In the clearing he created not that long ago, at the metaphysical border to the radioactive zone, it’s now been 7 days since Rune sat there and engaged in the purging process. There were no complicated manipulations to do except not doing anything.

You just had to wait for your own being, your body, your spirit, your soul, everything that defined you, to accept that one or more of the slotted mastery it hosted was not needed anymore. Such a process of dissociating with a core part made it require a pretty long adaptation period of doing absolutely nothing.

Meaning.

Remaining completely immobile.

*Ding* Reinforcement: Basic Reinforced Armor has been purged

With the long-awaited notification popping off, Rune stopped his 7 days long lethargic meditation and opened his masteries window.

Masteries

Tier 1 Masteries

Physical Fundamental: Reinforcement: Tier 3 Level 2

Physical Fundamental: Fighting Instinct: Tier 3 Level 4

Physical Fundamental: Body Control: Tier 3 Level 5

Energy Fundamental: Fine Manipulation: Tier 2 Level 85

Energy Fundamental: Grand Manipulation: Tier 2 Level 86

Energy Fundamental: Energy Compression: Tier 3 Level 4

Spiritual Fundamental: Perception Control: Tier 2 Level 79

Spiritual Fundamental: Awareness Division: Tier 2 Level 69

Spiritual Fundamental: Momentum Manipulation: Tier 2 Level 83

Tier 2 Masteries:

Energy Compression: Basic Energy Armor: Tier 3 Level 1

Energy Compression: Basic Defensive Energy: Tier 3 Level 1

[Empty]

7 days of stopping everything, even passive training made it so that he didn’t progress at all, but now he could restart his routine training again after confirming his reinforced armor mastery was gone.

Passive downward momentum, divided ether soul, and bent sphere training turned on, Rune then virtually selected the empty slot of his tier 2 slotted masteries.

Like he practiced before, he took his own health and “killed” it, then manipulating the cohesion properties infused in them, he created a little ball of energy which he infused, taking on the color of cohesion, a grey-white ethereal color.

*Ding* Do you want to fill one of your empty mastery slots with Cohesion: Specialized Cohesion Infusion?

‘Yes,’ with this confirmation, Rune was set till he decided to become a tier 3 entity and had to switch it again to then gain 3 additional slots for masteries.

Cohesion: Specialized Cohesion Infusion

Specialized Slotted Mastery (Tier 1)

By carefully infusing health into your energy, you can directly give it the cohesive property only found in it, such manipulation can now be used at a practical level.

Allow for large-scale use of cohesive health infusion into your energy at a ratio of 10 health for 1 infused energy. Your energy will lose a major part of its manipulation properties after being infused with cohesive properties.

Reading the description of his new mastery, Rune felt he only now truly became able to battle tier 3, from 0 to 2 000 cohesion ether stat was anything but a joke.

“And in addition, it’s the perfect place for training all my defensive masteries, so it’ll reach combat-able ratio soon enough.”

At its current 10 health loss for 1 infused energy, it was a scam, the purest scam, but even then it was still a hundred times or better than doing such an infusion without a mastery backing it up.

Rune then infused 190 energy, almost 10% of his energy pool, using 1 900 health, the equivalent of 95% of his health pool. And he got taken by surprise.

*Ding* Cohesion: Specialized Cohesion Infusion reached Tier 1 Level 1

Not the notification, that was normal, but the infusion itself.

‘So quick…’

At one moment he wanted to do it, the other it was done, his body was emptied of its ever-present health that he so treasured during every fight, and as a sort of congratulation for daring to do something like that, he gained a level.

Rune then opened the description of this mastery again.

Cohesion: Specialized Cohesion Infusion

Specialized Slotted Mastery (Tier 1)

By carefully infusing health into your energy, you can directly give it the cohesive property only found in it, such manipulation can now be used at a practical level.

Allow for large-scale use of cohesive health infusion into your energy at a ratio of 9.9 health for 1 infused energy. Your energy will lose a major part of its manipulation properties after being infused with cohesive properties.

Rune allowed a light smile to surface on his plain human face, he knew that once he reached the end of tier 1 in this mastery he’d reach a ratio of 1 for 1.

With every level giving him an increase of 0.1 till level 80, where every level gain would be reduced to 0.05.

This ratio would never increase again, even reality-breaking masteries weren’t able to create health or energy from nothing, same for the cohesive properties he wanted, not even provided or beyond masteries were able to do that to his knowledge.

As such, tier 2 of this mastery was reserving some surprise for him down the line. It was the same for everyone else, elements, infusions, stats manipulations, a ratio of 1 for 1 was the limit everyone got at peak tier 1 specialization mastery requiring a transformation ratio.

“Sigh, let’s go back to swimming in the radioactive air, nothing better for waking up!” Stretching a little and voicing out his inner feeling, Rune was ready to go.

His good mood was radiating from his body as every second now, his body was emitting a bit of grey-white energy mixed with pure white energy, the two filled his armor but the grey-white energy was little by little taking more of the armor for itself.

