The Void Gauntlet was finally cool enough to touch.
Jacob picked it up. Now that the dungeon's noise was gone, he could sense the stone itself. Unlike the very sturdy material of the dagger, Void Stone wasn't a dead zone. It had a personality.
He closed his eyes and meditated on the structure.
There were natural pathways inside the mineral. They were faint lines of higher conductivity where the mana wanted to flow. It was like the grain in wood. If he cut against the grain, he would lose power. If he flowed with it, the stone would amplify his work.
Okay. Flow with the grain. Build the core.
He sat at his desk and began to work.
He tried a sphere first. He constructed a round, hollow mana lattice in the center of the gauntlet and tried to weave his composite fields into it.
It collapsed. The sphere was too perfect. It had no anchor points for the square geometry of his lattice.
He tried a cube. It held the lattice perfectly, but the corners created stress points that bled mana. It heated up within seconds.
He tried a pyramid. A cylinder. A dodecahedron.
Failure. Failure. Failure.
Every shape he built either leaked power or fought the natural grain of the Void Stone. He spent hours channeling mana, constructing delicate 3D geometries, and watching them unravel.
"It doesn't fit!" Jacob yelled.
He stood up in a fit of frustration. He grabbed the heavy stone gauntlet and hurled it across the room.
Thud-clatter.
It slammed into his shelf. One of the glass jars shattered. A pile of Earth-affinity monster cores spilled onto the floor and clicked against the stone gauntlet.
Jacob stared at the mess. He breathed heavily.
He walked over to clean it up. He reached down to pick up the gauntlet, but his hand brushed against one of the E-rank cores.
It was warm. It was pulsing faintly.
He paused.
He remembered the campfire. He remembered Carlos handing him the bag of cores and telling him to pick a battery. He remembered dismissing it because he didn't know how to use them.
Carlos thought I needed a battery.
Jacob picked up the core. It was a rough, jagged crystal. To the naked eye, it looked like a rock. But to his mana sense, it was a dense knot of energy.
He sat back down on the floor and closed his eyes. He sank into meditation.
He looked past the outer shell of the crystal. He pushed his perception through the hard, chaotic crust of the monster's residual energy.
There, deep inside, he found it.
It wasn't a jagged rock. It was a perfect, crystalline geometric structure. It was a natural mana storage unit built by the universe itself.
The outer layers were garbage. They were the "spaghetti code" of the monster's biology, which was a mess of inefficient pathways that connected the core to the beast's body. But if he stripped that away and bled off the excess mana then dissolved the shell...
What remained was the stabilizer.
It was the shape he had been missing. It was a complex, faceted geometry that his mind couldn't even invent because it was organic. It was designed to hold pressure. It was designed to interface with a flow.
Jacob grabbed his mithril tool. He grabbed the monster core.
He tried to peel it. He visualized his mana as a scalpel. He tried to cut away the messy outer shell to get to the perfect geometry inside.
Crack.
The core shattered in his hand. The energy dissipated instantly.
Jacob groaned and flopped back onto the floor.
He had the theory. He knew the answer. But he didn't have the skill.
Stripping a core without breaking it required a level of delicacy he didn't have yet. It was like trying to perform eye surgery with a shovel. He had just burned fifty silver coins in a single second.
He looked at the pile of cores on the floor. There was fifty gold worth of potential money sitting there.
If he kept experimenting, he was going to burn through his family's entire earnings in an afternoon.
"Nope," Jacob said. He sat up and started gathering the cores back into a pile. "Not doing it. Too expensive."
He put the cores back in a new jar. He put the Void Gauntlet on the highest shelf, out of reach.
He had hit another ceiling. He knew the path forward now. He needed to learn how to process cores. He needed to learn how to refine the raw material of the dungeon into the components for his lattice.
But until he could do that without bankrupting the farm, the Void Project was on hold.
Jacob dusted off his hands.
At least I have the salt-grass, he thought. Plants are free.
He then headed out of the door to his house, as he needed to actually get a greenhouse built.
I was kinda surprised no one questioned me about the greenhouse when I mentioned it earlier . . . oh well.
He found his father out in the barn and asked to use the old donkey and a wagon to get some materials from the lumber mill.
"And what exactly are you needing from the lumber mill?" Arthur asked, looking rather curious.
"Well," Jacob began, "I want to go pick up some materials to build a greenhouse."
As he was speaking, it occurred to him that his plan had some holes.
I seem to have gotten ahead of myself . . .
Arthur grinned slightly, "When you get these materials, who is going to help you build this greenhouse?"
Jacob blinked, realizing his mistake, but before he could answer, Arthur simply clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't worry, son. Just tell your old man what your magic needs, and we'll see to it. Now, go get the donkey ready."