“But! I just can’t! It’s making me crazy! I’m going to break something soon!” A pachin, characterized by their dark brown skin and smooth, straight black hair, was raging by herself, evacuating her frustration.

“Calm your shi, enter the beyond, and find the etherial truth within yourself,” mocking her on the side was a human with brown hair tied up in a low ponytail.

“If only it was that easy! What you just said would probably be easier than... F*cking ‘naturalizing’ the ambient ether, ‘leading and bending’ ether currents away, ‘morphing’ the effective warping, or! F*cking, I swear! F*cking, ‘energizing’ emptiness! Who wrote that! What! The! Fuuuuuuu!”

“Your rage is a symphony to my ears, I just made a promise to myself that I’ll never externalize my future composite element creation to you or anyone close to me,” benevolently smiling, Rune acted like an enlightened ascetic.

“I’ll purposely bring the subject up then, and I’ll compare your results to others on the web!”

“You can try, but unless you’re comparing me to potential people who unlocked beyond ability the moment the Ether Law woke up, I’m not sure you’ll find a lot of people doing the same thing as me and publishing it online.”

“Where did you find this news? I had to go to a darknet-level psycho website to find people talking about those.” Adreana interestingly asked.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about ma’am, forget what I just said, the IGS spy agency will send us an email soon if we talk about it so openly!” Rune acted like he got catched with his hand in the bag.

“Or worse! They’ll abduct us! Extracting where we got that info!” And he added layer and layer of acting on top.

Being separated for more than a year, they had a lot to talk about, and they didn’t even try to contain themselves.

It was a tug of war for who had the best story, the most suitable snarky comments, and who could get the chance to follow with yet another story.

Adventures, misadventures, strange events, deadly events, encounters, the sights…

“We’re really having a true adventurer's meeting there! So cool!” Not hiding his thoughts, he just let them out.

“I’m sure Gar and Arik will have more awesome stories than ours combined, and Nelo will just tell how he blasted everything,” Adreana replied by instinct.

Drinking from his glass, he was sure that if his throat could get parched, it would have just got rejuvenated.

Having talked for hours, not that he counted it, Rune felt it was time to do the second step of his plan.

“Well, I have to go to the bank, there’s no tier 4 loan yet and I got a bit less than a billion in there. And as I’m going to purge all my masteries soon…”

“Yeah, really a bummer that there’s no loan of 40 billion to max out our stats, not like I reimbursed the one I took for my tier 3 anyway, hihi.”

“Hehe, right, I got a lot of tier 4 cores this time, so maybe I can max my high priority stat and reimburse it all? I can dream, don’t look at me like that.”

Adreana clearly already received her 95% core conversion value in EP for her own expedition, and she looked at him like a fool.

“Tier 4 cores only go from 200 000 to 400 000 EP, the best case is that one tier 4 is equal to two tier 3, completely unequal but nothing we can do, even if you…”

Rune stood up abruptly and put his two hands on his ears.

“I don’t want to hear what comes next, la la la, I’m out,” and he jumped for the balcony, directly taking the highway towards the central capital sector.

“Humph! You’ll only get a few billion, fool!”

Far-away, he heard someone saying something, but he didn’t even try to comprehend it, so he let it enter in one ear, and exit from the other.

…

From the south sector to the central sector, not much changed.

The bank he went to was one close to the west sector, he thought there would be fewer people than if he went to the one between the central and south sector.

He was half-right.

Checking his bank account prior to arriving, he confirmed he had 896 979 659 EP in it.

‘Maybe it’ll compensate a little for my… No, who needs a Mach 2 speed in an urban environment? Nobody, it’s useless, better keep focusing on energy regeneration, it’ll let me have more try at manipulating and transforming my energy into the elements I’ll need.’

Improvising his stat allocation, he concluded that investing more in energy regeneration wouldn’t do him any harm.

*Ding* You received 890 000 000 EP from Paiap Valefor

“Thank you,” thanking the bank employee after receiving his “money”, he left the place for the next “customer”.

‘Even if my allocation is wrong, my two other energy stats are low priorities, so tough luck for me.’

Rune Tudor (Tier 4)

Class: Armored Pathfinder

Specialty: Temporal Dimensional Perception

EP: 890 015 643

Stats Total: 52 738

Health: 5 000

Health Regeneration: 5 000

Strength: 5 001

Cohesion: 5 001

Energy: 5 000

Energy Regeneration: 7 735

Purity: 5 000

Affinity: 5 000

Momentum: 5 000

Perception: 5 001

He invested everything in his energy regeneration.

