บท 29: Soul nexus
It had been a few months since Cain's first hunt. During this time he learned a few things. first, the bloodline he had obtained from the serpent wasn't a one-off, there were many different high-quality bloodlines in the forest. Second, the bloodline he got from the serpent was from a low-ranking basilisk, a 5-star monster. Third, the mana of different people and species had different 'attributes' such as a higher explosive power, easier control, and the such. Cain's was, as you might have guessed, devouring. his mana and likely his qi when he could make his own had the inherent ability to drain mana from anything, including people and the atmosphere around him. fifth, he had reached tendon refinement but was unable to continue his ring formation as it would cause an imbalance and passably damage his core. Last, his network of souls was just bad.
The way his soul network was formed meant that it would eventually Plateau, meaning that as time went on his progress would slow. His plan to fix this was to create a 'nexus' of sorts, he had collected enough raw soul energy to implement his plan. he was currently inside his soul space building the rough outline of his plan.
the way it would work is he was going to use his own soul as the 'core' of the soul nexus, building around the 'core' he was going to use the auxiliary souls to form the foundation that would be built off. because of this, he needed to reform how all the auxiliary souls worked, this also gave him a chance to add new types of auxiliary souls and optimise the old ones using his new understanding of souls. the finalised soul types were refinery, storage, memory, output, absorption, defence, and efficiency.
the refinery would absorb soul energy and, as the name stated, refine it into a more powerful and rich form over time. storage would store said energy for later use. memory would act like the RAM and hard drive for a computer, storing his memories and enhancing his mental capabilities. the output would act as a connecter from his soul space to the real world allowing him to use mental energy to influence the real world, like telepathy. absorption would absorb ambient mana in the air and turn it into soul energy, something he had researched recently to make up for the inability of recharging soul and mental energy after it had been used besides sleeping or meditating.
defence would protect his soul from mental attacks, he hadn't run into any yet but the inherited memory of what the dragon did to him was enough to warrant a defence. and finally efficiency, it was more correct to call it a moderator so well just call it that. the moderator would act as its name said and moderate the functions of the soul around it. it would optimise and upgrade the soul module it was assigned to so that cains main oul would have less work to do which would free up more processing power for other things such as research. over the last few months, Cain had become addicted to studying new things and finding out ways to finding ways to implement them into his body.
back to the soul nexus. after the foundation was built it would allow him and the moderator souls to add different changes as needed. the great thing about the soul nexus was that it would act like one huge soul, allowing him to build auxiliary soul nexus. you might be thinking that he would run into the same problem as his old soul network. but with this design, he could simply repeat the process. using the soul network of soul nexus to build a larger soul nexus and a network around that one. and with the existence of moderators, he wouldn't need to control the whole soul network himself. allowing him to expand basically infinitely.
and because of the refineries he wouldn't haft to continually increase the amount of soul energy needed to maintain the modules as he just needed to increase the level of soul energy and all would be good. and the absorbers would allow him to scale the amount of soul energy he could generate at once based on his own level.
Other than this he had been working on the rune engravings in his body. he had in total refined his skin, muscles, bones and tendons. the elements he had engraved in each were earth, lightning, metal and water respectively. the earth's attribute on his skin enhances its durability and sturdiness while still giving it the flexibility needed so he could move normally. lightning for his muscles to increase their explosive power and speed. metal for bones to massively increase their sturdiness and strength like the earth element for his skin but without the flexibility. and finally, water for his tendons to allow for flexibility and a wide range of movements.
an interesting thing that happened was that as he would add different elements to his body his mana ring and beast core would change as well. his mana ring would gain the affinity for that element allowing it to absorb and convert pure mana to that form while his beast core would adapt and increase his affinity with said element allowing for easier absorption and an increase in the abilities related to said elements such as his muscle speed or bones hardness and if he learned any technics related to said element there would be an increase in the power and efficiency.
an unexpected downside of this was his speed in cultivating it wasn't slower but faster, add on to that the fact that eating beast meat would increase his cultivation once again due to his beast core and his now upgraded bloodline and his cultivation speed would put even geniuses to shame. while others might see this as a good thing, Cain knew that humans feared the unknown and would lock him up and study him once more if they found out that he, an 'experiment' and 'test subject', was faster than a normal human. therefore, he used his now growing knowledge of runes to form a 'seal' on his power. this seal would limit his total output of mana and would make it seem as if he was still in the muscle-refining phase.
the seal had multiple layers to it and he would constantly change and enhance it to hide his power from more powerful people as well as make it seem like he was growing at a 'just above average' pace by following the level of his class mates.
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