Chronicles of the True Wizard

Chapter 190 - Book 7

Felix only looked through the portal for a moment before he stepped through but he saw what appeared to be a large open field filled with green and blue grass. Stepping through and getting a better look, the grass was almost striped like an animal. There were large waves of deep blue grass that transitioned into a pale green and back again and, upon closer inspection, Felix wasn't even sure it was grass at all.

Before Felix could get a closer look though, he turned around, towards the bustling sounds around him and found a dispersed crowd gathered around a large building behind them. The building was a simple grey box with nothing more than a door. It wasn't very big and had nothing decorating it on the outside from what Felix could see.

Checking the time, he knew he still had to wait for a bit before the event started so he started stretching. He hadn't used his Persona in a while and though it was controlled as seamlessly as his own body, he wasn't quite as familiar with it. Felix started out by stretching and finding the limits of his range of motion.

Seeing what he was doing, Nova took a big bite out of the field then rolled over and started rubbing her back in the grass while she chewed on the grass. Felix quickly realized they were eating the grass with their teeth to try and hide the fact that they were a sprite. He sent a quick sense of gratitude over their bond then went back to stretching.

Once he felt more comfortable, Felix switched over to the first steps of the Dragon Dance. He was going to drop the skill soon but it's steps were still the best and most structured movements he knew to test his body. Once he ran through them once, he started tuning his mobility spells.

Though he didn't have his armor with inscriptions in his boots, he had been practicing and found he could cast about 15 Fire Bolts if he really stretched himself, and was standing perfectly still. He considered those to be essentially the base level of spell so he was at 15 total spell levels. At some point, he would formalize his categorizations but for now, he figured it would be enough.

The mobility spells he used were somewhere between really complicated first level spells and very simple second level spells. He could cast about 10 of them at once and, if they were all the same, he could stretch himself to 12.

The new versions of his Fire Balls, Lightning Bolts and other main combat spells, were around a level 3 in complexity from his estimates. Just forming the spell form in the air around him, without entirely dedicating his focus to them, he managed to cast 3 of them while forming mobility spells at the same time.

He was totally happy with that and though he could have cast another combat spell if he were in his own body with the inscribed Kraken leather armor, his health pool would also be dramatically lower. He was more than happy to make that trade considering his Persona also gave him a disguise so he wouldn't be noticed if he crushed this event.

He was already worried about his work with Shade's Wrath leading to unwanted attention so he was happy to do anything he could to minimize his presence in Telviras.

Felix found he had to tune the mobility spells a little as his Persona was a fair bit heavier than he was but, the change was minimal. In the past he had simply grown spells to make them use more mana, physically increasing the spell's size. While this worked fine, it didn't scale well if he ever had to make a spell a hundred times stronger.

Reading some of the enchanting manuals in Inscripticae, he knew there was a better way. Instead of increasing the physical size of the node, he would simply construct the spell form with the correct amount of mana. Instead of pushing mana into a form, he would simply use the entirety of the spell's mana to form the spell.

He had essentially done this back in the tutorial when he had created the Gust spell form with liquid mana. Liquid mana took too much time to create for him to use it liberally, but he didn't need it. It would require some testing, but for now he was hoping he wouldn't have to scale his spells at all because he had just revamped them with nodes that were more efficient with more mana.

A few people glanced over as Felix vaulted around the open field and tested his spells but not many. It wasn't a terribly odd sight and looking around, Felix saw some people sparring, others sharpening their weapons, some changing equipment all amongst an equal spread of loners and conversationalists.

Felix's actions made it difficult for anyone to come up and talk to him, which was a huge upside in his mind, not that there was much time to do so. Felix also spotted a couple dozen other people appear through portals while he waited.

Everyone within the field he inspected was around level 500 or below which was actually rather surprising to Felix. He wasn't the lowest level he spotted in the field, but he was pretty close to it. He had expected some individuals to have much higher levels, just looking for an easy job. Either way, it would make it easier for him if they were competing so he wasn't complaining.

