Adam was in the black space; he would think it was a complete vacuum if not the occasional wisp can spot here and there.
*sigh*
"It seems it will take a long time before the wisps recover."
Adam left the island core and was complaining about the refresh rate of the wisps.
He only succeeded with creating the earth spike skill, but after that, the wisps were too sparse, and there were not enough wisps to make more skill orbs.
He tried making other skills, but he could tell they would fail, and he dissipated them before they caused a problem.
"Hmm, maybe I can duplicate the core? Let's try it."
Adam decided on the spot and tried it out.
Adam put his hand on the black core, and a golden light came out of his hand and began to envelop the island core.
After the golden light completely covered the island core, Adam started pouring his mana into the talent skill.
However, no matter how much he poured in, nothing changed.
Until Adam ran out of mana and dejectedly stopped his skill.
Luckily, he was able to recover his mana without a problem.
"Darn, this looks like it would take more mana than I can hold in my body. It's unfortunate, though, that my talent does not inform me how much mana I need to duplicate something."
Adam sat down for a bit. He has been rushing and constantly moving; he did not take much of a break and time to unwind since he first ran away from the camp.
Adam sat there and leaned back, looking at the ceiling of this stuffy darkroom.
"Why did things have to turn out like this?"
No one answered his question.
He thought about the ooze on his body, the camp, Noelani, and his life back on earth. His mind was wandering, and Adam was becoming emotional.
However, the moment he started to feel angry, he quickly tried to distract himself.
He looked around and focused on the innate orb with stone spikes on them.
"It's nice that the island core immediately establishes a facility, instead of the need to spend time and energy on converting the skill to a facility, as Noelani did with the tree control skill.."
Adam smiled with this thought.
He tried using the earth spike; they cause sharp ends to protrude from any rocky surface connected to the ground, including the walls and ceiling.
"It will be a useful tool when fighting Neo- let's not think about that, let's work on something instead of thinking about these things."
Adam stopped his thoughts and got the inactive innate orb that was lying not too far away.
He was going to duplicate it.
Using his talent skill on the active orbs would cost much more than just duplicating a non-active one.
But, midway through deploying his golden light, his head began to ache.
"Ugh, it looks like my mental energy has run out."
Adam had not hit the limit of his mental energy when duplicating in the past two weeks.
Each day, the limiting factor to duplication was the mana and not the mental energy, especially after figuring out the strategy of duplicating many things at once instead of one at a time.
"Hmm, considering the number of times I used the talent skill today, my mental energy would run out after a dozen or so duplications."
"So, I must make the best use of these dozen chances. One strategy I can try is duplicating as many things as I can per go, especially because I don't have to worry too much about mana anymore."
"The only restricting factors now are the mental energy and the area size of the golden light."
After thinking about the future of his duplication, he began to consider what things to duplicate once his mental energy recovers.
He immediately crossed out the island core; he was just not able to copy it, even the max amount of energy he could muster.
Mana stones are not necessary since he could hunt corruption shadows and get their rocks.
But innate orbs are essential to copy.
Adam found that with more orbs, the less the cost of purification becomes.
This is even the case with Adam's current dome, which contains level-2 corrupted items, the ooze on Adam's body, and the one connected to the island core.
"There is also the light snake which consumes the light in the purification dome. But even still, the energy costs are greatly reduced with each added innate orb. It seems Noelani has hidden this fact as well, and the camp had a lot of mana all this time."
Adam remembered checking his innate orb back at the camp. The energy would be so drastically different from day to day. It seems that it was purposefully done to hide the truth of the camp's mana reserves.
He also thought of the tree controlling facility and was skeptical it would take too much mana out of the energy reserve.
"But so what? there is not much use of more mana when you have nothing to spend it on."
***
Back at the camp.
Noelani looked at the strand of light connecting her innate orb to the bright yellow clouds.
"It's time!"
She proclaimed and put her hand on the orb.
In the next moment, the orb transported her vision to the orb space.
All the camp members have not visited this space for a while now because all the innate orbs on the island are next to one another, and so there is no point in coming into the orb space.
However, when Noelani entered the orb space, the space was primarily as empty as ever, but there was something different.
All the innate orbs were releasing transparent clouds.
The clouds would circle the orb that produced them.
Noelani saw all the camp's innate orbs were right beside her, and all were releasing these clouds. But, especially her orb, it was releasing much more than other orbs but would not be more than the combined cloud production of the entire camp's orbs.
Noelani willed it, and the clouds from the camp's orbs started to move with her will.
They slowly clumped together with Noelani's orb in the center.
At first, they made a blob shape, but the blob began to change and morph until it took the form of a person.
It was Noelani!
After that, the Noelani in the orb space lifted her hand, and the clouds formed a platform for her and the other orbs to rest on.
Noelani smiled and then pointed in a particular direction.
"Move!" she commanded.
In the next moment...
The platform began to move with the innate orbs and Noelani on top!