When Mai opened the door, he had a polite smile on his face.
"Hello, Sakurajima-san," he said.
"Do you need something?" She asked.
"Do you have any movies? I've been training on the roof for the better part of four hours now and need a break from all that stuff," he said. "I looked through some of the other apartments, but they were all cleared out."
She nodded and, before he could respond, stepped back and closed the door in his face.
"What else did I expect?" He shook his head, waiting for her to give him something to watch in the form of alms. "It's good I didn't ask her for dinner…" He suddenly frowned. "Speaking of dinner..."
The door opened before he could continue delving into his thoughts, revealing Mai with a large plastic box in her hands that was filled with plastic cases of disks. She placed it on the ground in front of him.
"You can take whichever ones you want," she said.
"Are these yours, or did you collect them from the other apartments?" He bent over and started shuffling through them to find something familiar.
"I collected them for barter. Entertainment sells well," she said.
"Got it," he nodded and continued shuffling through the disks, taking note of the ones that Mai starred in. He was curious what the hype was all about. "Oh, something I'm curious about. I've grown much stronger recently and expected that I would probably need to eat a lot more, but instead, I don't feel very hungry at all. Is that a system thing?"
"I thought you didn't have a system."
He looked up at her with a flat expression. "What I have is close enough to your system."
"I still need to eat," she said, shaking her head indifferently, not seeming curious in the slightest about his situation.
"I'm assuming you don't know why I'm this way," he said, getting an indifferent shake of her head in response. "Got it."
I don't get it. Not to require sustenance is crazy to me. This Origin Energy thing is really something else. Am I constantly absorbing it from the environment, or is it something that can indefinitely sustain itself? Is there an intro to Origin Energy in the system?
Knowledge: Introduction to Origin Energy
Origin Energy Cost: 500 Units
Not as bad as I'd expected. Twenty-five years. Will it also teach me how to manipulate Origin Energy?
"Don't forget to pay me back," Mai's sudden words made him look up with confusion.
"I can't give you credits."
"The diesel we have is limited. Help me scavenge for some when you go out tomorrow. The settlements have cleared out most of the gas stations, but people should have some private stashes."
"Sure," Orion nodded as a thought came to his mind. Couldn't I create diesel using the Gear? Conservation of matter…even burning diesel won't destroy the matter. I'll just pull the burnt constituents back into the gear and retransform them into diesel.
The giddiness of having infinite fuel disappeared just as it had appeared when he realized the truth of the situation. He had no idea of the atomic composition of Diesel. While he could get a blueprint, those were one-time-use and worked similarly to how Great Red had helped him make the Katana. He didn't even know where to begin if he wanted to recreate that Katana.
It's going to be pretty expensive…
Knowledge: Diesel Creation (Prerequisite: Introduction to Creation)
Origin Energy Cost: 750 Units
That cheap? But it requires me to spend fifty grand on the intro knowledge first. That makes sense…Without the basic knowledge, complex techniques are meaningless, and with a solid base, the costs drop to practically nothing.
He had come to accept that the most overpowered aspect of his power was going to be locked behind the paywall of fifty thousand units of Origin Energy for a while.
"I'm taking these seven," he said, standing while holding seven boxes in his hand.
Mai's eyes narrowed as she noticed all of them were familiar titles. "Two of them flopped, so tread carefully."
"It's fine," he said. "I'm curious about our beloved national star, who is like the apple of the entire country's eye. You probably have more, right? Some premium ones."
She didn't respond, shaking her head and picking the box up before going back inside her house.
"Now if only I had some popcorn…" he mumbled, shaking his head. "I'm going to stop asking my gear how much something costs. I clearly can't afford shit right now, and it only makes me depressed."
Inside his house, he grabbed a bottle of room-temperature cola and poured it into a glass. Putting the disk inside the player, he was about to play it, but stopped.
"Ice shouldn't be that difficult, right?" The thought was extinguished immediately as he recalled the events from the previous night. "I'll just get a blueprint. Ice has got to be cheap…"
Blueprint: Ice Cubes
Origin Energy Cost: 10 Units
"Thank fuck it's cheap," he immediately exchanged for the blueprint.
Origin Energy: 162.84 -> 152.84 Units
This time, it didn't appear on his status panel, and instead, insights about creating ice directly appeared in his mind. It surprised him a little, but he quickly played along and directly exchanged eleven more units of Origin Energy to increase his mass limit to twenty kilograms. With the insights from the blueprint, he quickly imagined all twelve kilograms of matter transforming into the ice cubes. The insights included the structure of not only hydrogen and oxygen, but also minerals like Calcium, Magnesium, Silica, Iron, and more than thirty different elements and their respective oxidized or other types of stable molecules. Forming all of them into a big block of solidified water that had a very specific lattice-like structure with evenly spaced molecules, it was quickly cut up into correctly sized ice cubes while still inside the gear's internal space.
