Chương 521: B8—Chapter 26: Weaving Possibilities

We spent another month in the dungeon. During that time, my control over the vines reached new heights, and I also learned how to give the plants Al kept collecting occasionally—since he pretty much ran out of space—an extra boost of power. That discovery happened unexpectedly. Al stood beside a low bush with small, round, blue-tinged leaves and tiny yellow flowers, looking gloomy.

"What's the matter?" I asked. He sighed deeply.

"I recognize this flora from my native world; however, it has not achieved its maximum potential, even with the heightened mana concentrations within this dungeon."

"How do you know?" He pointed at a cluster of leaves.

"The coloration is notably deficient. If its potential had been fully realized, they would have been a deep blue hue."

"Did you try Flourish?" He nodded and somehow looked even gloomier. Walking around the plant, I sent my awareness into the ground. This whole place was so saturated with nature mana that the plant should not only have reached its full potential, but surpassed it. So far, in every dungeon we had visited, mana ultimately made up everything inside. The places looked natural enough at first glance—stones, trees, plants, dirt—but once you paid attention, the pattern always became obvious. They weren't truly natural.

They were mana given form, shaped into something that resembled reality. Stone was still stone, wood was still wood, but both were essentially manifestations created by mana first and substance second. This dungeon felt fundamentally different. The moment my senses spread deeper, I could feel it all around me. The forest we moved through wasn't some artificial construct the dungeon generated from scratch. It hadn't created this place the way other dungeons built their environments.

It had taken an actual forest and invaded it. Saturated it. Changed it from the inside out on a level so fundamental that the entire ecosystem had become something else without truly ceasing to be itself. It hadn't erased the forest's nature. It had amplified it, twisted it, and infused it so deeply with mana that every root, leaf, vine, and grain of soil had become more forest than forest should be. At least, that was the best way I could describe it. It also explained the absurd abundance of nature mana.

Of course, the vent responsible for this dungeon almost certainly had an extremely high concentration of nature mana, maybe even purely nature-aspected mana, but that alone didn't explain what I was sensing. This wasn't just mana spilling into an environment. It was a merger. The vent's power and the living forest had fused together into something far more natury.

It was the purest representation of Nature as a concept, woven so completely together with nature mana that it became something greater than either alone or even together. Once I realized that, the next step was obvious and easy. I just "snagged" some pure Nature, pulled it to the plant, fed it into the roots, and moved it up through the stems. It took a lot of concentration, but besides that, it was child's play. The plant changed before our eyes.

The stems thickened, the leaves turned deep blue, more flowers bloomed on the bush, and they took on a richer yellow color. Before, they looked like a pale Golden Delicious apple. Now they looked like an extra-vibrant lemon. Al looked between me and the plant, back and forth for a few seconds, saying nothing. Finally, he shook his head as if flinging off water and stared at me.

"How?" I shrugged nonchalantly.

"Nature affinity." He looked thoughtful and nodded to himself.

"I will try to use it again." From that day on, whenever he came across a plant he was excited about that wasn't fully realized, he looked at me with hopeful eyes until I gave in and upgraded it. The first time it happened, I looked at him suspiciously.

"I thought you said you'd give the affinity another chance." He looked disgusted, as much as Al was able, which in his case meant a slight pursing of his lips and a single line on his nose hinting at a scrunch, but not quite.

"I did, but did not achieve the desired results."

"What happened?" He looked even more disgusted.

"Nothing. And therein lay the problem." At least he didn't ask me to upgrade every plant. The main issue was that he'd pretty much run out of space to dry his stuff, so for now, he stored it as is until he processed the rest. In some cases, he cooed over plants with delight, which made me realize they had done their job right. Mahya worked on some small pieces she needed for her spaceship during our downtime, and kept lamenting the lack of "big open space" to finish the outer shell.

