“Fuck this shit, I’m leaving.” Catherine spat out then left. The clack of her heels echoed off the barren walls. ...why does she even have heels on? Hopefully this will remind her to not wear them anymore. Cain thought while using his mana to pry open a gap between the floor tiles as Catherine’s heel hovered over it. Her heel got caught in the gap, twisting her ankle. She hit the floor faster than Dresil binges anime. She laid on the cold tiles in the darkness, her torch somehow went out when she fell.

Veronica and Victoria attempted to hide their giggles. They managed to successfully hide the sound, but their faces remained contorted in a struggle to laugh silently. Jared looked away, pretending as if the light was too dim to see what happened. Jacob looked back, somewhat concerned for her.

He took a torch from his storage ring and lit it using the one Jared held. He carried the light over towards Catherine then knelt down to check on her while storing the one that went out. “Are you okay?” Jacob hovered the torch over her ankle, inspecting the wound. “I think I twisted my ankle… Can you help me leave?” Catherine requested, trying to be as sincere as possible.

Jacob nodded then handed her the torch. Catherine grabbed the torch, the flickering light illuminating her confused expression. A few seconds later, she felt two logs slide under her and softly lift her into the air. The torch she held illuminated Jacob’s face; what she thought were logs were actually Jacob’s arms.

“Are you okay…?” Catherine asked Jacob, concerned his fractured arms may not have healed perfectly. “It appears that’s all we can ask each other lately.” Jacob’s snide remark caused Catherine to grin, her cheeks slowly rising in temperature. “I’ll be fine.” Jacob said as he carried Catherine out the ruins.

“Oh…my… god… Did Jacob just make a joke?” Victoria muttered when the duo were out of earshot distance. “I don’t think that’s what we should be focusing on, Catherine actually grinned because of it…” Veronica added, seemingly stunned by what she witnessed. “It’s like… a romance novel just played before my eyes.” Jared commented, unable to figure out what just happened.

“You read romance novels?” Victoria whipped her head around to face Jared, her hair almost smacking Veronica in the face. “Uh… no… maybe… My master made me read some…” Jared’s words stumbled out of his mouth as he was suddenly put on the spot. “Uh-huh… Sure…” Veronica stares at Jared with a suspicious gaze.

“Oh hey! There’s some ROUS over there.” Victoria pointed to a dark corner of the room as she spoke. “Huh? Where?!” Jared immediately pulled out his dagger, shifting to his neutral stance facing the corner. He relaxed when he heard the girls’ laughter. “Haha… very funny… I had to pass time somehow ok? My master had the book laying around so I read it.” Jared attempted to defend himself, but that only increased their suspicion.

“Mhm.. sure.” Victoria mocked Jared in between her laughs. Cain stared off into the distance, trying to comprehend what just happened. Did Princess Bride somehow get carried over here as well? The heck? The girls continued to tease Jared here and there until Jacob came back and rejoined the group.

“I assume you guys will be continuing then?” Cain asked once everyone was present. “Yep. I’ll need a few hours to completely heal Jacob’s arms though.” Victoria reported once everyone else agreed in some form to Cain’s assumption.

“Alright, it’s a little past lunch anyways. We can eat and relax for a bit then continue onwards. I’ll be handling most of the traps, guards, and such, but if there’s something I think you guys can handle, then I’ll stay out of it. Capiche?” Cain defined his and the party’s roles while walking out of the doorway. He used SRI to create a portal in the doorway linked to the Mana Trash dimension. Thus, if anything tried to attack or leave that area, it’d go inside the portal instead.

“What does ‘Capiche?’ mean?” Jared asked while gazing through the portal, trying to see what lay within. Rex created faint eyes with fire that looked straight at Jared. Jared jumped back in fright, pulling out his dagger as Cain spoke. “It means ‘Understood?’” Victoria stared at Jared, then at the portal; the eyes that were once there disappeared.

“Are you that scared of ROUS?” She asked him in confusion. “N-no… it’s nothing.” Jared replied while sheathing his dagger. Cain snickered silently as he listened in on what happened. He sat on the floor tiles while creating 4 flashlights, disguising their birth so it’d appear they dropped out of a portal.

“Hover” The flashlights floated into the air and hovered over 4 different corners, lighting up a decent area for the party to sit down and relax. Cain sat with his back against the wall, the doorway portal to his right. Veronica sat on his left, Jared on his right, and Victoria treated Jacob across from them to form a circle.

