Chapter 338

Princess Yekaterina is sitting cross-legged in front of Jacob, who is sitting in a similar fashion. She touches an elaborate pickaxe that’s resting on her lap and says, “To mine Skill Crystals, you first have to peel away Mana Crystal Stone until you reach a node.”

“Um, what’s a node, and how do you peel the thing away?” Jacob interrupts her.

“I was about to say. Mana Crystal Stone is an extremely dense substance from which Mana crystals are born. A Mana crystal is the early form of a Skill Crystal. When it’s just Mana, it has what we call multipotence, meaning its potential is still to be defined. The most skilled miners can approach Mana Crystal Stone with such a neutral aura that by the time they reach the node, the Mana Crystal Stone has been influenced so little by the miner that the Skill in it can still become many, many things. But let’s say, for example, that you have a great fire affinity, and so your Mana is naturally carrying a fire affinity.”

She looks intently at Jacob.

“Uh, yeah. Are you talking about me?”

“Yes,” she says snappily.

They’re still in the dormitory, and Princess Yekaterina has sent her bodyguards to man the door outside. She hasn’t revealed her identity yet, but if Jacob didn’t know about it, he would still think this was all very uncanny.

“The Mana transference to a node starts the moment you start mining it. That is why the first and most important part of mining is to shave the Mana Crystal Stone around the Mana node without releasing any foreign Mana into it. Unless that is what you want — someone like you would naturally generate fire-tuned Skill Crystals. You could learn, for example, to create versions of Skills you already own and sell those. But — an interesting fact — if you want Skills that complement your style, and more importantly, Skills that round out your reserve…”

“What do you mean, round out your reserve?” Jacob frowns at the technicalities.

“Everybody has something they’re not good at. We call the reserve just the amount of Skills you have, but in that reserve, there’s always something amiss. Someone might not have a good defensive Skill. Someone might not have a good offensive Skill. Someone might lack utility, healing, anything. Perception. But here’s the catch. You will never generate the right Skill by injecting the Mana you currently have into the Mana Crystal Stone. It will just reflect what you already have. And so, to gain the right Skill Crystal, you must veer away from what you have already mastered into unknown territory.”

Princess Yekaterina looks very self-satisfied with her answer, but Jacob’s just looking confused.

“Are you saying I should already know what I need, have mastered it in such a way that I can emit that kind of Mana? And by the way, I have no idea what, for example, emitting Perception Mana would be like. And then I have to shave away Mana Crystal Stone and influence a Mana node. All of this with something I do not have that I need so that I can round out my style. And therefore, I kind of need to master it before I even master it? This makes no sense.”

She looks at Jacob and, in a very unroyal way, facepalms hard.

“You do not possess any sense of the depth and inner poetry that Mana carries with it.”

“I have no idea what that is.” Jacob shrugs. “I grew up in a very poor mine in a very poor city, lady. I’ve never dealt with poetry.”

Princess Yekaterina looks tired and says, “Okay, I’ll put it like this. You cannot know what you want unless you act.”

“What?” Jacob is just looking more and more confused.

“If I were to want to shoot a fireball, how would I know without seeing how a fireball is generated?”

“I mean, you can have the idea of a fireball, and then you say, oh, I want to shoot fireballs, and you go buy the right Skill Crystal,” Jacob says.

“No.” The princess shakes her head. “That is how the uninitiated talk. You must look for the power that comes from a fireball and then, through that, walk back. How is a fireball generated? What sensation, what Mana veins might generate such a thing? From there, you will slowly gain the understanding and enlightenment needed — once you approach an uninfluenced Mana node — to generate a fireball Skill Crystal before you can even cast a fireball.”

“So, like rehearsing the steps of a fireball before knowing how to cast the proper fireball? Sort of imagining how you must do something?”

“Indeed,” Princess Yekaterina says. “The Skill Crystal will fill in the rest, but that is where you should start looking: in your own mind, in your own imagination. That is why I compared Mana to poetry. The creativity you will need is often impossible to teach. It is often a gift, and even then, the process holds so many flaws that one must account for. Even shaping the Mana to mine the Mana Crystal Stone is so hard that it takes decades sometimes to reduce the flaws to a minimum before you can ever mine a Skill Crystal. Some enter mines without Mana Crystal Stone searching for enlightenment after they hit a bottleneck, in order to empty their affinities and become one with the dead rock, so that they might return to a primordial state of multipotence.”

