Chapter 238 - "Welding Coral?"

[As of now, you have a total of 49,300 system points at your disposal.] The system beeped.

“Fuck!!” Timothy woke up screaming.

That huge crab entity had knocked him out of the sky, and he couldn’t believe that the situation played out like that. He had been in a position where he could've made immense progress in a short time, and that opportunity was taken away from him, and his friends!

“I hate that crab!” He yelled out.

“You and I both, brother.” Gustav woke up as well, “That was such a stupid way to… die? Did we die?”

“No, we're alive, but we can't get up there again for an entire week, cause the Explorative Soul ability has to cool down. It's a bastard right enough, that crab really came out of nowhere!” He followed along.

Timothy was upset, because if he stayed a bit longer, he could've had several more flash upgrades, for example, because the Cloud Converter ability had been working over time to harvest everything around him. He could've toughened up his soul significantly, which would've been enough of a reward on its own, but he would appreciate the tagalong knowledge more, which came hand to hand with those flash upgrades. His MQ would've increased significantly, but it only went up by fifty points instead.

If he hadn't figured out how gas clouds worked, and what made them harvestable, he wouldn't be as lucky with his MQ. It bounced up by fifty points, mostly because of the latter reason, and not because of the flash upgrades!

With an MQ of five-hundred and fifty points, he felt like he was being forced to hold in a sneeze! An immense expansion of knowledge was at the tip of his hands, but he couldn’t grab on to it, and this put a serious mental toll on his well being! He was indifferent to the actual, little achievements that he made.

For example, he was at level six in the Rogue Entity Realm of phantomized mana, but he didn’t care for it. He would've been more fascinated if he crossed this realm all together, but yet he didn't, he was prevented from doing so, even though he would've needed half an hour at most to escape that realm! He felt humiliated.

Furthermore, he collected a bit above three-thousand system points up there in the sky, because of all the ghosts that he had shot down! He cared about these points the least, because he needed at least ten times that amount to buy anything useful.

“What was the deal with that other soul that was talking to you?” Gustav then asked, “Do you think it lives close by, could they be a threat to us?”

“Threat? No. Nothing can threaten us around here, not even the people on land. I saw a couple of cavemen, Ortana, the ones you mentioned months ago, and they're virtually insignificant. I don’t think they've discovered fire yet, nonetheless magic, and it's crazy to think that they're dumber than some of the fish around here… So no, Gus, we're not in danger.” He explained.

Ortana had woken up a minute after everyone else, and she was upset, though one could say that she was satisfied with the progress that she made. She started out at level one in terms of phantomized mana quality, so she felt blessed to get to level four!

Regarding the cavemen, she added. “It’s best not to underestimate them, because even experienced mages were scared of them as far as I remember. The cavemen I've dealt with had some kind of power that I'm yet to understand, so it's best to be careful around them. If nothing more, brute force can sometimes beat magical abilities.”

“Eh,” Tim refused to be scared by them, “I can explode their skeletons in a single second if I wanted to. Cavemen or not, every mammal has an explodable skeleton.”

…

In about a week's time, the cooldown timer for the Explorative Soul ability ran out. They could hit the sky again, but they were prevented from doing so, because Genta, the old lady who was working on the reef, had a task for them.

The reef was being shaped to accommodate hundreds of mana roots in the future, and although they made some progress, there still was a lot of work to be done before the roots actually sprouted! This was just the beginning.

“The Grundus Blobs are doing a good job, they're good listeners, but I'm afraid that there is a certain, ticking time bomb that would flush all of their work down a shit hole if we don't do something about it.” Genta explained, and then she added. “A coral reef isn't supposed to be shaped, and shifted at the rate that it is today, it's not natural, so mother nature will try and fight it, unsurprisingly.”

Furthermore, she explained. “In this case, the time bomb is the upcoming summer. We're in the third month of the year right now, I believe you call it March? We have a couple of months of time until the heat of summer warms up the sea, and causes us immense trouble. If the sea warms up even by ten-degrees-celsius, then we would need to start over, because the heat would dismantle every pound of coral that the blobs had shifted. Simply said, the cold water keeps the shifted coral together, and we need to keep the water cold for at least six months, until the coral is naturally welded into their new position!”

“Welded?” Arvena repeated, as there were a lot of words that she did not understand.

“Yes, welded, or, attached? The natural fauna of the reef will weld it together, but even the water pressure will help the shifted coral set into place. We must maintain the shifted coral in their new positions, because I already created four fields that are to fit two-hundred mana roots all together, and we can't lose those fields. I specifically designed the fields to be open enough to allow roots to sprout, but I also had them filled with jaggy, sharp coral bits, so most big creatures would get stabbed to death before they even got to our future roots.” She added.

Genta was saying a lot of things here, but the team still didn't understand what she needed from them. In her infinite wisdom, she had forgotten to dumb things down for the rest of the group to understand her, because as it would appear, even when she wasn't being secretive, absolutely no one understood what she wanted specifically!

After noticing that they were having trouble catching up, she then added. “We need Frost Orcs in the reef, and soon. Specifically, we need their hundreds of hatchlings!”