After everyone finished their own shopping, we all compared notes on what we each got.

Magnus ended up selling all his Magic Beast Cores like I did, but didn’t buy the left over spirit beast cores. He had little use for them at the moment and was content with harvesting some from the beasts we would fight in the future. Instead, he bought two more Meridian Cleansing Pills, enough to get him to body rank eight. He also grabbed a few combat arts, some health and stamina potions, and the skillbook he wanted for armor smithing. He could only afford the book that brought his skill to rank ten, but it was still an excellent investment.

Cody’s shopping list was very similar to Magnus’s. He got three combat arts, potions and a leatherworking skillbook. He also got some patterns for leather armor and other leather products, a quality set of tools to work with and even managed to pick up a magic wand that contained a healing enchantment for when he ran out of Divine Charges. It only had five charges and would need to be refilled by Rowan, but it was a good backup healing aid that didn’t rely on consumables.

Rowan got the fewest items of us all, but almost spent the most. He even had to rely on Cody donating enough credits, but it was worth it. Rowan could finally get the enchanting schematics he needed. They were only Novice Grade, but they still cost six thousand credits. Each grade up doubled in price. He also got an unenchanted mana-based robe he could put his own enchanting on and a handful of mana potions for emergencies.

“I also got a skillbook on woodworking, so I can make my own wands and staves and enchant them,” Rowan said, finishing his recounting of his purchases. He was the only one that didn’t sell off his mana cores. They were too useful for a mage and enchanter.

“Well, now that we are all almost out of credits, we should get out of here and move a decent way down the road. I don’t like the feel of this place, and I’m pretty sure they won’t like us if we can’t line their coffers anymore,” I said.

“Yeah, bro. This place gives me the wiggins. I definitely don’t want to sleep here tonight. The forge preferable,” Magnus said.

“Is there any place we can get some wood working supplies? I couldn’t afford any in the shop, and I need wood too,” Rowan said.

“We can look for a hardware store or something on our way out. We might have to wait until Rock Springs, though. I don’t want to ask around here and let people know where we go. I have the feeling some of these folk would try to mug us just so they could sell our gear and stay within the walls longer.”

“I noticed some of the armored people giving me the stink eye as I healed all the poor hurt people. I think we should go,” Cody said while looking around.

With a nod all around, we moved towards the gate. As we approached, one guard held up his hands to halt our egress. “Five hundred credits, each,” the guard said.

“Look, Troy. We already paid your toll when we came in. We paid your ridiculous tax at the shop, and now we are leaving. We are not paying anything else today,” I said. My temper was rising as these people tried to shake us down for even more money.

“Six on the left,” Magnus whispered.

“Five more on the right,” Cody added.

Rukia’s hackles were rising as she sensed the tensions mounting. Ice spikes crept over her fur as she readied for a fight. I activated the first stage of my Grace in Combat, just in case.

“No one comes in or goes out without paying the toll or leaves something of more value as collateral, to make sure they come back and pay their dues,” he said. He looked over all of us. “You can leave the healing guy behind if you need to get enough resources to pay. If you don’t come back, he can work off your debt to the settlement,” He pointed at Cody with greed glinting in his eye.

I ramped up my Grace in Combat to stage two and manifested my Jade Dragon’s Scale Armor. My spear appeared in my hand and I used my aura to press down on the so-called guard. His face paled in fear. The guard looked at his companions approaching and steadied himself. “You will pay your dues, or the village guards will take it from your hide and your equipment.”

“You will get out of my way, or you will die. You have the count of three.”

The head of my spear glowed as Ki flooded its channels. I was increasing its penetration power and building up my projected technique at the same time. “One.”

The guard stammered and tried to command me to stand down. I spoke over him “Two.”

The other guards started running at us now, but their heavy armor slowed them down. “Three.”

The moment I said three, I lunged forward with my spear. There was no way I was going to leave Cody here to become a slave in all but name, and I would let none of us get tied down here by these greedy scumbags.

