chapter 11

Time comes and goes here on the tutorial floor like nothing is even happening as he remain fixated at the same age he entered and although cultivation slows ones aging it doesn't stop it until the godly levels or so the book on cultivation say, of course 300 is the average life span of a first stage awakener who has merged their mana with a part.

Next step if forming a mana core using any means you can make as long as ones mana can gather and increase using the method and he had at first been confused by this concept as how is that any different then what he did when he merged the mind with the mana but now he knows, as he feels the double helix slowly increase the amount of mana within him naturally as the double helix was made into a mobius strip in his mind to see what will happen he discovered it had the property needed for ones mana core.

He had accidently made himself a mana core without realizing what he did, most probably followed a book but he is going blind and so such accident is nothing more then an achievement but now he looks at the still unnamed status and decides now is the time to name it.

His double helix mobius allows him to use multiple energy types beside his own and is highly stable, he is uncertain what name would fit but thinks of the information absorption ability of this cultivation with the tainted rabbit.

It is the most unique feature of merging with ones mind along with multiple mana types make this a highly versatile cultivation, Elemental empathy is the name given to this style by me and the tower takes it even changing it to match on y status window.

Status-

Strength-60

Speed-15

Agility-30

Intelligence-35

Regeneration-60

Detection-40

Health-60

Mana-300

-your mana type is purifying, beginning tainted energy resistance, apprentice energy detection, apprentice energy manipulation, apprentice blacksmith, apprentice<elemental empathy> cultivation, apprentice sabre martial arts, mana manipulation fire type, mana manipulation water type, mana manipulation wind type, mana manipulation earth type, apprentice energy manipulation, beginner enchanting weaver, beginner ballet, beginner belly dancing

One can only be an apprentice cultivator when one finally forms a core and after this he is now one.

He is advancing nicely but his advancement in forming a core has made it so the fragmented memory pieces stand out in my mind, it isn't that the rabbit is the first one but rather I have been building them up over time and simply they where to hidden within the energy to be distinguishable but now that the pure energy is removed into the core he made their figures become clear.

There are around a hundred all breaking apart and barely there, he slowly dissolves them like the rabbit and none give a talent like the rabbit did just blurry memories and small pain in varying spots.

Clearly the fragmented memory must be pretty powerful to get the talent of it but that isn't common.

Sighing all he can do is wait and see if he can luck into one or buy one on the store area but few people are willing to sell it as it is only worth 1 coin per 5 pounds and you have to bother butchering an inedible body without purifying it to increase the price to 10 coins per one pound, essentially it is worth more to purify the meat then sell it instead of just selling it.

He looks through the store and sees people pay to hunt down and kill a specific creature for them and think, he can use this to both hunt and give the body of course the price will be higher but I have sold my fire dagger finally and have plenty for a decent creature, I decide to offer 15,000, 5,000 more than a normal hunting request and go for the golden horn sheep as it is also a purity based creature though it only produces naturally purified cotton and so has little worth when killed as it's meat lacks enough energy for the lack of natural tainted mana to be worth hunting them.

They are decently powerful as they often kill goblins and other predators and their coat of fur acts as a shield despite it being soft like normal fur otherwise, I believe they have and ability to hard it and want to see if I can't get something from it, though whether it will have a strong will is hard to say if it is freshly killed with a dagger as specified in my thing it should work out.

I begin to forge another fire dagger in replication of the last time, once done I look and see one of the hunters has taken the task on the fifth floor.

A day later one sits in the tutorial beside me and I begin to cook it, although people say the muton it produces taste incredible the mana in it is less then even a lowest F-grade purified energy crystal and soon I realized it is true as the meat melted in my mouth but the mana is so insignificant if not for me looking for it I wouldn't sense it at all.

Slowly I enter my mind and sense for the sheep and feel it's presence already fading due to it's lack of mana, it seems purity things will be hard unless freshly killed when consumed, he takes the memories before it can get worse.

He can feel the sharp slice of a blade in his side as he immediately tries and defends himself with the harden wool ability and I feel the innate instinct leek into me, the way the mana enters into the hair and hardens it while also having it be a very thick army thanks to it's massive size without increasing the weight of it makes me wonder if I can't use the new found fur to make a shirt that does this itself like a light weight armor.

Anyway I feel the man jab into the eye and realize these visions need the thing to use the ability just before death to have the greatest chance to occur as both the rabbit and sheep did this while many of the others died to quickly to use the ability, looks like I need to specify this when I send out the hunting request which will again increase the price.