One day, during breakfast, she looked between us with a serious expression, her fingers tightening around her cup before she set it down carefully. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and blurted, "I know you hate the feeling of worlds without mana, but I really need a high-technology world. I can't build the FTL drives myself. I don't know enough. So we need to check Gates at an accelerated pace until I find one."

She said the whole thing in one breath, the words tumbling over each other so fast it almost sounded like she was afraid one of us might interrupt before she finished. Al nodded, though he didn't look particularly excited about the idea, and I just shrugged.

"Sure." In my heart, I hoped this would somehow shorten our time in the dungeon and that she'd lose her zeal for the whole level-up mission. She exhaled in relief, her shoulders dropping, then nodded sharply. That same day, Mahya leveled up. She jumped up and down, whooping and shouting, "Finally!" Yeah... right there, any hope of a shorter monster-fighting stint died a quick and tragic death. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

With a deep sigh and a defeated slump of my shoulders, I turned the four snakes into crystals, wiped my axe clean of green sludge, and trudged after them toward the next area. A week later, Al leveled up again. Mahya sensed it too, but this time she didn't glare at him. She just glanced his way, paused for half a second, then went right back to looking almost cheerful. She was probably still floating on the happy clouds from her own long-awaited level-up. Sadly, I still didn't get anything.

That said, I refused to lose hope. In our downtime, I finished the wood section in the book and moved on to metal. I'd hoped the approach would be similar in at least some ways, letting me cut a few corners by applying what I'd already learned, but, alas, metal turned out to be an entirely different problem. There was no channeling mana directly into the metal, no gradual saturation in increments, no runes to help the material absorb and hold it over time.

Apparently, with metal, if you tried to saturate it the same way as wood, the mana just dissipated instead of staying in. The proper method was much more complicated. First, you crushed mana crystals into powder. Then you melted the metal itself. While it was molten, you mixed the crystal powder into it so the mana became part of the material during the liquid phase rather than something added afterward. That much, at least, made sense. The real problem came after that. Setting it.

The book kept mentioning a skill called Stabilizing Pulse as if everybody and their grandmother already knew what it meant, yet it never explained how the skill worked, what it did in practical terms, or how to perform it. Worse, it didn't appear anywhere on my spells or skills list. It wasn't grayed out like some locked abilities and spells. It just wasn't there. That made the whole thing infinitely more annoying.

From context and from my experience making the Purifying Aluminum Blobs, I gathered that after mixing mana-infused crystal powder into molten metal, the mana remained unstable unless properly "set" before the cooling process finished. Without that step, the mana either dispersed, clumped unevenly, or failed to properly integrate into the final structure.

Stabilizing Pulse seemed to be the part where repeated waves of mana were sent through the metal to force the mixed-in mana into a stable, evenly distributed pattern before the material fully hardened. At least, that was my best guess. Based on my experience with Payan fixing my swords, I strongly suspected the mana waves she had sent into them in controlled pulses were that exact skill.

At the time, I hadn't understood what she was doing beyond "magic smith stuff," but in hindsight, it matched the book's descriptions a little too well to be a coincidence. Sadly, having a skill name in a book and vague memories of how something had once felt when somebody else used it on my gear were nowhere near enough to figure out how to actually do it myself. For a moment, I thought about using the same mana shell I'd used on the blobs to prevent the spell from dissipating, but I dropped the idea immediately.

That one was for spells. It might prevent the mana from leaking out, sure, but the second I actually tried to make something with the metal, it would clash with the runes and short-circuit the whole thing. I fought with the issue for two weeks, trying different approaches. Everything from simply intending the mana pulses I sent into the metal to do their thing, to trying to connect to the mana itself and fixate it inside the metal, to, I'm embarrassed to admit, actually talking to the damn thing.

After that, several other methods followed that made even less logical sense, all without success. Nothing worked. I even searched through my library, digging into the small selection of smithing literature I had, hoping somebody, somewhere, had explained it in a way that didn't assume the reader had apparently been born with this mysterious skill already installed. No such luck. Frustrated and stuck, I actually ended up enjoying the next few days.

