The Oracle Paths

This new Core followed on from a long string of realizations. Jake once believed that one Aether Core would suffice, and in theory it did. Only he came to realize that Aether was not a very readily available energy.

After more than a year of cultivating his Aether Core, it now contained enough Aether to blow up a small city, but this nearly limitless energy could not be mobilized as easily as in the early days.

Just like a black hole that swallowed more and more matter without spitting it out, his Aether Core continued to grow in density, accumulating more and more Aether, but it was trapped inside. The only Aether really available was the Aether contained in the Aether Core's accretion disk, which grew along with the Aether Core itself and reflected its pull on the surrounding Aether.

By influencing it with his mental force, Jake could cause the Aether Core to spin faster on itself, allowing it to more effectively suck up the Aether around it. Alas, even doing this, the amount of Aether available was barely enough to produce Aether Spells worth the power of a small C4 charge.

When his Aether Core was less developed, Jake could also, as a last resort, force his Aether Core to spin in the opposite direction, forcing it to regurgitate the Aether previously gobbled up. This would sabotage months of sweat and effort, but it would effectively give him a momentary power boost that would enhance all of his spells and give him unlimited stamina.

Sadly, Jake had not been able to use this method for several months now. When his Aether Core had exceeded a certain "weight", he found that his mental strength was no longer sufficient to force it to regurgitate the absorbed Aether. It was like trying to force a black hole to vomit out the matter in it and it was virtually impossible.

Even with his new Soul Class and a significant boost to his psychic abilities, it was so difficult that stopping the spinning of his Aether Core and then reversing it would probably take him many hours and he wasn't sure he could do it. In combat, his enemies would never give him that chance.

What he could do was let his Aether Core explode, although that again would require a lot of power. Yet destroying had always been easier than creating.

This solution could allow him to take his enemies with him in death, but for obvious reasons it was a last ditch option that Jake hoped he would never have to resort to.

To get back to the design of this new Core, it was essential to understand what had driven Jake to take this new path, but the reasons cited above had only weighed half in the balance leading him to this final decision.

The truth of the matter was that Aether was not meant to be used for casting spells. On paper, it was the primary source from which energy and matter were derived, but it also had a special function without which nothing in the Mirror Universe could exist.

Indeed, anything that saw its Aether Density drop to zero would instantly cease to exist. This was true for living beings, inorganic matter, but also energy in all its forms. Even an electron, a photon or any other elementary particle had its own Aether Density, without which it could not exist.

When Jake used his Aether to cast one of his Bloodline abilities or spells, he had to first convert it into energy or matter, but also assign a certain amount of Aether to define their level of existence. The thing was that all this was automated until now by his Bloodline and Soul Glyphs.

But that was about to change.

Jake had been exposed since his Third Ordeal to a much more efficient source of fuel for his magic: Fluid. In addition to providing a great deal of immediately available energy, it had the added benefit of nourishing the body, sharpening the mind and senses of the Fluid Masters, as well as providing an array of instinctively usable abilities. The stronger the Fluid affinity, the more the Fluid Wielders could call upon mysterious and unfathomable abilities, which in the case of the Grand Masters were almost akin to divine abilities.

The downside was that the Fluid was close to the Aether in many ways, but not nearly as versatile. By choosing the Fluid, they were closing themselves off from the Aether, which is why Sigmar, though a revered Fluid Grand Master, had chosen to give it up and restart his training with the Aether.

More recently, Jake had obtained a brand new slave: Shaktilar Zakal, a Shyril using relatively powerful ice magic. When he first read his Oracle Status, he found that he had a lvl 6 Ice Mana Core inside him, but an Aether Core worth only 112 points.

At the time, he wasn't that fascinated by it.

Two months earlier, however, and more precisely on the first day of his Fourth Ordeal, Jake had found this same characteristic in a certain Minmin: Jeanie Rumplesky. The little fairy had a lvl 10 Water Mana Core, but no Aether Core.

