PATH OF THE STAR HUNTER

322 Chapter 322 A Month’s Progress

In the grand scheme of things, a month was not a long time, there was not much that a normal person could do in a month, taking away the time that a person needed for rest and work there were few hours that a person could invest in something in particular.

This was, even more, the case for Desmond who, in addition to his responsibilities as a lieutenant, spent some of his time training Estela and spending some quality time with Claire or Sasha.

But Desmond was at the same time anything but normal, even Elaisa described Desmond as someone with absurd talent, at least when it came to combat prowess and affinity for mana there was no doubt that Desmond had an overwhelming amount of talent.

After his trip to the Martial Sovereign World, Desmond’s strength had greatly increased reaching the One-Star Class High-level after consuming the Twilight Soul, but due to lack of time and lack of mana in the Martial Sovereign World Desmond still, hadn’t developed adequate control over his new strength or abilities to complement that strength.

In the case of abilities, although it was possible to simply buy them through the association, Desmond believed that this would not be ideal, aside from the fact that he was still in a state of poverty due to how things turned out; Desmond had also realized the difference between an ability developed by himself and an ability obtained through other means.

One only had to think of the strongest abilities Desmond had so far, these were all abilities that he had developed on his own. Not only were these skills more powerful, but these also took less time to master, not even taking into account how natural it felt for Desmond to use them compared to skills purchased from the association.

If any power in the multiverse including many hunters knew what Desmond was thinking they would probably curse him to death thinking how unfair God was; Desmond was simply unaware of how difficult it was to develop an ability from scratch based on his understanding and affinity for mana.

To be clear, an Elementalist could do anything if they had the time, mana, and control to pull it off, so it wasn’t impossible to create a tsunami or brutal rain of arrows simply by channeling mana and shaping it at will.

But skills or techniques were different, they required understanding, visualization, and a strong will to carve a concept or idea into mana, due to the particular requirements a skill or technique was fundamentally different from a manifestation of mana.

.....

To put it in layman’s terms, Desmond could in theory simply channel an appropriate amount of water mana and shape it into chains before commanding the chains to bind a target thereby gaining something very similar to his ability.

The problem was that in terms of efficiency, mana consumption, and sheer power, these water chains would be incomparable to true which carries a strong understanding on Desmond’s part of the softness water, as well as a visualization quite specific that it was etched into Desmond’s subconscious when he developed the ability; all this is reinforced by the conceptual image within Desmond of the atlas myth.

So, if these two processes were compared with each other, would have a combat power at least three to four times higher than manual mana control.

This was the enormous importance of skills and techniques, but developing them was not easy at all either, precisely because of their superior power compared to the raw use of mana, the requirements to create a new technique were quite difficult to overcome, needing more than one talent but also a strong inspiration.

This was where not only Desmond’s monstrous talent came in but also his almost unheard-of amount of luck, was there even a better source of inspiration for controlling mana than having been one with a faerie? When it came to an affinity for mana Kyuru was unparalleled, although she lacked combat power, and the experience of being one with her, while still a hazy part in Desmond’s memory still brought him a significant amount of inspiration.

For this past month, Desmond had spent every second of his free time trying to digest this inspiration into part of his strength thus compensating for his lack of prowess as an Elementalist; it was a pity that his efforts still hadn’t paid off due to lack of time and control over his strength.

Desmond couldn’t wait for more free time to fully focus on training and finding new ways to strengthen his control over mana, he even already had a few ideas in mind that would help him deepen his control and understanding over certain types of mana, he just hadn’t had the time to do it.

On the bright side, Desmond wasn’t the only one who had made progress in the last month, Claire had also made leaps and bounds thanks to the resources Desmond had brought back from his last trip.

Similar to how Desmond’s ability to store and control mana had increased due to his physique enhancement, Claire’s telekinetic abilities also showed improvements after she began consuming the physique enhancement pills Desmond gave her.

