A silver egg was a very odd way of marking it was different, but it also felt strangely appropriate. I was really curious about what other effects the bonus would cause but until she hatched there was no way to figure out what was going on. As I looked at the black spot that was her head through the translucent silver shell I had an idea to try later. For now I asked Victoria how she was feeling, if she was feeling better or worse now that the egg was finally out of her. Turned out she felt a lot better since her mana stopping being siphoned so badly, in fact she felt weirdly light, from how she described it I would liken it to when someone with a ton of hair gets a haircut and their head feels floaty, Victoria had gotten used to the negative mana pressure and now that it was gone she felt odd.

With that gone she could also get back to training her dirt control, but when I asked how that was going she explained she had stalled out on that like I did some skills. Level twenty-four and it wont go up even though she managed to lift a bit of mud, dust, and ash, because she was the queen not the consort, I'm supposed to have this while she was not. Now I really needed to find a way to break this stupid level cap soon since we were both being held back by some odd restrictions. In her case it is really odd since she effectively granted me this power instead of it being something I came up with myself. It would probably be the same with learning worker spells, she could make things that had powers that she couldn't replicate. It was late though, so there was nothing left to do for now but set up the next batch of eggs and get to sleep.

The next day I picked up my training partner celestial and went out to try my new idea, I couldn't believe I overlooked something so simple. I activated power coat and made the field into two separate parts, one part was set to red and the other was blue. Then I carefully pushed them together while also commanding them to not combine into a single field with two different colors touching eachother. Soon enough what I wanted to happen, happened, one shell slipped and went over the other, red over blue. This caused me to gain a level and the resistance I was feeling towards this action vanished. A little check at skill's blue box showed that they were indeed connected, mastery bonus was about coat layering, which included putting the same color on top of itself.

Getting a second skill to level twenty-five without instruction, sadly, did not award another trait like the first one. But who knows, maybe if I got enough of them over the hump there would be something. I did increment a counter of some sort when I got dirt control to fifty, so getting power coat up there as well should increment it again and do something. So I proceeded to test the crap out of my newly evolved skill, the various combinations of two colors had various effects, two different colors granted both properties at the same time. For example, red and blue, aka purple, let me hit something and do extra damage of red and protected my hand from the recoil of hitting something too hard.

The really interesting thing was when I used the same color twice, it double multiplied, so if I hit something I did base damage times multiplier times multiplier. It also meant the recoil was higher as well so I broke my hand again from punching super compressed and hardened stone, which is why I brought the celestial up, but I will admit I thought the bonus would just be additive instead of compounding. With her help letting me heal from constant breakage I made good time with power leveling it, getting all the way up to level thirty before lunch. I went to the berry patch for that as well as to check on the oddity the workers reported on last time they got some, I didn't check before because it wasn't any sort of dangerous odd, just strange odd.

Once there I easily saw what they meant, several bushes were moved around and a few had even changed shape. Three specific changes stood out the most, one was that three of the bushes were merging into a tree, it was small at the moment but was clearly in process. Another interesting one had bent into itself forming a large shell of sorts with branches grown to form a physical version of the mana storage mesh the bushes had. The last weird one had become squat and was growing a single giant flower with branches in a way to act as a support structure for it's size, it was still not full sized, but was fairly large already, would say a celestial could fit inside it. This was pretty clear evidence that whatever the central controller was, it was capable of guiding how the surface plants grew.

A quick examination showed the tree and the flower didn't have a containment mesh, but the shell bush was ready to go, it had abandoned the pretense of offering a prize in response to my feeding it on purpose. Since it didn't need to dedicate any processes to growing berries or looking like a normal bush it's mana containment was much much bigger, the physical shell matched the magical shell. I ate a handful of berries before I walked up to it and placed my hand on a hard nub on the top of it and steadily pumped energy into it. After a few minutes I got a level in what must have been some sort of mana transfer skill since I got a level of it before when I first linked to the celestial.