The guard tried to unclip his mace from his belt and knock my spear aside, but he was too slow. My enhanced spear pierce through his steel armor and I released the projection technique inside of his chest. A screech of tearing metal tore through the air, blood flesh and bits of shattered bone sprayed from the guard’s back, and he coughed a bucket of blood from his mouth and nose. The man was as good as dead. I wrenched my spear out and shouted to my party, “RUN!”

The surrounding people were shocked still at the sudden and bloody violence that erupted in front of them, even the other gate guard. People screamed and scattered after a long frozen moment.

I looked over my shoulder and saw Rowan just finishing up summoning and getting on his mount. He must have started the casting as soon as they confronted us. Cody emanated a pale red glow that suffused his whole body. When he ran, his body seemed to blur. He managed to cover almost a hundred yards in just a handful of seconds. I took off running with Rukia at my side, Magnus using his movement technique to move nearly one hundred feet per step.

As I ran by, I kicked the now dead guard and looted him as I passed. I didn’t want what that man had to go to waste. It could be partial repayment from the settlement as far as I was concerned.

Over the next twenty seconds, the others actually managed to outstrip me. Slate was moving as fast as a car, had to be doing at least fifty miles per hour. Cody activated his red glowing ability again after just ten seconds, but after it ended, he was already close to a thousand feet from the settlement. He activated it for a third time and covered even more distance down the highway.

It must have been the Dash Combat Art. It added three feet per second, per point of agility, to your movement speed for ten seconds. The only downside was that it cost one hundred stamina each time it was used. And Cody only had just over three hundred stamina to use.

After five or six uses of Magnus’s explosive stride, he settled in to a fast ground eating pace. I could slowly catch up to Magnus, and we matched our running pace.

When Cody flagged, Rowan slowed and helped him climb onto Slate’s back and picked up the pace again.

Rukia maintained pace with me the entire time. She could have sped along as fast as Slate, but she would never leave my side, especially if I was running along with her. I managed to look back over my shoulder and saw pure pandemonium. If we were lucky, they wouldn’t send anyone out after us.

Once we crested the next hill, the last rise right before the three sisters, we all slowed down and caught our breaths. “We,” I huffed, “Need to… get… off the… road” I bent my knees and leaned forward, as I tried to breathe past the burning in my lungs. I hadn’t run that far, that fast, even before the apocalypse. My higher stats made it easier, but I wasn’t superhuman, not yet anyway.

Once my breath was a bit more under control, and I regained a bit of my stamina, I continued. “We need to keep going, but we can’t stay near the highway when we make camp. We are still too close to Evanston, and they might send out people after us.”

“I agree, but since we have a bit of distance, we should pull out the bikes. We can make better time and distance that way.” Magnus suggested.

“Yeah, you’re right. Rowan, how is your… um… dragon horse thing doing? Can it keep going?”

Rowan looked at Slate in concern for a while, then said, “Yeah, he can keep going, but not at such a fast pace. He used a good bit of stamina in that sprint. But he can keep up a good run almost forever. Even with carrying two.”

“Okay, let’s ride,” I said, as I took out a stamina potion and downed it. It would boost me back up faster, and I didn’t want to wait nearly ten minutes for it to recover on its own. At least on the downhill, I wouldn’t spend any more stamina.

I deactivated the second stage of Grace in Combat and my armor technique, leaning on its base version. I didn’t need the timer to refresh on both and burn another hundred Ki or so.

Fortunately, there were few accidents on this stretch of the highway. I remembered times when I was crossing through Wyoming and there wouldn’t be another car or semi in sight for miles, then you would come up on a huge cluster of them. Another point in our favor was that the snowstorm we faced getting up into Wyoming didn’t seem to hit this area. The asphalt was clear of any ice or snow.

We managed to make our way through the three sisters before dark fell. On the way here, we came across a construction site that had a lot of lumber in stacks. Since they would not be using it anymore, we grabbed it all. It was to our fortune that all the pieces of the same cut stacked in our storage rings, so we only had to use a few slots to collect the bulk of it.

