a meditation skill, for crying out loud.

These kinds of things were why such a thing was absolutely essential. Devila had told him as much. He really needed to think of getting one. He couldn't get every single one of his skills organically, could he? He needed other ways to get skills. For example he could buy skills. Yeah, it would be like the skills he got as quest rewards, wouldn't it?

Only, he couldn't get himself to do it for some reason. Sure, there was perhaps a way for someone of his particular talents to modify any skills he got, but still. Buying skills felt somehow cheap. Which was why he was probably not going to bother with the more normal upgrade to the quest system that gave him access to a kind of system shop. He wasn't that far off from it, if he remembered correctly. There was a seventy-thirty chance he'd choose the new upgrade the system had been promising him for months now.

Anyway in the end he decided he couldn't wait as long as his new method required, so he started experimenting with trying to reduce the diameter of the bubble incrementally.

The bubble popped the first time he tried, and he had to hustle and reconstruct it. It had very minutely reduced its radius, and he figured that if he reconstructed it fast enough, the energy wouldn't have spread too far again. He was not fast enough, that first round. With practice though, he became deft. And just like that Rafe changed at least the last step of his new soul cultivation manual. He would start with a relatively large bubble and keep on shrinking it down. It was more efficient even. At least he thought so.

Maybe whoever had first created the method hadn't used it before, and they'd created it specifically for him like he'd thought. Or maybe they were patient and liked to meditate. Rafe would never know. At least not until he met the gods of Skyholm again.

****

When the boy had first said he was going to train with Collab, Filoria hadn't expected the old man to train him personally. He hadn't trained her that personally after all. The last person he'd trained that personally was her father.

Although even with him things had been a little different. He had been weaker than Collab on their initial meeting, her father. Even when they'd parted he hadn't been much stronger as a warrior than Collab. But Collab only trained him as a warrior. Everyone knew Filoria's father was much more than just some warrior.

They just didn't know what the more was. And he'd then gone and broken through to the D grade, the first and only one to do so on their planet, leaving his master further behind. Her father was a legend on Primus. One Filoria couldn't help but glance at with sparkling eyes and cocked ears. Just like everyone else. He was her father yet she was forced to regard him the same way every sparkly eyed Ma'lan youth did.

Anyway, this Rafael Kingsley fought with Collab daily for some reason. Sometimes even going barehanded. Sometimes using an axe or hammer. But never a sword. This round he was using a training spear and a shield. Like he needed to show concern for Collab's safety if he used a real weapon.

The battle only lasted a few seconds longer than most others. He was lasting longer each time, and Filoria could feel Collab's stats try to push through the suppression equipment to take down the boy. The boy, being closer to Collab, obviously felt it. He didn't show any reaction though. He just kept on attacking, fighting.

Until Collab used a few moves he'd been working on recently. He unarmed Rafael somehow, making the young boy drop his shield first. Filoria saw Rafe put his left foot onto the shield, but she couldn't guess what he was doing for the life of her.

Then Collab attacked the hand holding the spear. For some reason, the boy hadn't yet switched to a two handed spear grip. With Collab's deft control of his new disarming move, it was easiness itself for him to disarm the boy. Filoria felt she could too if she was in such a fight. It had looked so easy to disarm the boy, uncharacteristically easy.

Only, even as the spear fell Filoria saw the boy's left foot tense and move a little. What ensued made as much sense to Filoria as stories about worlds without magic.

The shield flew into the boy's left arm. He went to shield bash his opponent. Collab was fast enough to try and intercept the shield, but then somehow the spear too was flying into the boy's hand on the other side. Filoria felt her eyes bug out as Collab froze, indecisive.

Both weapons landed. There was a strange quiet in the training arena. Filoria noticed she wasn't the only one watching the sparring match by now.

The boy's hits on Collab gained nothing though. Except perhaps the respect of everyone in the compound. Was the boy really not using any kind of technique? Collab also showed a hint of respect as he let the boy retreat a little. Then he stalked forward and attacked the boy even more relentlessly than before.

The boy pulled his trick at least three more times, though this time he was using other things as Collab had given up on trying to disarm him. For example he once made a rock fly using his leg, and then with the butt of his spear, batted it to increase the force with which it attacked Collab. It was an impressive move. It was not enough to beat Collab.

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