With the day of the Brotherhood auction finally complete, life in Tech City returned as close as it could to normal. The city and guild had a huge influx of new residents, guild and clan offices, money and resources.

A few factions tried to use their newly acquired equipment to infiltrate and capture members of the Brotherhood only to quickly discover that nothing they brought from the guild could operate within 10 kilometres of the city walls.

What they also didn’t know, was that every piece of equipment sold by the Brotherhood was tracked and monitored by Jasmine. Not only that, the self-detonation from the tamper-proof system could be set off remotely by Jasmine.

Many of the factions that had designs on using this equipment to finally abduct a core member of the Brotherhood were pressured to admit defeat and all agreed between each other that the Dark Brotherhood only sold them because they had some kind of array pattern in the city that deactivated these artefacts.

That was, unfortunately, the best theory they could come up with. They neither understood or could even imagine the power of the technology James had at his fingertips. They also never got a chance to find out because every time they tried to pry something open and inspect its insides, it would erupt and leave nothing but a 10 or 12 meter crater in its wake.

Jasmine reported 42 incidents in the first 24 hours since the auction. They even had a few of those incidents in the confines of the city, which stirred up the populace quite a bit after one of them was inside a tavern and took a dozen of its patrons in the implosion.

With a new day on the rise, James reordered his priorities again. He then went for a visit to the university and sat through the entire basics course. When he returned home, he left everything in the capable hands of Jasmine and Jessy, then sat down and meditated on everything he forgot after leaving high school.

Not only him, but Gold James apparently got blasted with the implant as well. The two of them often had arguments and discussions regarding things as they both sat and meditated on the intricacies of triangles, π, basic physics, chemistry and damn near everything else.

To the great surprise of them both, they realised that when they were in joint meditation as they often were at this time, their understanding was twice as fast. They often found themselves meditating on the exact same parts at the same time.

At one point they tried to segregate the parts they were learning only to suddenly both be muttering about chemical bonds. They’d then have a half hour argument about who was meant to be doing what and then eventually both give up and agree that they clearly shared the same brain and even though they had two active consciousness’s, they were clearly still the same person and sharing the same thoughts.

Even though that was the case, it didn’t stop them from trying to train the brain to think in parallel. Although they had no results at the end of the week, Gold James refused to give up. This meant that Gold James would periodically ask what James was thinking about throughout the day to see if they were thinking the same thing.

If they shared the thoughts, which they almost always were, then he’d try and start thinking about something else. James lost count of the number of times he was suddenly and randomly thinking about lighting something on fire or boobs.

Once that was finished, he went back to the University and sat through a number of other refresher courses and even tried to stomach a few more advanced courses that he’d never considered before. He then spent another two weeks sitting in a meditation chamber sorting through all the crap in his head.

By the time he came out again, the city had been through another renovation with all the leased land in the central district filled with guildhalls, clan mansions (guildhalls with living space) and from a multitude of other factions moving into Tech City. The Arena had also apparently been finished, and the Mysterious Stranger had reappeared to finally challenge James.

Hearing that James was in closed door cultivation, she simply said “1 month” and left again. According to Jasmine, the stranger left the city, and even she had trouble tracking her after that. In other words, the moment she entered a forested area Jasmine lost sight of her.

Other news he received on his emergence from his meditation chamber was that Perlious finally made a move to try and break into the HQ building only to be captured and imprisoned. Word from Hastoel was that the General demanded his release.

Being in charge at the time, Jasmine did what she thought James would do and hacked the man’s hand off and sent it with a ransom note back to the General. Since then there was no word from any Hastoelians regarding the matter.

James admitted that would probably be his first course of action. If the General hadn’t replied by now, it meant he was probably preparing to march over here and storm the city. With that thought in mind, James set in motion the reinforcement of the city’s defences.

Starting with the instant rebuilding arrays, followed by a deflector array and the production of Mk III and Mk V Rail guns. The MK IV was a personal hand held rail gun, and James didn’t see any need to start mass production on them for the moment. By the same notion, he issued the production order of the Devastator Cannon which was basically just a huge Arc Cannon that was specifically designed to fire a Spirit Bomb warhead at supersonic speeds.

