Six Months Ago

The merchant sighed. "It's a shame that such a good piece is being wasted like this."

Ryu smiled coldly but said nothing. Now that he was slowly coming into contact with more and more powerful beasts, his Shrine Plane knowledge was starting to become useful again. He was too used to strong beasts with great bloodlines, so he knew too little about their weaker counterparts. But when it came to beasts with great potential like the Diamond Back Ape, even if he didn't know as much as a Beast Master would, he still had quite a few tidbits of useful information.

The reason the merchant was lamenting this sale was because the true strength of this soft armor wouldn't appear unless its owner could catalyze the hair filaments it was woven from to react. Essentially, one needed to bathe the soft armor in oppressively hot flames in battle. If one could do this, the soft armor would harden into a complex crystalline structure, boosting its defensive abilities by over ten times.