Lindon had peeked inside earlier, and besides the Forged madra devices that produced the cloud, each pillar held a crystal flask the size of his head. The aura ran inside those crystals, condensing and processing into the madra that powered the cloud.
It would take three days to fill up the crystals, Cassias said. He had made it to the Desolate Wilds in a month, but that had been carrying one person. Not five people and an extra building.
If they had to spend three days drawing aura for every three days flying, it would take them twice as long to return.
Eithan assured them that he intended to make it back in a month, but they would still spend one day grounded for every three in the air. No one asked him how he planned to recharge their power reserves—he was the Underlord, so he knew what he was doing.
He spread out a blanket and had a nap in the sun, but the rest of them were expected to spend the day doing chores. Lindon regarded the idea with dread: if he was hauling water or scrubbing floors, then he wasn’t training. He wasn’t getting any closer to defeating Jai Long.
But just because he wasn’t practicing sacred arts didn’t mean he couldn’t improve.
When he was sent to fill a man-sized wooden tub with water, and then bring it back to Sky’s Mercy to fill up their reservoir, he refused to Enforce himself with madra.
He didn’t know any real Enforcer techniques, but everyone used madra to reinforce their body to some degree. Cycling madra to tired limbs, focusing it to lift something heavy—Lindon had been doing that since he’d learned to walk.
This time, he kept the madra firmly in his core, relying solely on the strength of his Iron body.
Before he’d carried the tub downhill for two miles, filled it up with water, and carried it two miles back, he’d never appreciated just how heavy water could be. The tub was big enough that he could bathe in it comfortably, big enough that he looked like an ant carrying a grasshopper carcass as he made his way back. Without his Iron body, he would have collapsed halfway up, even using his madra.
He arrived red-faced and sweating, limbs shaking, and his breathing disordered. But after ten minutes of letting his Bloodforged Iron body restore his fatigue, he set off again.
This might not improve his sacred arts, but at least he could build his muscles. ‘A healthy spirit lives in a healthy body,’ as his clan used to say.
After four trips, the reservoir was full, and Gesha was impatiently waiting on him. They needed dead matter for his Soulsmith practice, so Lindon, Yerin, and Gesha went out to track and kill a wild Remnant.
Gesha found her prey within two hours, but Lindon stopped Yerin from killing it. Forcing his trembling hands to be still, he looked down on a giant frog that seemed to be made from blue-green blocks.
“Let me try first,” he said, affecting a casual tone.
Fisher Gesha’s eyebrows went up.
Yerin put her sword away. “Scream and bleed when you need help.”
Lindon learned some valuable lessons that day. First, he learned that the Empty Palm blasted a chunk out of Remnants, who were made of solid madra. That would surely come in useful later.
Second, he saw how strong Remnants were in the outside world.
Yerin was true to her word, blasting the frog into a pile of blocky dead matter the second he screamed and bled. She tied the pieces of the spirit’s corpse together and dragged the bundle back, while Fisher Gesha carried Lindon.
His Bloodforged Iron body had restored him enough that he could walk on his own by the time they reached Sky’s Mercy, though one of his cores was empty and the other only half-strength.
Back in Sacred Valley, an Iron would be enough to fight anything but a very advanced, intelligent, or strange Remnant. Those were children compared to these.
In the Transcendent Ruins, he had battled Remnants most every day for two weeks…but he hadn’t battled them, had he? Not really. He had used traps, and script-circles, and ambushes. Even when he’d personally killed a few, he had used weapons, or fought them together with Yerin and Eithan.
Now that he thought of it, this may have been the first Remnant that he’d stood and fought, relying on nothing but his sacred arts. And it had driven a two-inch spike through his calf.
It showed him how far he had to go. As though he needed another reminder.
After they’d brought the Remnant inside, the sun was setting. Eithan finally woke up, stretched, and saw that the stream of aura flowing into the four pillars had slowed to a trickle.
He opened up one of the columns at the corner of the house, revealing that the green-and-white madra swirling inside the crystal flask had only filled it a third of the way. “Good enough,” he said. “I'm on a schedule.”
Then he carefully rolled up one gilt-edged sleeve and pressed his hand to the collection script, which gathered up aura and distributed it to the four crystals.
The script took in the proper aspects of aura automatically, but it could accept virtually any madra. It would take that madra, purify it, and use it to reinforce the existing cloud madra, but the efficiency was terrible.
Thanks to Fisher Gesha's tutelage, he could calculate exactly how terrible: cloud madra was the best to fill the flasks, twice as much pure madra would achieve the same result, and any other aspect would take four times as much power to generate the cloud and lift both buildings into the air.
Eithan filled all four crystals in seconds. Dark blue clouds popped out of each of the four corners, swelling and lifting both buildings off the ground. The levitation circle on the bottom shone bright, showing that it was at capacity and ready to be used.
The Underlord shook one hand as though it had fallen asleep and then walked inside.
Cassias and Yerin treated this as normal, but Lindon and Fisher Gesha had exchanged astonished—and somewhat fearful—glances before heading in. Gesha had confided in him later that she, a Highgold, would have taken four or five days to fill up the circle.
Lindon wondered how long it would be before he could do something like that.
Three days later, Lindon had gained a new appreciation for elixirs.
The Four Corners Rotation Pill doubled the speed at which he cycled his madra and expanded his core, noticeably speeding his advancement. Unlike the orus fruit or the Starlotus bud, it didn’t provide much external power, but the cycling effect alone was invaluable.
When he put on his parasite ring, it usually felt like he was hanging weights on his spirit, slowing his cycling but filtering the quality of the madra. With the ring and the pill together, he could cycle at his full normal speed, but his madra would still be filtered. Twice the result for the same effort.
He brought his second core up to Iron by the seventh day, which was actually something of a disappointment.
His Copper core had compressed to a brighter, higher-quality core with ease, matching the second ball of pure madra floating in his spirit. He had confided to Yerin that he’d hoped for a second Iron body, but she’d looked at him as though he wished he’d sprouted a third eye.
“How many bodies do you have? One? Well, there you go, then.”
Eithan had been prepared to give him a pill a day, but thus far it took Lindon two days to process the energy of each pill. In a week, he’d only used three, with a bit of energy left over.
Still, that was fifteen thousand scales. He pictured the Sandviper wagon he’d seen stuffed with boxes of scales back in the Desolate Wilds, and wondered if all of those together had added up to fifteen thousand. How many scales had they mined from the Transcendent Ruins every day? It couldn’t be too much more than fifteen thousand, and that was a whole sect of Golds working together.