Chapter 951 - This ring is not gold

[Parasite seed dark eons fruit]:

The fruit of a parasitic plant that grows a mana reserve to help sustain its host. The stronger the host body, the more the plant and its reserve can grow. In perfect conditions, it is known to flower about once every ten thousand years, producing one fruit.

Tends to destroy the host's digestive system to take its place.

Consumption before level 250 is not recommended.

Quite different from the Demon King’s note. It’s nice to have the actual [Identify] back, even if the out-of-body casting is a bit exhausting still.

So… Is my belly going to grow a flower in ten thousand years? How does that even work?

I suppose I can worry when I get there…

Alright, well… Do I actually eat the fruit and then swallow the seed whole? Or do I need to swallow the entire fruit at once? I don’t think that’ll fit.

Sofia opened her mouth wide but the fruit was just a bit too big to fit through her teeth. She considered just stabbing her chest and dumping it directly into her fake stomach, but then thought that having not been given any special directions, it was probably fine to just eat the fruit normally.

She took a forceful bite, under the leathery purple external layer was perfectly white and juicy flesh, with a lightly sweet and bitter taste. It only took that one bite and Sofia’s mouth and throat started going a bit numb.

Oooooh. I can see why someone at a lower level might have a hard time with this. That is some potent stuff.

Even for Sofia whose blood and nervous system were made of light, the fruit’s juice by itself still made her feel like she was actually taking some kind of powerful anaesthetic. After a few bites she could see the seed, which looked like a small hard ball of wood more than anything else. She swallowed it in one go, barely feeling it go down her throat, and followed its progression with her mana senses.

The seed actually stopped long before even making it to her stomach, it somehow slipped through the lining of her throat, and made its way down through her chest, pushing aside her few organs and slipping though what it couldn’t push.

Making it to the space under her diaphragm it stopped, and did nothing for a while.

Is it broken?

Does it not understand why my gut is mostly empty?

I do have a lot of free space there…

After a few more minutes, the seed slipped further down, growing tiny root-like tendrils that latched onto her spine just under her stomach, and the seed started to slowly germinate.

Sofia stopped observing it with her mana senses.

“I can not even feel it in there… Looks like it’s going to take a while.”

Sonia won’t be available for a few more days… I’ll just finish the leveling cube. It’s almost done.

Over the next five days Sofia worked restlessly on finishing the giant leveling cube just outside of her city, most of the complex internal structure she had already completed over many small sculpting sessions, so what remained was primarily laying out the thick layers of bones separating the different strata. The huge cubic construction next to the slime leveling farm was attracting quite a few eyes, raising questions in the quickly growing ‘Extra weekly’ newspaper but nobody dared to intrude on Sofia’s private space to ask what the thing really was.

By the time Sofia was adding the finishing touches on the leveling cube, the parasite seed was fully settled inside of her. It took quite a bit of space, like a third, fully inflated lung under her stomach. From what she could tell, the inside was like a sponge, slowly filling with her own mana, while the outside seemed to be a veiny mess, but was actually a rather complex network of roots constantly swirling her mana around.

It is not just taking my mana and creating a reserve, it’s redistributing it by itself? It’s mostly going toward the raw consumption of my muscles and brain it seems? Generally they just take that directly from my regeneration but it’s barely worth noting. Maybe this is more efficient somehow?

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It’s filling up very slowly but there’s already about a million in there and it’s far from full.

Sofia stopped everything else, and laid down on top of her cube to observe this new organ of hers closely. It had taken some blueprint space, but barely enough to register, observing it fill up over a few hours she came to some early conclusions.

So it only takes in mana if my mana is already full, and it can absorb… About one third of my base regeneration per second… in one hour.

That is so very very slow.

The capacity is rather large, though. It can probably hold about a hundred million mana, either a coincidence, or just half of my maximum capacity. At this rate… About nineteen days to fully fill up with the mana I would regenerate in just under fifty seconds in sunlight.