Rune Tudor (Tier 4)

Class: Armored Pathfinder

Specialty: Temporal Dimensional Perception

EP: 415 643

Stats Total: 54 962

Health: 5 000

Health Regeneration: 5 000

Strength: 5 001

Cohesion: 5 001

Energy: 5 000

Energy Regeneration: 9 959

Purity: 5 000

Affinity: 5 000

Momentum: 5 000

Perception: 5 001

‘166 energy per second, efficiency of 1 029%, 1 874 armor per second, maybe I’d be able to endure the bird's repeated attacks until it got bored of me.’

As he walked out of the bank, a white building with gold neon lights flowing in relaxing and hypnotizing patterns, he suddenly stopped.

“Wait… I can’t fully infuse it anymore, can’t I?” He whispered.

Feeling like the stupidest person he ever knew, and he got to know some truly hard-stupid people, he massaged his temples with one hand.

‘Ignoring the obvious to focus on the complicated, perfect Rune, you did it.’

“Sigh…”

‘Well, at least that’s another fail I got to add to my list of mistakes made as an adventurer, maybe Adreana will laugh a little and Arik will mock my entire being for it.’

Not bothered more than that, he really questioned himself as to how he missed that, it wasn’t “important” per se, as even back during his descent of “the hole tunnel”, he read that when on the behemoth path, energy regeneration outclassed everything else by quite a margin.

But it wasn’t the fact that he was right that bothered him, it was that he didn’t make the link with his specialization, he advanced to tier 4 and attributed his EP correctly but without thinking everything through.

‘Lesson learned, let’s contact that Ms. from the composite element lab, just got to find her name and contact again.’

…

3 years.

For 3 years, the IGS, since colonizing their own piece of the Endless, had never relented in its efforts to build a foundation all the future generations would praise.

A pacifist society wasn’t really a definition that could be given to the IGS, such concepts had been lost the moment it became impossible for 1 person to control an entire civilization.

From multiple galaxies to trillions of new stars, to now an Endless dimension, and an information board informing their whole generation, be it leaders or citizens…

Everything pointed towards the fact that reaching for individual power and advancing in tier was what truly defined the new era.

“Undercurrents” would be the words defining the IGS as of now, there were firstly the two protagonists, the “Native Dimension Party” and the “Endless Colonization Party”, they separated the administration into two separate entities that had much less contact than intended, due to the passing of information being too hard.

Whereas the “Native Dimension Party” didn’t have much problem in its functioning, due to the rock-solid administrative hierarchy encompassing everything, it was the one expecting the greatest amount of change in the short term.

From the ether erosion that didn’t yet start, to ether life forms that will then be able to come back, to all the new technologies and revolutions, the Universe’s inhabitants couldn’t see a way for their golden era to stop any time soon.

As for the “Endless Colonization Party”, the support it received from the other side was so one-sided that the acting leaders tried their best to make sure all the investments were going to the right places, for the right people.

One such example was the New Energy Institute, which pioneered the Ether Law Labs.

They also didn’t hesitate to account for every possibility, creating special brigades and units of specialized people to answer those very precise situations.

And with more than a billion people to manage, previously unnecessary answers had to be prepared.

Even if some of them had to always remain hidden from the public eyes.

…

Aleda Calico, the current research leader of the composite elements research faculty, was the person that told Rune at tier 3, that creating his element with only 6 slots was close to impossible.

Being a research leader wasn’t all glamorous, and it was even less so when all the scientists in nearly all the facilities and laboratories she visited clearly told that they all knew just enough to know they didn’t know anything.

At least, she comforted herself and the others by saying that having only one domain to focus on, they just had to do their best with their available information.

But the Ether Law wasn’t Video Games Law, once an advanced subject was brought up, the general population only saw how powerful it could be, and how successful the heroes who used those domains were.

The running-gag amidst all the Ether Law Labs was the Beyond Faculty.

Just passing before their faculty was enough to feel depressed, talking with one of their members was enough to make the mood of a whole room fool and demonic.

As for talking with the research leader? Well, unexpectedly, he was one of the most happy-go-lucky in their science park, though he clearly said that if he could, he would close the Beyond Faculty and move on.

An upside of working there was the availability of equipment.

Lots of equipment.

Sitting on her office chair, Aleda was doing her “job”.

A white desk covered in screens and different apparel was helping her navigate through the endless web of the composite elements' domain.

Advising people, studying basic elements composition, helping create a theoretical foundation, understanding the different structures, understanding the different effects, what acted on them, what countered them.

