After consoling his stomach, Tetsu broke the artifact into two halves and carved hooks on either end. This made it possible to attach and detach the artifact into two smaller sticks.
At close proximities, both halves of the stick grew, which made Tetsu wonder if he had two artifacts. Is the idea behind this artifact to make unlimited artifacts?
"Yikes! Now I see how superior this one artifact is to mine. I'm not even gonna mention the uncommon rarity for initiates."
Tetsu plays with the stick for a while to figure out its limits. He stumbles onto its first weakness pretty quickly. Once a broken part of the artifact is separated from its main body, it turns into regular pieces of wood. One can still carve a rune or use rune force, but the required resources to extend the artifact an inch will drain the user dry. A quick info to find more information on the wood yielded no results.
"Hmm... mystery wood."
Of course, one needed a mystical wood to make an artifact. Normal wood is... well, normal.
Tetsu gazes over the splintered wood. "A god-tier skill is useless when you have a man-made weapon." He sighs.
This fact did not discourage Tetsu. He knew he couldn't make a simple artifact with the material he had or find in the vicinity. However, this had been already considered and worked around.
Tetsu's goal is to get one foot inside the door.
A hack to understand the hack, if you will, and his current experiment would do just fine.
For now, Tetsu got scared as he had no way of telling which part of the stick belonged to its main body. To be safe, he stopped experimenting with its range and always kept the broken parts of the artifact close to him.
In his initial experiment, he marked two parts of the broken stick as the main body or the main frame of the artifact. Yet the fear remained. A single slip can cause the wood to grow over his runes, ruining the Ru'nic formation.
Since then, he grew part of the stick with utmost concentration and only used the excessive fragments for experimentation.
"Why is it so fragile?" Thinks Tetsu. "How else would one break it?" He answers himself.
Tetsu imagined breaking the artifacts into several thousand artifacts and supplying a small army with extending sticks.
"Now it's way too overpowered. How the fuck is it at such low-level?"
He had many doubts, yet this latest revelation reaffirmed his stand on how broken artifacts were.
"Too darn overpowered."
A few more experiments later, Tetsu dismissed this theory as well.
Distance is the biggest factor, the third and fourth broken extensions of the artifact have to be closer. The farther away they were from the artifact, the more resources they demanded. An army will be useless if they are clustered around a single spot.
"Not to mention a super easy target."
Even on their own, the sticks demanded more resources after the tenth broken extension. It was better to pick and etch a rune over a normal stick rather than using the broken extension of the artifact.
"Initiate level indeed." Frowns Tetsu.
Tetsu burns the extra wood from the artifact, not wanting to lose the main frame within fake artifacts. His luck was hindrance enough. He didn't want to play needle in a haystack.
To his surprise, rare wood gave rare smoke, which he gladly stored within his charcoal shards.
"Potent smoke," chuckles Tetsu. "Who would've thunk?"
Except for Tetsu, his inner sage, and probably everyone else, including the system.
[Ding! A new kind of creation has been made. The potency of the smoke within the skill 'Smoke Orb' has been upgraded.]
[Warning! Cool downtime has been increased due to a higher level of creation.]
"Yey or nay?" Tetsu was confused. "I'll take it as YEY." He cheers.
The artifact didn't have a top or bottom. Tetsu randomly selected one side and added the charcoal shards, making it the bottom side.
Tetsu carved the top end of the stick as a hook for two reasons. Tetsu planned on making more attachments for the artifact to convert it into a three-part staff. Each attachment contains a unique powered rune. Based on his estimates, Tetsu wondered if a hundred attachments would be enough to give him a title or class.
Math not helping here either.
"See... math's useless," Tetsu reassures his decision.
Attachment Uno is to boost his vital energy. Because vitality rules. The second attachment went to mana regeneration, and the third he still had to plan.
Both mana and vital forces worked with opposite principals. One originated within oneself and the other was ever present. One could only be created and controlled from within, while the other could only be bent and manipulated through one's will.
To make a rune suitable to satisfy both conditions seemed impossible. The way he came up with and applied the devour rune to work surprised him.
"A lucky shot?" Tetsu charts another victory to his luck.
Too bad the same rune wouldn't work over the artifact. For one, it would consume and restore itself, which doesn't help Tetsu whatsoever.
"If I require more attachments to make the hack work, maybe then?"
Tetsu separates a carved stick for later.
With plenty of room to be flexible, Tetsu made five runes around the first attachment. Exploiting the only rule that can be exploited in the rune force, Tetsu etched many runes around the artifact.
One rune drew on vital energy. The second rune stored the acquired energy within the vessel, while the third rune transferred the stored energy with force.
To enforce smooth transitioning while assuring the wood doesn't burst into splinters, Tetsu added one off-and-on switch to activate and deactivate the ru'nic circle.
Similar formation over the second attachment for mana and Tetsu successfully completed his first two attachments.
Tetsu flips and clips the mana attachment onto the artifact and infuses his mana to activate the rune.
Like a machine turned on, the rune glows a dim shade of black. The light seeps through the lines, connecting each rune, and activating them as it passes through.
With his palm over the last rune, Tetsu sensed pure mana entering his body.
"Step two."
Tetsu dashes off with a mad sprint, with two attachments clutched in his hands. Both pumped mana into his system while he used 'Devour' to consume more vital energy.
After sprinting for a good ten minutes, Tetsu marked another milestone as he crashed to recuperate. During recovery, Tetsu required two attachments pumping vital energy for an hour before he recovered. Even after no visible damage, Tetsu's second round decreased to seven minutes while his recovery time climbed to twenty minutes.
