Rune concluded that this dangerous ground was pretty dangerous, why?

Because continuous damage of 30 per minute existed, and it was after being resisted at the same time by his cohesion and health regeneration, or maybe it ignored cohesion? Rune wasn’t sure, but it shouldn’t.

The result was that he had to adapt and create an alternative farming method, going into the red aura ground, gathering every crystal he could on his way, and absorbing them when he was out.

With only 2 minutes to farm and still remain secured and assured, or alive in fact, he put the limit at 1 minute and a half.

So currently, Rune was plunging into the red aura ground and exiting after a minute with 2 or 3 ether crystals in his hands.

He didn’t dare train casually with death so near, so he put his entire focus except the 4% used for music in his avatar, and he even used the recently learned tricks to use his awareness at a 150% of efficacy by cutting things an avatar didn’t need.

Rune thought that avatars were fundamentally different, so when he tried to cut the senses of sight, smell, hearing, or touch, nothing happened, but the truth was that they were just in a different place, and what was even more surprising was the effects from deactivating them he experimented with.

The sphere was, in fact, an omnipotent perception center that could transmit smell and colors if you so desired, but those “add-ons” were naturally deactivated, and only awareness manipulation could help in reactivating them.

With his level, he could reactivate them like a switch, and the result was beautiful, the Void sometimes showed a glimpse of what ether was capable of, with all colors and shapes passing by.

If those weren’t so rare, he would pass all the time just admiring the Void’s ether.

‘Utopia told me it wasn’t common knowledge, and after he shared it, only some high graded psychic union bigshots reached out to him for him to contribute and describe his process of doing it, fortunately, I let Utopia do it for me.’

"Sigh..." Sighing in relief at his hidden genius inside, he continued his farm.

…

After less than 2 days of farming and raising his health regeneration stat, Rune could finally scout the dangerous ground deeply without fearing for his life and try discovering his first special resource.

However the place being so rich made his travel speed slower overall as he couldn’t just keep accumulating ether crystals because he didn’t have a bag or dimensional pocket to stock them, the latter didn’t exist just to be clear, at least not yet.

So he could only absorb what he got as he entered deeper and started to do a sweep.

Like he planned previously, he tried to split his awareness, sending a lot more than necessary to the universe side now that he was safe.

Multiple tries and data exchanges led Rune and Utopia on what they presumed was the good path, they already pulled off moving 2 bodies at the same time multiple times.

The only thing to note was the time-consuming manual awareness sending, it took hours to send just 4% and it wasn’t possible to accelerate it without more experience as it just activated the switching process.

They tried to change the process used to the one present in the psychic union guide, but it seemed that awareness ended up in a completely different state whether it was “stopped” during the switching process or being “sent” voluntarily slowly.

So till they became used to it or found another way, the two had to practice ambibodyterity, or simply, mirror body control, in addition, to keep their work on manual awareness handling.

Utopia already did all the experiments having to do with the awareness percentage division, this ended up as a farming efficiency scale they could use that reported avatar efficiency with different awareness percentages.

Like Rune thought and expected, not using all your awareness to “focus” on absorbing an ether resource lengthened the time needed by how much of it wasn’t being used.

But compared to his estimation of 45% efficacy for 50% awareness, Utopia found that after true and tried optimization on the avatar side, only 30% of one’s entire awareness was needed to accomplish a 50% resource absorption efficacy.

2 minutes per resource, that was the result that made them focus a lot more on awareness manipulation.

It also meant that currently, while Rune’s avatar was farming, his original body was training.

But while the theory was all good and fine, the practice was not.

Controlling two different bodies at the same time took time to get used to, there was no way to make one side automatic.

Farming was more of a “chore” activity than training, but unless some breakthrough in awareness manipulation took place, and from what Rune thought about it, something like that belonged to tier 2 or above manipulation, it was something everyone had to do.

And the wiki implied that once anyone reached tier 2, their avatar shouldn’t exist anymore… So, yeah.

With his current level of ambibodyterity, he could only do sphere training, the easiest training to do without being able to move.

He could also have just worked on sending his awareness back and forth between the 2 sides, but he had a reason to focus more on this training.

After learning that his perception sphere wall was probably so hard to transform because it was his “ether soul specialty”, he wanted to understand it more before it truly activated and his sphere’s wall became truly immovable like they already appeared to be for his amateur level.

His training was however really different from the norm.

‘Push! Relax… Push! Relax…’

He was literally trying to bend his sphere, he wanted his wall to become dough and be destroyed, but even with that level of intensity, only petty ripples spread before he realized that he did nothing at all.

So he continued, and continued, and continued again.

Without the prior spirit training he did that reinforced his spirit, he felt he wouldn’t be able to do this sort of training at all.

His spirit was already divided up, and now he tried to use a little more than half of his spiritual power to do what his full power couldn’t.

‘If only I could make them understand the hardness, the unfoldability, and the unbentability of my sphere’s wall…’

He couldn’t transmit to his friend’s brain the degree of force he was exerting but in his own opinion, it was like their sphere training was lifting a 1-kilogram weight while he was lifting a 100 kilograms one.

And he didn’t have any alternative, 100 kilograms was the minimum available.

If his ether soul awakened the true specialty of his perception stat, he probably would have no alternative but to try and train with a 1-ton weight.

‘Push! Relax…’

For 7 days already he didn’t stop bending his sphere, but even then it only went from perfect sphere to almond-shaped, and every time he thought he could relax, his perception pushed actively and tried to return to a perfect sphere shape.

‘Push! Maybe it’s bad for me! Relax… But I’ll still do it… Push! Sphere manipulation isn’t an option! Relax… For spirit mastery and ultimately tier 2… Push!’

His unique rhythm of pushing and waiting was for better effect, that was the only method he had thought of that could allow him to do continuous efforts over a long period of time.

And effects were showing, at the beginning nothing happened, but now at every push, a ripple appeared, and even if there wasn’t any visible deformation that took place, he just had to continue and he’d eventually succeed.

As he continued, a smile appeared on his lips before he continued training his sphere bending ability.

‘Special resource, here, come to me…’

…

In another dimension, in a dangerous ground characterized by its red ether, an avatar looked at a smooth stone, only with a perception sphere could one identify the dense ether light being emitted from it.

The avatar then closed its eyes and absorbed it.

Checking his gathering log, Rune was satisfied.

Absorbed ‘Tier 1 Perception stone’, gained 500 000 EP

His perception stat being maxed out, special resources couldn’t help him break the ceiling, so they transformed into EP that he could invest anywhere.

‘Seems to be a pretty rich ground, at only 50% efficiency I gathered 683 853 EP in a week, with that I nearly doubled my weekly yield.’

How could he not be happy after finally finding his first special resource, even the system congratulated him by offering a modest 10 000 EP reward via the Void initiation event.

‘Let’s continue to invest in physical stats, I need to grind other grounds later.’

Avatar (Basic Rank) (Tier 1)

EP: 19 202

Stats Total: 1 406

Health: 100

Health Regeneration: 71

Strength: 40

Cohesion: 100

Energy: 10

Energy Regeneration: 65

Purity: 10

Affinity: 10

Momentum: 500

Perception: 500

Gaining 1 193 853 EP in 7 days was like becoming a bigshot, so his mood was in fact very good.

‘Let’s not relax! Push! Relax… Push!’

Even on this side, he tried to gain experience with bending his sphere when he wasn’t absorbing a resource.

…

It was the first time in his life that Rune felt so exhausted, his revitalization spell’s effect was for sure coming to an end soon, but it should still have been active for 2 days.

‘Is my training so intense that my spirit can’t make up for the loss? That’s scary…’

As the sphere training progressed, Rune only allowed himself some hours-long periods of break which his perception sphere then actively used to go back to a perfect sphere shape.

‘Even if it becomes stronger and firmer I don’t think I’ll be unable to move it, I can go to the next training,’ thinking about the following step, he inadvertently remembered Utopia’s plan.

‘It’s identical in this part.’

His next step was physical path training, his recent training with his friends should have given him something to work on in the fighting department.

‘I just need to take a shuttle and go to the martial supreme dojo in the 4th district and I’ll see.’

It really was that easy, he had already adhered to the 3 path organizations and was already a member of the three.

‘But first, sleep, I don’t care about those 2 days, I think I’m even going to sleep for an entire week with this exhaustion.’

Rune recalled all his awareness and cut the energy loop, but he didn’t need to wait for fatigue to appear and accumulate like how it should have gone.

He just slept.

And so ended the 9th month of Rune’s life in the new interdimensional era.