If that was only it, it would be a disappointment, since isolation from external contamination was the bare minimum for a cultivation chamber. The most important role for such a place was amplifying and concentrating a Mana source, and for that, they had to embarrassingly ask the servitor how it worked. With barely a hint of contempt, she opened a small section of stone outside the room and indicated how to activate the different nodes. These were plate-sized indentations throughout the room, up to twenty-four of them, four for each wall, that could be turned on, each a possible source for Mana, to be seeded by providing material with the desired attunement.
Moxlin had a more elaborate idea than just plopping some good stuff down and letting it cook. She wanted to create a specific clash of various Mana types to help refine her own Mana weaving and internal flow, using her own array design to guide the Mana currents.
The idea was somewhat complex and the execution a genuine nightmare, and for endless hours Axl and her drew an intricate array into every surface of the room, willing its walls to curve so there were no hard edges, allowing for a more seamless construct to surround the focal point where Moxlin would stand. Conveniently, the room also produced staircases and walkways to access the ceiling and upper parts of the wall that didn't disrupt any work they'd already done.
They had to implant various materials into the twenty-four nodes as they built the array, and they largely used the F-Grade materials that they found in the manor, mostly because they had so much of it. This way they could easily waste them by the handful due to the minor mistakes or alterations that ruined whole array sections, the associated material payload included.
When they were done, it looked impressive, the even white room entirely covered in intricate carvings, piles of precious F-Grade ingredients clashing Mana throughout the various quadrants of the array. Moxlin sealed herself in the room, preparing to slowly activate the construct, and Axl finally turned to the body tempering chamber a few rooms down the second-floor hallway.
This room was far smaller, cramped even, barely three meters at its longest, only a chair at its center, in front of it an intricate marble pillar with a simple hammer on it. The hammer was too small for even a single of Axl's hands, the metal head chipped and scratched, its wooden hilt utterly banged up. But despite its humble look, Axl felt a terrible tension from the tool, something beyond what [Mana Shroud] could see. Just looking at it shook the mental protection over his soul and filled him with a subtle, diffuse fear.
As he stared at the hammer, instructions flooded into his mind, nothing as cold and piercingly efficient as the windows from the Deep System, but flashes of images and concepts. It would be confusing if it wasn't pretty straightforward. All he had to do was to take out the sources that the room could use for devising its tempering, then he just had to sit down and not die. Sweat started to form in Axl's brow and back as he beheld the hammer—or more that the hammer beheld him, the small object clearly watching with single-minded focus.
Tearing his eyes away, Axl brought out his three precious metals, the slab Ulmric Tungsten, the shard of Helkan Silver, and finally the branch of Lunar Fulger from its isolating box. The hammer inspected each in turn, taking barely a moment to contemplate them all, even the Fulger and its latent lightning. A system message appeared before Axl, one he partially expected but still gave him pause.
>>Quest: Body tempering to metal
>>Survive tempering by the residual will of Fleshsmith Bokal.
>>Reward: Proportional to tempering depth, boosted by Geas of the Weak.
>> WARNING: Peak F-Grade trial, undergoing at G-Grade has over 99% expected casualty rate.
>>Accept: Yes/No?
This was apparently more dangerous than the challenge rift he got all his poison stuff from, which only had a 95% expected casualty rate, and according to the servitor, this room only gave a quest for tempering when it was expected to be particularly taxing. For a moment, he contemplated other options for getting stronger, say doing some meditative cultivation like Moxlin or practicing alchemy some more, but this really was the only viable option for him.
He needed that damn cultivator's core, and frankly, his intuitive link with metals wasn't quite as high as he imagined it would get when he got the transmutation forge. The addition to [Gastric Cauldron] was more unbridled potential, but it clearly wouldn’t start paying off until he spent substantial time working with it. Time that Terrania didn't have.
Body tempering was the solution—he remembered how much linked to poison and soul-based attacks he got just from going through the entire underwater tower, and here was the chance to get a similar empowerment based on the three metals he wanted to base his core on. It would only take a few days sealed in, as opposed to weeks, if not months, with the safer choices.
He purposefully didn’t ask Aria about his plan to undergo such an extreme tempering, since this just felt right, such an obvious opportunity that he felt confident going through with it. Already having asked her about taking [Minor Telekinesis] felt off to him, something intangible in him chafing at the guidance. Oocile wrote about it in his notes on the [Elided Tome of Equanimity], how he saw many promising cultivators have their path degraded or cut short entirely by indecision and overreliance on rigid leveling paths. Axl figured even passing advice from a source as powerful as an oracle carried similar risks, so he only told Moxlin as they were planning their respective uses of the next few days in the manor's F-Grade rooms. He was fairly sure Aria knew, anyhow, and chose not to say anything herself.
"Alright, fancy hammer," he said, nodding to the pillar as he sat on the chair in the room's center, dressed only in underarmor shorts. "Time to get this rig on a roll."
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He accepted the quest, and the door to the room slowly closed, the ornately carved brown wood in contrast with the stark, simple grey stone of the rest of the room. With a simple click, it closed, and the air seemed to still for a moment, as if in breathless anticipation.
A slow hum started from the hammer, a pleasant metallic Mana filling the room, and it kept building, choking the air and pushing against his skin in a quickly building tension. Images of his various organs were presented to him, starting with his kidneys and ending with his brain. Before Axl could guess what this meant, sharp, long needles took shape around him and stabbed his gut, skewering both his kidneys entirely.
The force of the blow was memorable, even if the constructs were semi-physical before they struck their target organs on both of his sides. Their piercing of the kidneys themselves was pain more concentrated than he ever imagined possible. Then it got worse as the Mana was pushed in, soaking the utterly skewered organs in waves of pain and relief, like the rise and fall of water in a bucket being carelessly swung around.