An interesting phenomenon occurred as it filled up, since it was a mesh of lines instead of a solid object, as it started filling with energy it became visible. It was only a pinpoint of glowing bluish light that formed under a huge ball of invisible mana, clearly the center was being compressed by the other layers until it hit some sort of critical mass. Also it wasn't really shedding light, more like it was just visible now, like how power coat colors didn't shed light on nearby walls but were still visible. I even had to take a break from pumping energy into it, I actually started losing output from putting so much out for so long. Stopping the flow for a few minutes was all it took, but it was odd that I started running out when nothing else did before.

Letting go of the nub I pulled up a ball of dirt and pushed energy into it to the limit a single strand could do, then I carefully watched the mana as it flowed out of the dirt and into the air. It was rather hard to keep track of because it became a sort of diffuse gas, but I watched it intently and it actually ended up flowing back into me. An analogy would be like a water hose held vertically, the pressurized water goes up and up until it hits a point then is forced out of the way by the incoming water and falls back down. Analogy fails at this point because then the incoming water would then have to merge with the water in the hose and come back out. This is why feeding the bush could tire me out, I am effectively pouring water into a bucket, once in there it can't flow back to me so I start losing pressure.

It doesn't help much that I am also keeping a celestial charged while doing this, but her light seems to help me regain mana faster so it wasn't a pure loss. After two more cycles of feeding and resting the shell bush finally becomes full and like it was already doing, physical followed magical and the entire bush crunched inward as it squeezed the energy down a thicker than normal energy root. It met with the core which shuddered and processed it in some way like before, but this time it only sent the responding burst to the three altered plants. The burst let me see that they all had a thicker energy root but the flower had a second root wrapped around it. I had no idea what it could be but it was obviously putting a lot of resources into it because of my presence.

I grabbed two more handfuls of berries and fed some to my passenger before I headed back to do more punching of a wall until my hand broke and got healed. I just got a few more levels in power coat, and a level in that skill that made it harder to break my fingers, when Christina came back from a hunt. I let her get the meat ready before I went over and talked to her about her power strike and seeing if she was keeping up with her leveling with it. She was, but like I was she appeared to have gotten stuck at twenty-four, since It was a class skill though, she just needed the mastery for it to limit break. Power strike was extremely similar to coat, hopefully that meant the mastery crossed over, so I explained to her what I did and demonstrated the effect I had going on with it.

Even if it wasn't the mastery she needed, she really liked the concept behind it and wanted to be able to do it simply for the extra power it would give her. It took nearly nearly a half hour of constant attempts and adjustments before she finally did it, she was better than her sisters but her wis was still lower than mine so she needed more effort to get the right amount of control over weird powers. Control was a function of wis and level, so even the normal soldiers will be able to do it eventually, but the actual level needed could be high enough that it may be years before it happens. Anyway, my supposition was correct and power strike did in fact have the same mastery requirement as power coat, it made sense but it could easily have been something completely different, just because.

We sparred for a bit, and broke each other's arms a couple times, it seemed double defense could block a single layer of attack, but a double attack blew right through it. Course that was only against punches, a chop with her arm blade was still capable of nicking me with no enhancement at all against a double layered defense. All this constant damage resulted in plenty of healing opportunities, so the celestial finally hit level four, which meant she also had another whole point in Int and Wis to work with. Feeling it out she still didn't have enough to be self sustaining but I was able to decrease how much I had to assist her. She also got a new spell, cleansing light, which specialized it to removing toxins and nastiness like how the default light did for bad air, but worked on more potent things.

Unfortunately I didn't have anything for her to cleanse, a jar of snake venom would probably be the best thing to use that on, but maybe a huge jar of stagnant fetid water would be gross enough that it would take a while to clean and so be worth some good exp. Next thing to do was give Christina a standing order to spread around to keep an eye on the bush grove, and report any changes besides more of the ones I had already seen, like more trees forming isn't important but if the big flower finally bloomed I would like to know about it. After that we kept sparring until it was time to head back inside to sleep, before bed I met the newly hatched worker larva and they looked identical, I could only tell which one came from the silver egg by the sheer amount of mana one of them had.