Rebecca had ridden all night and the sun was already well up in the sky above them. It was easy for her to know where Isaac had gone just by looking at the treetops and seeing if they had been damaged by the Master Mage.
Although she wished to continue, fatigue was starting to show on her face and at times she would doze off and almost fell off her horse.
Reluctantly, she therefore decided to stop and set up a small camp to rest next to a small stream. Immediately after tying the horse, she went to cool her face a bit in the cold water, not noticing a man doing the same.
Hearing footsteps, the young woman took out her wand and came to watch Artiel suddenly raise his hands in the air.
- "Woo! It's me, calm down" he said, raising his hands.
- "Sorry, I had completely forgotten about you" she said, putting away her wand then turning towards the stream and filling her gourd with water.
Artiel said nothing more and began to wet his face tired from the night before starting to growl as he ran his hand over his chest. The constant pain was starting to become excruciating for him.
Seeing him growl in pain, Rebecca turned to him before widening her eyes slightly, remembering that he had been hurt earlier.
- "But what are you doing here ?! You should be in bed to rest!" she growled.
- "What about you ?" he replied simply as he began to remove his armor.
She walked over and slapped her hand against the young man's back who groaned in pain and came to lie down, unable to completely remove the armor he was wearing. He had barely had time to put her in his eagerness to follow the young woman.
- "Do you think you can compare your condition to mine?" she continued, starting to untie the laces and knots that were holding the armor together and beginning to remove it.
- "What do you think you're doing ?!"
- "Undress to heal yourself. Don't pretend or I'll hit you again" she replied, starting to remove Artiel's clothes after her armor.
The young man blushed slightly when he saw her trying to remove his clothes and there was little he could do. He really didn't want her to hit him. The pain was really intolerable even for him. After a whole night on the horse, the incessant movements had finally got the better of him. When she finally decided to stop, Artiel was in heaven.
Slowly, the young woman removed the top of the young man then the bandages stained by the ointment, revealing his chest and his muscles very well traced. He had trained day and night to become a soldier and was regularly trained to keep fit, on top of that he was quite young.
Seeing Artiel's body, Rebecca suddenly began to blush for a moment. "But what am I doing? Calm down. You heal him, that's all," she thought before resuming a serious expression. Artiel on his side was quite embarrassed and had looked away and therefore couldn't see the reddened face of the young woman.
The skin on the ribs was slightly purple and bruises were visible everywhere. There was no visible injury or bleeding which was already a good sign for Rebecca. Once the surface was examined, she began to examine the interior and activated her mana vision.
It was a review of mana circuits. Something the elder had taught her that allowed her to see if someone had a serious injury or not. If the severity of an injury was high enough to cause a person's mana to change or even rupture vessels, it was an urgent case. There were times when the flow of mana was erratic in wounded areas.
She began to observe the young man's vessels, searching for a flow of mana that was irregular in circulation and fluctuating abnormally. And quickly, she found a few near his ribs , nevertheless, their flow was fairly steady, indicating that the damage, while real, was not severe enough to threaten Artiel's life.
The next step was to treat him.
Rebecca placed her hands over Artiel's wounds as she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She began to concentrate, drawing the attention of the young man who was watching her. A moment later, she opened her eyes sparkling with a bluish glow as her palms began to glow.
A sudden pain came to shake the young man. He could feel something moving in his body around his ribs. He began to growl in pain as he stood up slightly before being easily pulled down by the young woman who put her hand on his abs.
- "Don't move, take this if you're in too much pain" she said, putting a piece of white cloth in his mouth. "Don't be a baby" she finally said before resuming.
The pain started again. Artiel took the cloth and put it in his mouth, nibbling it hard and closed his eyes. He was in pain, but now was not the time to give up. So he endured the pain as best he could.
For her part, Rebecca was taking care of Artiel's circuit as best she could. Although she couldn't truly heal him on her own, she could speed up his body's healing abilities by infusing mana into his body.
Once the mana is infused and integrated into the circuits surrounding the injured area, the activity of the body would accelerate proportionally, speeding up the healing process. It was something she had learned on her own when she was injured. Until now, she had never done it on anyone other than herself. So she decided to take it slow and avoid complications.
Isaac was in front of the mana flower bush, a smile on his face. He had had many ideas for using spiritual energy. Although he could synthesize it on his own, he had not yet found a simple way to produce it outside and especially create golems that can do it.
