The Oracle Paths

After his successful passage, Jake didn't shoot straight down into the depths of the funnel. First, there was something he absolutely had to do.

Saros, still trapped on the other side, watched him in bewilderment as he began to palpate the steel wall of the funnel just a few inches below the lower base of the barrier. Was he trying to disrupt the force field by directly damaging its base?

However, the Oracle Guardian soon realized he was off the mark. Jake's intentions towards the steel coating the funnel's walls were entirely different.

There hadn't been time earlier because he had other priorities and damaging the Magnetic Resonator was something they must avoid at all costs to succeed in their mission, but circumstances had somewhat changed since.

Time to eat!

Whatever the metal or alloy that covered the immense structure's surface, it was durable but not enough to stop Jake. The warped ground, shaped like an inverted bowl several meters deep after Jake used it as a footing, was the most blatant evidence of this.

Still, deforming the metal was one thing, but cutting off a piece he could ingest and digest safely was an entirely different challenge. In addition to being ridiculously tough, this metal was also remarkably ductile, capable of withstanding considerable torsional and tensile forces.

Up until now, only the mysterious earthquake that had shaken the Magnetic Resonator earlier had managed to crack its surface, leaving some fractures behind. It would take much more to break off a chunk.

Accustomed to working with metal, Jake first tried to manipulate it directly using his Cosmic Manipulation, but he failed miserably. Supporting this initial attempt with his telekinesis didn't help much either, leaving him feeling helpless.

"It's going to be hard," Jake frowned, identifying the reason for this difficulty.

There wasn't just a Time Aether Array covering the Resonator's surface. Many other Aether Arrays performing various functions formed a complex, intertwined mesh virtually impossible to untangle.

One of them had the function of unifying all the components of the giant structure, treating it as a single enormous particle, rather than a construction made of countless blocks.

That was why his telekinesis and Cosmic Manipulation failed. As long as this unifying Aether Array existed, Jake could only affect the entire structure at once, but not its separate elements.

"Whoever conceived such an Aether Array is clearly a genius," he grumbled reluctantly, admitting his inferiority to this Aetherist, but not admitting defeat. "If direct manipulation doesn't work, let's try to cut off a piece directly."

Pointing his finger at the funnel's surface, a bright white laser shot from its tip, instantly striking its target. For a brief second, Jake allowed himself to hope that this thin laser would bore a glowing hole into this steel like a red-hot blade through butter, but reality proved

to be far more disappointing.

Forget a hole or any glowing redness indicating that at least the laser was heating the metal at the impact point, the metal remained completely cold and dull. He might as well have done nothing at all.

Once again looking for the cause of the phenomenon, with his Cosmic Sight Jake bitterly noted that another Aether Array had kicked into action. This one spread thermal energy evenly throughout the Resonator, making his efforts futile.

Unless he planned to melt the entire Magnetic Resonator, he might as well give up this method. Moreover, he had a hunch that such an endeavor would meet numerous other obstacles.

Such a technological marvel left nothing to chance. This unknown metal or alloy was inherently tenacious, resilient to both heat and radiation, or else it wouldn't have been chosen to armor the walls of this monstrous funnel.

But make no mistake. It wasn't the heat- resistance of this metal that proved a problem but rather the Aether Array that entwined the very essence of an element within the structure to the entirety of the Magnetic Resonator. Given another circumstance, Jake was confident he could have prevailed, and likely, could have done far worse...

"In that case, it's down to the manual method," Jake grimaced, his words dripping with irony.

Saros had watched him, curiosity piqued from the onset, and as Jake suddenly hurled a furious punch against the wall of the funnel, a look of baffled bemusement blanketed Saros's face. 'What the fuck is he doing?'

Employing the same amplification techniques he had used against the barrier, Jake began assaulting the metallic wall with intense speed, this time supplementing his efforts with the use of Sharpening and Penetration Aether to hasten the desired outcome.

