Chapter 42: Aether Attunement

“Oh wow. You used to live here? I feel kind of bad for you, and I once lived in a kobold’s loincloth.”

“It used to look better, okay. The kobolds really did a number on it.”

Alex wasn’t lying either. The camp that his team had put together was pretty decent given the supplies they had. A few tents, organized packs and supplies. Things looked on the up and up back then.

Now, it was just depressing. Scraps of cloth and wrappers were strewn everywhere. Broken pieces of wood, plastic and glass littered the area around the fire pit. Anything worth any sort of value or of any kind of use was gone, scavenged by the greedy fucking lizard people which Alex was slowly learning to hate more and more.

“Whatever you say buddy. It may be a trash pile, but its your trash pile. Stay positive.”

Alex kicked about a few pieces of trash, already having lost the hope that he could manage to find something to help him on the journey to Vrung’s Quarry. It was a day’s travel when Garret and he had last made the trek, and he was already starting to get hungry.

He wouldn’t starve to death in that amount of time, but it would make the travel that much worse for him.

“Looks like I will just have to jog the whole way there and try to make it before nightfall? Hey Obby,” Alex mentally nudged the sentient rock with his mind, something he had learned to do over the last hour as he traveled.

“Yes flesh human?”

“Which stat would be best to invest in to let me get to the town faster? Agility so I can run faster? Or vitality so that I can have a higher endurance?”

“The best stat to invest in would be wisdom. Obviously. That way I can be way better suited to assist you. Barring that, well, you organic beings do get tired very fast. So vitality. But even that would be a stupid way to spend your experience in the long run. ”

“What do you mean? What should I put my experience points then?” Alex sat down on an overturned log next to what was left of the fire-pit. He mentally pulled up his status screen, which was something he actually hadn’t done since before killing Doudra back in the cavern.

A bit of quick math from Alex let him know that the experience throttling effect when killing weaker monsters was still up and running. He gained only roughly five-hundred experience points from killing all those badgers earlier. Including the badger warriors.

The first time he killed a badger warrior, he had gained over two-hundred from that one kill alone. Increasing his experience points even higher was going to be a chore at this point.

“Oh look at that, plenty of points to increase your wisdom to the next threshold. ”

Obby was right about that much. Wisdom was the last of Alex’s stats not to reach the refinement threshold as well. Something Alex was pretty certain he would get awarded for by The System. But he had other things to worry about.

“I will save the points to push up my wisdom, I promise. But I will do that later. For now, help me out here. Which stat can I ignore for my long term build, and what should I focus on?”

Alex was hoping he could have ignored wisdom now, since he no longer had a mage core to work on, thus the stat would have been useless. Since it was the stat that increased Obby’s efficiency though, that idea was out the window.

“You can ignore none of them. ”

That was not what Alex was wanting to hear.

“None?”

“Yes, none. Your physical stats are needed to keep your body not be squishy and frail, all three will be important to that. We already talked about why wisdom is your most important stat of all, so that leaves intelligence and willpower. ”

Alex ignored the jab about his wisdom score, again, and just listened.

“If you want to supplement your magical handicap either with magical gear, items or even enchantments, you will still need willpower to access and absorb the aether in those objects through your body gate. Which leaves intelligence, the stat needed to bolster your capability to manage and control aether that travels through your body once you pull it in. So yes, you will need all of these stats to be as high as possible. ”

“Well fuck.” This made things very difficult for Alex. Min-maxing was the hallmark of a character build in video games back on earth. If Alex didn’t have a viable path to set up a build and specialize, he might be screwed, especially with the handicap of his broken core.

“Why intelligence still though? I can’t cast spells, so I can just have items or gear that channels aether for me, right?”

“Not necessarily. You are thinking of magic as always starting from the mage core. That’s not correct. The mage core supplies aether for your spells, but its not the only way. You still have the infrastructure to channel aether inside your body, you just need a source to power it. After all, you have a small amount of that energy inside your body naturally already, just not very much. ”

“The aether already stored in my body…” Alex looked down at his hand, and then looked over the rest of his body. Sure enough, if he looked really closely, his body had a very faint azure aura that clung around it. The indicator to his new aether-vision sense that a concentration of energy was present.

Maybe he really could continue without a mage core, as long as he had a body, he could still intake aether from his surroundings with the [Condensing Spiral] technique. Then just hold on to it with his body instead.

So maybe he could still cast his [Flare] spell.

Alex held out his hand and began moving aether in the pattern which was still burned into his memory from The System. The aether inside his being surged to the limb and built in his hand. He felt the power it contained and Alex knew he was on to something.

The aether erupted from his hand as he finished the spell, creating a wave of force in all directions, flattening the foliage in range and rocketing all the trash and scraps around him off into the trees at rapid speed.

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“Awesome.” Alex muttered.

Then his legs gave out and Alex fell face first into the dirt with a groan.

He immediately felt exhausted.

“Wow, you are dumb after all.” Obby mocked Alex from inside his mind while he was still panting on all fours in the dirt. “Did you read the description of your aether body ability? Your entire body is now attuned to aether, what do you think will happen if you exhaust it all at once, hmm?”

“My body now needs aether to keep going?” Alex gasped out the response between breathes.

“Not to the point you will die without it, but… to the point you will be left in the dirt and flopping like a fish, yes. Those free stat points this ability gave you? They are not free, they are tied to the changes your body went through to adapt to aether, and the nourishment they get from that energy as a result.”