Just about everyone in the field was staring at the lone building so Felix joined them and looked towards it as the time approached.

Exactly on time, a short male Frostmyre with long slicked back hair that was streaked equal parts brown and white walked out of the building before them. He had familiar dark blue Frostmyre tattoos on his arms and chest but nothing else was visible to Felix as he wore a long, navy colored sleeveless robe that was open in the front.

[B] Orav Jaldnir (Lvl 2486)

The short Frostmyre man walked up a few steps then spoke loud enough for everyone in the field to hear.

"Thank you all for accepting my contract. My name is Orav Jaldnir. You may call me re

I guess not. Maybe that's why almost a quarter of the participants haven't handed anything in yet. How many participants are doing this?

I wouldn't be too worried. If they feel the need to do that, they probably aren't very confident in their individual ability to compete anyways.

Yeah I guess. There's also Merric who's just stealing corpses. Feels kind of gross that they're in the lead right now.

It is what it is.

Yeah, we'll see what happens as things even out over time. In the meantime, I need to find somewhere with more things I can kill. Ideally with high rarity, high density creatures.

Felix looked in the direction he had just come back from and decided he would continue searching there. He had initially chosen that direction because the least people were heading there so he hoped that meant it would still be the least contested hunting ground.

He flew back over the mountain range and the now much emptier fields and continued onwards. The fields stretched out a bit further to each side but it didn't take long for him to spot a different biome creeping up over the horizon.

In the distance he first saw ripples of heat in the air followed by a small cliff. That cliff fell just a few meters where there was a massive sea of dark orange sand. Floating atop the sandy dunes, Felix spotted specs of green that he realized, as he approached, were some kind of massive lily pads.

Once he was close enough to identify the plants, he also realized the dunes within the sea of sand before him actually moved. Rather than the signature unmoving dunes that he had come to expect from a desert, the dunes in this desert shifted and moved as if very slow waves on an ocean.

Felix floated over to just a half kilometer away and noted that the tide was calm at the moment, though he had no idea if that was always the case or not.

He quickly prepared some spells to keep himself cool then flew out to the first lily pad and tested it out by poking it with spells and corpses until he was certain it wouldn't try to eat him.

Felix carefully landed on top of the large green plant and looked out into the distance. Behind him, he saw the green and blue field he had flown over with mountains peaking just over the horizon to the left and right. In front of him lay an endless sea of dark orange sand and green lily pads.

Felix kneeled down at the edge of the lily pad, which was surprisingly stable no matter where he stepped, and ran his fingers through the sand.

It was hot as hell but otherwise, felt exactly like sand except for the fact that it was a little too easy for him to run his hand through it. Instead of desert sand, it felt more like a viscous liquid. Felix flew up and over the sand in the hopes that he would find a jungle or other fauna rich biome.

As he flew over the desert though, something glinting in the sand caught his eye. Felix quickly dropped to just above the sand so he could get a better look and found what seemed to be a small chunk of some kind of scaled creature. He couldn't really figure out anything else about it because the piece was so small but the fact that it existed at all was curious.

He decided to spend a little while investigating the desert because the scales meant it was less fauna empty than he had thought it was. At first he used Force spells to dig large cavities in the sand but he found nothing. He had been expecting to at least uncover some sand fish of some kind but there was simply nothing.

He flew back into the air and continued flying over the desert. After another half hour of flying, he spotted another glint, this one was half of a head and looked to be some kind of weird fish. It was mangled so it was hard to tell what it was but there was one specific feature that had Felix very curious.

On the mangled head, there was an eye. His assumption had been that these were sand fish but if they were, they wouldn't use eyes at all. He confirmed to the best of his knowledge that the eye actually did process light and not vibrations by examining it's structure. Felix found a lily pad nearby so he could land then looked down at the ever shifting desert.

I guess there's… water? Beneath…? the sand…

Before he started experimenting with diving in, Felix improved upon a different spell he had used a while back. If he wanted to try and explore the sand sea, he needed a way to breathe, even if he could hold his breath for over an hour at least. His solution for that in the past was to use a sphere of solid mana containing air to create a tank. Now, Felix had enough nodes that he could exclude his neck from a spell meaning, he could create a literal bubble of air using wind and force nodes.