His health was 95% full and he chose to maintain this level and use all his health regeneration to infuse his energy, it was the most straightforward optimization he could do, gaining 3 infused energy every second.

With his energy armor spell able to bear 2 000 energy maximum, he needed more than 10 minutes to fill it completely with infused energy, and another 10 minutes plus to completely convert his energy pool.

When he started to receive damage from the environment, he cleverly thought about another optimization, ‘I need my cohesive armor to be separated from the rest.’

So he slowed down and modified on the fly his own energy armor matrix to be separated into 2 layers, an exterior layer made with pure compressed energy, and an internal layer, made with cohesive compressed energy.

Once he did that, Rune was ready to go beyond not only thousands of kilometers but also where the ether would pulverize any lifeforms unprepared for it.

Running steadily towards the north following the straight cliff, he started his routine again, but as he already surveyed and cleaned the path before, he wasn’t slowed down much.

The entire environment was tainted by the air, it was still a jungle but it was completely stale, and he already saw everything he had to see with the current intensity of erosion.

“I sure hope there's a limit and I can’t go beyond thousands of kilometers…” Perplexed by this possibility of not being able to defeat what was before him, he prayed silently to the Endless.

If he attained some sort of limit in terms of erosion rate, he would be more happy than disappointed, it would be the first time he would be facing his limit, and that made him want to reach it.

A thousand kilometers in, his armor being eroded by 20 points every second, he started to see monsters again, the majority he already knew, but some were the variation of monster species he fought before, only with fleshy balls emitting neon white energy attached to their body.

He expected maybe some variation from their pure jungle counterpart but in the end, they were exactly the same, a panther was still a panther and a gorilla was still a gorilla.

The straight cliff was forever unchanging, keeping the same orientation, the same scenery, even the radioactive land didn’t affect anything about it.

Until finally, he reached a place that was by itself a mark of greatness, “100 armor per second… And it’s all natural and unintended…”

In his perception, the world wasn’t that different, but in reality, Rune could feel his armor melting, when he exposed one of his hands to the air by removing the armor layer, his skin disintegrated before his eyes in seconds.

It was at this moment that he realized something.

“Maybe, maybe that’s the same level of awesomeness as floating islands…”

Standing in the middle of a flourishing jungle, but greeneries didn’t exist, all were replaced by black woods and white leaves, on the ground, all sorts of leaves accumulated, transforming everything into a white and black world.

*Ding* Cohesion: Specialized Cohesion Infusion reached Tier 1 Level 5

Rune was sure it’s been less than a day since he got this mastery, but it was leveling up at a monstrous rate, it was good news for him as despite fighting against a constant drain of his armor, his 3 other masteries that could help him increase the efficiency of his energy compression was leveling slowly.

*Ding* Energy Compression: Basic Energy Armor reached Tier 3 Level 2

*Ding* Energy Compression: Basic Energy Defense reached Tier 3 Level 2

“When you talk about it… Well in fact that’s not surprising as the damage rate represents how much armor I regenerate every second, truly my holy land of training.”

The situation was so extreme that he would only survive 30 seconds without his armor, he was sure that a tier 2 wasn’t supposed to be here.

But here he was, basking in a never-ending, apocalypse-like, fantasy zone that reduced to nothing anything not belonging to it, even in the Endless that should prove a challenge for unadapted late tier 3 monsters.

And it didn’t slow down, Rune thought it was a linear increase at the beginning and it would stabilize later but not at all, it kept a regular linear increase of 1 armor damage per second every 50 kilometers.

He calculated that 2 000 cohesion made his health 30% more resistant to damage than vanilla compressed energy, so 1 armor infused with cohesive energy would in fact correspond to 70 kilometers, which meant that his limit was approaching in great stride.

‘If I keep my passive reinforcement on, I’ll only keep my current 127 armor per second, so 1 350 kilometers, but if I cut it off, my armor per second will increase to 136 per second, or 36 points, which equals 1 800 kilometers… Looks like it's time to put my ambitions to the test…’

Deactivating the constant flow of energy allocated to keep his reinforcement active, 2 energy points boosted with a 102% efficiency, so 4 energy, didn’t impact his physical condition much.

But it proved that it was a serious situation, one where this gain of 2 energy per second was going to change how far he could go massively.

The Ether Law’s masteries didn’t level up by being grinded, they were leveled by being practiced, a very slight difference that amounted to massive changes.

And as he advanced deeper into a land full of neon white ether, ether that kept increasing its erosion, Rune felt that it was the first time that he truly became a pioneer, one that was defined by exploring uncharted territories and going against the world and the environment.

He wasn’t only an adventurer, he also dreamed of seeing things that others would be forever kept from seeing, maybe they wouldn’t have the motivation, maybe their build was completely incompatible, but his was built for it.

With the cliff as a landmark, he didn’t hesitate and kept advancing, the occasional monsters he saw were as aggressive as ever, but it wasn’t a reason for him to ignore them, so he fought everyone that was on his way.