They picked up quite numerous interesting little arrays and catalyst recipes from the Founder’s Cave that limited the possibility of the ammunition suddenly exploding when fired. The trade-off was that for the same effects they had to use a larger delivery system. Which meant the layered ammo they fired from the Devastator was almost a metre in diameter, which compared to the palm-sized cube James used in the Endless Forest, was huge.

The bonus to that however, was that the things were fucking heavy, which meant they could be fired from the city to damn near anywhere in the entire Katsu province without air drag slowing their ammunition to the speed of a sickly dog.

In order to set the thing up without the sudden accidental decimation of the entire city, they decided to once again rebuild the Spire. It soon reached a kilometre into the air which was almost twice the height of the world trade centre.

Strangely, it was just as sturdy and rock solid as if it were a one story building on the ground. If anything, with the more advanced arrays holding it up ... and together, it was even more solid. It also had such an unimaginable pressure on the top floor that even if one of the ammo bombs went off on the roof, it would be like pouring a cup of water into a bathtub.

When James first saw this huge new Spire standing in the middle of the city, he and Skay had a short discussion. Skay readily admitted that it would be catastrophic if the main, secondary and tertiary support arrays were to ever simultaneously fail.

The combined pressure from the top hundred floors would not only flatten the city like a pancake, but it would be the same as 30 megatons instantly colliding with the face of the planet.

The impact alone would decimate the entire Empire. Following that would be the persistent earthquakes that would plague the continent for days. Irreparable damage would be done to the tectonic plate and could actually result in a fracture of the continent as a whole.

Not only that, but the impact would most likely set off the super reactor (because a reactor they couldn’t even measure wasn’t already crazy enough) that was housed below the tower.

Then, not only would it be a 30 megaton impact, but also the detonation of an uncalculatable super reactor and a dozen cube reactors on top of that. Skay wouldn’t say what he thought the result of that explosion would be, but he did mumble something about ‘how the dinosaurs died’.

Doomsday sort of stuff.

Being the kind of person he is. James freely began to advertise all this information. He even vamped it up a bit and declared that if the tower ever fell, the continent would join it. Most people took it for a hoax and a scare tactic. This didn’t stop all the people in power from keeping a wary eye on the horizon and an ear to the ground praying that it was all talk.

-War Room-

After this short week catching up on the city and watching the spire be rebuilt, James joined Goliath in what they referred to as the War Room. Naturally, it was an underground bunker outfitted with all the highest tech and out of this world crap they could stuff inside of it. James had Jasmine designing this thing ever since Artimus first visited his office and started putting thoughts of war in his head.

On the mention of that fact, Artimus had apparently been in contact demanding a meeting with James and saying something about agreeing to the deal. James decided he’d just let Artimus keep sweating for a little bit. Whether Artimus liked it or not, a war that would shake the continent was coming and he could either jump on board with the Dark Brotherhood or hope to ride it out in his tiny little Empire.

Now that James thought about it. The amount of space that the Jetsu mountain range covered was actually many times larger, because it was all stuffed into that strange spatial pocket. That meant regarding relative space within the borders of an empire, Yori was one of the biggest. Still not reaching the size of the three great nations, but definitely close.

Pushing those thoughts aside, James wondered around the war room. It actually had shit all in it apart from a huge table nearly ten meters in diameter. Covering the table was an unnaturally perfect but slightly blurry 3D resemblance of the entire Atsunari continent, with national borders, notable landmarks and cities.

Most of it looked slightly fuzzy and out of sync except for the Yori Empire and a few hundred kilometres of its three surrounding nations. A few glaring problems with the representation were the areas that looked all pixelated and faded into black. The Jetsu Mountain Range for one. These places pot marked the map, but the most glaring area was the place referred to as the black lands.

The entire black lands were ... black. Jasmine literally couldn’t see anything there which left James wondering just what the hell kind of place it was. The next largest area was the Jetsu mountains followed by increasingly smaller areas scattered all over the place.

After a quick look at the map, James made a pinching motion with both hands towards the Yori Empire then spread his hands apart. Following this motion, nothing happened. James then did it a few more times then stopped mid-motion with a twitching eyebrow.

“Jasmine, what’s going on?”

“Hello James. How are you?”

The workout James’ eyebrow got from interacting with Jasmine was enough that he was pretty sure those few muscles that made the twitching motion were the most powerful muscles in his body. With eyebrow working into a furry, James crossed his arms and stared up at the ceiling.

