Chapter 10 : Engraving some more

In the early morning, I visited Ivy's room. I was expecting her to be asleep but see apparently woke up early to meditate, I told her that even though it is better to consciously meditate instead of doing it in your sleep with the sleep meditation technique, she didn't get enough sleep the results wouldn't be that different. she may be excited to awaken, but as an unawakened, she should still get enough rest. she obviously dismissed my speech.

I didn't, however, come to teach her about good sleep. so I said " I wanted to check on how your feeling about the awakening, your probably excited but aren't you also a little annoyed that after all this work to succeed in awakening at a new record, that I overshadowed you, because of some unfair advantages.", after saying this she started laughing and answered "Were you really worried about that haha, I don't care! I just want to get strong and fight some monsters!" she kept laughing for a few minutes. I seemed to be totally wrong in my assumption, I felt stupid. It was a bit of a shot to my ego, apparently not everyone is as competitive as I am.

Ivy kept talking about how excited she was to awaken, It proposed to meditate together because I've read that in some cases when people meditate together they can connect their souls and grow from each other's experience. She agreed so we started doing that I've read that it works best when the people sit opposite of each other and hold both hands together.

It might have been because we're friends but when we started we could immediately feel each other's presence in our minds I could feel her emotions, mostly embarrassment because of the hand holding. We really connected and she could look into my core and I into hers, she could look at it and learn from it from the experience of absorption of mana and the condensing of mana by doing so we could both absorb more mana whilst meditating.

I could feel emotions of admiration and astonishment from her when she was looking into my mana core. For me, it just felt interesting to connect with her on such a deep level. I couldn't really learn anything from her core because mine is better and I've inspected mine thoroughly while meditating. It felt really warm and comfortable in this state of meditation It felt like we connected on a different level, on a level I hadn't connected with anyone.

We stopped abruptly when Ishton walked into the room, we both jumped away from each other and felt embarrassed. Ishton laughed a little and said we were late for training with him. On the way to the training ground, Ishton kept teasing us for holding hands we did our morning training and went to our private teacher, I think Ishton got the wrong idea when he caught us because while he laughed about it when the training started beating harder than usually, I also thought I heard him say something among the lines of "How dare you hold hands with my granddaughter!". Of course to his precious granddaughter, he didn't fight abnormally. after the training, I felt sour, not just because of the fighting but mostly because I had to continuously heal my body. After Ishton caught us meditating Ivy didn't dare even share a glance at me, she ignored me, it felt annoying, what did I do?

the awkwardness lasted till dinner when I asked why we weren't talking and asked if we got into a fight. Then Ishton started roaring about catching us holding hands. Ivy started turning red while I tried explaining the meditation while also turning a little redder with every word, in the end, everyone at the table started laughing for hours, while Ivy and I blushed while stuffing our mouths full of food. After being dismissed from; the table I ran to my room, hid under the blanket, and started meditating, but my focus was off, I kept thinking; "Why did I blush? Why did I feel embarrassed? and Why did I feel so comfortable when we meditated It felt like some sort of inner peace?" as always I meditated till morning but I never focused I was stuck in this mind storm of confusion.

when the morning came I went to the hall to eat breakfast. In the hall, I walked into Ivy she still seemed to ignore me so I just asked "Why are you ignoring me?" instead of answering she turned red and walked at a faster pace to get rid of me. I decided to just let it go, for now, this way she could maybe focus more on her awakening. It was the weekend now, normally I would go out hunting with Ivy and Ishton, but apparently, Ivy asked Ishton to cancel so she could meditate some more to which Ishton agreed. This means I have nothing planned for the weekend so I thought it might be right to proceed with some things I have been putting to the side like beast core engraving. I haven't really been putting it down because it's one of the main subjects I study in the library, It seems like the royal elvish library has much more text about everything and thus also more text about engraving. The elves aren't really better at it than humans, but it looks like they've collected much more data on studies of engraved relics. I've learned a lot in the library, but last week I seemed to build a theory about engraving. I believe that it isn't really the rune's percee, I believe that it also has to do with the frequency of the mana you use to engrave and I also believe that there might be runes drawn inside the main runes at a different frequency. To study this I have asked the king If I could lend a space relic, I don't want to start by making storage spaces as I did with one of my beast cores. I know how to make a dimensional storage core, but it isn't efficient at all the beast core ratio to storage is terrible, It just didn't matter because I only needed it to store the other beast cores, The core had a six percent storage to core ratio. It is honestly amazing for my first try the best engraver of current time can get about eight to ten percent of the ratio, but I want to get the same ratio as relics, most relics have between eighty and one hundred percent in the ratio. It looks like an Impossible feat but I think with some experimenting it'll work.

