TBATE Duality

Chapter 12

Jade Leywin POV

"Huff" I let out a tired sigh as I finished today session of assimilation, this is taking longer than I expected; in the last 6 months I barely made any progress with my beast will, I need to think of a more efficient way to assimilate.

I started trying to recall everything I knew about assimilation, in order to assimilate I have to send the beast will's mana through out my whole body, it feels similar to something else that's been described in the novel.

As I start going through all the knowledge I have about the novel a realisation struck me.

The asuras!

Asuras have mana flowing through their bodies like blood!

This is a little crazy and I don't know if it'll work but it's worth a shot.

I sit down once again and start trying to assimilate but this time instead of letting my mana out in all directions, I push it upward toward my heart

Since I'm focusing on a single direction it's easier to make my mana travel to my heart, once there it seeps into my heart and starts going in my blood.

THUMP THUMP
THUMP THUMP

With every heartbeat I can feel the little mana in my blood flow through my body as I feel a little feverish, soon the jet-black mana in my core starts to slowly make its way to my heart once there it sinks following my mana and joining my bloodstream

I can feel it spreading in my body, reaching all of my cells, slowly changing them adapting them to the power of the beast will, it's still a slow process but it's faster than before a lot faster

"JADE"

I open my eyes as I feel a hand on my shoulder shaking me a little and someone's voice calling me.

"Lilia? What's up?" I ask her a little confused

"Lunch's ready" she replies

"Oh sorry, I was too focused and didn't notice" I apologize scratching my head sheepishly

"You still have trouble assimilating?" she asks me worried since it was taking me too long

"More or less, I think I found a way to speed up things but it'll still take some time until I fully assimilated"

"Are you sure you don't want any help? I'm sure if we ask around we can find a beast tamer to teach you" she adds

When everyone found out about my difficulty in assimilating my beast will Vincent have offered to find a beast tamer to teach me, while beast tamers are quite rare it wouldn't have been impossible for him to find someone willing to teach me, I turned him down since my knowledge about beast wills came from Virion's explanations when he taught Art and given that Virion is one of the best beast tamers in Dicathen there wasn't anything that some random adventurer or noble could possibly teach me

"Nah don't worry I'll figure out something, now let's go I'm starving" I reassure her as we made our way to the dining room.

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After lunch I went to my room, since I couldn't spend all of my time assimilating and that I couldn't do normal training either I choose to dedicate my afternoons to reverse engineer alacryan technology and in this time I've been able to figure out how their communication artifacts worked and develop a counterpart that used dicathian technology, I've even been able to build an artifact capable of intercepting their communications since in this world there's no concept of encrypted communication just yet I could now eavesdrop on all their communications making finding their camps in the beast glades a trivial issue

As for the tempus warp I've been able to successfully reverse engineer it albeit it took some time, developing a counterpart was proving to be almost impossible: dicathian artificers worked in a very different way compared to alacryan instillers and to make things even worse the materials available in Alacrya are vastly different and in most cases superior to anything available here in Dicathen, granted I can't exactly ask my parents some crazily rare and stupidly expensive material for my "dabbling" with artificing so I had to get by with whatever I could ask my parents to buy me or could conjure with my earth magic

Well I guess worst case scenario I can ask for Gideon's help once the war begins, I was hoping to introduce tempus warps at the very beginning since they would help immensely but I can't ask for his help until I get rid of all the spies and traitors in Dicathen and I can't do that now.

Thanks to me now being able to intercept their communications I've been able to destroy quite a number of camps, of course I couldn't get rid of all of them since it would have made it obvious that someone was attacking, still I managed to get rid of a good 30% of the camps I've discovered and the percentage was increasing.

As for how I destroy those camps I have 2 ways, if the alacryans don't have full control over the mana beasts I simply sabotage the liquid that prevents them to be attacked and then stir up the mana beasts in order to make them attack, whatever outcome the fight had it was a win for me: if the beasts won I would have successfully destroyed another alacryan camp, if the alacryans won they would lose a dungeon with all the mana beasts inside and their forces would be depleted so to me it was win-win

If they already had full control over the beasts I would simply poison them specifically I would use radiation poisoning, since this world is so primitive compared to modern Earth no one knows about nuclear radiation and of course no one can detect it either making it the perfect way to simply kill someone completely undetected, I would just conjure some golems made of radioactive materials and program them to dissolve those materials in the water and food, thanks to this a rumor about a "curse" in the beast glades has started circulating among the alacryan troops stationed in Dicathen

'You know you can be pretty heartless and ruthless when you want' Yozora suddenly comments

'Have my thoughts been leaking again?'

'Yeah but you're improving, at least I don't hear you when you're working on artifacts anymore' she adds

'Thanks, returning to the topic you know full well how I feel about doing this, I don't like it and I do feel sorry for those soldiers since it's not like they have a choice that said the more soldiers I kill, the less likely someone I care about will die in the war' I remark

'Still seeing how you came up with things like these it makes me glad we're not enemies'

'I guess I'll take that as a compliment'

After this little back and forth with Yozora, I resume my work on the tempus warp.