I leave the events with a feeling like my left eye should be destroyed but slowly readjust as I wipe away the sheep's memory from my mind, once gone the feeling faded with it.

I send the energy to my body and realize that it works only to quarter of normal efficiency on skin due to the lack of thickness but if he also did it with bone and muscle he suddenly ran out of mana due to expending to much, he would leave it to skin for now as putting it anywhere else used up to much mana though that can be an emergency protection.

I recover my energy by eating a tower bought piece of tainted meat and as usual it was without a good memory fragment, I wipe it from my mind and decide to test the full effect of the protection in the ring.

the goblin in the first wave comes at me and I let it hit me as I want to see how much mana it takes for blocking the basic hit like this, a small amount probably a type of defense that takes mana in even amount of damage done, so for a more powerful attack it will take more mana to block.

I go until the warrior goblin and let it hit, a bigger chunk of mana as I thought as that took about 5% of my current mana to block.

Then comes the real test the berserker goblin, I am pushed back slightly by the berserker goblin but am not injured and my mana decreased by a good 25% making it so I can only take 4 hits from this goblin before I am out of mana and unable to fight or protect myself from it.

He will make sure to have a teleportation stone in case of such situations, now he knows the trick to getting a good memory fragment with the ability he wants and won't hesitate.

He puts out 2 20,000 coin bounty's on a fire weasel and water otter, both have furs that protect them from their elements and are used in making fire proof and water breathing clothes, I intend to make these unique attribute my own using my mana conversion ability to fuel them.

I begin to smith another dagger but this one is a wind dagger and after a week I am notified the weasel one has been taken but the otter one is still in the hunting room, that day I ate the weasel meat while sitting it's fur aside for personal use as it make beautiful paint brushes and that is something I can do with my wood working skills.

The weasel does exactly as I wanted which is by flowing fire mana through my skin I imitate the fire proof ability and am now also immune like most fire talents, though I use mana to do so it still will aide me in hiding my talent of purifying.

Then 2 days later the otter comes in and all I can do is hope the dagger is still connected enough for the effect to take place or that the dagger isn't needed in the first place, I enter my mind and can feel the otter isn't as agitated and therefore fading quickly so I immediately connect with it and feel the dagger come at me and try and cut me so I dive under the water and my innate talent absorbs the water around me transforming it into air without a need to use any of my own mana when suddenly a dagger does straight through my stomach pinning me to the ground before another kills me by slicing my throat.

I gasp and feel like blood is clogging my throat but force the otters phantom to fade taking the sensations with it but leaving the sensation behind.

I go to one of the basins I filled with water for this and use my mana by turning it into water mana and take a breath feeling air instead of water fill my mouth despite the lack of it, it is like a cold shock as you expect one thing but the body delivers something completely different as instead of cold you feel hot.

I pull out of the water and know it will take a while to get used to the sensation so a training time will need to be set up for that, actually he wonders if he can't find a way to fight under water for practice here in the tutorial in the future,

Snorting at his own humor he begins to cultivate and this time uses the money he made form selling the two daggers that both sold for around 60,000 coins a piece to buy the book solely dedicated to all the mana types and how to make them, and soon found it was as he thought that steam is just a mix of the fire and water one with it being to triangle connected at their tips.

Earth is a tube that shrinks to a tiny point the opens up at the end, so lava is a figure eight set of tubes that when they connect open up after getting shrunk, wind is a curled pattern and when you add it inside the water triangle it makes a whirlpool while if you attach it to the outside short end of the water it makes a hurricane and finally if you add it on all flat sides then you get ice.

But he instead tries his hand at manipulating the mana he produces to do this on it's own, he swirls the wind mana with the water mana and release it making a small whirlpool, and then puts the wind mana hovering over the water mana and slowly the water mana is sucked in by the wind making a hurricane when released.

The Ice on is trickier as I need to essentially surround the water mana with wind mana without letting them cross paths just coexist like they normally would in nature.

I try and end up with small hail in a hurricane, the next one led to a slightly frozen mini whirlpool and so one slowly they got more and more frozen but still showing the effect of one or the other and not just pure ice as he expected. He knew he was considered only a apprentice level in energy manipulation and this proved it as ice can be produced by some water mage journeymen without even having their own wind energy but simply using the energy in the world around them.

I know this is all about not letting any of the mana merge but it does so to easily as it is all my mana even if they are transformed slightly, something most mages don't need to deal with I guess.