He used force nodes to isolate the bubble and keep the sand out and the wind nodes to actually create and replenish the air. He had been pretty sure before that there was something off about the wind node he had found in the tutorial. Comparing it to other nodes in the reference books Aldahn had leant him, it resembled a force node more than any of the air nodes.

The air nodes in the reference text were some of the most complex nodes Felix had ever seen, and for a good reason. They seemed to actually be creating air from mana. There were hundreds of nodes for different gases, air compositions and densities along with different efficiencies for each.

There was no math in the reference books themselves, but Felix was able to examine the nodes using his Identify Arcane Component skill. With some slight modifications to some other nodes he used for measurement, Felix could fill a sphere of solid mana with air and measure it's change in weight.

Ding You have become more proficient with the Profession skill: [Arcane] Identify Arcane Component (Initiate IV => Initiate V)

Once he had manually calculated and measured it once, the skill now listed the output rate for all the other nodes he identified that produced matter. It was costly to produce enough air for him to breath, almost 15,000 mana per breath. On the other hand, he didn't need to breath very often so he was pretty sure he could sustain the mana cost, at least for a while.

He tested the spell by attaching it to his hand and submerging that into the sand to be sure it wouldn't collapse or leak then designed some backup spells. If he got hit or distracted, Felix wanted to be able to erect a new bubble in an instant. He used a different air node that produced air much faster but less efficiently so he could instantly fill the bubble in that situation.

After some thorough testing that involved submerging his head for extended periods of time, collapsing and reconstructing the bubble as well as sending it as deep as he could, Felix felt comfortable with his spell. He still had no way to see but he was hoping his ability to fly along with gravity would be enough for him to orient himself and escape if necessary. He also planned on going straight down and so long as he traveled along the stem of the lily pad he would have a safe path to return to the surface.

With all his preparations complete, Felix sat on the edge of the lily pad with this feet in the sand and rose to a standing position. He fell into the sand faster than he had expected but still much slower than with water. It took him a few seconds to be completely submerged under the effects of gravity alone.

He was pretty sure the sand should have been denser than he was and act more like a solid but for whatever reason, that wasn't the case.

Before he fell too far below the surface, Felix held himself just below the lily pad then ran his hand along it as he drifted over to it's stem. Once he found it, he latched onto the thick green appendage and propelled himself downwards.

He was worried he might encounter some kind of sand fish or worm that would be able to see him without him seeing them but he was confident he would be able to protect himself or escape either way.

He did spend the time while he descended thinking about alternate ways of seeing so in situations like exactly this one, he wasn't completely blind. He didn't manage to come up with anything promising in the few seconds it took him to break through the bottom though.

Felix had no idea what to expect but falling out of the sand and through the air was not it. He was still holding onto the stem of the lily pad so he latched onto it before he could actually fall any significant distance.

Instead of water, the air was filled with some kind of thick pink gas. Looking down, Felix saw a vast ecosystem that looked a little bit like it belonged underwater.

There were creatures that looked like fish except they were wide and flat with their side fins shaped like wings. They flew through the gas everywhere and reflected the light that emanated from each of the lily pad stems scattered throughout the area.

The bottom was over a kilometer below him but as far as Felix could see in any direction, it was covered in a massive twisting coral reef that was covered in odd looking vegetation. There were also creatures of all kinds wandering the reef, many of which seemed to ignore gravity completely as they scurried along the side or bottom of a coral branch.

It was a multicolored maze covered in a constant pink tinge and filled to the brim with life of all kinds. Felix couldn't help but be reminded of a series of young girls toys or a princess movie with the pink tinge and fantastical colors.

Looking around and identifying various creatures, Felix didn't spot anything particularly threatening to him so he tentatively let go of the stem. He was ready to slow his fall immediately but found he didn't have to at all. His buoyancy within the gas was enough that a fall wasn't really a threat to him at all.

As Felix fell to the ground, he saw off in the distance a large four legged creature with joints that were revered from what he expected, walk over to a specific spot and press itself into the coral. Every step it had taken caused a massive rumble that Felix had easily heard, despite the slight distortion caused by the sound passing through his air bubble. Due to it's apparent massive weight, Felix hadn't expected it to then launch itself off the ground and snatch one of the shiny flying fish in it's maw.

It managed to get the whole fish into it's mouth but it's chewing was messy and it actually lost two small pieces of the fish that floated up and away. Other flying creatures swooped in and caught those pieces before they reached the sand above though.

Felix landed on a large twisting branch of coral and was immediately spotted by a wide array of creatures. Most of them scurried off but a few of them stuck around. Only one of them attacked him though while the others just watched.

Felix dove to the side of a gout of flame that suddenly appeared before him. He landed and turned, seeing a hard carapace and a hundred crab like legs winding around the coral.

[D - Rare] Ignaribus (Lvl 262)

The flames themselves weren't hard to avoid but the centipede like creature had already scurried through another hole in the coral before Felix had a chance to hit back.

He waited for a little bit but saw no sign of it returning so he decided to move on. Felix hopped down the coral so he could reach a flat area instead of standing on the side of a twisting column.

Felix jumped but completely forgot that his buoyancy made gravity feel weaker so he ended up jumping much farther than he had intended. As he glided through the thick pink mist around him, one of the four legged creatures that he had seen jump earlier lumbered it's way below him.

[D - Rare] Yaboleg (Lvl 291)

Ah shit.

Felix prepared a couple of Force spells to move himself along with one to swing the axe. He also prepared a Lightning Bolt that he attached to the axe head.

The Yaboleg found a suitable spot on the coral just in front of Felix's arc and lowered itself to the ground for just a moment before it launched itself through the air.

Felix waited until it was in range then activated all of the spells he had prepared at once.

The creature's toothy maw stretched wide to accommodate Felix's large Persona body but only got a meter away from it's prey. Felix's body stopped moving forwards and shot downwards as the axe swung down into the mouth and trailed little arcs of lightning all around the blade through the air.

The Yaboleg was faster than Felix had expected and managed to snap it's jaws around Felix's shin before his axe came down onto it. It's jaws immediately ripped through his flesh but was stopped by his bones. His axe swing spun his body around but only barely grazed the creature.

Felix and the Yaboleg flipped and started spinning from the momentum of his swing as they fell through the air. The Lightning arced through the creature but that just caused it's muscles to seize.

Felix could feel blood pouring out of his leg and drenching the creature but he had already dulled the pain instinctively so it wouldn't distract him. He found his sense of pain wasn't quite as dulled as it was in his actual body, but it was enough for him to stay focused.

They fell through the air as Felix prepared a few Force spells to orient them. He channeled and adjusted the mana in each to make it so the Yaboleg was under him then smashed them into the ground with another spell.

The Yaboleg kicked and squirmed to try and reorient itself on top but it's limbs found no purchase. It never released or even lightened the force of it's bite though.

They slammed into the ground and Felix felt his legs reverberate right before he tumbled to the ground with the creature as he had no way to find stability as he landed.

Now that they were wrestling with each-other on the ground, it was much easier for Felix to tell that the creature was only a little bigger than his Persona's body. It looked had a flat mouth that was clamped down on his leg along with a big tail. Between those two was just a small hard body.

If it weren't for the four massive legs that reached outwards like a spider's, it's body would be a quarter of Felix's size at best.

Felix summoned a shade behind the creature as they tumbled and swung as quickly as he could. They both rolled meaning so did the shade so the strike missed anything vital but the blade still sunk into it's back leg.

As Felix rolled back over, he saw his health plummeting and also saw the fish that flew above them circling overhead.

Those fish like creatures had only really flown by themselves, as far as Felix had seen. Scattered and traveling for long periods in specific directions. Now, Felix watched them swarm together like a school of fish as they surrounded a cloud of red that slowly permeated the pink gas above.

