CH713

Going through the gate from the shop back to his warehouse, Ben took over his clones once more and got back to work on making materializers, placing a special focus on making ones for himself.

Even with his jacket, he was getting to the point that trying to create all of the souls he needed for his leveling while also materializing other items in their entirety was becoming a new sort of strain, one that was going to slow down how long it would be for the next level he wanted so badly and he moved to change that by creating tools to materialize any major substance he might need.

Perhaps as a limit of his own soul reflecting in the ones he could create, he learned he couldn’t produce a materializer for any of the affinitied magic materials, meaning voidstone and deathstone were locked away from him, only to be created when he could borrow Jake’s mind and soul, but as useful as those would have both been to have endless access to he was much more concerned about the more basic ones.

He’d already created something that could make rainbow mana crystal and from there he made sure to make something that could handle the white one and then mythril and moribusial as well before going to the more common metals like iron to help in his work, meaning that one of his bigger mana costs in the form of all of his materialization could shrink to something significantly lighter by only needing to shape the substances instead, either with his hands or his mana in a way that would still be a significant savings.

It was only once that was done that he began, creating soul crystals en masse for all of the uses he’d already found for them while holding a single one in his hand, a question forming in his mind while so much of himself was working around him.

To what extent could he modify an existing soul?

It was seeing Ralia that had made him wonder that, her strange soul clear in his eyes as the question of if he could in any way repeat the work of the ancient soul mage that had radically altered the destiny of her kind. Could Ben materialize a soul in a way that would merge it into another soul?

It was a question he couldn’t deny himself the pleasure of investing a few hours in, doing everything he could to build on the simple soul he’d created and in the end having what he would describe as meaningless success.

The soul he was testing on was the simplest he could produce and when he tried, Ben was able to build it up to an extent, bringing any of the strange aspects of its structure to the maximum he could make when materializing them and a few aspects even beyond that, though far from enough for his liking.

Namely what he considered the core ones. Sure, he’d found he could increase the scale of some parts of a soul whose purposes entirely eluded him but that wasn’t actually helpful. It only really mattered when he tested an idea significantly more relevant to himself as he tried to build up its affinities and resistances and that had ended in failure, telling him he was still as trapped as he’d ever been, locked away from the more common magics of the world and not even in a position where he could improve a few of the more beneficial resistances he had.

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So it looks like I’m not going to raise my fire resistance above one hundred to beat out the magic. Lame but it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it no matter how thrilling it would have been to be wrong. But with all of that done, time to start trying to test the big one.