It being called her “job” was more false than right, for her, it was more her doing her passion and “being paid” a lot for sharing what she learned and helping others.

The path she had chosen for herself was to simply passively train all her useless fundamental masteries together.

For her passion, she only needed her three energy fundamentals and her awareness division.

“Maybe, maybe, a bit of solar flair, a bit of mystic, if I multiply it with 5 similar elements? Maybe with 2 light basic elements, it should stabilize the whole?”

With more and more people reaching tier 3, unlocking their elemental specialization, and the dissemination of information about composite elements via the guide, her faculty was making a very fine living and was receiving more and more support, people included.

But 3 years of focusing only on this domain, even when she couldn’t even manipulate the elements correctly allowed her, with her rululu eidetic memory, and countless experiments, to solidify her position and that of her team more than necessary.

“And if she needs it, she can take an additional 1 or 2 properties from the one she desires. And… Done!”

Sending the review, she immediately opened the next.

Reading the elements the person desired, the basic needs, the element he wanted to be included, she adjusted her 5 screens dedicated to only displaying the IGS guide at the composite element section.

Once everything was adjusted, she started to fuse things in her mind, learning new elements she never knew existed, reading their properties, comparing everything…

She wasn’t fighting monsters, but her spirit was working more intensely than if she did.

Then, an auxiliary screen started to flash with dim colors.

In the futuristic room with screens everywhere, she could manipulate everything with only her mind, so she saw it and finished her current review step before making this screen travel to her.

“The monolith perception dampening user?”

Recalling what it was about, she accepted the call while bringing up her memories about his request.

“Hu… Hello Mr. Tudor?” She hesitantly greeted.

Rululus could also be socially awkward, and she was a prime example of that.

“Hello, Ms. Calico, just calling to know if my composite element help request is still there?”

“Yes, of course it is, did you reach tier 4 then,” a slight excitement appeared in her voice.

Tier 4, 9 slots available for her greatest pleasure. Tier 4 subjects, she had some, but compared to some other faculties, she certainly wouldn’t brag.

“I did, I still didn’t start my purge as I just came back and had to finish everything expedition-related, but I’ll start my purge soon, after which I’ll immediately start transit to my composite element project.”

“So you’re officially a tier 4 now? Administratively classified as such?” She got an idea, one of her colleagues from other faculties bragged about.

“Hu… Don’t know, maybe? I included advancing to tier 4 on two of my reports so I can ask my first support to know if it’s enough to be official.”

Aleda immediately followed, “If you confirmed your tier 4 administratively, I’ll be able to send a request to my administration and I should be able to fully allocate the time necessary for your request by virtue of you being tier 4, so just confirm it and that should do it.”

A little jittery at doing the equivalent of a “field test”, she felt she had to push for it.

If it succeeded, and it had no reason to fail, she would be able to personally go.

And if the monolith composite element creation succeeded…

She would be rich.

“Ok, I’ll ask my first support to see if my tier 4 status is official, so… Should I contact you again in a week? Plus some days?”

Thinking for a bit, she brought her schedule up.

It was packed.

From reviewing requests to ongoing experiments, to whatever reports she needed to write each week that she generally left to her assistant with a slight summary of what she did, the only way to massively alter it was with a tier 4 field test.

“Just contact me after your purge and fix a time and place. As for now, I’ll send you a form to fill, once you confirm your administrative status, just send it back to me with everything filled and I’ll be able to forcefully alter my schedule to meet you, find a good place please.”

She could always hope.

She found the form she needed in a backwater file and sent it.

A few seconds of silence later.

“I got it, then I’ll do that, maybe it’ll not be exactly a week then, I’ll take a bit of time to explore the south sector and find a good place, maybe…”

She didn’t hear his following mumbling.

“Hum… In this case, I’ll await it very much, until next time then,” not wanting to continue this awkward bit where there was nothing else to talk about, she brought an end to their call.

“Goodbye, Ms. Calico, until next time.”

And she hung up.

On an auxiliary screen, she opened a file dating back to the time she reviewed this Mr. Tudor request.

Inside, she had included some insights, but while the majority were still usable, a small part of them had to be erased or re-written.

And when she read and remembered all the things about this element, she thought it was going to be a hell of a field test.

Then she looked on unimpressed, as long as it was about a composite element, she would take the challenge.

If it was an impossible challenge, she would solve it and make her prior knowledge pale in comparison to what she discovered.

The guide had millions of pages of content for her to check out, if she couldn’t find a solution, then the problem wasn’t the element.

The problem was her.