The fighting helped me vent some of that frustration, and repeatedly smashing monsters did wonders for my mood. More importantly, somewhere during all that hacking, binding, and general therapeutic violence, I got an idea. Back in the past, when I was still on Earth with Lis and Mahya, I'd spent quite a bit of time studying mana constructs for spell creation, especially the mesh structures used for "open" spells, like area-effect spells that didn't rely on a fully closed internal structure.

Those had always been more complicated in some ways, because instead of containing everything inside neat boundaries, they required carefully controlled patterns that guided mana while still allowing it to function without collapsing or dispersing. At the time, it had mostly been about spellcraft. Now, though? For the first time, I started wondering if maybe I'd been looking at the metal problem from the wrong direction entirely. I wasn't a smith, after all. I was a wizard.

So maybe I needed to stop trying to do it the smith's way and start doing it the wizard way. It took another week of trial and error, a frankly embarrassing number of failed metals, and several more moments when I questioned my own intelligence, but eventually, one day, something finally clicked. Instead of trying to pulse the mana into obedient stability the way Stabilizing Pulse apparently did, I treated it more like constructing an open-form spell mesh.

Rather than forcing the mana to "set" evenly through smithing pulses, I carefully wove it through the metal itself, threading it into the existing structure, almost like magical reinforcement woven through gaps in fabric. And it worked! Because the mana was woven into the metal rather than layered over it, it stayed put without becoming an obstacle. More importantly, since it wasn't an outside shell, it wouldn't clash with external runes or magic script later.

Instead of blocking future enchantments, it left the surface and structure open for them. It wasn't perfect. The spread wasn't nearly as even or clean as what the proper stabilizing skill probably produced, and I had zero illusions that an actual magical smith wouldn't take one look at my result and have a lot to say. But the mana stayed.

It held in the metal instead of dissipating, remained integrated instead of leaking away, and for the first time, I'd successfully created a stable mana-infused piece of metal using my own method. That felt like a huge win. Sitting there, staring at the result, I suddenly had an epiphany. When I'd first touched the Gate to Lishuan—the cultivators' world—the Gate had said something about Mana Weaving level.

At the time, I didn't understand what that meant beyond "cultivator stuff," but now, looking at what I'd just done, weaving mana through metal instead of saturating or pulsing it or whatever, the similarity was apparent. This had to be it. Maybe not the full version or proper cultivator method, but it was too similar to be a coincidence. What I was doing wasn't smithing. It was weaving. That realization immediately made me think about the crystals I'd set aside from spawnies.

Those were different from regular mana crystals, each carrying specific flavors and aspects depending on the creature they came from. I'd refused to waste them as normal crystals because I'd been hoping to eventually crack the mystery of how cultivators created flying swords, and for the first time, that no longer seemed like a ridiculous fantasy. With that thought in mind, I took a piece of metal and carefully ground, melted, and wove two beast cores with flight aspects into it.

Once the metal cooled, though, the final result just... lay there. Completely still. I scratched my head, staring at it in confusion, trying to figure out what I'd done wrong, then smacked myself on the forehead hard enough to make it sting.

"Right. Mana." The second I channeled mana into it, the piece shot out of the window like a cannonball, blasted through several branches, and vanished somewhere deep in the forest before I could do anything except stand there with my mouth hanging open. On one hand, excitement hit so hard I almost forgot to breathe. I'd finally cracked the first real piece of the mystery.

I hadn't built a flying sword, not even close, but I had absolutely created a flying metal object through woven aspects, which meant I finally had a real starting point. On the other hand, I was also completely crestfallen, because I had apparently just invented and immediately lost my first flying metal brick. Still, once the disappointment faded, I did a proper Gangnam Style dance, start to finish, right there in the middle of the smithy, and completely ignored the choking sounds Rue was making behind me.

Whether he was laughing, dying, or some horrifying combination of both, that was his problem. He could laugh all he wanted. One day, I was going to create a flying sword.