Xander continued to practice with his new lightning core and like this, hours went by.
Soon the day was almost over and Sung-Min finally said, "Alright kid, I think that's enough of that for today."
Xander nodded his head.
"So is there anything else you can think to ask me?" Sung-Min asked.
Xander started to think, then he suddenly remembered the saturation next to his rank.
[Rank: G-rank - Entry] - [Saturation: 0%]
"How do I saturate my core?" Xander asked.
"Ha!" Sung-Min laughed.
"You really don't know much now, do you? But don't feel bad, I was once in the same boat when I first left Division 43 and entered the tower," Sung-Min said as he looked into the distance.
"Well, to saturate your core, you need beast cores."
"You take beast cores and consume the energy in them, and that will help you saturate your core," Sung-Min said.
"That's it, just beast cores? It's that easy?" Xander couldn't believe it; he figured it would be this crazy, difficult thing.
"Well, it's simple but not necessarily easy. Beast cores are expensive for a reason, so unless you want to go out into the wild and kill a bunch of beasts every day… But regardless of which method you take, there are a couple more things you need to know."
"First, you can only consume so many beast cores a day. It's different for everyone, but your core can only handle so much, so the best thing you can do is consume only high-rank cores."
"And that's the other thing: as an entry G-rank, you can consume any core, and it will help toward your saturation, but once you enter, say, mid G-rank, then low and entry-rank cores won't do anything for you. So to increase your saturation, you have to consume higher-ranked cores."
"And then lastly, you might be thinking, 'What if I can get a bunch of F, E, or D-rank cores and use those? Then my core will fill up really quickly,' but you would be wrong. While a G-rank core can handle an F-rank core, it will explode and cripple or even kill you if you try to consume anything higher. Remember, a core can only consume one rank higher, so G can consume F, F can consume E, and so on."
"Now, how many cores do you have?" Sung-Min asked.
"Umm… about 100 G-ranks," Xander answered. He hadn't personally killed that many G-ranks, but the spatial rings he got from the men he killed had a few, but not too many. They seemed to have been mostly broke, with the majority of the money they had coming from the two twins that they kidnapped.
"Alright, good, that's a start. Pull 'em out and see how many you can consume," Sung-Min said with a little excitement.
Xander did just that and started to consume a high G-rank core.
After 30 seconds went by, he had fully consumed it, and he happily went and looked at the saturation percentage.
[Rank: G-rank - Entry] - [Saturation: 0%]
And he was very disappointed when it didn't even go up by 1%.
"Ha ha!" Sung-Min started to laugh.
"You should see your face. You must have thought it would be easy to raise the saturation."
"Ha!"
"It will take a lot more than that. If you're lucky, you can raise it about 1% a week, so it will take you about 2 years to get to 100%. Now, that of course is if you stick with G-rank cores around your level, but if you use higher rank cores like half-steps the entire time or, hell, even better, if you can get your hands on some consistent F-rank cores, it will go by much quicker," Sung-Min said, finally starting to stop his laughing.
Then for the next couple of minutes, Xander sat down and consumed 6 beast cores for each of his two cores, which according to Sung-Min was pretty good but not exactly great.
He also learned the different percentages and what they meant.
Entry - Saturation 0-10%
Low - Saturation 11-30%
Mid - Saturation 31-60%
High - Saturation 61-80%
Peak - Saturation 81-99%
Half-step - Saturation 100%
After finishing saturating his core that was still stuck at 0%, he moved on to trying out his new mirage trait that was now G-rank.
The first thing he did was phase into the mirage realm and try to move around, but unfortunately, Sung-Min, who was an E-rank, watched his every move as if he could see him.
He phased back into reality and asked, "How can you do that? How do you see me?"
"Well, I can't exactly see you, but I can sense you with my soul sense, and even when my soul sense isn't active, I can feel something wrong. It's kind of like an itch; you can just feel it. I don't know…" Sung-Min explained.
"Soul sense? What is that?" Xander asked.
"Ahh, it's just when you push a small part of your soul out into the world and sense with it. Don't worry too much about it, tomorrow I'll teach you how to use it."
"Wait, I can use soul sense at G-rank?" Xander asked, excited.
"Yeah, you can, but I will say a G-rank's soul sense is dogshit," Sung-Min said with a little laugh.
Xander then phased back into the mirage realm, ignoring Sung-Min's staring, and he learned that he could now stay in there for a little more than a minute before running out of qi, which was a huge improvement, and he knew that if he could improve his core beyond entry rank, that time would increase.
'Now I just need to see how well G-ranks can see me,' Xander thought.
He then phased back into reality again and started to try and use illusions.
It still took up a ton of qi, but it wasn't nearly as bad as before. He even started to think of possible ways he could use this to his advantage in a fight.
"That's pretty impressive, kid. Being able to use illusions this early is extremely rare." Sung-Min finally gave him a little praise.
"Hey, is it possible to use my illusions to help me during a battle?" Xander asked, wanting to know if he was thinking about something that wasn't even possible.
"Of course you can, if you get good enough. It's not easy, but you can do a lot with illusions, from creating clones to sounds to being able to communicate with someone from a distance. All types of things can be done with illusions."
"You can even learn how to fake out soul sense."
"The people that are best at illusions, and there aren't too many of them, can emit aura with the illusions. So imagine if you create a clone with your exact aura."
"What would that do to someone using soul sense?"
"They'd be F***ed," Sung-Min said with a laugh.
"Anyway, there's a lot you can do with illusions. While we don't have anyone near this level in our tower of fate, it's said that people good enough, like demigods or something, can turn illusions into reality, but I don't know if it's true or not. It sounds cool, but at the same time, it kind of sounds like bullshit."
Xander started to imagine the endless possibilities, then started to mess around with his illusions some more until he finally ran out of qi.
"Alright kiddo, let's call it a day. After you finish your class tomorrow, grab some lunch and then meet me back here, okay?" Sung-Min said in a serious tone.
"Okay. I got it," Xander said.