“Jasmine, I’m not starting a polite conversation. Why aren’t the hand movements working?”

“Oh, I’m sorry James. I’m just sooo overworked right now. Maybe if I could possibly redevelop a newer core hardware platform, I could keep up with all the work you have me doing.”

James smelled a rat the moment he heard this. He had checked in with Skay after the last upgrade and was assured by him that Jasmine now had enough processing power to run everything she’d already been doing a million times over. He even let slip that she didn’t even need the last upgrade.

Seeing James silently staring at the roof, or supposedly her, with a frown on his face, Jasmine couldn’t help but give an embarrassed cough. “Ahem ... Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

With that said, the projected map suddenly enlarged in onto the Empire and the few hundred surrounding kilometres that Jasmine had mapped out in full detail using drones. Odd areas soon began to light up all over the place with various colours depicting unmined resources in the Empire.

Quite a few had the seal of the Brotherhood marked on them depicting that the land had already been bought up by Jessy and the area was ready to be cleaned out by the Brotherhood.

James continued to ignore the sudden good behaviour of the map interface and continued to stare at the ceiling with a frown. “Jasmine.”

“...”

“Jasmine!”

“...”

“Jasmine God Damn It! You answer me right now!”

“Yes, Guildmaster James.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand the...”

“Don’t you play dumb with me Jasmine! You tell me this instant!”

“It’s not fair! Everyone else gets to play with cool toys! I wanted one for myself!”

James pinched the bridge of his nose to fend off an incoming headache and then let out a long sigh. “Where is it?”

“Promise you won’t get mad?”

James felt his finger twitching, getting ready to sprint to the reactor and set it off. The only thing preventing this was the fact that he’d most likely be engulfed in the pending spirit explosion holocaust. He placed both hands over his face and groaned into them.

“It’s in the hanger isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t even have any weapons on it yet!”

Hearing the yet declaration James and Goliath shared a look and then sprinted out of the War Room.

-HQ Hanger-

James stood frozen in the hanger staring wide-eyed with shock written on his face. Stood next to him was Goliath and on the other side Skay. Skay seemed to be the only one still cognizant as he watched over his masterpiece with a dreamy grin and chin cupped in hand.

“Magnificent isn’t it?”

James’ eyebrow then started doing its thing and his face slowly developed into a scowl. “What the hell is that thing?”

Skay patted his chest proudly, with a twinkle in his eye and a face filled with pride he smiled broadly and declared; “That my boy, is dominance.”

“It’s a fucking spaceship isn’t it?”

“It’s not a fucking space ship. It’s a true Dropship. That piddling little Velocity thing could hardly be considered more than a cargo plane. You know it’d take us more than 2 hours to fly from this continent to the next closest one and more than 8 to get to the centre of the next continent. With this, we could fly around the world in three days. If you fail to comprehend the magnitude of that statement allow me to simplify. This thing is twice as fast as the velocity.”

“Yeah, it’s also 8 times as big. It must be nearly 2 kilometres long.”

“2.2 to be exact. Not only that, it’s nearly 600 metres in width and houses 31 decks from a hanger bay big enough to fit three velocities side by side and a launch deck capable of dropping 8,000 combatants in groups of 200. That’s just the beginning. It can be run almost entirely by Jasmine and can operate with only a skeleton crew. Even though I say that it has the room to house pretty much the entire 8,000 people required for a full drop.

“Eventually I plan to have Mk V Rail Guns mounted on this beast along with a Devastator, maybe even two of those, then there’s the array powered missiles I’ve been working on along with the pulse cannon and something special I’m sure you’re going to love. I guess also ... it’s capable of breaking the atmosphere and maintaining space operations for a few days.”

James just let out another long sigh as he watched hundreds if not thousands of drones buzzing around a huge exoskeleton of a ship and welding materials in places or running LS3 cables housed in some type of protective rubber Skay cooked up in the lab.

Sparks flew like rain and materials of all kinds were being constantly dragged over by the drone army. It resembled fly’s picking a corpse to pieces in reverse.

James now realised where all that processing power of Jasmines was going. It wasn’t because she had to control so many drones, no that was easy. She had nearly 5,000 drones flitting about in the empire, endless forest and other places all at once. No, the processing power was going into computing the design for this monstrosity.