“Aether body is a bit more literal than I thought, got it.” Alex managed to pull himself into a cross legged position on the ground and close his eyes.

It wasn’t long at all until he was pulling in aether from his bodygate at his neck. The [Condensing Spiral] was rather unspecialized for any given elemental attunement, but it was efficient otherwise. The element point was a bit of a bother though, if Alex had an easier way to filter out the fire element aether he could do this much fas—

“Wait.” Alex didn’t have a core anymore. So, did filtering out just the fire element even matter? “Hey Obby? My body doesn’t have an attunement right? Do I even need to focus on fire elemental aether now? My [Flare] spell wasn’t even fire when I used it either. Am I just an unattuned mage at this point?” Alex looked at his hand again, at the blue glow of the aether, trying to determine if he could see a hint of elemental aether anywhere in it.

“Now that’s the right kind of question! And the answer is… I don’t know. But I really want to find out. You’re right about your spell, looks like that was pure aether, no attunement when you had cast it. Might be that, even if you try using fire aether it won’t work at all.”

Alex just nodded silently in response.

If filtering out the elements was no longer needed, or even detrimental to Alex’s new body, than using the [Condensing Spiral] technique might not be as much a handicap as he first thought.

Sure, it was still a low grade technique, pretty much bottom of the barrel. But, it was able to gather every element, which meant Alex could draw every scrap of the aether energy in his surroundings that his willpower stat would allow.

He smiled to himself and then closed his eyes once more.

The braided tendril of aether that he was pulling through his body gate suddenly grew, rapidly increasing in size as Alex pulled in the energy around him. He felt the sudden rush in his body, passing through his limbs and torso. He could feel the energy collected near his heart, then flow outward in all directions, his tissues, muscles, organs and bones greedily eating up as much of the energy they could.

Eventually, over an amount of time Alex couldn’t be sure about, his body stopped gobbling down aether energy. A sort of equilibrium was reached and Alex no longer felt exhausted.

So this is the amount of aether my body wants to maintain itself. For now. He thought to himself.

Alex felt the energy in his body, watching it in his mind’s eye. He could feel the saturation in his tissues and muscles. It did look as if his body needed a certain concentration of aether to stay in peak shape.

But it wasn’t actually constant.

Simply existing meant Alex was using energy. Which meant as the minutes crawled by, the amount of aether in his body dropped ever so slightly. Just a tiny bit.

Alex was certain that would increase as he moved around, and even more so when he was fighting. He couldn’t guess how much aether his body consumed during his fight with the badger hive earlier, but it was probably a moderate amount.

He pulled in more aether.

The energy flowed through his body once again. His flesh accepting the new wave of food. But it eventually stopped eating.

Alex still didn’t stop absorbing though.

The amount of aether he felt in his body was not much. Alex remembered how much he expended casting his [Flare] spell. The energy currently in his body was maybe one and a half times that amount. So he could cast the spell again, and remain on his feet perhaps. Not in the same exhausted state he had been in last time, but still weaker.

Allie was able to store four times that in her mage core. And she had just been starting out in this world. Not even on her first wisdom refinement yet. There was no way Alex would be able to survive with that pitiful amount of aether for his spells. He needed more.

He pulled in more energy through his body gate. The spiral of aether connected to his body growing thicker as Alex tapped into all the force his refined willpower could manage. His form took in the aether like a drowned man sucking in oxygen.

The energy filled him and moved, circulating in his body slowly as it got pushed along by the new aether Alex continued to absorb. Once he pulled in all he could, Alex breathed out slowly, pressing down internally on the energy. Squeezing it into his tissues like a mental vice.

The energy compressed slightly, and Alex took a slow breath in, pulling more aether from the air to fill the newly made space. And he continued this, over and over again.

Breath in. Absorb. Breath out. Compress.

The pressure inside him was building with every breath. Alex bit his lips after twenty breaths, the pressure inside him beginning to turn into pain. By the thirtieth breath, he was beginning to shake. At forty, blood leaked from the hole he had bitten in his lip. By the fiftieth, the blood was leaking from his eyes.

Alex couldn’t hold it anymore. The pressure was too much.

He mentally examined his body. Besides the pain and damage he’d suffered, there was no change that he could see. Alex had hoped he could force his body to store more aether by building the pressure and force it in like a release valve buckling and expanding. But there was no luck. His literal bones and muscles would buckle before that happened, he had to let go.

Alex exhaled a final time, and he raised his hand. The aether pattern for his [Flare] spell was superfluous at this point. The energy wanted to leave him.

The wave of aether blasted from Alex in all directions with a level of force that surprised him. Dirt, rocks, and leaves rocketed away instantly. Bark was shaved off of the nearby trees when the shockwave struck, smaller branches snapped away and flung into the distance to crash against tree trunks further in.

With the pressure relieved, Alex sighed. Besides the minor self inflicted injuries, and the wounds from the badgers, his body felt fine, peak condition. He still had about one and a half [Flare]’s worth of aether saturating his tissues.

Alex blinked as a notification appeared in front of him.

“That’s interesting.”

“Oh, it looks like your level of dumb has benefits. Your crazy exercise there seems to have attuned your body slightly more. This might be a great discovery. We should do this more.” Obby’s voice was a bit excited, and Alex shared that emotion.

If he could increase his body’s attunement by abusing it with aether, he might be able to progress a different way.

More experiments needed to be done.

“Experiments. Now you’re in my wheelhouse!”

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