Axl tried to turn on [Mana Shroud] and rally his Vitality instinctively, but the Skill wouldn't activate, and the hammer simply brushed off his body's incursion entirely. With the Reklerian Fathoms at least he had the cycling of the poison to keep his mind occupied, but here there was nothing, only the pain rising to an unbearable peak, then slowly retreating, to then start again.
He could move, but that absolutely didn't help, and he tried to take a deep breath to perhaps engage in meditative cultivation, but he couldn’t even breathe. The hammer had taken over his lungs and paralyzed them, flowing in and air out in a constant, even stream. Even if Axl managed to get ahold of some Mana to try to get it accumulating to the pit of his gut, the hammer dispelled it immediately. Even the twelve-point defense around his soul was effortlessly brushed away at some point, his soul fully exposed to the trial's punishment.
Axl threw the question out to the hammer, an accusation even—what the slit do I do? His voice was a low gargle, barely words at all. The hammer was silent, the needles piercing his body continuing their cycles of pain and release.
Fine. Be that way. Axl relaxed his body, retreating his will as much as he could from the source of the pain, figuring this was just another intended difficulty. He had to resist and nothing else, body and mind simply aligned to the task of enduring.
This turned out to be easier said than done, flashes of painful memories or flare-ups of indignation and rage twisting his body in a convulsive fit or subtle tension. Each of these would exacerbate the pain, sap his willpower, and even strain his soul. Soon, the utter difficulty of this trial became more than apparent—any morsel of resistance would only be rallied against him.
At what point would even the extra burden of small twitches and a strained face accumulate enough to kill him? At the idle question, the hammer presented Axl with a crooked, amused smile.
Quite the little bastard, aren't you? But the cruel visage was a relief, confirming that this was what really was at stake, that it wasn't just more or less pain on the table, but his very ability to survive. And when that was clear, it became much easier to simply withstand.
At least it was for the first few hours.
Unfortunately, the hammer couldn't take away Axl's ability to open up his Terrania quest and see how much time had passed, and it didn't help, so after the third hour became four, he stopped looking. It took another hour before he could do more than just resist the temptation to check again, and by the sixth hour, his mind was as blank as he could make it, his body still as a corpse, his existence only pain and the vague notion of needing to endure.
It wasn't enough. Because he'd forget why he was doing what he was doing, and the pain's pull would become unbearable, his mind and body would rally against it instinctively. So he had to find a middle ground, a blankness of mind that maintained his self, his goals, his memories. And unfortunately, that meant memories he tried not to think about too much would rise the most.
At first he thought he had a workaround, focusing on going over fighting techniques in Sulliana's lessons or Lomenkkar tactics. But the hammer shut that down, straight-up sealing his very memory of those things, thinking about those details becoming blurry and impossible to focus on. All he could do was that damnable middle ground.
Twice, he found this balance right as he pushed the tenuous state away, the memories too painful to examine. He normally could set them aside, there being plenty to do when fighting against the Vikam or cultivating here, even when trying to eke out a living in Ost. He knew this balanced state was what he needed to maintain, the true terror of the trial dawning on him, for the first time since he took this rinky-dink elven body, regretting ever becoming a cultivator and doing any of this bullshit.
Then the pain was gone, the needles retracted, his kidneys feeling unusually stable and sturdy to his inner Perception. He was allowed a full second, where relief and sheer joy was quickly replaced with dread as he realized this was only the first organ of the orderly progression he was shown earlier. The first step of seventeen.
The needles reformed and passed through his flesh, only somewhat bypassing any existing damage to reach his liver.
The human liver is about ten times bigger than a single kidney, and much more dense, and the elven equivalents were similar. And apparently, size and density were proportional to the pain the tempering inflicted.
For the first countless waves, Axl could only reel, his mind struggling to even survive the new horizons of pain and suffering his body could be inflicted with. This was better, however, his mind not having the bandwidth to torment him with idle thoughts, simply struggling to keep from shattering entirely into a reckless, flailing despair.
This didn't last long, as he got used to the pain, his mind and soul settling into the pulsing rhythms of Mana infusion, and begrudgingly he returned to that dreadful balanced state, his will and mind gingerly tense, the first memories seeping back in.
He remembered the smell of Sprout's hair, and how he used to weave his fingers against her curls, finding their springy resilience amusing and strange to the touch. It would sometimes make little tufts of her hair stick out in a funny way when she woke up, but she never seemed to mind. The image of her sleepy face blinking awake was suddenly replaced by the smear of blood leading from her step to the Pit.
Axl twitched at the shift, the stabbing sorrow of the memory shattering his balanced state, a grunt erupting from his throat. His chest strained slightly at the small motion, the needles cutting into his flesh at the mistake. Slowly, he returned to the calm, to the balance, dreading it more than the pain.
The lies from the hyacinth tower were easier to deal with, as were the false memories it created. This was a new, deeper agony beyond what he ever wanted to endure. His re-centering trick was useless without his ability to breathe, and in the face of the overwhelming pain, he had no tools to deal with this problem. His mind reeled at the begrudging realization that the only way out was through. One organ down, sixteen more to go.
There was a knock at the door, a strong one. He thought he was imagining it, at first, his body hallucinating an excuse to interrupt his induced mental state, but then it happened again.
"What?" he muttered, thinking he was yelling, but the sound coming out cracked and weak. Even that was rewarded with a burst of additional pain to his gut.
"Something is wrong with Moxlin's meditation," Aria's voice sounded frantic. "I'm afraid that she might die."