Felix realized he only had as long as it took the fish to follow his blood trail. He turned his attention to the Yaboleg and reached forwards with his left hand. He placed it into it's mouth then prepared a new and improved Flamethrower.

He already knew the pink gas wasn't flammable as he was almost hit by a gout of flame earlier, so he was confident he wasn't about to kill himself. He knew it would more than likely cook the end of his leg but that was a sacrifice he was willing to make considering the Blood Ring's healing capabilities.

He pointed the spell as far away from his own leg as he could while still keeping it in its gullet then pumped mana into it.

He immediately felt his skin charring despite his dulled pain but luckily, the Yaboleg seemed to be faring much worse. The flames, rather than being pushed back out of it's mouth as Felix had expected, actually vented out along the sides of it's body. It seemed to have had some kind of gills or similar organ that were slowly shriveling as it's body blackened around them.

Ding You have slain a [D - Rare] Yaboleg (Lvl 291)

Felix kept pouring the heat in until he saw the notification he had been waiting for then wrenched it's jaw open. Its jaw surprisingly provided far more resistance than he had expected from a corpse and even forced him to use a Force spell.

He quickly activated both his rings instead of keeping the corpse because it helped him partially restore his leg and there was a chance he could integrate parts of it's body.

Felix looked up and saw the swarm of flying fish spiraling downwards as they tracked his faint blood trail. He didn't feel like he was in the best condition to fight them at the moment so he ignored them and leapt further into the coral reef with one leg.

His other leg was charred to the point where it stopped bleeding then the internals were mostly restored by his use of the blood ring. The skin was still charred and mostly black but it was holding on, somehow.

Felix caught himself at the top of his arc with Force spells and started flying so he didn't have to land on his leg. His only goal at the moment was to make distance and he avoided flying too high so the Yabolegs didn't jump at him.

He had thought about killing and collecting the corpses of the flying fish swarm but he wasn't sure how to do so while preserving their corpses and didn't know how strong they were. He also now knew exactly how to attract another swarm, with a big pool of blood, so he simply decided to prepare himself so he could collect them in the future.

Once his leg was fully restored, he would start experimenting on the fish until he could attract and capture entire swarms efficiently.

Felix had instinctively continued heading in the same direction, away from the evaluation building. The further he flew though, the more the weird instinctual feeling of pain he had felt back in the field, grew. The same sensation he had felt earlier, it was ever present as he traveled but it was so faint he had easily ignored and even forgotten about it.

Suddenly though, it had started to grow. The feeling went from the faintest of whispers on the wind to audible but distant screams. The feeling also grew more nuanced as Felix felt something along the lines of a migraine. He wasn't experiencing it himself, but he could feel the experience of it saturating the anima.

Felix continued to push the sensation away even though he was now able to tell that he was moving towards it. He couldn't pinpoint even its exact direction but he could sort of tell that forwards would lead him closer. He didn't want to go investigate it just yet because he still hadn't fully explored the pink gaseous sea though. He figured he should be able to find a number of creatures he could dissect and integrate into his own body here as well as collect plenty of points for the competition.

What he really needed was to sit down and manually work at his body, though he wasn't sure how that would work on his Persona. The blood ring could restore him but, he had to absorb more bodies for it to do so, he had already expended its meager reserves.

Once he deemed himself far enough from the commotion he had just been a part of, Felix started looking for a place to rest. There was no cover in the pink sea above him and he had no intention of resting in the middle of the desert so, he looked downwards, into the expanse of winding coral.

It wasn't hard for him to find a small alcove in the coral that was just too small to be a cave but still large enough for him to sit within. He covered the entrance in a sustained mana shield that had been upgraded from his new knowledge of enchantment nodes.

He made it so that the spell would never pull on his mana hard enough to injure him through the use of limiters and buffers. With the only exit covered, Felix sat down and closed his eyes. While he was certain some creatures down here would burrow through the coral, he didn't worry about it because there wasn't much he could do except react. He had Grim focusing his senses outwards just in case.