Although due to the softer, more easily digestible nature of the pills Claire did not need to go through the same pain Desmond went through to become stronger, this also meant that Claire’s strength grew at a significantly slower rate.

Of course, neither Desmond nor Claire cared, after all, Claire’s telekinetic abilities were already quite strong and there was no rush for her to enhance her physical body at the expense of going through a lot of pain.

Having gone through the hellish baptism that was the soul of the twilight, Desmond certainly didn’t want Claire to go through a similar experience.

With Claire and Desmond making progress on their respective abilities, it was Sasha who showed the least progress, mainly because she was already stronger than Desmond, to begin with, she wouldn’t increase her strength significantly unless she consumed resources like Desmond’s soul of twilight.

It was good enough that Sasha’s strength showed signs of improving after she consumed a very special fruit that Desmond bought at the auction in the sovereign martial world.

Originally a fruit intended to be used to enhance the strength of beasts by purifying their bloodline, the fruit had a very particular characteristic of being able to enhance the strength of creatures with a bloodline with an affinity for fire; this was the reason Desmond acquired the fruit in the first place.

Meanwhile, Sasha had been trying to digest the methods, formulas, and logic behind the alchemy book that Desmond had given her, but according to her it would still take some time for her to fully digest all the information, and only then would she be able to gain a real benefit from it.

This could not be avoided, originally alchemy was a very high and complex field of study that contained an enormous amount of information on methods and ingredients that varied according to the place of origin; the fact that Sasha was confident in digesting the alchemy methods of a completely different system from her own showed Sasha’s enormous natural talent in alchemy.

Even with all of the above, Desmond was not entirely satisfied, he knew that the current peace was temporary, not only did the movements of the mutated beasts seem to have increased on a large scale in almost the entire continent, but also some strange movements had occurred from the military forces of some countries around the globe according to the information that Desmond managed to capture; because his military rank was not high enough Desmond did not have access to more specific information due to it was classified but what he knew so far was more than enough for him to know that things were not going to be peaceful for a long time.

Desmond was uneasy, he didn’t like not having control over his destiny, but he was also humble enough to recognize that there would always be things beyond his reach, he was at the end of the day just an individual and he couldn’t control everything around him. Of course, he had some plans to change things a bit and make his environment safer, but all this required the right time and opportunity; It was not easy to implement.

Lost in thought, the sound of someone knocking on his bedroom door snapped Desmond out of his brooding state, making him wonder who would come looking for him this late since Claire didn’t seem to have been in the mood to spend the night in his room. A couple of hours ago he had made up his mind to spend the night alone, although he ended up unable to sleep.

Opening the door to the room was none other than Claire who was on the other side of the door with a somewhat shy, but uncomfortable expression.

“Can I come in?” A rather strange question came from Claire who was usually quite open in her attitude towards Desmond and her desires for him.

Letting her in, Desmond couldn’t resist the enormous temptation that had been placed in front of him and without much thought, he grabbed Claire from her waist and started kissing her as he pushed her onto the bed.

At first, Claire seemed to enjoy Desmond’s touch but soon she began to resist leaving Desmond somewhat confused and slightly frustrated at being interrupted.

Seeing Desmond’s slightly impatient eyes, Claire did her best to clear herself with a helpless tone: “Can we just sleep together?...it’s one of those days and I’m not feeling that well.”

When all was said and done, Claire was for Desmond the apple of his eye, his heaven, he would never make her feel uncomfortable just to satisfy something as trivial as his lust: “And to think that it was something like that, let me prepare some tea, the heat will help you feel better and the tea will relax your nerves; you should have come earlier”

Showing the more caring and protective side of him, Desmond lost any notion of satisfying his wishes and dedicated himself to taking care of his dear Claire who was having a bad night due to her being on her period.

In less than an hour, the two of them were already in bed holding each other warmly before ending the day with a little kiss goodnight.