Despite her ridiculous stats except for her Intelligence, Jeanie had proven during the battle of Lodunvals that she could use powerful support spells and create ice and water shields strong enough to protect her comrades from Wengol assaults. Not being a water mage, she lacked experience and technique, but at no time did she show any signs of exhaustion or mental fatigue.

At that moment, Jake knew he was doing it wrong. With the battle over, he and Xi began to research the various alternative energy systems that existed in conjunction with the Aether. It was a good thing that his novice manual also covered this subject.

It had been a long process, but he had finally found a type of energy that suited him perfectly: Reiga.

This energy source was not natural and had been invented by a certain legendary warrior from the System A4 trillions of years earlier. In essence, it behaved like light, but could be manipulated to follow a certain trajectory. It also had a zero joule effect, meaning that the energy wasted in the environment was nil and therefore unintentional heating was impossible.

Like Mana, Reiga was a neutral energy that could be used to support any magic, but unlike Fluid, it was a genuine pure energy in the same way as thermal or nuclear energy and therefore had its own Aether density.

Because of its light-like behavior, it was an energy known for its instantaneousness and long range. Handling it could be difficult, but for Jake whose Bloodline specialized in radiation it was the ideal source of power.

The property that made Reiga so interesting compared to Mana or Fluid, was that being unnatural, it had to be customized step by step, making Reiga a customizable energy unique to each user. Nonetheless, what all these types of Reiga had in common was that they could use other types of energy to restore and expand their own.

A Reiga Core could be refined and redesigned to convert other types of energy, as Enya had done with the help of Hakkrasha to use Aether to feed her Fire Core.

Finally, the last major selling point for the Reiga was that there was no limit to the number of Reiga Cores and their attributes that an individual could create. Depending on their characteristics, internal conflicts could emerge, but nothing that an expert could not resolve.

Jake had one major problem, though: He didn't have the instructions for creating this Reiga Core, only a detailed description of what could be achieved from such an energy source.

If he had to rely on his own skill and perseverance to create one, who knows how many years it would have taken him to succeed. But with his Rune Engraver Soul Class, it was now a dream within his reach.

With his mind in an extremely profound meditative trance, Jake continued to master one Aether Symbol after another. Each new Aether Symbol he mastered forever added to his arsenal, and like a baby learning to speak, babbling the first words was always the hardest.

What should have been abstruse and obscure to any other novice Aetherist soon became amazingly clear to Jake because of his Deciphering/Coding ability to instinctively understand new languages.

The first few stuttered words became sentences, then text, and only a few days later, Jake realized he was already able to "speak. At that moment, he was overwhelmed by the realization that creating a Reiga Core was not difficult at all. Perhaps he could do even better.

With this new language, Jake first created the basics: an extremely complex Aether Symbol capable of harnessing Aether, radiation, heat, life and spirit energy, as well as the ambient Mana of Quanoth, and converting it into Reiga. Even with his Rune Engraver skill, this took time.

For added adaptability, Jake made this Aether Symbol work both ways. If he ever needed to recharge his mental or physical batteries, he would have his Reiga available to do so.

Then imitating the structure of Mana, he set about to parameterize this new Reiga to give it properties similar to light and without the Joule effect as the Oracle System archives described, but with the possibility of being used in the same way as Aether to generate spells.

Because of its electromagnetic-like behavior and the fact that this Reiga had some mass, Jake knew that learning to master this energy would prove difficult, but it was the path he chose.

A month later, the convoluted Aether Symbol that governed all the parameters of his new Reiga Core was born. At that moment, the cave he was in was suddenly plunged into darkness. The lava of the magma chamber dimmed and the temperature suddenly dropped by several hundred degrees.

All the energy in the room, be it Aether, Mana, heat or light, suddenly converged on the Aether Symbol positioned a few centimeters above his Aether Core and as it was absorbed inside, a ray of exceedingly pure light shot out from the other side.

The Reiga Core was born.