26 - Helpful Sylvia

Settling down to train again, I began absorbing more chaotic mana from the mana crystals of the clams.

Months passed, and I got more proficient at absorbing chaotic raw mana, and I had to repeat my clam excursion multiple times in the process, but finally, half a year later, I managed to eat a whole compressed mana crystal in one bite of my gluttonous limb.

That's when I felt the absorption rate skyrocket all of a sudden, and I finally obtained [Basic Chaotic Mana Absorption].

The [Sphinx Cutter] book said it'd take 100 large mana crystals to learn this skill, but I had needed over 3000. I wasn't entirely sure where the disparity came from, but I had a guess.

The new skill I had gotten after the "2-bite incident", [Greater Blood Burst Resistance].

A new skill infused in the blood made it harder to even learn subsequent ones, and I had already had [Mana Proclivity] infused in a skill slot as well. With just 2 more skills than the author of the book had had, it made learning the last skill in the book literally over 30x more costly, time-consuming, and difficult.

It was really ridiculous.

The book also didn't say anything about what came next. It was a book for the class blood stage, and prepared the practitioner for the void magic stage, but reaching the void magic stage was not expressly detailed in it.

All that it did mention was the simple and well known fact that breaking through would require absorbing void mana.

My physique should now theoretically be strong enough to absorb the chaotic void mana, just barely, but I needed to know how to first.

Asking the guard captain, the only known way I could glean out of him was the royal family's personal technique, taught only to the king upon ascending the throne.

Well, that wasn't exactly the easiest thing to get a hold of.

I only had one other lead, so I decided to follow it.

***

In front of Sylvia's door, I knocked over and over again until she finally got annoyed enough to answer.

Opening the door, she looked extremely annoyed as she said,

"Aaaagh, oh my god, what is it?! Don't tell me you need more mana crystals cause I won't be giving you any. Or is it...do you want my body? I'm telling you right now, I'm way out of your league. I'll even largely outlive you if we did fall in love, it could never work."

Looking at Sylvia's serious face that had to have been joking, but showed no signs of it, I ignored her remarks and said,

"I'm ready to enter the void magic stage, but I need a technique to absorb void mana."

"...oh. Well, come on in."

Sylvia looked disappointed, which again, I swear had to be fake, but she was doing a great job faking her emotions.

She...didn't really think I had been here to confess my love, right?

I mean we had met a whole one other time.

No, she was faking it, surely.

It went to show how good her acting was if I was doubting something so obvious. Guess living a long time makes you a good actor.

Come to think of it...

"Hey, Sylvia. How old are you?"

Sylvia almost tripped and fell when I said that.

"Uh-ahem. That is none of your business."

She went red-faced for some reason. Now that I didn't think was fake, but I couldn't understand it at all.

Was being old that embarrassing?

I myself was in my 40's already. Of course, both me and Sylvia looked young.

Coming to the lounge again, which wasn't big by the way, it was small and homely, I waited as she brought out a few technique manuals from wherever she went underground.

As I sat there waiting for her, I thought about why I was becoming stronger.

I didn't really have a good reason. Back when I had gone through intense pain when first practicing absorbing chaotic mana, I had the serious thought of giving up any further advancement.

If I had to state a reason, it was because I wanted to get the treasure fully restored and upgraded, and the feeling of growing stronger felt nice.

However, those were both very surface level reasons.

Honestly, I hadn't thought things would come this far when I had first obtained the treasury. I understood something magical had happened, but I only realized the degree to which the world I lived in was such a magical place after I adventured around and learned more about this reality.

Now, I was a middle aged man who looked like he was in his late 20's, who killed giants and was even able to run away from a dragon. I was talking to a who-knows-how-old beautiful dryad woman who was about to teach me how to absorb void mana, after which I would be able to traverse across realms.

It all felt very surreal. I had grown up an ignorant unawakened human after all.

As I reveled in this feeling of surrealism, Sylvia came back with another interspatial ring in her hand.

When she handed it to me, I dripped my blood onto it as I thought, 'these really must be cheap, huh.'

Inside, there were 5 manuals.

[Basic Void Severance Technique]

[Voidflame Purification Art]

[Starcatcher Diagram]

[Basic Astral River Technique]

[Archmagia]

As I looked at the titles, Sylvia spoke.

"These 5 are some of the most common techniques in the 3000 realms. Especially [Archmagia], that one's basically the go-to archmage technique.

They're nothing special, and I made copies, so just take them. None are better than another, so choose based on what you think fits you. Don't practice multiple, it'll mess you up. You can cultivate multiple techniques once you reach the level above the void magic stage."

The level above the void magic stage?

"Don't even bother asking, I don't know much about it either. After all, I'm only in the void magic stage myself."