We were worried about finding a place to camp that wouldn’t be out in the open. There wasn’t much vegetation where we were and we could be seen from a mile away. Once we crested the last hill, though, that changed.

Highlighted in the setting sun lay the most massive forest I had ever laid eyes on. And that’s saying something. I once went through the redwood forest in northern California as a kid. The trees looked like regular pines instead of redwoods, but they soared into the sky for hundreds of feet. The base of the trees looked to be easily twenty to thirty feet across. The forest looked to be in perpetual gloom, as the sun didn’t penetrate very far, even at its current angle.

We had already put away the bikes when we started up this last climb. My legs were still a bit Shakey from all the exercise I subjected them to. “Ok, let’s go in a ways, get off the highway and see if we can find a good place to open up the forge and cover it up,” I said.

With a weary agreement from everyone, we carefully ventured into the forest.

Warning!

You have entered the Domain of a Wellspring Claimed by Stone Cave Bear, Energy Cultivation Rank 5

Defeat this Stone Cave Bear to claim the Essence Wellspring and its territory

“No matter what, we are not going to try to tangle with that monster of a beast.” I said to the others. Rowan and Cody didn’t seem to hear me as I spoke. They had the glazed thousand-yard stare of someone reading a message. It was then that I remembered when I first entered the Wellspring in Idaho. A prompt popped up explaining to me what a Wellspring was.

I gave them time to read. I took a deep breath and I could feel the essence thick in the air. It practically wanted to flow down my throat, into my lungs and settle in my Dantian all by itself. It felt even thicker here than the first one I was in. I might even finish my Lung Meridian that night. I would then only have the Heart Meridian and the Spleen Meridian left to go.

“Wow, my Mana Regeneration is triple what it normally is. I’m getting almost two and a half mana per second in here.” Rowan took a deep breath and held a full, genuine smile on his face.

“Well, let’s find a good place to set up camp and we can enjoy the benefits of being in a wellspring after.” I said, bringing everyone back to focus. “We need to be careful. The last Wellspring, I went through was filled to the brim with monsters. They are probably a lot stronger in here than that last one.”

We mostly kept to the edge of the new giant forest; the trees grew so rapidly that the earth was torn up around them. It didn’t take too long to find one with high roots and a hole going down to their base. I used my portable forge on the root, and the doorway opened up just fine. I tacked one of our darker spare blankets over the opening, and in the dark, it was hardly noticeable.

We all went inside and had our dinner of snake meat and water and broke apart to do our own things. I pulled out all the hides I had in my ring and Cody took them. He planned on making us some warm cloaks in case it tried to rain or snow on us. Rowan was pretty excited. He wanted to try a warming and a water repelling enchantment on them when he finished, if the quality was high enough to take two enchantments.

I went over to my forge and pulled out some of the extra tools I picked up from the construction site we visited earlier. I didn’t need the tools so much as I wanted the metal in them. I wanted to make a pair of hand axes using the Fire Essence steel. If the new steel could be hardened well, I was going to use it to make the blades and use the tool steel for the rest.

The first thing I did was heat one of the one-pound ingots of Embersteel in my Ki forge. I needed to see how they quench and what kind of grain structure they would have. I didn’t pull any Ki from the smithy to infuse the ingot. I needed a good baseline.

Once the ingot reached a nice straw yellow color, I pulled it out of the fire with my tongs and took it to my power hammer to flatten it out. It took a few passes, reheating it to keep it nice and hot, but I managed to stretch it out enough. I reheated it once more before plunging it into the oil barrel.

After giving the metal a bit of time to cool on the anvil, I grabbed one of my files and ran it along its length. It hardened up well; the file skating off without biting into it at all. I then placed the bar in a vise and with my biggest hammer, I beat on it relentlessly until it snapped in half.

I picked up the half that flew off and looked over the grain structure with a critical eye. From my admittedly limited experience, and a lot of study, I thought the grain was very fine. The metal was tough as hell, got really hard and it still had that Fire Essence in it. I wasn’t sure what that would do for a finished blade, but I had one more experiment to try before I used it in an actual weapon.