Felix's consciousness flowed through his body but he found that the bodily control granted by his race, didn't seem to extend to his Persona. He could use the blood ring to modify and control the body when it was within the ring itself but otherwise, he was severely limited.

He couldn't even assess the damage to his body from an internal perspective so he was stuck with the vague number that represented his health.

Before he went out and killed something just to restore the meager health he had lost and potentially cause a commotion, Felix had work to do.

He adjusted the Mana Shield spell he had created to make it opaque then deactivated his Persona. Back in his real body, he shifted his consciousness into the soul ring and started manually sifting through the soul matter he had absorbed.

Felix had already deactivated the automatic harvesting earlier so he got a chance to look through them himself. He had no real adjustments to make to the harvesting process just yet, but he was looking for something new.

His new soul layer had already been started, the one that he planned on suffusing his body with, but now he had more than enough soul matter to grow it substantially. He harvested what he could from the souls and added them to his own so he gained raw stats but made sure to preserve all the excess.

He took the excess and wiped it clean of experiences, intent and anything else leftover from their previous hosts then compressed them in pieces. Each and every piece he carefully fused to and incorporated into the third layer of his Persona's soul.

As he fashioned the third layer, Felix spent a little while observing the second layer he was building over and realized it wasn't exactly acting as he had intended it. Instead of just being a protective film over his own soul, it was actually contributing in large part to controlling his Persona's body. It acted like a second layer did for a normal being with a normal soul.

He realized he wasn't sure it made much sense that the bodies didn't share a second layer. If they did, his harvesting would be twice as efficient, theoretically.

Couldn't I have the souls share my soul's second layer?

You could, but it would defeat the purpose of having a Persona at all. You would appear, from every soul detection method, like the exact same person.

I thought the core soul was… the person?

Yeah but like I said, no one can really interfere with a living being's core soul.

You can't even read it?

Not really.

So if someone used highly trained soul senses on my Persona, they would see this second layer and that's it?

Yes.

Huh… In that case, I should probably expand his layer manually.

I'll be honest I'm not that well versed in souls but, if I had to guess, you're probably leaving a lot of stats on the table right now by not doing so.

Well shit.

I didn't realize it until you just mentioned it either.

Felix didn't have enough soul matter at the moment to correct his mistake, even if he compressed all the ambient anima he could along with his soul's third layer, he would only negligibly increase its size. He was quickly realizing that was the real advantage to harvesting souls, not stealing stats, but the fact that living creatures were by far the densest packing of anima anywhere.

The third layer he had been working on still wasn't complete, it was only about half the size he needed it to be to completely suffuse his Persona's body, but he had made a lot of progress.

After that, he adjusted his Persona's body and modified it. He minimized the cells of the world bosses because he was quickly realizing they weren't efficient at all. He had only included a small portion of them in the body for testing purposes but they resulted in massive energy costs with little benefit.

The world boss' bodies were massive so the cells were able to work together but at the same time, they were all E grade except for the Kraken. The Kraken seemed to have just been so massive, that it relied on it's size over everything else. He also only really had the heart and samples of it's treated skin so he couldn't do much with its cells.

The creatures that were rare or above had cells that were far more useful to Felix than the World Bosses had. They were more tuned to his size and efficiency requirements.

The one thing he kept was modifications to his bones that he had made by morphing the bone cells of some of the world bosses. The rest, he left to sit in small stores within the blood ring. If he ever needed them in future they would be there, but for now they simply sat.

He was then able to manually break down some excess cells to restore his Persona's leg though it was a patch job at best. He still needed to hunt something down and absorb them to fully restore it.

Next, he started dissecting and examining the body of the Yaboleg. He quickly found it's core located between it's jaw and underbelly. Felix found it rather entertaining that the blood ring seemed to be confused by the mana core and instead of breaking it down into a ball like it did with other bodies, it simply floated through the space.

Felix grabbed the mana core and examined it but found that it was essentially just a ball of gaseous mana held together within some kind of organ.