Cain dispersed his mana outwards from Sinclair’s tag, creating a mini Mana Zone. His mana pulsed into the forest, marking any suitable firewood. SRI then teleported the firewood into the center of the circle on Cain’s orders. Cain expanded the Poison Immunity Prototype to encompass the entirety of their huddle, getting rid of any humidity and making it easier to start a fire.

Cain lit the fire as the party commented on the increase in air quality and Victoria explained Cain’s technique. Cain created a portal with SRI above the smoke; the exit portal was created a few hundred meters away from Sinclair, at the same elevation. It took a few minutes to blindly find a spot without trees since Cain just guessed the distance.

Dresil took out some snacks to grill as Jacob distributed everyone’s lunch. A leaf mat spread out around Cain in all directions, with portals depositing cooked food on it seconds after. Jacob and Victoria joined in on the feast once she completed the preliminary treatment and healed the damages caused while carrying Catherine out of the ruins.

The party continued to eat and talk about miscellaneous things. Cain passively listened while thinking about how to implement the filter on the Poison Immunity Prototype. ...it won’t matter what I do, since I’ll always be limited by my own brain until I find a way to make a processor or a magic circle that could act as one… oooh, maybe even a second brain. Cain came to this conclusion as he ate.

I only know vaguely how a processor works, but not everything… It'd be best to create some simple experiments and trials to improve my understanding. The modern CPUs that I’m used to execute billions of operations per second… hah… I’ve got a long way to go. Cain thought while finishing off three skewers.

Veronica eyed a skewer that laid on the leaf mat once she finished her lunch. Cain was too preoccupied with his thoughts to notice, thus Dresil sneakily handed Veronica a few skewers to her. Veronica accepted the food then handed some fresh bread to the vines that gave her food. Dresil put the bread on the mat for Cain to unknowingly eat while thinking.

I should create a few test magic circles to get some data for the cpus… I miss google. Cain lamented while finishing another skewer. At this point, the party finished their meal and began doing separate tasks. Victoria healed Jacob’s arms fully, taking breaks every 30 minutes to an hour to refill her mana.

Veronica and Jared took this opportunity to cultivate mana using their gathering techniques. As an adventurer, times like these, where they could completely focus on cultivation, was hard to come by. Between completing quests, traveling to and fro, waiting for gear to be repaired; all of these things stole some level of focus and awareness needed to cultivate effectively.

Cain created a few magic circles in front of him to test out his theories, visible to himself only; too busy to notice that the party used the techniques he wanted to observe. Dresil noticed his focus and recorded some details within the digital storage so the opportunity wasn’t completely wasted.

Let’s see… a cpu needs to receive a task from memory, decode the task, and complete the task, according to my Comp 101 professor at least. The memory here would be the digital storage or a local queue… hmm… the last one will be further down the line, for now let’s just focus on the basics. To decode it… I guess that means interpreting it so it can execute the task smoothly.

Hah… this is going to be a pain. Cain programmed each magic circle to retrieve math problems from the digital storage, interpret what each operation meant and how to perform said operation, then execute the math problem and store the output in the digital storage.

3 magic circles were programmed like such, each one had their own input and output folder. Each magic circle logged the time it took to complete each operation and attached it to the input. The numbers involved started with 6 digits and went to 21, thus making it relatively easy to determine if the magic circle processed the problem or Cain’s brain did since each operation was performed in less than a second..

Cain felt the mental toll as soon as he activated each magic circle. He spent the next hour and many, many kilograms of food, to fix the bugs and tweak the programming until he could perform other tasks along with the daily things easily. Jacob and Victoria observed with awe the amount of food Cain ate. Although the speed was too fast to determine accurately, it seemed as if he just ate 10kg of various meats and at least 20 dishes of sweets.

—Dms: Cain and Bob— (14ms)

Cain: Can you log how much my brain is being used to process for each operation the magic circles perform and attach it to each operation?

Bob: I can… although it may be delayed depending on the developments of the Star Dimension.

Cain: That’s ok, just keep that as your priority and do this when you have the time to spare.

Cain: I’ll treat you to whatever you want later.

Bob: Oooh, could you create a plot and enact it if I gave you some details?

Cain: Sure, as long as it doesn't conflict with my interests or harm my people.

Bob: Perfection.

Cain: :hehe:

Bob: :hehe:

--------------------------

Now the next bit… The incident with the plasma beam made me realize that my proficiency in healing is tremendously slow compared to how fast things could harm me at this level of power. I’m going to need to amp that up if I want to survive, especially since I don’t have techniques to make use of my raw physical power.