James could only let out another sigh and then scowled. “How long do you expect to be working on this project?”

Skay scratched his chin and readjusted his glasses. “Hmm, well ... shouldn’t be more than a month or two I suppose. Then it’ll just be a year or two for Jasmine to finish construction and maybe a few months added here or there if we hit any roadblocks that need testing and re-engineering.”

James accepted that for the moment, he couldn’t do anything about the old madman’s desire to build a fucking space ship and that Jasmine no doubt wanted this more than anybody. Considering his options and his care factor, James just let out a grunt then turned to leave the hanger.

“Fine, but Jasmine, you’re to limit your attention on this project. No more than half your processing power. If this project limits your ability to perform your other duties, then I’m going to come down here with a couple gravity bombs, and you can consider the project cancelled. Is that understood?”

“Certainly James.” Replied a cheerful sounding Jasmine.

-Tech City University-

James once more returned to the University. Every month the University hosted one of Tech City’s three challenges. The Science Fair. The whole idea of this challenge was to give academics and scholars a chance to share their knowledge or breakthroughs with their peers.

The rules of the fair were simple. A person or team had half an hour to introduce an interesting idea or project and describe how they planned to implement it. Their idea or project could incorporate anything from arrays and alchemy to basic physics and chemistry. It could span every field from farming to industry and then all the way on to commercial or even just entertainment.

The whole idea was to encourage people to creatively learn more about their world. At least, on the surface it was. James instead had more nefarious reasons for the science fair and looked out solely for powerful minds that he could rope into his guild.

Skay was stretched thin, and if James could conjure up some at least slightly capable scientists, then his guild would rocket forwards.

He’d held this competition just before the Auction and found a few worthy candidates. The best part was that they willingly jumped at the chance to join the guild after he started listing all the things they could study once they joined.

In saying that though ... it wasn’t like they were anything special. They only came up with a few clever ways to use basic arrays that hadn’t been thought of in the lab. In saying that, it shouldn’t go without mentioning that Skay had leapt over huge amounts of research on his path. He simply didn’t have the time to run all the tests that he could in all the thousands of variations that he could.

This was the whole reason James had the idea of starting a science division.

It was now a month later though, and James was fairly certain that there should be some better results. First of all, the number of people to pass basic testing from the elementary courses had quadrupled.

There were now hundreds of people that had managed to wrap their heads around a grade 10 education. To have achieved that in only the few months the courses had been available, with this world’s prior poor ... or rather entire lack of scientific knowledge and theory, was actually quite remarkable.

It was obvious that this could only be attributed to the nature of the implant, but by the same notion, the majority of people had taken 3 months just to complete the first part. That went to show that the few hundred that had already finished were something like the cream of the crop. Not to mention that most of them had actually only studied the 4 elementary implants over the period of 1 or 2 months.

In a theatre of the University, James and the reluctant to waste time on this Skay, sat overlooking an empty stage. One by one a person or group of people would march out onto the stage, usually with some kind of experiment, and try to convince James and Skay that they did something interesting.

Skay looked ready to fall asleep, and James looked like he was already asleep, as yet another group of three walked onto the stage pushing a cart. This trio was much more interesting than the last few, being made up entirely of young scholarly types who couldn’t be much older than James. That meant they were either quite advanced in their cultivation and had stepped into True Spirit in their teens or early twenties, or they were just very young and had brilliant minds.

Either way, both scenarios granted them a glance from James and meant they would be recruited into the guild. Seeing the disinterested looks of the pair in the audience seats, the girl from the trio just shared a look with the two boys like it was to be expected and started unpacking equipment from the cart and setting up what appeared to be an array pattern without saying a thing.

It was one of the most complex and convoluted arrays James had ever seen and had patterns that neither Skay or James remembered ever seeing before. If anything, it actually looked more along the lines of volume formulas, mass and density calculations, molecular bonding diagrams and what James was pretty sure were the atomic makeup of certain materials from the periodic table.

Lore patterns replaced numbers and names and support patterns formed geometric equations and molecular bonds. The foundation patterns did what they always did and powered everything.

They then placed a single copper coin in the centre of the array and the three of them jointly channelled spirit energy into three separate parts of the array. They also each had a different state of matter as their element. Water, Wind and Earth. Or rather, liquid, gas and solid.

