As I turn to the real yellow divine fragment in my hand, the body double that was on its way here as this display from the Lich King unfolded sends a telepathic message as it arrives nearby.
"The last remaining isolation pod has been recharged up to a stable 10.5x dilation. Ember can begin his hibernation beneath the guildhall with my supervision right now."
It touches down, and I think about a response while it pulls the large cylindrical metal contraption out from its item storage.
As it sets it down, I walk over and open the front, typing into the control panel to give myself a 3-minute session, which would be the equivalent of just over half an hour inside the chamber.
"I want to test something quickly."
I take a step inside, then turn to my teammates and nod.
"Tell me what you see while I'm inside. I'm curious if this will work..."
Once the door closes and I'm left inside the small mana-shielded room, the air becomes thick with pure mana while the pod activates.
The thought of channeling divine energy inside a pod made only to hold mana seems like it might be too stressful on the structural integrity of this magic machinery. However, if there's a chance it will speed up the process, I have to give it a shot.
The whole pod is void of any leftover threads, and from what my teammates and the Lich King describe, there was yellow aura flowing through the walls of the pod the entire time I was inside.
I nod, open up my storage, then let Ember's sleeping body gently fall into the isolation pod where I just sat, and turn to my double.
"This pod won't be useful to me at all. Set this pod to 30 days our time, almost a year in isolated sleep. He may need more than that, so get ready to recharge the pod once the time is up. I want a double watching him all day and night beneath the guildhall. If I need to use it, I'll send Bri a message to have you transport it back. We'll be training out here for a while."
The double closes the pod after entering a few codes in the control panel, then lets the pod fall into its storage.
"Understood. Good luck with your training."
Then, it flies away to leave us in the empty desert.
I nod and think to myself.
While the extra time within an isolation pod would be helpful, losing pretty much all of the energy that I filter through makes all the time in the world useless.
I have had one breakthrough, the fact that I can hold the divine threads inside my body, but I need to think of a way to compress a higher percent of that energy into my core while not losing all of the excess into the atmosphere.
While I think about this, I open up my storage and pour out all of my red divine fragments and look to the Lich King and my teammates. Then, I share my self-regeneration skill with Maria and Fisher, as Lydia and Abby already have functioning healing skills.
"I need time to think. These are no use to me now, so use all of them if you wish. They should be enough to bring all of you to the red core stage."
My gaze turns to the Lich King.
"Guide them while I solve this problem on my own."
Each of them takes the red gems and puts them into item boxes while the Lich King begins to go off on a tangent about his first time awakening his red core, the optimal way to awaken, and the effects it has on the body and mind like an arrogant record player on repeat.
Satisfied with the fact that they will be able to achieve this on their own, I turn away and begin walking to a more isolated part of the desert.
I watch a cloud of red mist form around them as I walk further and further away, then sit in the sand until an idea comes to mind.
"This could work... Or become a disaster... I'm far enough from the city where I think it's worth a try..." I whisper to myself, then shrug and reach into my inventory to pull out four black seeds of the trees I managed to pull from the ocean inside the divine construct.
I place them in a diamond shape around me, then use my new skill [Barrier Creation] to create an invisible dome around me with a small tunnel that leads deep underground as an escape route.
Next, I pull out a fragment of yellow divine energy and consume it, letting the same process as before play out.
Instead of keeping all of the energy inside my barrier, I let it seep out through two artificially manufactured weak points in my purple limiter in the center of my palms. I don't just let these excess threads flow into the atmosphere and out of sight, I push them toward the black seeds that sit inside this barrier with me.
The instant the yellow threads touch the obsidian seeds, they all start to grow upward and create branches that mimic the outer shape of the dome.
At the end of the branches, four small yellow fruits dangle in front of me containing a large amount of the energy from the fragment I just expelled.
Some of the energy was lost, but it's far better than what I was dealing with before when all of the excess threads just dissolved out of the pod and into the empty desert..
I smirk and use small air blades wrapped in yellow threads to cut the four fruits down from their branches and eat them on the spot one after another.
Every time I eat a fruit, it cycles through my core, leaving trace amounts of its threads behind, and the expelled energy is collected and presented right back to me with a small tax taken from the trees.
I use my purple barrier to keep the yellow threads circulating through my body and back into my core while I consume the fruits one by one. Letting my core take in larger amounts of energy at smaller intervals seems to be even more efficient and less energy taxing on my body too.
I go through another two dozen cycles, of four fruits each, until its taxed away every bit of energy from the single fragment I started with. Over this half an hour of cycling, the black trees create a midnight-colored dome above me, catching every fiber of energy that is expelled from me now, no matter where it flows out of me.