Origin Energy: 152.84 -> 141.84 Units
"Yeah, I definitely need two thousand and five hundred years to learn the complex knowledge of the elements that is required to work with creation. Not to mention the chemistry…I barely passed the subject in my freshman year, how am I expected to know about every single different kind of connection that elements can have?"
If he was good at one thing aside from constantly monologing to himself, it was pushing aside any disheartening thoughts that threatened to dampen his mood. He did exactly that and put some of the newly created ice into the glass before playing the movie. It was a horror movie starring Mai as a kid that had two sequels. One immediately after where Mai had grown up, and one released recently, presumably after Mai returned to work full-time.
He completely lost track of time and ended up binging all three of the movies. By the time he was finished, it was already sunset, and he was left thoroughly impressed and awestruck.
"I get the hype…" He said. "The second one's story was a bit mid, but damn, she carried it to victory…It's probably one of the flops she told me about. To think she was in middle school when it was released. I wanna watch the trilogy again…" He looked at the dark sky outside and shook his head.
"It's time I took care of my training. I want to be done with Foundational Strength Control today itself."
Noticing Mai's sword resting against the table, he shook his head. He'd practiced enough to bring the integration up to seventy-seven. To complete the integration, he needed to train with some other weapons like rapiers since they had some exclusive foundational techniques that needed to be practiced.
"I'll ask here where she got that sword and see if I can get those two as well."
With that thought, he summoned the melted ice into the gear's internal space and left his apartment to go up to the roof.
Under the moonlight, he quickly started practicing, starting with a tai-chi movement while visualizing his body, trying to make his mental image follow his physical movements accurately.
As an hour passed, he started getting distracted again, but forced himself to persevere, intent on getting at least one of his two techniques to the maximum integration level.
After two hours of constant movement and visualization, he found his progress reverting instead of improving. Realizing that he'd reached his limit, he finally stopped and lay down on the ground with his limbs splayed out.
"Come on, just one more hour…" Feeling tired and sweaty, he ended up summoning an ice cube directly into his mouth. Immediately, a cool feeling spread through his body as he slowly moved the cube around his mouth, letting it naturally melt.
I didn't realize it with the glass of pop, but this is great water… Hell, if I'd melted the ice and drunk that instead, it would have been better than the pop itself…
During his short break, he thought of his system in a rare positive light. The compromises that it made in terms of convenience were more than made up for in terms of the quality of products that he got. Not only the ice, but even the techniques that he'd received were as comprehensive as he could imagine. With Foundational Swordsmanship, he could use any kind of sword with practiced proficiency. While he wasn't a master of any specific advanced style or even something advanced like dual-wielding, his basics were very solid, and any advanced technique would be very easy for him to learn in the future. It was the same with Foundational Strength Control. It didn't just get him familiar with his current strength; it gave him the means to always have full control over his body, making it much easier to know how much strength he had and how much he needed to hold back.
Instead of melting another ice cube, Orion simply drank the water that had melted from the ice he used to cool his beverage. He thought of cycling the water through his body and took what he'd already drunk into his gear's internal space. Just looking at it told him that it wasn't the same water anymore, having reacted with the enzymes and acid inside his stomach to become something else entirely. If anything, he wasn't even sure if it was even a stable substance. After all, only the atoms and molecules created by the gear were pulled out, leaving everything else inside his stomach. The extracted contents might even directly explode if not inside the gear.
"Wait… Doesn't that mean my stomach might have something extremely toxic inside it? At least I didn't immediately explode, so that's good…" He spent the rest of his break worried about suddenly coming down with something dangerous and was ready to consume all his Origin Energy on his physique to make sure he didn't end up dead.
Thankfully, nothing happened…Note to self, don't fuck around with things inside your body. Wait to first excrete anything that has been eaten before extracting any of the matter. Preferably, wait for a year or two to make sure that everything is truly out. I don't know what problems I might run into otherwise.
Ultimately, after a stressful break, he resumed his training and finally brought one of his abilities to a hundred percent integration before midnight.
He immediately summoned his status after feeling that the technique was fully integrated with his body.
Name: Orion Vaelor
Exile Gear: Infinite Dream
Specialization: Creation
Origin Energy: 141.84 Units
Physique: 26.84
Matter Limit: 20 KG
Techniques:
Foundational Swordsmanship (Integrity 100% — Integration 68%)
Foundational Strength Control
Knowledge:
Japanese Language (Integrity 100%)
"So any mention of Integrity and integration completely disappears when I'm done with a technique. Good to know…"
With that, he went back down to do the next item on his agenda, which was to understand what the hell runes were.