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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CQhISo8yKRHsi1gJGads6SpY375XJPoR0ddaIcn_zqg/edit?usp=sharing
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Alex groaned and sat up, immediately noticing the tremor in the air and pulling power from his throat.
Bev gave him a small smile when their eyes met, momentary tension bleeding out of hers. “Well, well. Couldn’t stay away?”
Alex quirked a smile, actually feeling pretty great. “You know it.”
She walked closer now that he was awake and his dissonance restrained. “The ship’s been cleared, bodies dealt with, and even the bloodstains have been scrubbed. Though, you were only out for about an hour.”
He raised an eyebrow at the time, and she seemed to understand.
“Most of that was monitoring you to ensure there weren’t any secondary effects. The creatures seemed to have relation to were-creatures, meaning there was the potential for infection.”
Alex’s eye twitched. He was not going to turn his life into some teen romance story.
Bev seemed to notice his thinking once again, and continued with emphasis. “But instead, that’s just their natural state. Who knows if their ancestors were so afflicted or not.” She shrugged. “You are in desperate need of food, Alex. Do you need anything from me before you go eat?”
He shook his head, quickly accepting the experience for the three assists. Nice.
It seemed that the System counted what he did as helping with the deaths of both other creatures, not just the one that he’d been a chew toy for. He didn’t get anything for the final one, but that made sense. He hadn’t really contributed to its death aside from finding it.
“Thank you.”
“Any time.” She smiled wider then. “Just not too often.”
He huffed a laugh. “Yes, ma’am.”
He pushed up his feet and felt his clothing fall oddly about him. Looking down, he found his shirt and pants ruined, leaving him in coverall backed rags.
Alex sighed, tapping the ‘I did my best’ pin when he noticed. “Wasn’t good enough this time.”
Bev took pity on him, reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. “You found an infiltration, and let the rest of the crew deal with it. Engineer John is alive because of you.”
Alex’s eyes widened, realizing he’d forgotten the man. “John!” He looked around the small med-bay. “Where is he?”
“Already discharged. He was barely knocked unconscious. His healing was a matter of moments, and with no wounds, he didn’t need the monitoring that you did.” Her gaze became a bit frosty. “And he’s easy to scan, so even with extra thoroughness on my part, he was cleared with ease.”
Alex let out a large breath of gratitude at that, choosing to ignore the barbs. “Good, good.”
Still, he had not liked how things had gone.
It was time he fixed the issue.
Ten minutes later, he was sitting at a dining table, his broken dadao laid out before him, a self-created ration bar wedged between his teeth as he gnawed at it.
He’d expected rations to be suspect in comparison to the other food he’d had of late, but it turned out that suspect was a bit… overly optimistic.
I thought they were okay before, but I guess I remembered wrong…
Regardless, he had a different issue to deal with at the moment. He was down a significant chunk of his Life with nothing to show for it, and now he had to repair his weapon.
Still, he had more than nine thousand Life available. At the abysmal rate of 1:16 to ‘heal’ non-living material that had never been living, it would take a lot of Life to repair this.
He’d recover just more than twenty-four Life per hour as well.
My front-line fighting is done for a while…It would already take him nearly a week to recover what he’d wasted in just one clash.
Truly, his days of wiping out hordes of enemies were behind him.
And I need to always get my Life back at the end…
But he was delaying.
He couldn’t fight without a weapon—he simply wasn’t good enough with magic yet—and for better or worse, this was his.
He could get a different weapon, but this one had protected him and helped him through a lot already. There was also the fact that his class was directly tied to this type, so using another might entirely preclude him from gaining experience, though he doubted that. It would make his skill less potent, and that wasn’t acceptable either.
That left him with one course.
He rested his hands on either side of the sword on the table, continuing to absently gnaw off and swallow bits of the ration bar. To keep doing that, he occasionally would spin up a Shaped Force Burst that was very simple, very weak… puerile even, to bop the bar further into his mouth.
It was weak enough and simple enough that it came together with barely a thought, leaving the majority of his mind to the real task.
With fingers barely brushing the hilt and tip, he sent his Life into the blade.
Just like with Natasha’s broken spear, Alex felt some resistance from the metal, but this weapon seemed to take his Life more easily than hers had. It felt… closer to him, like the material was used to him in some way.
