20 - Treasury Upgrade

I already had great techniques from the lab, and I had plenty talent and potential. I was disciplined in my daily practice, and I didn't really need many pointers.

I could break through to plasmic mana, and 7th circle, in the next 10-15 years, and all I'd have to do is cultivate and practice diligently.

Still, it really didn't sit right with me to be so slow about things.

Apparently class blood also boosted lifespan by a significant margin, and after I learned that I was less worried, but I was still unable to fully relax.

How could I? I had a once in a million lifetimes level opportunity in front of me and I was supposed to be content staying at home doing the same routine on repeat?

What was it called in the books, closed door cultivation or something like that? Yeah, sorry chief, that sounds awful. I'd really rather not.

Still, I had little choice now. I was too weak to be a thief in this realm like I had been until now. There were plenty of people stronger than me, even with the benefits of the golden key and the treasury.

Traveling to unknown locations was also dangerous, much more than ever before.

I basically had no choice but to stay put where I was and diligently bide my time.

Indeed, I had no choice... so that's exactly what I did.

Years passed once again, but this time I was staying put instead of moving about and traveling.

I made friends with some locals in the capital, and became fully immersed in the culture.

In the new year, they would celebrate with these things called "mana lanterns", which were exactly what they sounded like, by modifying them to float high up into the sky.

Then, a class blood stage, which was the collective name for the level equivalent to the plasmic mana stage across all classes, would use a multi-target attack to pierce all the mana lanterns and make them explode as they got pierced.

It caused a huge spectacle in the sky, especially since it was done at midnight of the turn of the new year.

There were other things too, here and there, but those didn't matter so much.

The main thing was that it had been 8 years, and through sheer grit and non-stop practice every moment I could, I managed to reach plasmic mana ahead of the time I had thought I would take. I had also reached 7th circle as a mage.

I had looked into skills for knights and mages, and magic swordsman, and how to learn them, and had managed to obtain two new skills:

[Aura Blade Beam], which was simply the knight's ability to send out a blade beam using aura, except it was more poweful, efficient, and overall better now that my body had ingrained it into a skill.

As a reminder, a skill is a technique your body has memorized and made a part of itself.

Also, using the technique that made it on top of the skill could sometimes result in more power, and sometimes not.

The second one was more important: [Mana Proclivity].

It made you more sensitive to mana.

The way to obtain it was repeatedly casting spells at the limit of your abilities, draining out your mana to rock bottom, recovering your mana in short time, and rinse and repeat.

Doing so for around 10 days over and over again would give you this skill. It was extremely crucial to becoming a capable mage.

Moreover, in the future, as it got ingrained into your blood, your direct descendents would be born with [Mana Proclivity] from the start. It was a huge headstart.

And since they already had it, all they would have to do to continue the spread of the skill in their lineage would be to cultivate to the class blood stage and ingrain it in their own blood. They could not only use it to fast track their advancement, but they also didn't have to go through the hassle or burden of talent needed to try and learn it.

This was still an introductory skill, albeit a powerful one. One could imagine how strong the skills aquired at later levels of strength were.

Actually, it was not possible to obtain [Mana Proclivity] under normal ciecumstances.

The skill depended on overburdening your body beyond what it was normally capable of, forcing it to adapt to that new state as it's new normal.

It was supposed to take decades to obtain [Mana Proclivity] by slowly burdening the body with one spell, waiting a whole day to recover mana, and repeating.

However, this process could be sped up by several hundred times if the recovery period, which took the most amount of time, was shortened.

Thankfully, there was something that did just that, allowing the recovery of mana in but a few short moments.

It was called a mana recovery potion, or just mana potion for short.

It was literally just liquid mana, made by melting mana crystals, but liquid mana couldn't be kept without crystallizing under normal conditions.

Moreover, liquid mana couldn't be absorbed directly either, since it was too energized. It didn't hurt to touch, but when attempting to absorb it into your blood, it would cause your blood to boil from the inside of each individual cell.

So, the liquid mana had to be made drinkable, requiring alchemy, and the potion bottle had to be specially made by a runrsmith to hold the then modified liquid mana.

With these steps in place, the mana potion was born, and by using it in droves, I was able to empty out and fully regain all my mana while casting high tier spells over 500 times a day.

Although it cost me a small fortune to buy all the potions.

Let's just say I had a few less of Jackal's mythril bricks than before. Well, he had a lot, so it hardly made a dent in the overall number.

In this way, what would take decades was sped up by over 500x speed, allowing me to attain [Mana Proclivity] in a mere ten days.

This was also a fairly common strategy amongst well off families.

I could only start ingraining skills into my blood after reaching the class blood stage, aka plasmic mana and 7th circle, so it would be time to do that from now on, but first, there was something very important.

Something I had been waiting for all these 8 years.

I was 36 now. I was 28 when I saw the last damn upgrade.

In the treasury, Ixtra and Tom were gathered beside me as we stared at the screen above the library front desk.

Taking a deep breath, I walked forward and pressed the [Upgrade] button at the bottom that had now become available.

As soon as I did, there was a rumbling sound from the warehouse.

Rushing inside, I saw the warehouse in the midst of a kind of reconstruction.

The walls at the far end were rotating and slicing open, moving about in all sorts of ways, re-arranging to form stairs that lead to a second floor at the end of the room.

Moreover, the second floor seemed to be darker than the first, adopting a different aesthetic.

Coming closer, Ixtra and Tom right behind me, I saw that there were these purple-blue panels on the wall. The wall was bricklike, but smooth, and every so often there would be a brick that was glowing with a soft, purple or blue light.

It gave off a very mystical feeling.

The wall itself, the non-glowing parts, were also a purple-blue color, albeit a dark one rather than glowing.

Actually, it seemed more like there was a light behind the panels, and the wall's base color was what made the light change into its color.

Why the light was in panels with clear rectangular borders was beyond me.

Walking up the stairs, whoch were made of something that looked like marble, but the flecks and impurities in normal marble were replaced by purple-blue flecks and impurities.

There was clearly an ongoing color palette being used here.

Reaching the top of the stairs, there was no door. The room was open to enter, and within it, there was an extremely large space filled with these cylindrical things, evenly slaced out.

The only way to describe them would be...containers? They were see through, with some magic circles swimming inside.

That's right, the magic circles were moving about all over the place within the containers.

At the top and bottom of the containers were additional objects attached. The bottom was clearly to hold it to the floor, but the top...

The top seemed to be just to look cool?

That was the impression I got initially, but I shook my head at how silly that sounded and continued looking around.

The lighting was slightly different than the stairs. It was the same purple-blue hues, but brighter this time, in order to adequately light up the whole room, which was a very, very large room mind you, and instead of from the wall, although light still came from there too, in addition there were also little "wisps" of light floating around.

I had learned about this in my time in this realm, this was a 2nd circle spell, [Summon Undead Light Wisp].

Alive light wisps were rambunctious and difficult to control. They were like a flame.

In fact, they literally looked like a burning flame.

In comparison, undead light wisps were just shells of that, floating around in a confined box, spherical and small.

They looked kind of cute.

Alive light wisps were aware of their surroundings at a higher level, and were almost conscious. They were at the level of intellect of an insect or a small beast.

They could be summoned using 3rd circle magic.

Undead ones were less conscious, barely registering as having any spirit at all. They were at the level of a machine more than a living thing.

The reason why summoning light wisps, alive or undead, was more complex than 1st circle spells, was because they stuck around on their own. In comparison, the equivalent 1st circle light magic spell, [Light], would only stay so long as the caster continuously cast it.

In general, summoning something permanently required a higher levek of magic than summoning it temporarily.

Of course, [Light] didn't actually summon a light wisp anyhow, it just created light.

There was no common spell to temporarily summon a wisp, since that seemed pretty useless. After all, undead wisps could always just be snuffed out just like that.

Moreover, although it was of a higher circle, undead light wisps didn't require very much mana at all to summon. Summoning a hundred of them would barely equate to most 1st circle spells. It was just the casting which required 3 circles that was complex, but the mana cost was almost zero.

So, as long as one had the proficiency, it didn't really make sense to not just summon an undead wisp permanently. A temporary summoning spell seemed unnecessary.

Thus, there wasn't one. At least, not in the mainstream. Maybe some unorthodox, esoteric spell someone made in some corner of the world existed, but nobody cared.

Back to the 2nd floor of the warehouse, I could see that not all the containers were empty.

Some of them had been filled, 13 to be exact.

They were all items that I had previously deemed "unique" or "high-level".

For instance, the various dragon parts I had collected from the western half of the continent of my home world.

Or the dragon egg that had yet to hatch after all these years. I wondered if it was still alive in there.

In these containers that had items in them, the magic circles that were dancing around and about in the empty containers had come together to constrain and restrict the treasures.

Doing a rough count, there seemed to be 1000 containers on the second floor.

Presumably, I'd have to collect 1000 of these "2nd floor treasures", just like I had collected 1000 treasures overall before.

I guessed there might be a 3rd floor that opened after that, but I wasn't sure.

The ceiling was several dozen meters high, but the containers didn't reach that high, only being perhaps 3 or 4 meters tall. The ceiling was also a dome, like a conservatory, but it was opaque and nothing couls be seen through it.

The treasures that were too large to fit in a container, like the larger dragon parts, or even Jackal's lab, which had disappeared from the first floor, had shrunk down to an appropriate size and entered a container somehow.

Did this mean I couldn't enter Jackal's lab anymore?

Walking up to that container specifically, I noticed something I hadn't before.

In front of every container, there was a little black, flat area on the container-floor connector, at chest height, and after tinkering with it a bit, the console on the container for Jackal's lab turned on.

On it, there was a simple but elegant interface with an option to enter the lab.

Clicking on it and confirming by clicking yes, my spirit body in the treasury disappeared and appeared in the lab. There was a prompt near the entrance to go back "out" to the treasury.

Clicking it, I was back on the 2nd floor.

Relieved I could still enter and exit the lab, I was simultaneously amazed at the abilities of the treasury.

Walking to the ends of the room, there was nothing special on any wall or anywhere else on the floor except in the middle of the wall opposite the entrance staircase.

I had noticed it when I entered, since it was directly in front of my vision, but had left it for last to investigate.

Walking up to it now, it was a pair of double doors, and it wouldn't budge no matter what I did.

The handles had an unusual looking lock sealing them, although what was interesting was the door wouldn't move at all, even the small bit of free space the lock didn't restrict movement in.

I didn't know if the door was just too heavy, or there was another locking mechanism beyond the lock I saw on the handle in front of me, or maybe even the lock on the handle was making the door unable to move at all, using some magic or another.

Whatever it was, it was a fact that the door was locked shut, absolutely and completely.

On the door, there was a light black (or would it be a very dark grey?) on the edges, and there was a gold and silver colored surface everywhere else.

With the gold and silver surface as the background, there were tendrils of black shooting across the doors, like chains but not. They were more organic looking, more...creepy.

However, they weren't real. It was just a pattern on the door, a coloration. It jutted out from the door slightly, like a thin sculpture on top of the door's frame.

It was rock solid when I touched it.

Finishing up my thorough inspection of the door, I walked back down to the first floor.

It still felt more familiar down here.

Ixtra and Tom were also done looking and came down.

I then looked at the treasure compass, which wasn't stored on the 2nd floor despite it clearly belonging there.

The number was now: [13/1000].

That was the number of treasures currently on the second floor, so it was clear what the next upgrade would require.

Indeed, I finally get to this realm and am able to obtain essentially near unlimited enchanted items, which would count as first floor treasures, but by the time I got here, I no longer needed first floor treasures for advancement.

Alas, such is life.

The change log didn't say anything about the treasury's new floor and changes, so I guess I would have to learn of the effects of future treasury upgrades by myself.

Sorting out my thoughts one last time, I left the treasury and came back to my main body.

Ixtra also came back to my shadow.

I thought it was kind or unfair that Ixtra got to have his whole body and mind go to the treasury, but I had to leave my body here, but oh well.

It is what it is.

Stepping outside, I started walking to the royal library. I had gotten to know the guard captain since I was pretty strong, albeit weaker than the top powers of the kingdom. So, I could use the royal library.

Of course, now, I was in the same league as those top powers, although I was still on the lower end since I had just broken through.

I was going to find a technique manual for ingraining skills into the blood for a magic swordsman.

Jackal didn't have anything like that, unfortunately.