So that’s what my father was doing, Jacob thinks. Did he come from this place?

“Okay. So, about the pickaxe, how does that work?”

“You must hold Mana around the blade this way.”

Princess Yekaterina closes her eyes briefly, and a coat of Mana appears around the head of her pickaxe. Jacob sees that it’s extremely dense and compact, and more importantly, he notices that this is not a Skill.

“That’s a Primordial Spell,” he says.

“Yes. It is a very simple incantation and technique to learn. But it is almost impossible to master. Therefore, let me teach you. Watch this and learn.”

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Jacob activates the Primordial Grimoire and scans Princess Yekaterina’s spell.

[Primordial Spell: Wrath of Blade.]

[Flaw Analysis: 254 flaws found.]

Jacob looks at the number of flaws as Yekaterina teaches him the spell, and feels a huge headache incoming.

- - -

“What is he doing?” Volkov asks the princess, with his arms crossed in front of him. “Why does he want to make a fool out of himself?”

“He said that it was pretty easy to understand, so…” Princess Yekaterina shrugs.

Jacob has mapped all the major flaws of the spell in such a way that, if he manages to account for all of them, it would be extremely easy to mine in an almost flawless way. But rather than just practicing alone in the dormitory, it makes much more sense for him to do so in front of a wall of Mana Crystal Stone.

He looks at the pickaxe that Rafnov gave him, and he closes his eyes.

There are twelve main flaws that require careful focus, but they shouldn’t be too hard to execute. It’s just Mana vein rerouting. So he starts circulating his Mana and then starts slowly pushing it out through the head of the pickaxe. He raises it above his head and strikes.

The strike, unlike the swing that almost sent him into a coma, is rather slow and chips at the outer layer of the stone, literally trying to peel it away. But the moment the blade touches the stone, despite Jacob having perfectly arranged the Mana circulation across his body, everything backfires. The stone itself destabilizes the Primordial Spell and sends him into a spin, creating a turbulence in his Mana veins and making him recoil and spit a mouthful of blood.

“What are you doing?” Princess Yekaterina runs to his side. “Have you lost your mind? Are you trying to modify the Primordial Spell I gave you? There’s a reason why we use it this way. It’s the most efficient. The Mana stone attacks back when you try to destroy it.”

Jacob looks at the princess, still coughing blood, and says, “Couldn’t you have said something?”

“I didn’t think you would be so foolish as to alter a Primordial Spell you’ve never used before. What arrogant, mindless fool would try something like that?”

Jacob rubs his face and wipes his lips with his sleeve. Then he looks again at the pickaxe.

“You guys have arranged this Primordial Spell this way because it’s more resistant to the Mana Crystal Stone, you said.”

“Yes. It is not the perfect way to execute the spell, but the spell itself appears to be an endless pit of Mana. So it’s either used this way, or the Mana Crystal Stone fights back too hard and makes it impossible to break it.”

Jacob looks at the stone and then says, “Well, if it’s all about the Primordial Spell…”

He unsheathes his sword.

“Do you wanna try attacking the Mana Crystal Stone with your weapon?” Princess Yekaterina asks. “Have you lost your mind? You’re going to destroy that blade.”

“I’m not stupid,” Jacob says. “I can see that it’s very hard. That’s not what I wanna do. This is a little catalyst, you could call it.” He holds up the sword.

“A catalyst for Primordial Magic?” Princess Yekaterina asks.

“Yeah, something like that.”

The second seal of King Baalrek’s sword — which Jacob starts to think he should call his own sword by now — is a massive Primordial Magic amplifier. It required eating through so much Mithril and absorbing the Sword Art of King Baalrek, something Jacob still has to use. And most importantly, drinking the blood of two divine incarnations.

You needed one, Jacob thinks, but I got one and a half, actually.