Seeing this, James finally became interested and leant forwards in his chair to observe more closely. After a while, the array still failed to activate, and James nudged Skay and nodded.

The duo then walked up to the stage and observed the array pattern. By now they’d somewhat guessed what the trio was trying to prove with this experiment and using everything they could remember from their own array research they looked over their patterns.

James finally broke the silence of the array hall. “Is this the first time you’ve run this experiment?”

The focused and concentrating trio paused for a moment until the girl, who now clearly was the lead in this project replied. “No, we managed to make a gold coin in the University laboratories. It takes a long time to charge the array though.”

She then pulled a coin from her pocket and handed it to James. The coin looked gold in every way until James applied some spirit energy and twisted it in half. It then revealed itself to still be a copper coin plated in gold. James peered closely at the coin then flicked it to Skay, who flipped down his spider eyes and began to flick through his 15 different lenses.

When he was done, he tossed the coin aside and smiled. “Let’s have a crack then shall we boy?” Skay then moved forwards and pushed one of the boys out of the way. James also moved forwards and pushed the girl and the other boy away.

The moment he placed his hands on the two circles they’d been feeding into he realised what the problem was. “I think I know what the issue is old goat. There’s an imbalance. They probably only fluked their first success.”

With that said, he flipped out his black pad and took a picture of the array the trio had painstakingly drawn. After a brief chat with Jasmine, his black-pad flashed a few times. He then pulled Skay over and they spent a few minutes pointing at bits and mumbling to each other.

The trio, who weren’t sure what to make of this mess their project had become got another shock when a drone came flying in through the doors with a bag filled with tins of paint.

James then touched the array pattern on the floor again and it suddenly dissolved into thin air. A projection was then made from his black pad with different parts in different colours, and he and Skay retreated back to the seats.

The trio stared in amazement at the array pattern on the floor. It was definitely their array pattern, but at the same time, it wasn’t. It now had some extra parts they weren’t entirely sure about and was missing some old parts. It also now had three circles on the outmost edge connected only by a single line to the main array formation.

As he sat down, James explained for them. “If your theories are correct, then you’ve discovered something even we never imagined trying. Not just one thing either. If I had to guess it would be at least three. You may, in fact, have changed the very nature of our array pattern research. Now, what I want from you is simple. Re-paint your pattern, and try again. Use the correct colour paint to the corresponding colour of the pattern.”

Without asking questions, the trio then dove into the task at hand. James didn’t actually have to alter their array pattern or help them out with powerful catalysts. He could tell at a glance that what they’ve achieved with this experiment was revolutionary. But the best part about science, is seeing the results of your work yourself.

After a much shorter time than when they’d had to paint the array from memory, the trio finished and started pumping in spirit energy. Very quickly a reaction could be seen, and the array lit up like a Christmas Tree. A sudden influx of primal spirit energy surged into the theatre and filled the array pattern to bursting.

Seeing the array mysteriously fuelling itself, the young trio stepped back and watched their hard work pumping away. Very slowly, the coin began to heat up and vibrate. It soon became red hot and started jumping about inside the array pattern.

The moment it began to move more than a few inches from the centre of the array the array sputtered and died. James returned to the stage and twisted the gold coin into two revealing only a slither of copper still remaining in the centre.

James congratulated the trio, and after some more pleasantries, they were invited to join him later to discuss their research.

From then on the rest of the day was rather boring and the group that changed copper into gold was announced the winners. They were then given 100,000 gold, got a pat on the back from James and the science fair was once again finished for another month.

-The Lab-

The moment Skay and James escaped the university they raced back to the lab and began experimenting with arrays again, much like they had done when they first discovered them. They had just discovered one of the most crucial moments in array pattern history ... for them anyway.

The experiment to turn a copper coin into gold may sound extraordinary, but that wasn’t the true treasure they’d managed to scrape up from this experiment. Instead, it was the notion that they could create their own lore, support and foundation patterns.

The notion never occurred to them because they’d always presumed it was some kind of twisted ancient language and operated based on some system left in place by Ancient cultivators. Instead, it wasn’t a matter of some system left by cultivators but was a law of the universe created from the interaction of dark matter ... or rather spirit energy with structured spirit energy in set patterns.

Coming to this conclusion not only helped them discover a means to create their own array patterns based on their science, but also gave them a glimpse into why and how a person or thing collected and cultivated spirit energy.