His eyes were drawn to the green crack-lines that showed where he’d used his HP to repair the sword in the past, and that made him curious if that was why.
Maybe I primed the sword? It didn’t matter too much. It wasn’t like he could take a different approach.
The pieces grew back together, releasing audible clicks as they shifted and settled, cracks filling in at visible speed as he sent roughly ten Life per second in, five from each side.
After ten seconds, all the parts were back together, but even his eyes could see the fractures weren’t healed.
He had always loved metal working and blacksmithing, at least in theory. He knew that there were absolute libraries of information on the processes and the art of it that he didn’t have the first bit of understanding about. Worse, he knew that all of them were important to a weapon’s durability, usability, and lethality.
So, rather than trying to command his Life to do anything specific other than heal, he imparted it with the need to work with the metal as it was, meaning the nature of the metal, not the breaks.
The sword ‘remembered’ how it should be, for lack of a better way to put it. That was how he’d ‘healed’ the weapon in the past. Now, he’d pour Life into strengthening, reinforcing, enhancing, and healing that.
After all, it was a System granted weapon. That had to count for something. It wasn’t the first time he’d relied on the quality of such an item.
Beyond those simple instructions, he was hoping that it would still be his Life, which might make it cheaper to fix in the future.
It was interesting, because he could detect his commands to his Life with his new sense and understanding of the language of power. He knew that his Life Manipulation skill was imparting far more detail into the commands than he would be capable of ‘writing out’ even had he known exactly what to write. In truth, the skills and his new class were clearly imparting System assistance in the formulation of what was being imparted, with his understanding of the language simply ‘plugging in’ and smoothing out some of the language and clarifying, allowing for far more specificity than the skill would have been able to give on its own, even with his Legendary class backing it up.
His Life-Based Runewrighting was clearly facilitating more efficient use of health and Life in the empowerment of magical workings as well, just like it said on the tin. Moreover, since he was using his Life as the structure of the language of power within the weapon, it seemed like it was having a lower cost and greater fidelity during this creation process.
Funnily enough, creating a runic structure was considered modifying it, which keyed in a part of his class benefit, making the entire thing 50% more stable while he was working on it, and increasing his chances of a good outcome as well as further reducing how much Life he’d need for whatever this was.
Well, I guess we’re doing a bit more than simply repairing. Let’s do this.
A hundred Life became a thousand.
A thousand became two.
Then three.
Then five.
…And the Life just kept finding places to go, volume after volume of instructions tucking away in the shelves of the weapon’s nature, mostly duplicates, but even so. As such, he kept giving more, not wanting to fail because he lacked commitment even while he didn’t really know what he’d be failing at.
This was supposed to be cheaper… It was possible that he’d made a mistake. After all, the weapon had looked and been entirely fixed after the first sixteen-hundred points or so.
As he approached eight thousand Life invested into the blade something began to tip over within the blade, prompting him to give just a little bit more.
He did so, and as his investment hit eight thousand Life, a fierce green light exploded from within the weapon.
The commands he’d given seemed to almost click into place, somehow forming a bridge between his Life and the material of the weapon—specifically the metal—the language of power seeping into the very nature of it.
System Notice:Congratulations! You have forged living steel, and look at that, it’s already a weapon.
Aren’t you just precocious?
Don’t worry, almost every Life user does this early on… assuming they survive long enough.
Living Steel:This material is a horrifying middle ground between living matter and inert material.
The chemical and crystalline structure of this metal will shift and morph to provide strength, durability, and hardness as required, where required.
For all applied effects, it is considered either alive or inert depending on which would be most favorable for the user of the metal.
Note:This might occasionally be to the detriment of the metal itself.
Any damage taken will heal over time up to the maximum provided by its creator.8000/8000
The creator—or other Life forger—may be able to increase this in the future under the right circumstances.
Rate of HP recovery is determined by the base rate of the creator at the time of creation.
HP Recovery Rate: 8/second
…
Error
…
Creator’s Life contains unusual aspects.
Calculating.
Life Recovery Rate: 2.88/hour
Error:Living Steel cannot recover lost Life.
…
Calculating.
Reclassifying.
Lineage Steel:Seemingly Living Steel to all but the most observant, Lineage Steel has something extra from a creator with a powerful Race and/or attributes.