That made sense.

I spent the next few hours looking through the 5 technique books and choosing one for myself, and I settled on [Basic Void Severance Technique].

[Archmagia] was for archmages, not magic swordsmen. I could still pivot for now, so Sylvia gave it to me to look over, but I decided to stick to my current route.

[Basic Astral River Technique] and [Starcatcher Diagram] were too difficult for me to understand, and [Voidflame Purification Art] focused more on flame magic than swordsmanship, which wasn't to my tastes.

Nothing against flame magic, I just like swinging a sword around.

The feeling I had gotten when I had slain those sphinxes with a single slash amplified by magic. Now that was an unforgettable experience.

Making up my mind, I left the other 4 books in the interspatial ring and left.

Sylvia watched me leave with a pondering expression.

***

After Merca left, Sylvia took the interspatial ring that was still bound to him and went to the underground floor of her lair.

Indeed, she also liked calling it a lair. She thought it made her sound cool.

She was a void magic stage powerhouse after all, she deserved to have a cool lair.

Heading down, there was a balcony overlooking a large open space. It was like Jackal's lab, except bigger and without the bland white coloring.

It was filled with warm colors, reds and oranges and yellows, and the infrastructure was mostly made of an odd kind of wood.

Leaping over the balcony, she jumped down into the midst of the ground of the "cave", where there were a lot of machines and tinkering things laid out neatly.

On the right wall of the cave was a large, long bookshelf, and on the left was paths leading to more rooms.

In the back wall, opposite the entrance, was a large part of the wall caved in unnaturally, like it had been carved out, and inside was a splendid bedchamber, open to the rest of the cave with no door.

Sylvia's bed was draped in purple curtains, and looked very vampiresque and alluring-

No, sorry, that's off topic.

She walked up to a certain contraption in the center of the floor that looked like series of concentric rings floating in midair and swirling around.

In front of them was a console connected to the ground on a wooden stand, and Sylvia tinkered with it before throwing the ring inside the rotating circles.

The ring got stuck in the middle of the circles and froze in place there, slightly reverberating as though it had hit something.

On the console, the screen lit up, and Sylvia navigated to a certain program and clicked on it.

There was a command line, and she started typing out some code very proficiently.

Finishing, she clicked enter and the circles began to spin faster and faster.

Finally, they shone a bright light and slowly came to a stop.

The console lit up with a pop up window that showed a rotate-able 3d model of the ring alongside certain information underneath.

Going to the section on information about the bound user, Sylvia clicked on the metadata option for the bound user's blood.

A new window popped up with a line saying:

{Genetic Code:}

Followed by Merca's genetic sequence laid out bare in front of Sylvia's eyes.

Jackal had had a console in his lab, but it wasn't backed by a sophisticated computerized system like this. His was made with runecraft, which was limited in its scope for such things.

In comparison, Sylvia's computer system worked exactly as Earth's systems did, with small transistors forming logic gates and creating an independent environment that could be fully controlled.

Moreover, it was much better than any computer system on Earth.

Sylvia used a program to analyze Merca's genetic sequence, and it gave several outputs.

One was the bodily shape. Another was the cells. A 3rd was the brain formation.

However, the 4th pop up made her squint her eyes.

[Bloodline: Arachne's direct descendent]

'!!'

'That Arachne? The one currently trapped in the chiral prism dimension? How did he...'

Sylvia was extremely shocked, but more importantly, she realized she had to pay more attention to this kid.

At the same time, she resolved herself to only pay attention, and never befriend him. She'd also stop helping him out of goodwill, and ignore him in the future.

'Hello?! Arachne was imprisoned by those people!! I ain't tryna get involved with all that. Nope, goodbye, kid, it was nice knowing you.'

Sylvia thought that there would surely come a day when Merca tried to free Arachne, and when he did, he would have to fight against a certain group of people.

If he won, he'd still owe her for these last 2 times, but if he lost, she had to make sure he didn't make mention of her as an ally. She had to distance herself from him.

If those people thought she had any goodwill towards Arachne at any level, she was beyond screwed.

Turning off the console only after deleting the gene file, she grabbed the ring out of the air and went to a large contraption nearby.

It was two curved plates, one high and one low, forming the top and bottom of a sphere, with the part in between them being empty. The top plate was floating in midair while the bottom plate was attached to a stand that itself was attached to the ground.

Placing the ring in the middle of them, it froze there again like before. There was a console there too, and pressing on it a few times, Sylvia turned on the incinerator.

The top and bottom plates conducted electricity between them and the electricity grew stronger until it was blinding.

When the light died down, the incinerator turned off automatically and the ring...was nowhere to be seen.