The reason the state of mind was so important to first begin gathering spirit energy, was that it caused your brain to send signals in set patterns. It was essentially like creating the simplest and most primal of array patterns by forcing your neurons to restructure when entering meditation.

In much the same way, certain materials could draw in spirit energy and, for lack of a better word, cultivate a certain way of interacting with spirit energy. Skay and James weren’t sure if it was an atomic structure or molecular structure or even something they still couldn’t quite detect, but they were now certain that was the secret of spirit energy.

They still had no guesses as to why there were different forms of refined energy, but they were still new to all this and were well aware they had to take baby steps before they could run.

While pouring over old array patterns, they began to see connections with their own scientific jargon. They still weren’t certain about lore patterns. After some testing, they found that they could use any language to write their law patterns provided they knew what the lore meant when they wrote it.

They then began to suspect that merely the intent when writing lore was enough. To test that theory, they drew an entire pattern, and instead of actually writing any lore in words or characters, they simply made a series of dots or dashes and thought about what that should represent in this array as they painted it.

They quickly found that even though it worked, the array was a lot weaker than if they had used a language they knew the perfect meaning of instead of just an intention. Nonetheless, this was also a remarkable discovery because it meant that it wasn’t just the interaction of spirit energy with the character but the interaction between the spirit energy and the intention.

When they discussed this issue, James suddenly thought back to when he’d been interacting with the storage ring and the spirit jade. That was all done entirely with his intent and his spirit aura. After a few more experiments they found that when releasing their spirit aura filled with their intent while they drew array lore, the array became more responsive. It could determine what it was supposed to be doing faster and reacted quickly when it needed to change stages from say charging to expelling or attraction to gathering.

This opened up a whole new world of research and answered a great many questions. This whole time they’d believed spirit energy was a cause and effect system similar to standard science. They now realised it was more complicated than that.

Spirit Aura was the key they’d had all along but never bothered to look into. It was something James had longed for as a barrier realm but never had the time or inclination to investigate once he actually had it. With that thought in mind, he and Skay began a barrage of experiments to investigate the phenomena.

The first thing they agreed on was that spirit aura was a form of intention that affected the nature of spirit energy and not only could it be left behind inside lore patterns but also influenced your own spirit energy control.

They also theorised that it wasn’t only limited to controlling your own spirit energy but free spirit energy in your surroundings. It was also the reason why refined spirit energy was so special. It’s because refined spirit energy was infused with your spirit aura. Or so they guessed.

How spirit aura was connected to your true spirit, they weren’t yet certain, but the fact that you needed a true spirit to control it made it obvious this step was necessary. After some more testing, they found that people who had condensed a true spirit but hadn’t yet broken through the barrier could still manifest an aura.

After even more testing, it was discovered that using spirit aura was mentally tiring and the mad duo both agreed that your spirit aura was a reflection of your personal willpower and mental acuity. The more willpower, conviction and sharpness of the mind you had, the more control over your spirit aura you could exhibit.

It was proved that when a person released their spirit aura wilfully into their surroundings without a purpose, it essentially froze any free spirit energy in the area. Initially, this wasn’t a strong enough influence to completely freeze the spirit particles but instead only slowed them down. If a strong enough Pressure were to influence particles within the range of someone’s aura, then those particles would still move.

This was tested by setting up some test rooms with arrays built into the walls that worked in the reverse of a gathering array. The rooms would then be filled to a set level of spirit energy concentration based on average saturation levels, and then they would have people enter the room and release their spirit aura.

Without any purpose, simply releasing your aura stopped the motion of spirit particles. A True Spirit realm cultivator could reduce particle movement enough to restrain a commoner and slow a barrier realm. A palace realm was a step above, able to freeze a barrier realm and slightly restraining a true spirit.

This of course was entirely dependent on the other parties own spirit aura power and control. They already guessed that the level of control a person had was dependent on willpower and after more testing, in what they began calling the clean rooms, they believed that a person’s aura strength was not only dependent on willpower, but something entirely different from anything they’d ever witnessed. James was of the opinion it was most likely similar to muscle strength or reflexes and required continuous training to improve.

Perhaps people really did have a soul, and the spirit aura was this thing called a soul that was undetectable.