He has yet to try and use it, so he grasps the hilt tightly and channels his Mana, first through the sword, and then through the pickaxe once again.

“Increasing the power is just gonna get him killed,” Gromov says. “Your High—” He stops himself. “Milad—” He stops himself. “Miss, could you tell him not to kill himself?”

“Let the fool be. He’s clearly too arrogant for his own good,” Volkov comments.

Jacob gives them a side glance, barely bothered, and then raises his pickaxe with only one hand.

Using a Primordial Spell such as that one with only one arm, when it requires a two-arm loop, is foolishness, Princess Yekaterina thinks.

But then, as she looks at Jacob from behind, her mind flashes to a painting back in the keep. It’s a representation of Rafnov, one of the many that have been painted by who knows who in the keep, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. More importantly, it’s the only painting where Rafnov is not depicted with his pickaxe only. He’s holding a sword and a pickaxe. Princess Yekaterina always thought that it was a representation meant to display the destructive power of Rafnov alongside his incredible understanding of mining and Mana. That it was a symbol.

But now, looking at Jacob Cloud do the same, something needles the back of her mind.

A thin layer of Mana appears on Jacob’s pickaxe, from the haft to the blade, and then suddenly covers all of him as well, the blade shining brightly. And then he lowers it slowly, so very slowly that he looks like he’s barely moving. It hooks into a small rock.

Princess Yekaterina has a wealth of Skills related to mining, and she can see the loose concentric circles of the Mana stone — of its flow, of where it would be ideal to strike. And from the way Jacob acted before, she knows he has no such Skill. And yet he hooks the pickaxe perfectly, right between two circles. And with barely any strength behind it, he peels away the stone, which crumbles like cold butter and falls to the ground without a sound.

All those present are stunned, and the princess says, “Call the foreman, Volkov.”

Volkov takes a few beats and then breaks into a run.

Jacob, in the meanwhile, is moving the pickaxe with motions no one would have imagined before. He’s not going from above in a swing. He’s moving it like he’s carving something, slowly peeling the rock away at the perfect intersections of the Mana-flow circles that the stone is made of. And Princess Yekaterina sees that even as he moves toward the inner circles, where the flow is getting tighter and tighter, he still manages to pick them off just like that, easily, releasing no excess Mana, in a flawless way — such a way that she has never seen before. Even the most experienced miners she knows in her own family are not capable of anything like this.

As she looks harder, she sees that the sword is just amplifying the power, but that he is the one channeling it throughout his whole body — not just the blade of the pickaxe, but his entire figure. And that’s why there is no excess Mana in his strikes. That’s why the Mana flow is disrupted so easily. Even just a little bit of power emitted from the pickaxe would mean that the Mana Crystal Stone would react and fight it and try to repel its intrusion — that it would try and push him away, hurt him, sometimes kill him, if Jacob pushed too forcefully. But by acting so gently — by being in concert, in complete communion with his own Mana, and covering himself from head to toe with it — Jacob is capable of peeling it away masterfully with no wasted motion.

Just when Foreman Ivan gets there, Jacob has reached his first Mana node. He takes a step back, dispelling his technique, and looks cockily at the stunned four.

“Not bad for the first time, huh?”

He approaches the node, getting a pretty decent idea of where things stand. A movement Skill that channels my Heartfire better through my legs would be nice. He’s starting to envision it pretty precisely, thinking he’s got a pretty good idea. And then he uses the Grimoire again.

[Primordial Grimoire Analysis.]

[Flaws found: 9,999.]

He even hears Princess Yekaterina let herself say, “He might really be our kingdom’s savior.”

Jacob swallows and slowly approaches the Mana node, trying his hardest to channel his vision — all while the flaws keep appearing in the Grimoire, alerts going off in his head.

“He might be the chosen one,” Foreman Ivan says.

But then, as soon as Jacob touches the Mana node, it explodes in a shower of splinters.

They are normal splinters, and they can do nothing to his empowered physique. But behind him, the foreman says, “What the hell was that? Never seen something like that. Not even a child has ever gotten that effect.”

Jacob looks at his Grimoire and realizes.

Holy shit. It’s because I can see all the damn flaws.