As such, it gains one or more aspects of the creator’s Life, depending on the quality of the creation’s craftsmanship.
Alex started to chuckle as he read about the new material he’d created. He was quite happy with the results, but before he could fully consider all the implications, he was presented with another notification.
Item Upgraded:System Granted Dadao -> Living(Lineage) Steel Dadao
Living(Lineage) Steel Dadao[Legendary]This is a great-blade weapon usable with one or two hands.
Base damage dealt is calculated based on Physical Power and is multiplied by 2.5x when wielded in one hand and 5x when wielded in two hands.
Damage type: Slashing/Piercing
Living Steel Attributes:HP rather than durability - 8000/8000Recovery Rate - 8/secMorphic structure - Resists damage as if it were perfectly tempered and constructed against any specific use or stress.Morphic Nature - Considered living or non-living independently for any given effect.Mundane Armor Piercing - This is a supernaturally sharpened and maintained edge, making it excellent at bypassing mundane armor that might otherwise have reduced or negated the damage given. It will also have a greater resistance to magical attempts to reduce damage.
Lineage Steel Attributes [System Granted Quality]:Life Recovery - 2.88/hour
????
????
????
Alex gaped at the results. There were three places at the end of the description that seemed to have been redacted, but his knowledge of the language of power—and likely the fact that he’d all but created the item—bypassed the System’s censoring, presenting the information to him regardless. Even so, he’d barely started to process them before yet another notification came in.
Notice:A new creation has been made, experience has been earned.
…
Calculating
…
Legendary Results - Experience Greatly Increased
…
Calculating
…
Analyzing
…
System assistance detected, if indirectly given or attained.
Item upgrade quality heavily influenced by starting item being System granted.
Experience greatly reduced.
Accept Experience?Y/N
Though he was disappointed, Alex nodded, accepting the experience automatically.
It applied directly to his new class.
He grinned. How much will I get? This is a Legendary item… apparently, and I was level 1—he hesitated at that before continuing the thought—in a Legendary class.
He had a sinking feeling, which was born out by the experience bar… which showed that he’d gained ten percent toward level 2.
Ten flip-flap-flooping percent.
He growled, but even as he felt his frustration rising, he realized that this had barely taken him any time at all, and he’d still gotten ten percent from it.
True, he was down by nearly two weeks worth of Life recovery, but still, that wasn’t terrible…
He sighed.
Who was he kidding?
That was awful. Even if it was reasonable for a legendary class to expect legendary feats, it was still awful.
He frowned in thought then. Wait… the weapon recovers Life over time, and I can consider it a part of me when held. Does that mean…
“Alex?”
“Gah!” He jerked, looking up and finding Natasha sitting across from him, having arrived who-knew-when while he’d been working. She flinched back, and he quickly pulled power from his throat before speaking. “Don’t do that.”
She gave a half-smile, still looking a bit off from the dissonance. “Do what? Sit down and wait patiently?” Her eyebrow rose in question, even as her hands seemed to move on their own to correct a few hairs that had fallen out of place when she jerked back. “Because I can act differently next time.”
He huffed, then shook his head and chuckled. “Fair enough. Thank you for waiting.”
“Of course. You fixed it, then?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Upgraded it too.” Her eyes lit up, but he shook his head, causing her expression to fall. “I honestly probably invested too much into it. I’m going to be hurting for a couple of weeks.”
Still, her smile didn’t vanish, and she waved that away. “I think I can help with that, assuming I’m right in what you invested.”
It was his turn to quirk an eyebrow. “Oh?” He looked around, realizing that he must have finished his ration bar at some point. “What do you have in mind?”
She grinned broadly. “I saved the two capa-were-its that you touched. You put your Life into them, right?”
Alex barked a laugh. “Yes! Oh, Natasha, yes. Thank you!” He laughed again. “That’ll help a lot.”
He pushed to his feet but staggered, feeling… weak.
He groaned. Of course I feel weak. I only have about ten percent of my usual Life in me. He sighed. “Let’s go now. I feel like I was a bit more foolish than I realized.”
Natasha shrugged, standing with him. “Well, you are you.”
He decided not to respond to that… and it wasn’t because he didn’t have a good way to do so.
As they moved toward the exit, she cleared her throat. “But after, we really do need to decide where we’re jumping next.”
Alex almost tripped. “Oh, sticky carseats…”