He didn't use any weapons, most of them rendered obsolete by this newfound metal. This unknown substance outclassed the performance of all the alloys he had previously crafted and worked with, and for that very reason, he was determined to procure a sample. Once devoured, all his gear would make yet another giant leap forward.

Jake's mood darkened, however, when he found that even his Sharpening and Penetration Aether was scattered by these Aether Arrays, thwarting his efforts. Ultimately, he had no choice but to rely solely on his raw, unbridled strength.

The trick that his cells had just learned when confronting the barrier was still fresh in his memory, and inspired by a sudden intuition, he let his bloodline adapt freely.

Life Force gushed out of his cells, along with a torrent of biomass from god-knows-where. It was another one of those breakthroughs from the past year. By combining the Life and Space Elements, he had successfully created a stable dimension within his own cells capable of supporting living matter.

With each punch, his arm and the rest of his body began to double in size. The arm responsible for hammering the wall adopted an increasingly inhuman and disproportionate design, bristling with organic thrusters spitting out crazy amounts of Cosmic Force and a sort of bluish-black plasma.

Each kinetic energy generated was reabsorbed by his cells, dramatically boosting the next strike. By the sixth punch, a thirty-meter giant hovered in the vacuum in front of the funnel wall, the punching fist transformed into a monstrous crystalline drill, rotating and vibrating at a frenzied speed.

Sssssssshhhhhrrrhrrr!

Thank goodness there was no air in the funnel, for the piercing sound produced would probably have exploded the teeth of anyone unfortunate enough to hear it, including its creator. But even without that privilege, Saros, witnessing this horrific Frankenstein-like spectacle, was gripped by stunned disbelief at such an approach.

The high-frequency vibrations cracking the ground under his feet were definitely proof of that. A few seconds later, unsurprisingly, Jake brandished a handful of black steel shards in front of his face with a victorious grin.

The Oracle Guardian might have shared his joy if the man standing before him, taking pride in his achievement, wasn't a fifty-meter monstrosity. As he wondered what Jake intended to do with this invaluable metal, his eyes nearly popped out of his head when his "protégé" tossed the entire contents of his hand into his colossal maw, as if he were tossing back a large peanut.

It was too much for one day for the poor Oracle Guardian. Watching Jake tear into the Magnetic Resonator, Saros had hoped, somehow, that he had a precise and sophisticated plan that he hadn't thought of, but it was just to whet his appetite and satisfy his gourmet curiosity.

BOOOOM!

When the metal hit his stomach, his internal furnace capable of digesting anything got to work, transiently revealing the shape of his stomach as it glowed brilliantly. The metal held out for a few seconds, a feat in itself, before melting, then disintegrating and joining his bloodstream.

The digestion was already complete.

Jake closed his eyes for a moment to feel the difference, and when he opened them again, he raised his hand, and the same metal he had just consumed oozed from his pores in liquid form, morphing into a long sword, then various pieces of armor.

Simultaneously, the smith wove numerous Aether Symbols, brought out numerous other ores and materials to add to his creations, and then finally inscribed all sorts of engravings on his new equipment.

Inspecting the result with his bracelet, Jake clicked his tongue in dissatisfaction, "Barely Bronze Grade. But it will do for now.""

It was inferior to his previous equipment, but unlike the new gear, he had spent entire days in a perfectly equipped workshop to forge those artifacts. Producing a batch of Bronze Aether Artefacts in a few minutes of makeshift forging said a lot about the potential of this new material.

Thanks to the bracelet, Jake also now knew what it was. It was an alloy aptly dubbed Voidsteel (Incomplete).

He should have been pleased, but he could sense that the steel produced by his cells was indeed slightly different from the one he had devoured. Tasting it on the tip of his tongue, his first thought was that the taste was... lacking?

'Didn't I digest it all?'

Puzzled, he then scrutinized his stomach with his mental sense and was shocked to find a solid particle no larger than a grain of dust at the bottom of it. When he read the scan description, blood rushed to his head in a surge of irrepressible excitement.

He had hit the jackpot!