Chapter 671: Talent Tethering
Northern, after a very long nap, slowly rose from his bed. Even after rising, he still felt tired and not half as functional as he was a day ago.
It was indeed a great boon to him that he had a bottomless reserve of essence, but that came together to take an even much greater toll on his stamina than usual.
Over the past few weeks, just as he had trained his combat technique and forging ability, he had also taken every activity as an opportunity to increase his stamina.
Prolonging his sword training and missing sleep wasn't because he just felt like it. While he was indeed particular about the growth of his combat technique, he was also taking all those avenues to increase his stamina.
But it was to no avail. Although, what he had done twenty-four hours ago indeed required a lot of his stamina to be lost.
Besides the fact that transferring talent was incredibly, unnecessarily tricky and sucked on his essence like a whirlpool, it also consumed his stamina at a terrifying rate.
However, that was right now the least of his concern.
Northern rubbed his temples, feeling the weight of his actions over the past day pressing heavily on him.
Talent transfer. Even with Diy, it was not as simple as Northern thought it would be.
Diy allowed him to combine talents and delete them. This was a definite ability, but because of DIY's presence in the system, everything that had to do with talents-both owned and copied became relatively loose.
Relatively loose because it was not like they lost their tethering to his soul. DiY just made it possible for them to be altered and handled however, as long as he understood the way they worked.
It just so happened that Northern possessed eyes that could see the true essence and structure of a thing, no matter what it was.
Owned talents, he discovered, had a thin string that tethered them to his soul.
Copied talents, however, were untethered to his soul, which made them an easier target to manipulate the ligatures of.
But even when he dove into the ligatures and chaos construct of the talent, it was still difficult to do anything about it because they did not yet have a tether.
Which meant he had to depend on owned talent. But Northern found another way.
An artificial thread.
After copying Alystren's ability [Mulish Thread], Northern happened to discover some really interesting aspects about the ability.
First, it was a string that had the ability to attach to someone and ultimately control their movement; every other talent ability worked in a way that contributed to this factor.
The point for Northern then was, it had a string. He needed a string to be able to temporarily connect copied talents to other people.
But the threads, although almost invisible, were still physical-they could never do the work Northern needed them to do.
Mulish Thread created an essence solidified into physical thread and attached to the body of a target to control them.
So, Northern decided to take a gamble and evolved the talent.
When he did, his notion was correct.
Mulish Thread gained two evolution pathways:
[The Path of the Body]
[The Path of the Soul]
Naturally, Northern had gone for the path of the soul. This led him to uncover new abilities of Mulish Thread.
All the mechanics of the talent's abilities were changed from attributing to one's body to the soul. And Northern gained a new talent ability from it, called [Core Tether].
The ability enabled him to connect immaterial strings of essence to people's soul core. When this was done, he could see all the information regarding their talent.
It was pretty useless for any other person, including him, because he already had that ability. However, it wasn't so useless. It was exactly what Northern needed!
Northern needed a way to tether to someone's core, and Mulish Thread's new abilities gave it to him.
Hence, all he needed to do was manipulate the ligatures of the thread, connect one end to Aster's soul, and connect the other end to the talent which stayed within the premises of his own soul.
Which he did. And the end result?
Northern had, in fact, used one stone to kill two birds. Of course, this was no coincidence or a happening by mistake.
It was something he had thoroughly thought about while he was figuring out a way to go about this.
He could have woven the talent ligatures and the threads in such a way that they'd be externally attached to Aster's core but still residing in his soul.
That way, the boy would still be able to use the talent like his own without facing any consequences, but he still wouldn't have enough essence to propagate the essence.
Besides, Northern did not want that route either. While he was doing this, he had discovered a secret about Aster that he wanted to keep secret.
Both before and even now, he very much welcomed the idea of betrayal, so he preferred to just tether it, so come what may, all he would have to do is cut the tether and Aster would no more have access to both his essence and his talent.
Yes. His essence. Because the second bird Northern managed to kill with this stone was
solving the issue of essence with the same tethering.
Leaving the talent in his soul and tethering it to Aster's core gave Aster the freedom to use it without having to pay for the cost of using it.
The little weight of it that he bore was just stamina and skill.
The skill fed on Northern's void essence, which also fed on Northern's stamina.
In the end, it was like he created too much trouble for himself. But Northern did not mind it...
after all, he also had something to gain from this.
Starting on a small scale with the disruption of order within the academy.
And at large, a destruction large enough to force Rughsbourgh out of secluded training. And it just so happened that the right specimen for his plans walked into his hands.