“Is it done yet?” Emily asked again.
Flo sighed in reply, but finally his eyes lit up.
[Job – None
Currency – 0 Shards 0 Sols 0 Eclipse Shards (Owes 35 shards to Blake Hospital to be paid within 29 sunrises)
Life Core Element – Blood
Weapon body – Gun body
Current Level – Beginner Gun Body
Innate Body – Unknown
Realm – Inactive
Realm stabilisation – 0
Companion – None
Location – Brimnar City
Date – 13th Sunrise of Summer of Year 4032]
“It’s done.”
“What’d you get?”
“Blood element and a gun body.”
Emily withdraws from the chair and rummage through the drawers eventually pulling out one blood core for Flo and a simple iron pistol along with a basic manual.
“Aaaaaaaand because you have a weapon body, you get a special something.”
She grabbed Flo’s plink again and then took out a circular wooden stamper.
Pushing the stamp onto the necklace, she requested Florian, “Now check your plink.”
[Job – Adventurer]
“You can go out and fight monsters and also take on any requests but you will have to fight for the country in times of need.”
“Can I withdraw?”
“Absolutely not.”
Flo sighs again.
He turns to leave but Emily pulls on his top causing him to turn towards her.
“I’m not done yet, youuuuu also get a free hour in a training room to absorb the essence from the core.”
Flo hears a chorus of children not much younger than himself enter the Union building, quickly replying:
“I’ll use that hour now,” he flees from the desk, with a fast walk into a long hallway.
He held the necklace wrapped up in his arm as he moved down the hallway and inspected the edges melted by the strange blood.
He reshaped the necklace back into its original form through the same settings he molded the necklace previously.
Eventually he pauses at a door with a large number 5 plastered onto it.
The training room is a simple metal box, with only a small square mat on the floor and a straw dummy in the middle of the room, placing all the items beside him.
Sitting in a meditative position on the square mat and grabbing the blood core.
He was about to begin the usual process of absorbing the life essence from the core but was stopped by immense pressure causing his blood to run cold.
Flo’s mouth left wide open from the shock witnessed nothingness of the fabric of the air grab the blood core and chuck it into his mouth.
“It’s a perk of being one of us,” a familiar majestic voice stated.
“You also get double the life essence by consuming it and you won’t explode.”
Usually, you use simple meditation and open up your core to the surroundings.
In the air, there is always life essence and your core wants to draw the most life essence of the same element.
So, it takes in the life essence to power up but in Flo’s case the life essence is surging in his bloodstream.
Flo controlled the life essence in his body and brought it to his core, activating it and making it form into an iron ball.
Opening his plink menu:
[Realm – 1st Stage of Iron Core Gathering Realm]
“Ummmmm, what have you done to my body, why haven’t I exploded and destroyed this building yet?”
“Your one of us, sweetie,” the voice states.
“I’d use your elemental abilities now.”
Flo does as commanded.
He draws upon the nearby life essence and forms a weak puddly ball of what should be red blood but is instead is a dark purple almost black-in-colour liquid as he saw when finding his element out from Emily.
Life essence are small particles that are always flying around and by using your life core, you can attract this life essence.
The stronger the core, the more you can attract and the more you can use.
Also the stronger the core, the easier you can control it.
At very low stages, you can only form the life essence into a ball of your element but at higher stages, you can form hundreds of blades to fling at the opponent.
As he played with the ball of blood in his hand, the majestic voice added “See, you’re one of us.”
“Great,” Flo replied in an incredibly sarcastic tone.
Flo attempts to control the blood flowing out but due to his low realm it only floats a little upwards.
To withdraw from his own misery he grabs the gun and with one hand aims it at the dummy.
By connecting his essence to the gun, the black blood he can barely move himself catapults out of the pistol’s barrel and takes off the head of the straw puppet.
One by one the body of the straw puppets is replaced by being pulled under the room by a machine.
Each time the defence of the puppet improves by 1 minor stage.
Until the 9th stage of the iron core realm all of the life essence bullets penetrated the head.
At the 9th stage, the e-bullet (Life essence bullet for short) simply bounced off the straw puppet.
“Guess that’s my current limit, huh?” Flo stated in self-reflection.
He slides his gun into his trouser pocket before picking up the basic manual given by Emily.
The manual outlines the ways to absorb essence from the cores and also how to absorb essence from the air without the help of cores but it is over 10 times slower.
Additionally, the manual has some of the life cores stages written down:
Iron Core Gathering Realm
Bronze Core Gathering Realm
Silver Core Gathering Realm
Gold Core Gathering Realm
Platinum Core Gathering Realm
Crystallisation Realm.