He traced the organ's connections into it's legs and found that most of it's legs consisted of bone and tissue that worked together to channel that mana. He quickly confirmed his assumption that they used force attuned mana by running mana through the legs then tried to incorporate the system into his Persona's legs.

Felix tried a few times before ultimately giving up because it just didn't make sense. The organs were too big and would interfere with his body's standard functions like walking. He really needed something more efficient.

Ideally, he had mana channels then used his Persona's half finished third layer to reattune the mana as needed. It wasn't something he could test just yet but it was something for him to look forward to and work towards.

Felix returned his consciousness to his real body then started experimenting with spells. He wanted to nail down a solid set of spells he could use in his Persona so that it had a believable set of skills. He had already messed around with a few but he was not liking the idea of just winging the rest of it.

He ended up spending most of his time tuning his Fire and Lightning spells so they seemed more like reproducible skills then he designed something defensive. He didn't want to use Mana Shields or Mage Armor so instead, he created what was essentially a Force Shield. The nature of Force made it so that the shield would either repel an attack or slow it down. He also made the shield conditional so it would resist attacks with as much force as it deemed necessary.

In theory, with the shield active, attacks would be slowed to a halt before they reached his body, so long as he had enough mana to resist them.

Felix reactivated his Persona and dropped the opaque Mana Shield then walked out onto the coral. Instead of moving upwards into the open sea, Felix instead decided to continue searching through the winding coral. He was pretty sure it would be easier for him to attack and defend in a confined space with spells that could fill the entirety of a nook or cranny. It was also harder for anything he fought to dodge, but that went both ways.

He walked across the coral and returned his sense of pain to normal finding his leg, while damaged, was no longer in pain at all.

Wait, what did I just do? I don't have my racial control over my body with my Persona… what am I doing when I dull pain in this body?

Felix waited for a few moments but Grim didn't bother answering.

It's my soul right? I'm tuning out the experience of pain?

Grim finally deigned to respond, Yup. Same way you filtered out Nova's emotions.

Gotcha.

Having been reminded of his familiar, Felix briefly tuned into Nova's stream of emotions and found they seemed to be happy. He tuned their stream of emotions back out just so he didn't feel everything they felt. He would still feel it if they were in danger, not that he could do much about that at the moment considering how far away they felt from their soul bond. It still made him feel better so he let that through.

Felix wasn't expecting much within the coral, maybe a few creatures and some small caves but as he walked, the branching tunnels just kept going. They grew narrower until Felix had to crouch but quickly widened after that. Felix continued to follow the paths that veered downwards in the hopes that he found the bottom.

Instead of sand or rocks like he expected though, Felix hopped down a coral tunnel and flew off to the side through an exit. The coral just suddenly stopped like it had been cut open.

Felix slowed himself down before he flew too far into what appeared to be almost an entire other layer to the biome. It wasn't quite large enough for that but it looked like a massive cavern.

The cavern floor was made up of jagged rocks and stone that looked cracked and broken all over. It reminded Felix of dried clay with its geometric patterns. Growing out of the ground there were pillars of coral that held the network he had just left aloft and between those, pools of multicolored liquids and vegetation. Random bits of the vegetation provided the entire area with very dim and varied light.

Felix descended slowly to try and keep himself from drawing too much attention but had to quickly dodge a geyser that exploded beneath him.

Once he was clear of it, Felix turned around and saw a stream of thick pink gas pouring out of the ground for a few moments before dissipating. He suddenly felt a weird sense of deja-vu from when he fought the alchemist Devoured camp.

Lowering himself to the ground Felix avoided any of the other geysers as he landed upon a solid outcropping of stone. As he descended, he noticed the weird whispered screaming that the ambient anima carried with it grew, but only just slightly. He suppressed the sensation for now but resolved himself to investigate it soon.

Looking around, Felix got a better look at the ground beneath the coral. The pools of multicolored liquids were shallow enough that vegetation grew out of them, but only them. There was no vegetation anywhere else making it look like a dead biome with individual oases scattered around.