Before I continued, I used Identify on the bar of metal to see how it changed after being worked and snapped in half.

Embersteel Ingot

Quality: Exceptional

Rarity: Epic

Durability: 23/23

Weight: .5 lb.

Traits: Steel bar imbued with the Essence of Fire

The max durability halved itself, not really surprising. Unfortunately, the quality dropped by one rank, which meant it lost ten percent of its final bonuses. It was still a lot higher than the mass-produced tools I collected.

I looked at my Ki reserves; they were still quite low. I pulled Ki from the Forge and refilled my Dantian and Meridians. Ready to try to imbue Ki into the Embersteel as I worked it, I set to.

I worked the metal by hand, allowing Ki to flow from me and into the Embersteel while it was hot. I straightened up the snapped portion and prepped the bar to that it could be a blade insert for the bearded hand axe I envisioned. The metal became more malleable, not needing the Power hammer to make good progress. I forged in the bevels on the edge, wanting to do as little grinding as possible for the finished piece.

Once I finished the shaping, I reheated it till it was a bright yellow and laid it on the anvil to cool slowly. I knew it would take a while for the metal to cool, so I started prepping my other materials. I pulled out one of the three-pound hammers and took it to the chop saw. I cut off either end, just shy of the eye. Each piece should be just under a pound and a half, more than enough to make up the body of the hand axes I was making.

I tossed the yellow plastic handle into the corner of the forge; I would use solid wood instead of that cheap crap. I looked around and saw Rowan working on his new woodworking skill and I walked over. “How’s it going?” I asked.

Rowan looked up from whittling away at a stick of wood. It looked like he was making a harry potter style wand. “It’s going well. A bit weird to remember how to do something you’ve never tried before as you’re doing it. But I’m getting the knack for it. What’s up?” He asked.

“I’m working on making a pair of hand axes using that new metal we picked up. I was about to start making the handles, but I thought that if you liked, you could do it. The quality would probably be a good bit higher than if I did.”

“Oh, is that all? That’s no problem. What did you have in mind?” Rowan asked.

I pulled out a pencil and notebook and quickly sketched out what I was thinking. The haft of the axe would be about a foot and a half long, swelling at the base for good hand retention and with a bit of a forward curve to it. “Something like this. You don’t have to worry about getting the head shaped yet. That will have to wait until I’m done forging the axe heads.”

“Do you mind if I use some of the power tools?”

I almost slapped my forehead as I remembered I didn’t set the permissions to allow them to use the tools, only Magnus so far. I remedied that. They had good heads on their shoulders, and as long as they were careful, they wouldn’t hurt themselves, and even if they did, we had healing magic now. “No problem. I just updated the permissions in the forge. You and Cody can use the tools now.” I looked over at Cody and saw him looking at one of his books, then drawing lines on one hide. It looked like he was preparing to trim the hides to match the design in the book.

Rukia was laying in front of the exit, nose just barely past the edge twitching as she took in the myriad scents of the forest. She looked happy and relaxed, with her tail swishing back and forth.

Magnus was busy reading the Beast tamer’s guide I lent him. He really wanted a pet of his own, especially after getting the taming collar. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to tame a creature in this forest.

Shrugging my shoulders, I went back to the forge and placed one of the hammer pieces in to heat. After flattening out the steel and folding it over to make the eye, I started the forge welding process. I lost myself in the motions of swinging the hammer, heating the steel and letting my Ki flow through it. I didn’t focus on infusing the edge, or any special effect with the Ki. I just wanted it to suffuse the metal and for it to be ready to take the bindings.

Once the forge welding process was complete and I cleaned up the metal on the grinder, I went over to Rowan to see how he did on the handles.

The work was amazing, especially for only a couple of hours of work. It had an organic feel to the curve. The handle fit my hand well and the swell at the base was just right. He even took the time to carve in the impression of scales like the Ki armor I make. “These are great, Rowan. Thank you. If you need any metal work done, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Thank you. All my artwork was digital before, well… everything. It was nice to create something again,” Rowan said.