It’s definitely not the most impressive thing I’ve seen, but having an extra 50% of my mana on hand in an emergency? Yeah that is quite nice to have.

With this I can even afford to waste a hundred and fifty millions on a [Lock-Step] cast and not be totally disarmed afterwards if I really need to.

Besides, since mana regeneration doubles every filter, wouldn’t this thing’s filling speed double as well? It would take about one day to fill up for an Ascended then. Pretty good.

Trying to pull the mana from the parasite’s reserve was as natural as taking it from her own, it was still her own mana, after all. All in all, once Sofia got past the disquieting feeling of having another entity living inside of her, she was quite satisfied with its utility.

The following three weeks passed in a flash, Sofia followed Sonia to get the promised corpse of a god, who had been in the forbidden layer for so long that there wasn’t even anything close to a memory for her to receive this time, nor any bones, really, only the very noticeable divine corruption that the ring quietly devoured. The ring provided Sofia with a vision of another corpse’ location after that, and it was only a matter of going where it was to get it. The leveling cube was fully prepared, and Sofia was almost done memorizing all she needed to.

During this time, she also officially launched her castle’s shop selling bone sculptures, ingots of her own bones, a ton of surplus from her storage ring, and the books she had multiple copies of. Alith had her own side of the shop for her alchemy business, but what by far got the most visitors was the gold ring service.

Sofia had procured a small object dating device from Richard, and any gold ring that tested as being over ten years old, the shop would buy at thrice the going rate of pure gold. The goal was obviously to find the lost Saint set’s ring, which was much older than a short ten years, but the point was to draw as many people as possible to sell their rings here, without creating a market for buying gold and crafting gold rings to resell to her for a profit.

Before long, the shop attracted many people into Sofia’s castle, and she had to hire a full time shopkeeper as well as a few more staff, consequently rushing to finish the staff living quarters on the first floor. She also started to let a few trusted people and loyal city officials buy library passes, making the castle that much more lively.

Standing on top of her leveling cube, Sofia idly played around with the jade slip puzzle she had gotten from Alkorm a long time ago and still not solved. Every time she got stronger and better at controlling her mana, she managed to push it a little further, but there was still no end in sight. It was like an endless maze full of traps hidden inside of such a tiny object.

“There better be some reward at the end for how tough this thing is…”

Sofia looked at the people coming and going in her streets, then at the sky.

“Finally time to level up and make some new skills… Let’s just get one more jump in before that…”

Sofia closed her eyes, looking for a new target to transpose to more than a lightyear away.

Hmmmm… Let’s look for a smaller one this time… Last few very big ones were all just rocks… I really need something interesting for once.

After a few minutes of scouring the star map, Sofia found her new target, a small blip almost at the limit of her transposition range, originating from light she emitted just after her Lumian race change.

Pareth, Pestle and Bookie were doing something else so Sofia only brought Crowie with her.

From the bright daylight, her surroundings became black like ink.

At first she saw nothing around her.

Did I miss?!

But upon closer inspection, she found an object rapidly drifting away in the far reaches of her aura. She had to hurry just to catch up to it.

It turned out that the object was simply painted with a pure black, which was why it was hard to see. Sofia latched onto it, wrapping it in her mana to observe it in detail. Her mana senses couldn’t find a way inside.

It’s a space temple! It has to be! This is clearly some complex technology! Are there people inside?

There was a short moment of hesitation, but seeing how different the exterior looked in design compared to what she knew of the Dark Epoch, Sofia guessed it likely wasn’t from them. The structure was about five times the size of her castle in Ser’Extra, not small but not gigantic either, shaped like a big ring with flat sides, she felt like she could explore it all in a few minutes and quickly return. It did not seem to be very alive, or reacting to her and her mana in any way, so giving up on finding the entrance, Sofia had the graveyard Nymphs pull her inside. Mana had a hard time passing through the walls, but ghosts did not.