Each oasis was slightly different. One of them was a tiny forest with an array of trees growing out of it's pond. Another was dominated by a single trunk that rose up from the center of its pond and held a large canopy aloft over the pond. Some had no trees at all and instead vines grew out of the pond, reaching out across the ground.

Wherever the pillars of coral touched the pools of liquid, crystal growths appeared that were the same color as the liquid. This pattern of ponds with vegetation, coral pillars and the rare crystal growth stretched out as far as he could see in any direction.

Oddly to Felix, the pink gas seemed to mostly be sucked up through the coral and into the area above making it much clearer in the under-coral. He suspected that had to do with the presence of an even thicker, colorless gas considering how buoyant he still was so he maintained the air bubble spell.

Felix didn't immediately sense any creatures nearby but he cast and maintained a Force Shield nonetheless. He had already learned his lesson from the first vault in the world event and he did not want to have to remove a crossbow bolt from his abdomen again.

Walking over to the nearest pool, one with tall algae like plants growing out of it, Felix reached down and touched the pool with the tip of his finger. When he didn't feel any kind of pain or other effect after a few minutes, despite his lack of fine grained senses in his Persona body, he scooped up a larger amount of it.

Just looking at the liquid, he could feel the mana saturating it. The liquid he was looking at was a light green color but he couldn't quite identify the suffused mana's attunement. To him it seemed almost like a combination of multiple attunements but he knew it wasn't just that. Only because he had just been messing around with gas, or more generally, matter producing nodes, he knew that multiple overlapping attunements of different strengths indicated something more complex.

In his mind, attunements were still frequencies though he was ready to drop the analogy as soon as it fell apart. In this case though, it helped him tremendously in wrapping his mind around it all. The only thing he couldn't quite figure out was why specific combinations of frequencies produced waves that created matter.

Sensing the mana within the liquid, Felix realized it wasn't as dense as pure liquid mana like he created, especially when it was on the brink of becoming a solid, but it was much denser than gaseous mana. He was mildly disappointed he hadn't found a cool way to have more and denser mana but either way, it was interesting enough for him to try and collect it.

Either he would find a use for it himself or it was possible he could hand it in for points instead of a core. Felix didn't have much in the way of liquid storage containers but he had an idea of what to do anyways.

Opening his Pocket home against a coral pillar, Felix walked inside and started digging by first softening the ground then ripping chunks free with explosive Force spells. He dug out a series of pools that he kept just over a meter apart and circled around the tower in the center. Luckily, the ground was largely made of large solid stone so the liquid wouldn't seep into the ground.

After that, Felix pulled out some Starmetal and formed it into a long tube that he bent once. With a simple Force spell inside of the tube, the liquid started to pump from the pool in the underground cavern, into his Pocket Home.

The pool was only a few inches deep so there wasn't much liquid for him to pump out, but it still took him a little while. As the liquid drained from the pool, the algae slowly fell to the ground like ribbons falling in slow motion. Felix cut a chunk off of one to examine it but other than being slimy, there didn't seem to be much to it. It had more mana than a normal plant would but it didn't seem to do anything with that mana.

Felix left the algae and moved his makeshift pump over to a different pool filled with vines that twisted and knotted themselves together but only seemed to grow upwards. None of them passed through the threshold of the pool below them.

The liquid in the pool that the vines grew out of was a dark ruddy color. As Felix drained this pool, the vines stretched themselves upwards and tightened into a solid pillar, removing all the space between themselves.

There was once again, nothing of note at the bottom of the pool so Felix moved onto the next.

The liquid and plant for the next pool was wholly uninteresting but this one intersected with a coral pillar and formed a crystal growth that traveled a number of meters upwards.

Felix examined the crystals but as far as he could tell, they were just some kind of quartz. The crystal itself was incredibly low quality and brittle. With just a modicum of force applied to the crystals, they crumbled into a number of shards.

He collected some of them just in case but he didn't see any value in them at the moment.

He continued draining pools as he moved, some of which had repeated attunements but he still kept them all separate just in case he had missed something. Surprisingly, he didn't see much in terms of fauna in the under-coral at least for the first few hours while he drained pools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .