Chronicles of the True Wizard

Over the next 4 months, Felix fell into a strict schedule of working out for 2 hours followed by 2 hours of practicing the Dragon's Dance. Grim had given him new forms and he felt he was getting close to ready for the next step. The remaining 20 hours were split amongst two different activities, the first of which was simple enchanting work. At the start, he spent almost 10 hours a day designing, inscribing and testing enchantments on his armor with the ultimate goal of creating some sort of mage armor like spell.

He had a series of inscribed mana shields of various sizes and shapes all interlocked around his body. He didn't have access to very many shapes or any ways of curving and bending the structures though so the spell was not ideal by any means. It was however, very usable. If he could see an attack coming his way, he could effectively just push mana into that area of his armor to create a mana shield and defend himself.

The other activity that ate up the last 10 hours every day was working on his body. He was already working out, and he noticed himself getting stronger, entirely due to his much greater awareness of his own body. He also had a much greater level of control over his body, even though he wasn't nearly ready to actually redesign anything, he did feel like he could make a simple change. Felix began slowly forcing his cells to grow denser, each one smaller and closer together without making them weaker or less flexible.

His daily workout and Dragon's Dance were a huge help in making sure he could still use all his muscles and making sure nothing got too tight. With the daily stretching, Felix was confident he wasn't causing any permanent harm, but he still proceeded with caution. He spent the most time and effort on his bones and slightly less on his muscles. He was most confident that strengthening his bones would have the least side effects followed by his muscles. At first, he didn't dare touch his brain and only slightly touched his more vital organs.

After the first month or so, Felix was finally satisfied with his armor inscriptions. All of his tests, in his lab and in real combat were finally satisfactory. He had found minor improvements and iterated many times but he had finally gotten to a point he was happy with. With that complete, he had 10 hours a day freed up that he spent on a couple of different things.

Firstly, he drained mana from his tower's mana engine and funneled it into his soul space daily. Over the last four months, he managed to expand it to a sphere just over 240 meters across using 4.3 billion mana. He also spent some time loading up his inventory with mana batteries, just in case. He had initially planned on just using the absurd amount of mana in his soul space as a reserve but found that it was far too difficult to remove the mana for it to be usable in combat. Removing mana resulted in his soul space shrinking a bit, which wasn't comfortable, and the process of removing it was heavily limited by the how big he could make the opening to his soul space. It was much faster for him to push mana in than to pull it out.

Nova had learned to fly at some point and spent most of their time out hunting. They had come back and gotten Felix to teleport them to the main continent at some point, he assumed just for a change of pace. Nova had spent the last third or so of the 4 months there.

As he progressed, Felix was happy with the results of his working out and cell compression. The compression had netted him fewer stats every day completely halting around the hundredth or so day. He had mostly gained endurance, strength and agility with a slight increase to all the other stats, except intelligence. Along with the working out, he was just about at the limit of his restrictive equipment and would have to come up with an alternative soon.

He was sorely disappointed though that he hadn't yet found a way to increase his intelligence. He felt like he had the tools to do so but just didn't know how and was too scared to just try something. All of the other parts of his body were simple in comparison, his bones, skin, muscles and some of his vital organs he could simply compress and grow back to their original size. Effectively, he could just make them denser, push his cells to be more efficient.

Brains were so much more complicated though. He was worried that if he made it denser, added any cells, or even just altered their function even slightly, he would accidentally ruin memories or change his personality. Grim assured him his soul would protect his personality and the harm would be minimal but Felix was still just too worried to try anything, at least for the first three months.

At the start of the fourth month, Felix had decided he wanted to increase his brain's speed. He figured that change should be relatively safe and he was very careful to test it on a tiny portion of his brain that he was pretty sure controlled part of his motor control. It was a success but the difference was negligible. On the other hand, he couldn't find any adverse effects so he slowly spread the effect to the rest of his brain. He limited use of his brain as much as he could over the course of the upgrade, remaining in a meditation for the few days it took to complete. When he was done, he had increased his intelligence by almost a hundred points as well as his dexterity and agility by about half that. The increase was disappointing in quantity but Felix was just happy to have increased his intelligence at all. He was beginning to worry he might have to switch to a melee fighter if he wasn't able to increase his intelligence somehow.

Overall, he was pretty happy with his progress. He knew he wasn't where he could have been had he figured out soul harvesting, but the enchanting work did wonders to increase his profession level allowing him to hit level 191. The manual modifications to his race along with working out every day had resulted in between 100 and 1000 per stat, with intelligence being the lowest and endurance the highest. The majority of the stats came from his manual modifications, even though they were minor modifications and all he did was make everything slightly more dense.

His daily work out had gradually resulted in less stats per day but he figured it was still worth it as the stats were pretty much free. He had also thought about practicing the Dragon Dance in his soul garden for the time dilation, but ultimately decided against it so he could keep growing used to his body. He also didn't feel overly pressed for time. He continued to put all of his free points into intelligence as he hadn't reached the ratio limit of 5 between his highest and lowest stats yet. The only other changes were that his Core Energy Infusion skill had reached Initiate II and the stat increase had risen to 90% and his Dragon Dance skill was now Novice III.

Name: Felix Kade FREE 0

Innate: Ascendant Prodigy: Mana (Wizard) STR 4746

Class: [D - Epic] Soul Harvester (Lvl 135) DEX 8204

Race: [D - Unique] Wanderer (Lvl 163) AGI 4745

Profession: [D - Arcane] Mana Engineer (Lvl 191) PER 7957

Health: 37650/37650 VIT 3765

Mana: 1975270/1975270 INT 17957

Energy: 213280/213280 END 5332

The time had finally come for the next world council meeting though. If Felix's estimate was correct, the screen would appear in just a few hours. He had a couple of things he needed to do first though so he teleported to Atalus. First he found Noah and gifted him his Amulet of the Wild. He was expecting a more surprised reaction when he saw the item but apparently it was known and a few of them had popped up here and there. He could have sold it but honestly, he was more than rich enough and felt no need to make the effort. Noah helped him a ton with managing the entire city and he deserved a bonus here and there.

Then, Felix ran through the commerce district until he found what he was looking for. He walked into a specialty soap shop and settled on a minty bar of shampoo and a citrus one for body wash. He bought the shop's entire stock of 25 of each bar totaling 500 credits. He quickly flew into the river and scrubbed himself clean as best he could, lathering and rinsing multiple times as it had been a while since he had cleaned himself. With his thicker skin, it was harder for dirt to stick to it, his cells lived longer so there were less dead cells and his body regulated temperature better so there was minimal sweat. However, he still felt kind of gross and didn't want to show up to the meeting without having cleaned himself. His armor was easy to clean as nothing seemed to stick to it so a simple rinse removed everything, though he used a little bit of body wash to make it smell nice.

Once he was done with that, he dressed himself and flew up into the air then flew as fast as he could in the direction of Nova. He followed their soul bond which he had mostly dulled over the last four months just so he wouldn't feel all the emotions pouring through. Nova wasn't great at managing their own emotions as they were still mostly new to them and they didn't filter them out of the soul bond so Felix had initially been hit by a roller coaster.

The emotions jumped rapidly between nervous, adrenaline, joy, hunger, tired and bored. Initially Felix didn't realize they were affecting him until he was meditating and noticed his emotions jumping around randomly for no apparent reason. Grim had instructed him on the very simple solution of simply dulling everything that was sent through. They would still affect Felix, but this way he could also feel it if Nova needed help or consciously tried to communicate with him. Felix had then worked from there to filter the emotions so that he didn't need to dull them at all. He practiced splitting them off from his own emotions so that he was aware of them, but they no longer had a direct effect on him. Essentially he was stepping back and watching the emotions roll through the bond instead of having them carelessly pour into his own soul. Now Felix had almost entirely tuned out the emotions in his day to day occasionally taking a peek just so he didn't feel like he was abandoning them.

He flew south east through the plains and up into the mountain range on the east coast of the continent where he found Nova. Had he not had a soul bond with his familiar, he wouldn't have recognized them at all. When he had retrieved and teleported Nova 40 or so days ago, they were the same black kitten as always. Now, Felix looked down at the mountains where he saw a massive panther leaping through the air at ridiculous speeds to catch demonic looking goat creatures. Nova was almost the size of a horse and entirely made of what looked like metal. It seemed as though they had done away with the idea of using the actual corpses of animals and was instead replicating them using other materials it had eaten.

He watched as Nova's claws glowed and streaked lightning through the creature as it ripped open the side of it's body. The demonic goat leapt away bleating and bleeding as it did so. It was extraordinarily fast, but Nova was much faster and managed to catch it in it's jaw before it even hit the ground. Felix did his best to keep up with the fight but both creatures were evidently faster and stronger than he was, by a fairly large margin.

Nova killed the creature by breaking it's neck then laid down and let out a gentle stream of fire from it's mouth, bathing it's kill in flames. It then devoured the creature as Felix descended next to it. He was wary at first because Nova's level along with the other creatures on the mountain were much higher than his, but he didn't see anything else nearby so he proceeded with caution. He watched Nova devour the creature with a completely out of place flesh tongue that caused Felix to frown in confusion. He tuned in to Nova's emotions and was actually astonished to realize that Nova was using the tongue so that it could taste the creature as it was consumed.

It can tune into the taste buds or brain and experience taste?

Seems like it.

Awesome.

Grim just chuckled in Felix's head.

Felix waited patiently for Nova to finish consuming it's prey then knelt down to pet it's metallic head. As soon as he did so, it shifted back into a familiar black cat in an instant and leapt onto his shoulder then crawled into the folds of his robes. Felix flew into the air as fast as he could and headed back towards Atalus as he wanted to get out of the domain of creatures that out leveled him by a factor of two at the least. He was surprised, proud and sad to see Nova at such a high level, only sad because he felt like he was falling behind. He was hoping to catch up soon, but as it stood, Nova out leveled him quite a bit. Felix also suspected Nova's stats were greater than his by quite a bit, at least strength, agility and likely endurance.

[D - Cursed] Ravenous Matter Spirit (Lvl 353)

This thing is kind of a monster.

Yeah, no kidding.

You kept mentioning me falling behind but I didn't really feel like I was. Now though, I definitely feel it.

Well, Nova is also ahead of the curve it seems. You might not want to compare yourself to that standard.

Well, if I had gone with the lich race and a different class I could be that high.

Yeah, you could have. What you chose has higher potential though, you could surpass that and Nova, it's just gonna take some more time.

Yeah I guess, I just feel like I've slowed down so much.

From what I gather, that's D grade. Well, I guess for everything but Nova. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .