Turia looked at Theodore and could not help but compare his eyes to those of her old friend.
Seeing the same fearless look again had been invigorating for her.
She had been immensely depressed as of late.
Her dream of perfecting a free and unfettered body for herself had encountered massive setbacks.
Mana was one of the most complicated things that she knew of and the more answers she had gotten, the more questions came up in the end.
She had reached the cultivation of stage nine, major success, and was for all purposes already immortal. Her mind operated on mana and she was capable of truly incredible things.
Mana was generated from the sentient minds of intelligent species. It was a force that, once mastered, allowed for the will of the mind to overwrite reality to a degree.
If reality was a musical instrument then mana was able to pluck its strings. Mana could be shaped by thoughts and, if sufficiently powerful, a mana pulse was like a song that vibrated with the notes of the universe.
A cultivation of level ten was typically the point at which one was considered to be an immortal.
The reason that the ranking system stopped there was that once someone had reached this stage, one's available energy was too hard to quantify.
Machine cultivators are unique in this regard.
Without any outside intervention, they will slowly and automatically grow in level until level nine.
That point is the only one where they encounter a true bottleneck. The accumulated quantity of available mana would no longer assure steady progress.
Out of all the machine cultivators, she may have been the first but she was not the only one.
Over time, others had joined her cause, and efforts were made to investigate the path ahead.
Turia's achievements meant that her work had already affected the fates of many.
This came along with the enormous expectations and uncountable hopes and dreams of many machine spirits and cultivators.
She had already discovered some clues, about how to break through this stage of machine cultivation.
Since at this point, the quantity of available mana no longer guaranteed success, maybe its shape and quality did!
She examined all the relevant data over and over for months but the result was discouraging.
It had gotten to the point where she could not make heads or tails of it and she had moved out of her mansion and began living in the old woodshed.
It was the only environment on this island that she felt truly secluded in. She then disconnected completely from the net and just sat there from dusk until dawn, looking at the ocean.
It had often reminded her of the internet of all things.
If her mana was a sea, then perhaps, she was the crest of a wave struggling to fly into the sky and reach for the stars.
If only there was a well-threaded path ahead but this was wishful thinking.
She began to drink mana wine frequently.
Normal wine got one drunk and immortal wine contained spiritual energy. It could be immensely beneficial to one's cultivation!
Mana wine was different from the other wines consumed by cultivators.
It contained emotions and a state of mind. The brew-master could infuse the specific emotion that he wanted the consumer to feel into the wine using mana.
A small handful of cultivators had managed to achieve enlightenment or breakthroughs by consuming this wine and it was ridiculously pricey!
Since machine cultivators operated on mana, this wine would have extreme potency. Should a machine cultivator drink such a wine, they would feel their mana resonate with the mana in the wine.
It was the equivalent of feeling one specific thing and forgetting everything else with all of one's being should the cultivator allow it.
The wine was naturally very potent and only the strongest machine cultivators would dare to consume it undiluted.
All sorts of "Flavors" were available and in Turia's frustration, she had tried them all.
The money she possessed could not be spent in her lifetime as she constantly received royalties from her inventions and patents.
Turia had spent years drinking in solitude and felt that she had arrived at the lowest point in her life.
She had defied the odds over and over only to hit a bottleneck.
Turia had thought that her achievements would satisfy her drive to push forward on the path of machine cultivation, after all, the body she currently occupied was the best of the best.
It underwent nine centuries of continuous upgrades and she was proud of it!
And yet at the same time, she had hit another ceiling. Her steady advancement had come to stagnate and the path ahead was once again obscured and seemed far away.
As a machine, she was technically immortal but her form was not. Should it be lost somehow, she would lose all of her cultivation and be forced to seek shelter in her subspace pocket.
No matter how much machinery was crammed into the subspace pockets, the available mana no longer sufficed to overcome this weakness.
While her mind occupied the circuitry, she was unable to fully transition into a being consisting solely of mana.
Subspace pockets also could be lost. She had destroyed many of them at the beginning of her research.
To Turia, failing again after all that she had accomplished, felt the worst.
In one of her moments of clarity, she had begun searching for other naturally evolved mana sensitive individuals like her.
Machines had become able to wield mana but perhaps there was a chance that an organic person held the answer.
The only problem with this was that they were simply too rare!
Most organic beings cultivated using spiritual energy and not mana.
Thus she decided to play to her strengths and contacted the government!
With her lofty status, she easily arranged for machine spirits to accompany the young prodigies and geniuses in the guise of trophies and brought them to her world.
She hoped that at least one of them awakened to mana and she would then know about it right away.
To prevent any accidents, the little ones would be instructed to guide their charges and protect them until they could be picked up.
But these individuals were too rare indeed!
She waited and waited.
For twenty years she remained there, drinking and waiting while gazing at the sea.
The numbers always told her, that she was doing the best she could, that this scheme of hers carried the best chance at success and yet….
Her true body had become too enormous again. Her planet Turia had not just been terraformed but it was also excavated extensively and at the core of the planet itself, stood a massive gravity furnace.
It was in the shape of a large sphere and its inside surface was dotted, in what looked like tuning forks. These consisted of many, invisibly small parts that could manipulate gravity itself.
It produced boundless electrical power and was surrounded by thousands of kilometers of processing power facilities and data storage banks linked to her mind.
In her quest for knowledge, she had willingly shackled herself again. While she could operate her body and leave this world, she would end up losing too much of herself in the process.
As if the heavens were sympathetic to her plight, after twenty long years, something actually happened!
One of the little ones awoke! A human cultivator had awoken to mana! She had felt it trembling on the surface of her world!
Immediately she instructed the ever-loyal Duunim to invite him over!
He had been patiently by her side since the construction of this planet finished, over a thousand standard years ago.
His unique personality made him the best choice for this task. With him involved, she had no doubts, that everything would run smoothly!
She decided to drink the last bottle of her mana wine she would ever drink, a vintage of "ecstatic" flavor variety.
After opening the bottle and taking a deep swig, she sat in the shack she had spent the last twenty years in.
As she looked at its shabby interior, she felt an elated melancholy wash over her mind.
Although the shack was ugly, it had served its purpose well. The seclusion here had allowed her to think up the first successful approach to her problem in decades.
She would keep it here as a reminder to be patient in her endeavors.
That was until she heard someone insulting her holy palace of frugality!
Enraged her eyes flared with mana and sent a stream out towards this blasphemer! Grabbing him out of the air she was stunned at this insolence! How dare he!
Once she realized the identity of the foul-mouthed voice, she canceled the last of the mana wines effect and slapped the little one out of her shack!
"SLAP!"
She had intended to only severely punish him but ended up accidentally destroying the structural integrity of the shack instead!
As if her hand had inadvertently closed the curtains on the last twenty years.
She felt embarrassed and her cheeks blushed as the shack crumpled to pieces around her.
Using the rubble to hide her embarrassment, she took a moment to vent her dissatisfaction and blew everything away using mana.
When she emerged she decided to be as fearless as the foul-mouthed old monk had been and confront the future knocking on her door.
Looking at the fearless eyes she missed so much she knew, that things would soon change forever!