Saying that though, in this world even if they couldn’t detect it, they could measure the effect it had on the world around it. They pulled out the floor of the clean room and set up a series of scales that measured the pressure created when particles bonded with free spirit energy were forced into the ground.

This allowed them to accurately measure the strength of a person’s aura and somewhat measure their control. At the True Spirit realm, it was markedly harder to control than you might think. Not in the sense that you couldn’t will it to materialise and then will it Pressure everything downwards, but rather in the sense that you couldn’t accurately direct it.

You could control the direction your aura pressured spirit particles to move and even control the strength of it. The problem lay in controlling it to be directional or targeted instead of omnidirectional.

James could intuitively tell how far from his body he could materialise his aura to affect free energy. The problem was that whenever he tried to direct his aura to a specific area, it would always fully release with his body at the centre. He knew that it should be possible to only have it work in a cube area a meter in front of him, but he just couldn’t get it to cooperate that way.

It acted like an amorphous drop of water with a high surface tension. When he tried to split, move or reshape it, the blob would only respond slowly and then very minutely. He was of the opinion this was going to be like breathing techniques, and he was going to have to train it constantly before he could properly coordinate it.

Luckily for him, when he released it and focused enough, it would remain released around him but wouldn’t effect spirit particles at all. Instead, it became somewhat of a third eye that had x-ray vision. It became a form of extra-sensory perception that painted an image of his surroundings based on free spirit energy in the area.

When he started to use it like this, he quickly began to notice little things he hadn’t picked up on in his testing. For starters, whenever someone was in the range of his aura he could tell even more easily how powerful their cultivation was instead of only knowing from a glance that they were in a certain realm.

Not only that, but he began to ‘see’ or rather, ‘feel’, just how much unrefined spirit energy permeated everything. Every form of matter and energy was filled with spirit energy. Not just things like the earth or the air but even the photons of sunlight had spirit energy attached to it.

The only downside to this experience was that it gave him a mind-numbing headache. During the course of their research, they glanced back through everything they’d managed to collect on cultivation and found numerous references discussing ‘soul pressure’, or ‘divine will’ and other things that sounded similar to this phenomenon.

When they’d seen things like this before, they’d not paid much attention to it because they had no reference to understand it. Now that they had discovered some of the intricacies of their aura, they finally grasped what these things were talking about.

According to some of the literature they’d scrounged up over the past few months, Soul Pressure was the act of influencing the world around you with the power of your soul. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find anything discussing the state of mind that they could reach which created the inner eye, extra perception things James could now experience.

The few references they had found only referred to more nonsense about souls. James was of the opinion that this was all hogwash and that they simply didn’t have the means to understand what exactly this was yet. Skay remained unusually silent on his thoughts regarding discussions of such a nonsensical thing as the soul.

Regardless of the thoughts they each had on the matter, the both loved the idea of the soul pressure and soul sense.

Skay, mostly because it gave him a more in-depth view of the spirit energy world and James because he could now see behind locked doors ... also because he believed that this was the missing link in their artefact workmanship. He believed the ‘forging with the soul’ that the Gau Founder’s notes referenced was actually talking about using Soul Pressure to implant your will into the artefact you were forging in much the same way as writing array lore infused with will, this should supposedly help the artefact influence spirit energy.

Another week passed as they did this testing. It had now been a month since the auction. It was also time for the Gau clan to send their first batch of disciples for training with the Brotherhood.

-Endless Forest - Boot Camp-

The boot camp was a horrid place. At least, that’s what anyone that had ever had to suffer through it would tell you. Boot Camp was James’ special way of welcoming new members to the guild and was also used by the two generals of Star City and Tech City for training their security Pressures.

It was a little camp positioned far out in the middle of the forest. James had discussed this with the Dryad and she readily showed him to a sparse area of forest that was riddled with true spirit level spirit animals. They were far less intelligent than spirit beasts but had the same level of spirit energy. They just hadn’t managed to condense a beast core yet.

The camp was designed by James to drill Barrier and True Spirit cultivators into disciplined fighting machines. They didn’t bother with Palace Realm cultivators because normally they were limited by their cultivation methods being so crap. In other words, they were usually crotchety old bastards.

That wasn’t to say that Palace Realm cultivators weren’t free to join the boot camp, it just meant that it wasn’t exactly designed for them. If it were designed for them, then they would probably die from stubbornness during their training.

