It only took Azotreh a day to recover from her first proper monster fight. Strangely, during that time, the burn left by Diana's attack did not heal as she expected it to. Instead, it remained there, slicing the sigil that blocked her system senses.
While she was still recovering, Azotreh continued her training every hour she could. Diana had taken away the tools to assist in her strength training, but that didn't stop Azotreh from using the forms Diana had taught using her body weight, along with movements Nicholas broadly communicated.
Otherworldly forms of training were strangely more effective than the ones Diana taught, using her body with a little more efficiency, especially with the assistance of both the system's interface and the two more knowledgeable beings within her soul.
As it turned out, while the brands stopped her from feeling the flow of arcane power through the veins below them, they didn't halt the system from telling her broader facts. Part of her interface was six bars that represented her resources. Colored red, yellow, blue, white, black, and gold, they showed her current state. It helped a lot when considering her current inability to detect the arcane power and when it was reaching its limits within her body.
Whenever she drained the yellow bar representing her vigor as close to its end as she could, causing her body to collapse, she would shift to mental exercises like writing and reading. When the black and white bars of her vaticence and vehemence were drained, she'd stop and attempt to move the minimal ambient mana of the facility with her aura.
Her plans to continue training were abruptly cut short by the appearance of the administrator. His metallic, obelisk-like form rose from the ground of her room during the third hour of the first night. His red, cold but soulful eyes fixed on Azotreh, then on the empty floor space where a pile of several skill books once sat. Azotreh had put them in her inventory after regaining access.
"You didn't absorb all of those, did you?" The administrator's voice was cold as usual, though once again filled with the detached curiosity he'd held during other experiments.
Azotreh shook her head silently. The administrator shifted across the floor, the seamless pillar of cold steel not making a sound as it appeared beside Azotreh. A hand reached out and grasped Azotreh's face, a second hand holding her hair aside to examine the brands. The administrator let out a rumbling sound as he saw the new massive burn wound across one of the runes. After a long moment of observation, he let go.
"Nobles… always believing themselves to be so right." The voice released from the obelisk had an abnormal grinding quality as he complained. Then his eyes lit up a little more brightly before reaching into the empty air.
He pulled out a clear spherical crystal, its innermost core filled with radiant white light. It looked like a monster core, though the white color felt more comforting than the harsh blue and pink of other cores.
"If you can carry items, I have many of these cores, along with other books. Your timetable has been moved again."
Azotreh frowned, but nodded as the administrator took out more of the cores. Then he began to grasp books. Not skill books, but normal books from his personal collection. Azotreh stored them without a doubt. The only question she had was where the books were vanishing from. Every time she put one of the books into her inventory, it would vanish. But she didn't lose possession of it; it had just changed locations.
The administrator also paused after handing her the tenth book.
"How are you storing so many unique items?" He asked, to which Azotreh could only shrug. She had no idea either.
The basic inventory ability had eight spaces to store items at level one, with a maximum capacity of eight items per slot. Capacity and number increased with level, as did the maximum size of a stored item, but even though her inventory had hit level two during that day of training–letting her store sixteen unique items–she didn't have space for all of it.
On a hunch, she activated a different ability. One she hadn't bothered with until now.
She made a couple of hand gestures and spoke some words in a language she didn't know, yet knew how to say.
A bookshelf, six shelves high and made from sparkling purple wood, filled with golden stars, rose from the floor. On it were six glowing skill books and ten regular books. Strangely, a small slip of paper was resting horizontally on the bottom shelf.
"Fascinating. Do you think I could place more books on it?" The administrator asked. It seemed his curiosity about the strange new power had overwhelmed what he wanted to do initially. Azotreh nodded and gestured to the shelf.
The administrator eagerly began to place books on the shelf, but he quickly ran out of space. When he attempted to place a regular book onto a shelf with a skill book, the shelf ejected the book with great speed. The administrator was naturally unharmed, but it was clearly fast enough to hurt Azotreh.
When he instead attempted to place a skill book on that shelf, it accepted the book without reservation.
"Fascinating… different shelves for different kinds of books. I wonder what it gains with advancement or prestige…" He murmured before looking at the bottom two shelves.
Only the bottom-most shelf had the slip of paper, though the one above it also rejected books the administrator attempted to place on it. He carefully lifted the piece off the shelf to look at it.
"The notice for the monster young Miss Crimbrew sent you to kill. Wait…" The administrator pulled a couple of items from the empty air, waving wands and rings of metal over the paper.
"It still has the arcane power of the quest intact… and it didn't disintegrate when you killed the monster. It even still has the system integration. What a marvel." The administrator turned excited eyes on Azotreh.
"I wanted to conduct AZ-03 in the lab, but I'm moving location to here. I want to experiment more with this shelf power. It could be more useful to me than you being out in the field."
