Setting up a ritual circle was a bit like making a painting, but in order to make the painting, you had to program every stroke using some illogical programming language that also, for some bloody reason, had to follow weird rules reminiscent of feng shui. Concepts had to play properly together, which could be likened to mixing colors to get the optimal palette. Some colors did not mesh well together, and if all colors mixed haphazardly, you would get a muddy brown. AKA, you would get shit.All of this also had to be done while painting within the lines if one was following some preset ritual circle and trying to make a very specific image. Not following a preset ritual circle was far beyond anything Jake could do quite yet.When Jake initially set up the ritual circle, all looked well. The colors were adequately separated, and things seemed to be meshing well. However, with a higher Perception stat, he began to see the flaws. This could be likened to seeing the borders where the diff

Two weeks after Jake had returned to the Order, he was hard at work with the many cores he still had in storage. Meira had continued to buy new cores to keep the ritual going during his absence, building up quite a stock to complement all those Jake had also dropped off.Working on the cores was slow progress, as Jake was trying to figure out how to infuse this energy he had decided to call Primal Energy. Could he call it Origin Energy? Yes, perhaps, but he felt like it wouldn’t be as accurate.From the beginning, he knew this energy was pretty much just his arcane affinity. At least a part of the arcane affinity. If his arcane affinity had a unique name, Jake would naturally name it the primal affinity, as that seemed to fit him well, hence why he’d landed on Primal Energy.Anyway, Primal Energy was something Jake had a hard time properly understanding. It seemed utterly unrelated to the two concepts of destruction and stabilization. It leaned more into the concept of simplicity, as

Jake tossed the token up and down as he looked at the beautiful carving of a red dragon on it. It was clearly made of high-tier metal, produced as a show-off piece for the Emberflight to display how wealthy and powerful they were.Which was just the problem. They were large and powerful. Annoyingly so.Could Jake just use the token, contact Helen, make her meet him, and force her to take him to some superior who could make everyone fuck off? Potentially, but in order to do that, Jake would have to show he had enough backing to avoid getting himself thrown out or killed outright. Considering he was a member of the Order—or at least, it was believed he was a member—they probably wouldn’t kill him. Not wanting to meet him, however… Yeah, that one had a big chance. In fact, chances were they would use this opportunity to have Jake bring out his backer to discuss the issue in his place. They believed Jake’s backer was an S-grade, after all, which wasn’t something the Emberflight was afraid

The meeting room was silent for several seconds as Albaromoz stared at the spot where the Bloodline Patriarch had disappeared from. No, he had been teleported away. In the moment prior to the teleportation, the dragon had felt a divine presence, making so many questions appear in his head… but it did dispel one doubt.Albaromoz felt ashamed of even questioning the urgency of the Bloodline Patriarch’s issue. He had thought it was just one of the oldest tricks in the book that people used to get out of meetings early—something he himself had even done several times. However, it was clearly something far more serious than Albaromoz could understand when it was deemed necessary for a god to directly interfere and assist in bringing the Patriarch back. That meant it was a situation where every second mattered.But… Albaromoz was still perplexed. Why was the Bloodline Patriarch even involved in something of such importance? Who was the god that had acted? Likely his backer.The formation us

There was one good thing about exterminating ectognamorphs compared to other races. If someone wanted to wipe out a faction of humans, one had to kill every single one to be successful. Failing to do so risked the chance that the survivors could keep reproducing and reviving the faction, with there even being a chance a talented individual could be born and make the faction more powerful than ever.Such was not the case with ectognamorphs. Ectognamorphs needed a Queen to survive, and if all Queens died, the faction crumbled. A common ant could not evolve into an ant Queen, so you could eliminate the entire faction as long as all of them were killed. So that is what Jake planned on doing. He usually didn’t like killing things too weak to even give him experience, but this time he would make an exception.Leaving a nest of this size so close to Haven and within the territory inhabited by Earth humans was simply too risky, and he had a hunch that after the Prima Guardian ordeal, the limi