I took all my beast cores out of the storage, took a bad B-class, and started the engraving.

the king told me I could take the dimensional storage after lunch, but I was excited so I started engraving a bit to see If I can already get higher than six percent. the hard thing with engraving is the output of mana from your body to the core must be as constant as possible, it is said that the best engravers can control the output on the mandas scale which is on a microscopic level. because I've practiced on control since before I even awakened, my control is on a prodigy level, and since my core is so pure and strong from the early awakening I can endure the stress of keeping a precise flow much longer than most. I believe I can surpass the current percentage ratio already just because of a better core. A thing most engravers struggle with is keeping such a precise flow of mana takes a lot of mana and concentration, but this causes that they can only keep this state for max an hour, And the thing with engraving is you have to engrave everything at ones, you need to start engraving and when you end it the core sort of burns the engraving in after that is done you can't change it anymore. There have been studies that learn to wipe cores so they can be engraved again, but they show that previously engraved cores become damaged due to the engraving and thus when you wipe them and reengrave them they won't be as effective.

because of my stronger core, I believe I can keep engraving for at least three hours. I just haven't done it because three hours is a long time and I wanted to take out some time to experiment. Because I am able to study relics up close from the royal treasury and because I have the potential for much more precision and endurance ever recorded, it will just be a bit f time until I'm the best living engraver and just a little more unit I get on the relic engraving level.

After finishing My first attempt I looked at the clock three and a half hours had passed and I could still go on for longer but I was too excited to see the result, If I spend longer on it I could go into more detail with the engraving and it would have been better, but this is just a test before I even analyzed the relic so it isn't really too important it's just like a warming up.

I put mana into the engrave B-core and it opened a storage dimension, that's a good start.

Now I need to measure the space in the dimension and match that to the core strength to get the ratio percentage. the dimension was about the size of a small room, but compared to the core strength I got a ratio of fourteen percent. I did the calculation a few more times out of disbelief, but it was correct, with one test I got a better result than any engraver since the relic engravers, this is an astounding result. I expected it to be seven percent or eight, but I've already set a new record as the test!

by now it was lunchtime, I decided to eat lunch and after show the king my engravement.

so I went to eat, Ivy was also eating lunch, but she still didn't talk to me she did glance at me a few times and quickly looked away when I saw, she seemed to think this would go unnoticed by an awakened. after lunch I walk to the council room, I was told by a guard I would find the king in there. I knocked on the gigantic door and the king told me to come in, he was in the middle of a meeting and told me I've I could wait for a few minutes in the hall, I obviously did and in half an hour the rest of the council walked out and the king invited me in. I was a bit nervous, but I don't see how the king could be anything but pleased with my results so I started telling him what I did this morning and the king lost his composure and sat in his grandiose chair with his mouth agape "you astonish me again! How did engrave for that long? Fourteen percent! And this was just the test! Fourteen percent! This is unbelievable!" the king called for his assistant and told her to tell the best elvish engravers to the palace as fast as they can he also asked me if he could keep the core for now so they could test it. I agreed and asked If I could get the relic from the treasury to analyze he obviously agreed and send me with a guard to the treasury. when I looked back before walking out of the room I could still see the king staring at the core with his mouth agape.

I walked into the treasury and it was amazing It was well organized with some relics displayed as well as some weapons and golden crowns. the guard gave me a bit of a tour explaining the legendary weapons used by elvish heroes through history and explaining the history behind the crown that was displayed before he walked to the relics and gave me a ring. it was gold and had a tiny beast core the size of a teardrop placed in it. I didn't look into it until I got back to my room, but when I did I saw that the core was a very pure S-class core. The core alone would sell for a fortune. I started inspecting the engravings on it, and when I looked in it was like a new world it was so clear why we couldn't replicate this to get this much detail into the engraving, it would take at least twelve hours or more. When I looked at the engraving it had runes inside it and more runes inside those runes. but when I looked at the runes some were burned in a little less, when you engrave with mana it is like burning it into the core but these runes clearly showed that some were engraved lighter than others, this confirmed my frequency theory. I started making a plan to replicate this, first I will copy the exact engraving onto parchment and note where to use what frequency of mana I needed a big piece of parchment. to get the amount of detail with the pencil I had to scale up the engravement. after finishing the drawing I got curious and looked into the storage. it was beautiful, it was empty but it looked amazing, then when I measured I realized this ring looked like It had a one hundred percent ratio. I got out of the storage and looked at the ring again, it looked so familiar. and then I recognized it, this ring, I'd seen it in books in the library, this was the ring that belonged to the first elvish king, it was said he had received it from the main elvish goddess herself.

I'm presumably analyzing a god-engraved relic. If I could replicate this I would be able to create a godlike relic, that's awesome!

the next step was to memorize the whole engraving and engraving it, I am curious if I could possibly keep engraving for twelve hours straight, but first I had to memorize it all, It is like memorising a small book, very hard, but I'll succeed eventually.