"Not worth it." Tetsu sighs, not bothering with the math. "Why did it decrease?"
The third round knocked any little hope Tetsu had to use it in a fight.
"This is useless."
[Ding!...]
"Okay... not completely!"
Tetsu skims through his skill. It offered him speed while using his vitality as fuel and an over-strain timer for cooling down. This skill is leaps and bounds over his rune. They had limits that wouldn't outright kill him if Tetsu overused them like his runes.
They also gave him more head space to think rather than have a constant eye on his fatigue and mana levels.
The sprint rune or the skill is like having an adrenaline rush. If Tetsu shifts his focus for a second, that second can become an hour in no time and the backlash will pile on before vitality can reclaim control.
"Quick escape technique ten... I need to make some fighting runes soon." Tetsu clasps his head.
Sage swiftly shut an idea to make more attachments and flood his body with vital force down.
"Why not? Vital energy is good."
Tetsu pushes himself into a sitting position with the support of the attachment. He hears a crunch and feels a squish in his palm. The artifact in his hands breaks.
Boy, he was glad to be experimenting on an extension. He squints at the wood and spots fine black lines spreading within the wood.
"Isn't it?" Tetsu raises a brow.
He crawls toward his stashed resources and picks up a normal wooden branch. After copying and using the vital attachment of the artifact, Tetsu spots the wood breaking from within.
Pitch-dark lines crawled from the inside out, corroding everything in its path. Tetsu didn't understand what had transpired and his inner sage didn't offer up any help, either.
"Is This bad?" Tetsu places a hand over his stomach, imagining the worst. "Stuff like this! You should be warning me about it before I try." He scowls at the sage. "And not a silent tug but an ear drum tearing alarm until I stop."
Tetsu folds his legs and meditates on his next step. He did notice his fatigue levels rise ridiculously fast before, but he never thought much about it.
"Did this have to do something with that?" He questions. "But you always bounce back after a good night's sleep." He answers himself. "Rest? That's it!" Tetsu laughs at himself. "I'm pushing the recovery and growth process too much." He scans his body. "I always knew my mind worked on a different level from my body."
Tetsu lays back down, slipping away from his worries, plans, experiments, and mostly himself to relax. His hunches demanded their own experiments, and only the millionth sheep jumping over the fence could knock him out. His inner sage still wouldn't confirm or deny any of his doubts.
Early in the morning, Tetsu sprints back to action. In the best shape of his life and after eleven hours of sleep, he achieved another milestone of a twelve-minute sprint.
Rest, recover, and take breaks. Three different concepts meant for three different aspects of life. Such simple concepts we always forget.
With meditation added to his schedule, Tetsu takes the last step in creating his first artifact.
Materials used in an artifact mattered a lot. Tetsu cooked up a plan to overcome this problem with a failed experiment and the materials he could find. The plan was still to get one step in, but that doesn't mean you don't do your best.
In search of some good wood, Tetsu broke every tree branch, searched high and low, and also used some severed limbs. Yet none of them came close to the mystery wood used to build the artifact.
Different wood, rocks, and limbs were placed over rocks. All of them with Ru'nic symbols to push vital energy into their rock, while their brethren pushed mana into different rocks.
Either the rock or the rune forcing the energy into the rock would explode and Tetsu took notes on which lasted the longest. Math be dammed. He just had to wait and see which rock lasted until the end. He was also done using himself as an experimental subject. Those masochist days are far behind him.
Every time some kind of wood always won and the mystery wood always held the highest score.
"Wood is life?" Wonders Tetsu, as his inner sage, confirms his hunch. "Don't bother." He frowns. "Stand on the sidelines like always. Your subtle help only pisses me off."
About to give up on his quest, Tetsu's eyes linger over the mind-fuck tree. "Nah!" He dismisses the idea.
He turns away, and this time catches a glimpse of the old coffins the tree prepared for him.
He distinctly remembered them to be separate from the tree. With a quick 'Info' Tetsu double-checks and confirms the origin of the roots. They were indeed a separate formation without life, and using them shouldn't hurt the tree by any means.
"Sorry, but you have no life, and I have an itch only you can scratch." Tetsu bows and tries to pull it free.
He puts his entire back into pulling out a single root and fails. Next, he uses the stinger with his sharp skill and also tries to burn it free. Yet nothing left a mark on the root.
"The good news is this should work."
Tetsu falls back, laughing. His fangs drop, making his smile a bit more menacing.
"I keep forgetting I have these." Tetsu flares his tongue over the fang's tip. "That's sharp." He mumbled with his tongue, busy checking out his fangs.
Not being a part of him since birth, Tetsu had to keep reminding himself during meals to activate his vital draining skills. If it wasn't for the sharp fangs cutting his tongue from time to time, he would've never known he had fangs.
"Huh! Wait."
Tetsu chews his way through and claims his first root within five minutes.
'Edge Cut' skill smoothened the process even further as he claimed the second piece of wood within two minutes.
Khoff! Tetsu coughs out sawdust mixed with chunks of wood. "Worth it... Kho!" He coughs out more.
"Maybe I shouldn't have given up on being a vampire," Tetsu said in a muffled voice, examining his fangs. "Even if I did pick it, it might take me years before notice I am one." He taps on them with his fingertip, checking for damage. "All well."
Not wanting to repeat the sugar rush incident, Tetsu used the saliva, his fangs secreted along with the rune 'Devour', to devour every trace of wood from his mouth.
"Wish I had this back then."
Tetsu shutters, reliving the sweet memory of sugar poisoning. "I've had enough sugar for a lifetime." Both he and his stomach agree.
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