The boot camp had been running since Star City was constructed and had 4 drill instructors that were the first survivors of the camp. Normally James and Goliath didn’t attend the boot camp to instruct, but they made an exception today because of the ten Gau Clan disciples that they promised the clan they would give 24 hours of training to.

Normally a person had to go through a week, and if James hadn’t been so pressed for time before now, they would be taking at least a month. Regardless of that, he decided that if he was going to train these disciples for a day, then it was going to be done here.

The beauty of the boot camp was a special little wristband made of strange minerals and covered with arrays. This was what James called the Mortal Coil. Usually, once a person had spirit energy they needed less sleep and rarely needed to eat. Because of that, it made it difficult to create stressful survival situations.

That was until he found some interesting arrays in the collection sent to him from Rex. One of them created the sensation of starvation. At first it isn’t that bad, until a few hours in and it’s started to kick in. The longer you were affected, the more hungry you would get.

By the same token, he had another array that made a person feel tired and exhausted. These were the arrays that were on the Mortal Coil. These two arrays would feed the two greatest needs a human being had to ensure their survival. To eat and sleep. It also created a situation in which these people had to focus their minds against the ever present nagging of need and had to control their urges.

Joining the students from the Sword Hall was Grace. James had a special Mortal Coil made up for her that amplified the effects tenfold. Not only that, but he also gave her a little black box about the size of a fist with a devil carved onto the side and told her to keep it safe after giving her a little leather pocket pouch.

This black box was just as sinister as it looked. This was something he and Skay cooked up in the lab after the big discoveries made from the transmutation array. The moment Grace attached the pouch with the little box she realised what it does.

For an area of 2 metres around her, primal spirit pressure suddenly disappeared. More accurately it was pushed away. This little box acted as a barrier that prevented her from drawing in primal energy to replenish her refined energy.

James’ customary smile of the devil appeared, and he started filling everyone in on today’s training. “First of all, no one is to remove your Mortal Coil. This artefact is designed to stimulate your survival instincts and distract the mind. It will force you to push your limits of self-control. I will know if anyone removes it and that will be the last time you train on my time.

“You will receive instruction in combat from method and practice to thought and action. Because we only have 24 hours, your instruction time will be shorter than most, but I expect each of you to complete the same amount of progress I would see from trainees that normally spend a week here.”

James and Goliath then took turns teaching combat tactics for both single fights and warfare. They then had their youngest drill instructor, who was still in the barrier realm, come and beat up all the true spirit realm disciples from the Gau Clan.

James personally took some pleasure in pressuring Grace to admit defeat. She knew very well that with the limiter on her hip, she wouldn’t last the rest of the day if she allowed James to draw her into a drawn out battle. Which was exactly what he’d planned to do.

He made a point of showing that she chose to retreat instead of fight a war of attrition she knew she couldn’t win. He didn’t state it in a goading fashion, but rather in an attempt to reinforce smart battle tactics. Grace was well aware that was why he pointed it out, but it still rubbed her the wrong way.

The day continued on until night, and then everyone got split into groups and dropped a hundred kilometres away in the forest. Each group had an observer from the boot camp flying about on an Air Board yelling loudly at them on what not to do when in enemy territory.

The drill instructors always got a kick out of very loudly reminding them that silence is one of the most important parts of moving around in dangerous places.

While this was going on, Skay was doing absolutely nothing to help the top craftsmen of the Gau Clan. Instead, he’d chosen to sit them all down, pump about a quarter of everything they had on crafting, alchemy and arrays into their heads with an implant then said they could ask questions next time and kicked them all out.

Although it wasn’t the 24 hours of sharing information they’d wanted, it was still a great deal of interesting and useful information. Especially the array patterns. Getting a direct implant on some of the Brotherhoods arrays was like finding an endless pot of gold. Memorising them was one of the hardest parts of array patterns.

Little did they know that Skay was busily researching array mechanics magnitudes ahead of what they just got a glimpse of.

Eventually, the next day came and Gau clan met back at their mansion to discuss their experiences which apparently varied. Everyone from the Sword Hall now firmly believed that James was the incarnation of evil. Grace had only confirmed her opinion of the boy after their jaunt in the forest, in which James liberally sprayed something labelled ‘Allure’ onto her which attracted a horde of beasts that chased her the entire way back to the camp.