Re: Tales of the Rune-Tech Sage

Chapter 794: Fortune-Style Meditation Session

CH794 Fortune-Style Meditation Session

***

Phew~

A silver-haired youth seated on a bed heaved a breath of foul air from his mouth.

Within his consciousness, his Spiritual Force stretched into a dark space filled with colourful bubbles, but as he had always done, he ignored them, diving deeper into the space in search of something else.

Soon, the youth came across a region containing three purple bands—a great fortuitous event.

With great care, he morphed his Spiritual Force into a broad net to capture the bands in one go.

This was an all-or-nothing move, as he knew that if he failed to capture all three bands in this single attempt, any that escaped would immediately flee.

Considering the time it took to find these bands within the space, the youth wasn’t willing to waste even more time trying to capture them one after another.

The net surrounded the bands and closed in on them in a flash.

Unfortunately, because the bands had spread apart, the net had to cover a much larger area to ensnare them all. As a result, it also had a greater distance to close before it could fully enclose them.

One of the bands transformed into a bolt of purple light, slipping through the narrowing gap just as the net closed in on itself.

Outside, the youth’s expression visibly creased into an annoyed frown.

But then, something happened within the dark space that caused his expression to change once more.

His Spiritual Force, and of course the net extending from it, suddenly released a golden sheen. The golden radiance quickly gathered into a single point on the enclosed net before shooting towards the fleeing purple bolt.

The golden light caught up to the purple bolt, revealing its serpentine form as a terrifying yet majestic golden dragon reached out with its five-clawed hand to snatch the purple band.

However, the purple band seemed determined to escape, its speed suddenly surging for a brief moment.

The purple streak narrowly slipped past the dragon’s grasp.

The golden serpentine dragon didn’t give chase—almost as though it couldn’t—and quickly returned to the Spiritual Force net.

The dragon moved through the net, arriving inside it as though phasing through its surface. It opened its balled-up hand, and a small purple thread floated towards the other two purple bands within the net.

As it turned out, the purple band hadn’t been able to completely escape the dragon’s claws. A small part of it had been torn away and captured.

The youth found it a pity that the dragon had failed to capture the entire thing. Whatever remained of the purple band would break down some time later.

If the band had simply stayed still, he could have put it to good use.

But before the youth could properly come to terms with the loss, the golden serpentine dragon made its move again.

Now that they had been captured, the two and a half purple bands were now docile, floating quietly within the Spiritual Force net, seemingly with no intention of trying to escape.

Ordinarily, this was when the youth would shrink the net, tightly binding the bands before forcibly bringing them back with his withdrawing Spiritual Force. But before he could do that, the dragon moved.

The dragon reached out with one hand towards the bands. A suction force pulled at them, and they shot towards it.

The dragon wore the bands like a two-piece bracelet connected by a string around the wrist of its outstretched arm.

Before the youth could fully process what the dragon had done, it turned into a golden blur that flashed along his Spiritual Force—like a metaphysical highway—returning to the youth’s Mindspace.

From his Mindspace, as usual, the dragon disregarded the youth’s privacy, phasing directly into his Mana Heart.

Inside the Mana Heart, the golden serpentine dragon slithered and danced through the air, forming multiple loops before the fiery western dragon that acted as the Mana Heart’s gatekeeper.

The golden serpentine dragon handed over the two and a half bands of Aether to the fiery dragon, which proceeded to carefully process the energy contained within them.

Copious amounts of energy were purified by the fiery dragon with extreme prejudice, leaving behind not even the slightest speck of impurity.

Only then did the fiery guardian dragon allow the purified energy to merge with the cloud of mana already within the Mana Heart.

While the golden serpentine dragon disappeared back to wherever it had come from, the fiery guardian dragon watched the dense cloud of mana filling the Mana Heart with the utmost concentration and scrutiny.

The moment it noticed the slightest speck of inconsistency in the purity of the mana within the Mana Heart, it struck. Turning into a vortex of golden flames, it dragged every cloud of mana within the Mana Heart into itself.

Soon, only the purest drops of mana condensed from the bottom of the vortex, filling the Mana Heart with liquid mana.

But those drops soon evaporated, transforming back into a cloud of the purest mana possible within a Mana Heart.

The youth’s—Alex’s—eyes snapped open.

He released another breath of turbid air.

He had finally found the time to meditate again now that he had more free time.

He hadn’t expected there to be changes to his usual meditation session because of the Fortune-Suppressing Dragon.

As always, the Fortune-Suppressing Dragon seemed to know no boundaries, even going so far as to invade his meditation space, where he absorbed bands of Aether energy according to his Aether Meditation Manual.

Whenever the Fortune-Suppressing Dragon invaded his meditation session, Alex found, to his surprise, that it became much easier to locate the usually sparse and elusive bands of Aether.

They were also easier to capture, and the providence dragon even acted independently to catch any Aether bands that somehow managed to escape him.

This had increased his cultivation speed by anywhere from 20% to 50%, pushing Alex ever closer to a breakthrough into the (Class 4) Great Mage rank.

In fact, since the gaseous mana within his Mana Heart had begun showing signs of condensing into liquid mana, it indicated that Alex could advance to the Great Mage rank whenever he wished.

An instinctive warning not to do so was the only thing stopping him from taking the final step.

He still didn’t know why he felt he shouldn’t advance, but he chose to trust his instincts, focusing instead on raising the purity of his mana to the highest level possible.

As an analogy, Alex’s mana purity was currently akin to 99.6%, with his goal being to push it as close to 100% as possible.

However, mana was incredibly affinitative. It naturally attached itself to something else—usually the ubiquitous laws of the world—making it difficult, if not impossible, to obtain in a perfectly pure form.

Since reaching 99% purity thanks to AetherKindle, every additional decimal percentage point had become a monumental challenge, surpassing the combined difficulty of every improvement that had come before it.

Reaching 99.7%—no, even 99.65%—was as difficult as the combined effort it had taken him to reach his current 99.6%.

And this trend would only continue the further he progressed.

However, while this would have been a nuisance for others, it was a welcome situation for Alex, as it meant he could continue meditating and cultivating without the risk of accidentally advancing his rank.

Just like now, whenever his mana condensed into liquid mana as he pursued the elusive 100% purity, it would naturally revert to its gaseous state because it had not yet reached his target purity.

It was as though this absurd goal of his had become a subconscious condition embedded within his Mana Heart.

Whether that was truly the case or not, Alex only saw benefits in it.

Increasingly pure mana meant he could achieve more with less mana—a stopgap solution while he searched for a better answer to his mana capacity problem without having to increase his rank.

‘Just imagine how bad things would be for me if I didn’t possess the Mana Capacity Talent and hadn’t further refined my Mana Heart with the heart of an Elder Dragon. I probably have the highest mana capacity of any Class 3 being in the universe—or at least rank among the very best—yet it still feels like I never have enough.’

It was obvious that, to his Runemaster Class, there was no such thing as having too much mana.

He hadn’t forgotten that—at least theoretically—with enough mana, he could induce the creation of a plane entirely on his own, potentially regardless of his rank, just like the Sanctuary pocket space.

The only thing stopping him was that he couldn’t mobilise a sufficiently high mana output or a great enough volume of mana to sustain the formation.

That was only one example among the many things he could theoretically accomplish.

Alex shook the thoughts of his mana capacity issues from his mind and refocused on the Fortune-Suppressing Dragon.

Thanks to it, he, who had previously been limited to a single traversal through the Aether meditation space each session—restricting the amount of Aether he could absorb—could now achieve much more.

***

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