His offensive ability wasn’t that much diminished from losing his 4 energy worth reinforcement or his reinforcement mastery, he knew that every hit he took would have long-term effects, so he executed the monsters he stumbled across in the most surgical way he could possibly reach as a peak 2 entity.

The swing of a mantis came his way, and as they were specialized in fast attack speed, he couldn’t evade.

As it was only the start of the battle, he did the most reasonable thing he knew, make an opening appear to directly strike its head in retaliation.

If he didn’t stun it or disturb its ability to strike faster than he could respond, he would lose too much, and with body control came the ability to perfectly transmit all of one’s strength to a precise area.

In this case, the center of command and reaction, the head, was what Rune always targeted first when he could, it was pure distilled wisdom after being an underdog for months.

Once he hit the head at the price of 800 armor, he successfully evaded the next swing from its sharp limb and countered by pushing against its weak side and unsettling its supporting limbs.

Against a mantis-like monster, described as such just because they vaguely looked like mantis with proportion changed to survive with greater size, it was the move he preferred over anything else.

The monster reacted like its most precious area was under threat and stumbled on itself to try and rotate, but Rune wasn’t playing, he already knew all he wanted to know about this species of monsters.

The time he gained was enough to execute a front kick, lowering the monster center of mass, followed by a perfectly executed uppercut that sealed the deal for a second head strike.

After rendering the monster completely dizzy from such a direct strike, Rune started a regular evade and strikes from minimum distance style.

He got an advantage so strong he didn’t even care about carefully moving to not create openings or keeping his distance, only emptying the monster's health would conclude the battle.

The short fight ended after he dealt a kick to one of the support limbs of the mantis, which then fell to the ground the next second.

It was dead.

He didn’t have anything to stock a core or a body and he didn’t want or need to absorb them, so he left the corpse behind and started advancing again.

The current erosion rate of 114 armor per second wasn’t enough in his book, he wanted to see if he could reach negative balance, only then would it be the ultimate training ground which he couldn’t complete.

Every 50 kilometers on average, he had to fight a monster, but he knew them all from their pure jungle side version, so he executed them in the most efficient way with his own drawn-out fighting style.

Ultimately, however, as he expected, the balance could only tip in favor of the adapted monster's side, every time he fought, he took thousands of armor damage, and such an amount could only be restored by minutes of waiting.

His armor balance was still positive at 10 per second, but now every point he lost would drastically diminish his battle regeneration and subsequent sustaining ability.

From 10 it got down to 5, doubling the time necessary, from 5 it decreased to 2, now at his disposal he only had the equal of 120 energy regeneration stat, if he were to wait for his energy pool to fill back completely, he would need a little less than 17 hours.

Completely absurd.

The late tier 3 tiger he had to fight at this stage of deterioration was on the level of marathon ending effort, he lost more than 5 000 armor before finally breaching its defense and exhaling a sigh of relief upon feeling his foot hitting its skull.

With only 1 000 armor remaining, he could only resist an ultimate strike before the next would impact his health.

So at any price, he wasn’t going to let the tiger back down to stop the dizziness it was under, and for that, he had to actively remember the study he did of this species of monster.

Against a tiger monster, the worst mistake he could make was believing its side were unprotected, for them, their limbs were things they could twist as they wanted, only distance from behind or staring directly at their eyes could make them make mistakes.

‘Yes it’s a mess, but it’ll all be fine.’

Targetting what he needed to, stopping his offense when he had to, if he had to wait a whole minute he wouldn’t hesitate, the situation was completely different between the two of them, once he took a strike he wouldn’t come back from it.

The way he was fighting now was what he considered to be the textbook and practical use of everything he learned till now, it was the reason he developed the way he did, no mistakes and waiting for the right moment.

His only limiting factor in this battle was that he had to keep the tiger under a state of dizziness, and that prevailed over anything else.

In the end, he didn’t receive another strike from the tiger monster.

A simple mistake of going all in and opening its front defense cascaded into Rune jabbing its head, and the fight was sealed from this move.

As he was concluding the fight, Rune felt that his body was truly the worst weakness he could have, a limb cut or a bad hit to the head and he would be in a very bad situation... Only increasing his armor and preventing those issues from the start was the way to go for a stable approach to fighting.

The tiger-like monster eventually stopped moving, concluding the battle, Rune only had 1 900 health and 1 160 armor remaining, the regenerating rate was still 2 armor per second.

From his senses, however, the situation was reaching a state he never thought of before, he could feel the flow of 33 energy exiting his body every second, and he could also feel how it all was compressed and became part of his armor, only to be reduced to nothing the next second.

His body-shaped armor was washed away, his body only a thin layer away from inevitable death, he only needed another 100 kilometers before reaching the ultimate limit of his armor generation.

*Ding* Spiritual Fundamental: Awareness Division reached Tier 2 Level 70

“Sigh… Thank Ether Law,“ sighing, he continued.