After a bit more pleasantries, Rowan went back to making wooden wands, and I reworked the blade of my axe a bit. The handle gave me an idea, and I thought I could make the axes thematically more fitting with my new developing style.

In the end, the blade of the axe took on a look of a fang, and with the scaled handle I decided I’d call them the Dragon’s Fangs once they were both done. After the final quenching and tempering, I suffused the handle with my Ki and affixed it to the axe head. I used identify on the axe before I added the bindings.

Name: Dragon’s Fang

Quality: Exceptional

Rarity: Rare

Durability: 52/52

Damage: 20

Weight: 2 lbs.

Traits: +1 Binding slot

Ki effects: any Ki technique passed through this Blade gains the Fire attribute and +20% effect.

Ki Pool: 0/43

The twenty base damage was beyond my original expectations. I was expecting an axe of this size to only deal out ten base damage. But with the infused Ki, the special materials, and the quality bonus, it doubled my expectations.

With the Axe already having the Fire element to it, I didn’t have to use one slot on my new Element Core Socket. I went over the bindings I knew and thought about the best options to use.

I wanted the axes to have a larger Ki pool and be able to recover their Ki on their own, so that’s two Bindings taken, and it would be stupid to not include the Sharpness binding to increase the damage further. Instead of just copying the Bindings on my spear, this time I was going to include the Protection binding and really boost the Durability of these axes. I wanted nothing to break them. The higher durability should keep the blade from getting dinged up as well.

I settled onto my stool at my formations workbench and set to shaping the Ki pathways and bindings for my axe. Since this was going to be a matched pair, I saved the rank five demon core and used a rank four instead, which would increase the base Ki pool by seventy-five points.

I took my time in forming the Ki pathways. I made sure they flowed smoothly from the Ki storage socket, through the Sharpness Binding, and all along the edge. The pathways looped through the Protection Binding and spiraled over the entire axe head and around the shaft until it reached the Ki Condenser Binding, where it then connected directly into the Ki storage. The axe practically hummed with potential and I could almost feel my Formations skill rank up.

As the last act, I infused the storage with enough of my Ki to activate all the Bindings. I took a deep breath and backed away from the Dragon’s Fang and Identified it.

Name: Dragon’s Fang

Quality: Exceptional

Rarity: Rare

Durability: 149/149

Damage: 29

Weight: 2 lbs.

Traits: +1 Binding slot, Ki infused haft and head +150% durability, +50% Ki flow, +100% Material Ki Capacity

Ki effects: any Ki technique passed through this Blade gains the Fire attribute and +20% effect.

Burning Blade: 1 Ki per 3 points of fire damage (+20% material effect)

Bindings: Sharpness +43% damage, Protection +43% Durability, Storage Socket +75 Ki pool, Ki Condenser 1 Ki regenerated per 10 minutes in normal Essence density area

Ki Pool: 20/161

I sat there, mouth agape, as I looked over the stats of this new weapon. I had to read it three times for it all to sink in. This single axe put the spear I was so proud of improving to shame. It dealt more damage. The durability was off the charts. The Ki pool was fucking massive. I even managed to get the same recharge rate as Magnus’s soul-bound hammer. Though I did the math, counting on my fingers. It would take almost twenty-nine hours to fill completely on its own normally. But that was fine. I could refill it at night during cultivation.

My hands itched to forge a whole new spear with what I learned from this. I could make it so much better than it was now.

I took a deep breath and calmed myself. I still had the Razor spine spear in my inventory. It’s natural stats, properly infused and Bindings applied, would probably dwarf anything I could make on my own, for now anyway.

I had already spent many hours crafting this one axe, and I still had one more to go. But it should wait for the next day. I needed to open as much of my Lung Meridian as I could manage while in the Wellspring’s area of influence.

I put Dragon’s Fang in my inventory for now and settled onto my bed, sinking into meditation, filling my Ki pool and cleansing my Meridian.