Those words made her heart sink. If she was sent out, there was a higher chance of her escape. But if she was trapped here as storage for the administrator, there was a chance she'd never escape.
Strangely, she suddenly noticed her prana bar go down by a tiny amount; the red indicator decreased. She began to run her hands over her body until she found the spot; right near the wound that had healed overnight was a new wound. She could barely feel it, as it healed quickly enough. But she could feel the blood from it stain her shirt.
The administrator put the scrap of paper back and glanced at Azotreh. He snapped his fingers and a metal slab rose from the ground. He spent a couple of seconds adjusting it, making sure it was even. Then one of his stick-thin arms reached into a nearby wall and pulled out a jar holding a large, scaled white object. Azotreh felt additional hands wrap around her wrists and ankles as they lifted her into the air.
Unlike AZ-02, as the hands clamped her to the table, no spikes emerged from the base of the table to suppress her struggling. Instead, they just laid her on the flat sheet of metal face down. She pressed her forehead into the metal and tried to struggle, but it was no use. If she couldn't even hurt Diana in her desperation, there was less than nothing she could do to the even more powerful administrator.
She felt a sharp tip brush along her back as the administrator cut away her shirt, then felt that same tip pierce her skin as the pain-enhancing ritual circle was drawn into her flesh.
[Ability: Bulwark of the Weak activating]
The system message somehow still appeared visibly to her despite her face being pressed into the table. But she had no time to consider the oddity as she was suddenly pulled into her soul realm. Snow fell outside the window of her room as she looked up from the comfortable bed.
Azotreh's aura shifted as Nicholas took control. At this point, he was sure that the administrator thought the pain was necessary, even a good thing. But Nicholas didn't care much about what the strange metallic man thought.
There was a secondary benefit, though: the ability Bulwark of the Weak. It was one of Azotreh's innate abilities and provided a rather substantial bonus to their defensive and regenerative capabilities while they were defending someone weaker. What defined another as weaker seemed to be rather arbitrary, but in this case that worked in their favor. Azotreh wasn't as mentally resilient as he was, so he was defending her by taking the pain and activating the ability. He had a theory that this ability was how they survived the implantation of the second draconic eye.
This time it wasn't an eye being implanted, though. Nicholas could feel the cool air on Azotreh's skin as her clothes were torn away. Then small points of biting agony stabbed in a line down her spine, ending at her tailbone. Skin was cut away in the area to expose nerves.
Nicholas managed to stay awake through the torturous process. It hurt less than the second draconic implantation. He guessed that was due to the dragon now residing in Azotreh's soul. With that being already formed, there was less conflict between the two existing parts and the new one.
He was a little concerned about how his mind managed to stay both aware enough to notice the differences and stable enough to allow him to keep his own struggling to a minimum. It wasn't a normal response to having one's nerves exposed and forcefully bound to a new extension of the body. He felt like he should have been screaming.
It didn't take long for the twin draconic eyes to burst again as the new item was implanted. The bursting eyes actually hurt much more than the draconic implantation, which once again surprised him.
But he still felt Azotreh's body attempting to rip itself apart, then repairing itself with the assistance of Bulwark of the Weak. He kept as quiet as he could, knowing that the procedure had to end at some point, and extending it with his struggling would only make it worse in the end.
He also didn't notice the effects of the pain amplifier, though he certainly did know it was there. The same ritual was now carved into Azotreh's back as had once been used on her eye. He recognized it, but didn't feel its effects.
It was strangely calm as Azotreh's physiology was altered. But calm didn't mean there wasn't damage, and soon enough, Nicholas passed out as Azotreh's prana once more plummeted below ten percent of its maximum, entering a state of preservation as the experiment ended.
The newkin, less than a few minutes old and barely sapient, watched as its charge was practically ripped open and attached to something else.
It had moved from a spot on her body to the wall, drawing mana from the solid surface to grow quickly. Something told it that the floor was a danger, so it avoided that space at all costs. Instead, it attempted to grow onto the solid surface of the wall, its slight mycelial network spreading over the plane of dark metal and eventually the blue glass.
It had a large task ahead of it, granted by its progenitor. But it paused in its sole mission to watch as the very entity it was supposed to save was torn open as a corpse spotted by vultures and then bound to a mass of flesh thicker than the charge's arms.
If it was still surviving on her blood, it would have had a feast on the sheer quantity lost. It was truly a magnificent display of both the need for its purpose and the cycle it was born to.
It spent a moment watching as the body of its charge finally collapsed into unconsciousness, and the big slab of metal returned its attention to the strange purple conjured object, muttering in a language it knew not.
It watched for another minute to ensure the metal thing didn't know it was there before it closed its external senses and refocused on consuming the power coursing through the sheer metal and glass it was attached to. They carried mana, and a hint of vitality as well. Why, the fungal newkin would likely not find out. But it wasn't curious. It had a purpose, and it would fulfill it.