As his previous experience had shown, the magical power of the golems when fed with spiritual energy was increased exponentially. However, it was a temporary boost.
Golems, unable to produce or hold energy for long, will lose energy within minutes and revert to their original state. While this was saddening news for Isaac, since he wouldn't have the opportunity to boost their performance, it gave him the ability to boost them when needed at any time.
This information in hand, he had also thought of a way to infuse his runes and arcana with the same energy. Arcana was a simple thing since it was temporary and so he didn't need to find a permanent source of power. However, the runes were a different story.
This had therefore given him the idea to move towards the mana flower feeding the rune of the flying rock and more particularly its functioning. If he could create a plant capable of producing spiritual energy, he would find the ultimate source of energy supply.
In addition, he could theoretically also boost the mana flower and thus boost his mana production. He had a lot to do, but all in good time.
Isaac sat right in front of the bluish flower and closed his eyes before spreading his aura to envelop the bush. Golden filaments began to seep into the plant and slowly penetrate inside, harvesting its composition and mana circuit.
After about fifteen minutes, he opened his eyes again, his face frustrated and disappointed. He had tried unsuccessfully to get ideas from the plant, but it was far too different from that of spiritual energy.
Where mana can be extracted from the environment like the flower did, spiritual energy cannot be found in the environment. Even among humans, finding a person capable of producing this energy seemed extremely rare.
Now that he had ruled out for the moment the idea of creating a plant capable of creating spiritual energy for his creations, Isaac had no choice. He had tried to dismiss the idea, but it seemed like it was the only way out.
Although spiritual energy appears to be produced by beings with fairly advanced consciousness, this energy can also be created in other ways. As he had noticed, it is actually a specialization of mana towards a more intense and more stable form.
He had already managed to create some without knowing it during the golden ray incident. And that was where his ultimate solution lay: Reproduce the golden ray and capture its energy. Where the flower of mana was a small power generator, what he intended to create could be seen as a nuclear reactor, figuratively and literally.
As soon as the idea was settled, he jumped off the rock and returned to the ground before spawning new runes on the grass. The instant they activated, the mana around and in the earth began to condense before forming boulders floating in the air.
In all, about fifteen flat rocks about two meters wide were created. Once the operation was completed, the rocks levitated using the aura of Isaac in front of him and then runes began to appear on their surface.
Around, wind runes barely two inches tall appeared one by one around the discs of rock. Behind it, a rune of logic was created with a function in its center allowing it to absorb a large amount of energy.
In front, two runes were created, one inside the other. The former made to take the extra energy from the rune of logic and propel the mana forward while the latter was there to create a light version of the arcane imprisonment that Isaac had named Lockdown.
He repeated the operation on each of the rocks before placing them to the side. After finishing, new runes appeared on the ground and five new rocks appeared, but this time much larger, around eight meters in diameter. The same runes were inscribed, this time larger.
Isaac repeated the operation a few times. Once finished, the sun had already set. In front of him, rocks of different sizes floated in the air thanks to his aura. Satisfied with his job, he then nodded positively before starting to float in the air with the rocks and left the gardens.
If he had to test a nuclear reactor, he preferred to do it outside and avoid risking destroying the one place he felt safe.
Once about two kilometers from the gardens, Isaac finally decided to descend to land before placing the rocks in a corner. The first he started was to create a logic rune on the ground and extend the circuits over a large area to maximize its mana absorption area.
Once the nodes were created, he began to code every behavior. He began by integrating a deactivation function. As his arcana with the trigger Dispell, he programmed the rune to absorb all the energy in the reaction chamber and disperse it into the air as quickly as possible with the "shutdown" trigger.
Once this is done, he wrote a new safety measure with the Emergency shutdown trigger which, like the previous trigger, is not really a way to deactivate the reactor. When activated, the trigger will throw the reaction chamber as high as possible before deactivating the containment chamber and suddenly releasing the energy. It was a bit of a crude but functional way to steer the danger away to a slightly less sensitive place.
Hoping no one is right on top.
Once these measurements were established, Isaac began to trace the functioning of the rune and relate the functionalities to the rocks. Gradually, the rune traced on the ground nearly thirty meters in diameter began to become more complex. More and more fine, complex and sensitive lines appeared.
The night passed entirely until he could finally get up and observe the enormous rune he had managed to draw.
- "Good. Have to test it now!" he declared while floating in the air.