My proficiency in healing muscles is almost perfect, organs are meh, bones are meh, nerves need some serious work, and veins/blood management need some serious work. I can simulate everything except the last one, I’ll need a live specimen to improve my understanding and proficiency…

Cain navigated the tag directory, looking for death row inmates. After a few minutes of fruitless effort, Cain created a few clauses within the tag HUD to categorize death row inmates and a function to filter the tags based on their attached categories, species, or family names. He used the new function to search for a death row inmate then linked the tag to SRI.

—Dms: Cain and Bob— (4ms)

Cain: Can you monitor this next operation? Idk if it’ll work properly with SRI.

Bob: Understood, give me a few minutes to slow down the pace of Star Dimension’s expansion.

Cain: Sweet, ok.

--------------------------

Cain directed SRI to create portals around the arteries of an inmate’s heart. He then created a disguised space roughly two times the size of the heart in front of him. The party could not see, smell, or hear anything within that cube. Cain had Rex heat the disguised space to the high range of room temperature (73-74°F or 23°C) as he waited until Bob gave him the ok, then Cain used SRI to forcibly teleport the heart into the disguised space along with the portals around the arteries.

Cain created a mana model of the heart he saw beating in front of him to its right; once again disguised so only he could see it. He programmed the magic circle underneath the model to monitor the real one and mimic any changes by using mana echolocation to detect them. Because the model was semi-transparent, Cain could see each and every blood vessel and tissue.

Cain refrained from activating the echolocation function to detect changes when he realized the heart still had the inmate’s magic circles orbiting it. Thus, the experiment shifted from causing and healing damage to an inmate’s heart to figuring out how to dissolve the magic circles around it without causing too much harm.

Cain started by encasing his mana, disguised as natural mana, around the inmate’s heart. In the first attempt, Cain decided to shatter the magic circles abruptly. His mana slowly gathered around the magic circles, then shattered them by increasing the pressure around it and trying to separate parts of the circle into different directions.

The heart of the inmate convulsed rapidly, while the inmate himself started having seizures. Cain stared at the heart, waiting for it to calm down, only for it to calm down too much and stop beating. He sighed and opened a portal that served as a window for his mana to inspect the cause of death of the inmate. Veronica and Jared were too absorbed in cultivating while Jacob and Victoria could only see the black portal but not what it showed.

His mana ran throughout the inmate’s body, searching his vessels, bones, and organs for damage. The feedback from the search told Cain that the remaining mana within the inmates body ran rampant due to the sudden disappearance of the magic circles that regulated their flow.

Normally, this wouldn’t have done much apart from damaging the blood vessels that carried mana and possibly the muscles and organs as well. The twist that exacerbated the inmates’ symptoms: he wore magic cuffs that blocked the flow of mana. The two conflicting forces, the cuffs preventing the flow and the turbulent mana stirred to motion due to the lack of magic circles controlling the flow, clashed against each other. The inmate’s body could not handle the burden of these opposing forces, and died.

Of course, Cain didn’t know this. He just assumed that destroying one’s magic circles caused seizures and death. Although he knew of the existence of the magic cuffs, and the potential effects it could have on the prisoner’s cause of death, he did not have access to any subjects without cuffs to test his theory.

Cain already had plans for Victor, Myles’ former mentor, Hunter, and Sig-gwon and his party. There were no other forces that he tagged and were against him. He couldn’t risk killing the noble whom he had won the bet against 3 days ago, as he’d be immediately assumed to be the culprit due to the lack of signs and the abruptness of his death. This would invalidate what he said about the warning and threat then, thus inspiring nobles to further invalidate everything else he said.

Cain couldn’t just use random citizens either. The sudden lack of mana, or in the worse case, death, would surely be investigated. The ambiguity and suddenness of these “attacks” would cause fear and panic to spread through the capitol, disrupting the plan he sent in motion on 3 days ago. Not to mention, some nobles would be desperate enough to blame Cain for these acts, even if no evidence existed.

Most importantly though, Cain felt uncomfortable doing such a thing to someone he had no relation with. A vague sense of disgust crept up on him whenever he thought of doing it to someone random. He smiled wryly at this thought. At least I still have some sense of morals, however skewed or nonexistent they may be. Cain thought while checking the time. About ten minutes had passed since he teleported the inmate's heart here.

Cain made a note in the digital storage to investigate the effects of destroying someone’s magic circles when they didn’t have those cuffs, or similar items, on. He redirected his attention to his next step, deciding to find a way to covertly destroy someone’s magic circles. He pondered this problem over skewers.

Yet, no matter how he thought about it, the safest way would be if the inmates had no mana to revolt at all. In other words, Cain would have to convert all of their mana into his own or natural mana, then destroy their magic circles.