Flo knows there are realms above this but as it is only a basic manual it doesn’t show these realms.
Each realm is about gathering as much essence and then refining the core into the next major stage until the crystallisation stage.
Flo leaves the training room and heads back to the desk.
“I don’t need this anymore,” he hands back the manual to Emily.
“Also, can I test my innate weapon body here?”
“Nooooooo, we do not have those capabilities,” Emily slurs out from her exhausted state.
“So many kids, so many questions, what do they learn in schools?” She mumbles.
Flo turns to leave the Union building.
“Oh, they’re still here.”
He quickens his steps to walk past the school class who are most likely only a year younger than himself but bumps shoulders with a girl.
They look at each other and make eye contact and quickly look away again.
The girl has long messy black hair and bangs that cover her forehead along with glasses that shield her eyes.
Flo flees from the class and out the door into the street.
“Cath, Cathy, Catherine?” A tap on the shoulder finally makes the girl apparently named Catherine break from her trance.
“Was that boy really that handsome, staring like that,” a blonde girl friend teases her.
“No, no that’s not it.” Cath replies.
She continues to stare in the direction he left.
Making the great escape, Florian is near the edge of the city leaning onto the large defensive walls that surround the city.
“Whoo freedom, maybe,” he pats the wall behind him.
“Now money, but how to get money?” Flo questions himself as he wonders about the answer and quickly finds the problem.
He forgot to check the questboard at the Union building.
Only one option is now left for Flo as there is no chance he is going back now.
At the city gates, he shows his plink screen to the guards wearing very light armour and is permitted to leave the city.
Now outside the city, Flo heads through the grey grass and into Greywood Forest and quickly finds some low level spiders to kill.
“One, two, three, four, four of them.”
He pulls out his pistol and in quick succession lets out two e-bullets and kills 2 of the spiders.
One spider spits out a column of webs and Flo gets his swinging left hand caught.
Using his only free hand, Flo lines up the shot, gathering his essence into the barrel of the gun and pulls the trigger.
The bullet lands directly in the face of the spider, this one not exploding.
The last spider only a metre away from the freshly killed spider attempts to run away but another loud bang rings out across the area.
All the spiders were killed.
Now Flo is slightly stuck and tries to wrestle himself out of the silk, keeping his arm stuck.
At this moment, he spots the body of one of the spiders dissolve from his e-bullet.
Flo summons his blood and pours it over the silk.
It quickly dissolves, freeing his arm.
“So my blood is poisonous or acidic.”
“Both—pretty cool right,” the elegant voice is back.
“I thought I told you to stop stalking me, pervert.” Flo says coldly.
The voice vanished quickly after.
He then dissolved the rest of the spider’s bodies and pulled out the cores.
All living beings have life cores and could be extracted, even trees have life cores and some imagine each shred of grass does but they are too small to spot with the naked eye.
In total there were three stage 2 iron cores and 1 stage 3 iron core.
All the cores were silk cores.
The cores are extremely small, barely the size of a tooth and easily fits into Flo’s pocket.
Whilst putting the miniscule cores into his pocket, Flo hears screaming in the distance.
Panicked screaming.
He runs to take cover.
Not far away was a much bigger and stronger spider.
This one part of the silver core realm.
Tearing up the ground as it sailed across it.
It was chasing a group of adventurers, 4 of them total.
Could be at the bronze or maybe silver stage.
The spider generated layers of silk in front of it while it glided.
Eventually, the spider had enough fun and released the silk covering the whole party.
“Ahhhhh mmmmm ahhhh,” some of the adventurers attempted to scream but they were muffled by the layers of silk.
“Well, they’re dead.”
They all died while Flo was watching from a distance through a thick layer of bushes and shrubs.
Mercilessly strangled to death—Flo didn’t stay to enjoy the sight.
He walked out of the forest slightly annoyed by the massive spider and re-entered the city.
He didn’t think much of it.
It was a common scene that shouldn’t have the word common attached to it.
Flo found his way back to the Union building praying the school kids had already left.
And he is in luck.
The class had already departed and he safely went to the desk.
Emily was no longer there and instead it was a man with shrivelled ginger hair.
He threw down the four shards he collected on the desk.
The worker didn’t say anything and only looked at Flo.
“I would like to exchange these three stage 2 cores for shards and the stage 3 core for an equivalent stage blood core.”
The worker stood up and shuffled through the drawers, bringing a blood core for Flo and passing 6 shards to him.
“Thanks.”
The worker didn’t say anything and just looked down at his desk as Flo thanked him and left.
Once on the street, Flo looks at the shards and audibly sighs:
“No where near enough for the hospital.”