I take a break with my mana exhausted and eat some of the towers tainted meat.

Then I think of the otters ability to take oxygen out of water and wonder if this may be the hint he needs as he begins to form the water outside his body then let the connection with himself go and the now normal water with little traces of mana in it exist before manipulating the air to freeze it and a small patch of ice is now in front of me.

I wonder if it can be done the other way around and make breezes around me but they fade as soon as I release my mana as this as it move without something budging it.

I have a way to make the ice outside of my body and it works even better as no one dodges water attacks because they do no damage, if I freeze the water while they are covered in it they will be slowed down and fire spells are more difficult to cast in cold places so although no cool ice spikes it is still very useful.

Sighing both relief and slight disappointment I decide to see how tough the ice is by testing it and discover it's greatest use is against the assassin goblin as a small splash and suddenly freezing the ground around me keeps it from being able to hide and run like usual.

I was useful against weaker but fast opponents as the warrior goblin could break free in a single go, so not strong but for stopping something or slowing it down the use is great.

Slowly I begin to figure out how to use the other mana advance abilities like lava manipulation which is just rapidly heating the earth you manipulate using fire mana as conjuring earth takes a lot more energy then manipulating it, I bought some rocks on the player store a bit ago to test manipulating them with my earth energy.

So on and so forth it is simply replicating the means by which it is produced in nature with your mana, though others have to use nature energy to make these effects I have both mana and so can do so on my on without a certain condition or another magician.

But the funniest and easiest one I have found of them is lighting which is fire and wind my two most compatible energy types, not all that surprising in hind sight.

It acts almost like a stun effect as the opponent seems to become dazed and confused after being hit with small burn marks from the hit, but if I make it so the fire part is greater then although the lighting amount decreases to a small spark the amps in it are increased stopping the hearts of his opponent with a much more violent and excruciating attack that look like a type of spark you see when you rub the carpet and touch another.

Though more wind causes it to lacerate and scar worse, useful to slow something down or capture without killing it but less useful in a fight then the less impressive looking one.

The other combinations that he can make although interesting use up to much mana for use in a proper fight.

Finally after many practices and working on melding the different energy together he freezes a ice spike as he had been aiming for when he first tried, he froze the water as it appeared, allowing him to impale a goblin on the spike like he read some of the journeymen water mages doing.

He grins in joy of this achievement and even the tower agrees he has succeeded as a ding comes from the tower after he makes his first Ice spike.

- Your energy manipulation has advanced to apprentice grade.

He is excited by the advancement and looks in the tower store for more books on the patterns of nature when another book catches his attention, it is a bestiary and basic explanation on different creatures and the floors they inhabit as well as the grading and levels of each floor.

He sees the price tag of 50,000 coins and is shocked but thinks why a book on such things should cost that much, he knows if it is such a basic book and yet costs so much then the information within has to be worth that much.

He buys it in hopes that it holds truly invaluable information on tower, instead it throws him into the darkest abyss destroying the pride and joy he has built for his accomplishments inside the tutorial.

He was now at the average level of most species that have lived with knowledge and training for the tower where, although journeymen was only up to the 50th floor in most species for ones like us humans and lower born species getting that far is already a gift.

In the books it says most never see anything more advance then a master grade thing no matter what they do, humans have only ever made it as far as the Legendary status but their species restricts them from going any further.

Yet the dragon is born at the legendary status and a wyvern can transform into a dragon, the wyvern is born at the master level and can go as far as dragons if they successfully transform. It is said that all primordial beings are their own separate species innately born with the talent for such position, most species are just to low down on the picking order to ever truly mean something in the eyes of other more capable species.

The tower claims all have potential to be primordial's but reality is never like that, it is why some species are favored and better rewarded then others.

He is still only within the rating of most low grade species like him are expected to reach and anything born naturally higher then him can still squash him like a bug or enslave him with a flick of their eyes, in the tower he is another commodity to please a being viewed to have better potential.

Only in the tutorial can he be completely hidden and safe from such things, he needs to reach the highest rank he can before he leaves the tutorial or the only fate that awaits him is someone's chew toy.

He feels like everything he has done all he has accomplished was suddenly like a child taking it's first steps rather then a pro runner as he once thought, he had been originally judging his accomplishments based on the towers gifts and other humans but now realized he was limiting his own vision to the truth and that is as he once said.

We humans are little more then ants in the eyes of the tower and the beings residing their and if they want they can put us in a glass cage and watch us scramble for any little thing they give us.