Chapter 293: Competition for the Inheritance Starts (Patreon)

Aalam

Competition for the Inheritance of the Spirit Smith

Rules:

• All 107 potential inheritors will participate in 108 challenges, judged by a panel of divine artifact spirits

• For each challenge, the potential inheritors will be ranked based on their performance, receiving points according to their ranking, first place 12 points, second place 9, third place 8, fourth place 7, and so on, with everyone below tenth place receiving no points

• Any potential inheritor who personally solved one or more of the puzzle books to start the competition begins with 144 points

• Final rankings will be based on total points of the potential inheritors at the end, the more points the better

Rewards:

Rank 1: Full inheritance of the Spirit Smith

Rank 2: 12 fragments of the Spirit Smith’s knowledge, 4 artifacts or resources up to A rank, standard participation present

Rank 3: 6 fragments of the Spirit Smith’s knowledge, 2 artifacts or resources up to A rank, standard participation present

Rank 4: 3 fragments of the Spirit Smith’s knowledge, 1 artifact or resource up to A rank, standard participation present

Rank 5: 2 fragments of the Spirit Smith’s knowledge, standard participation present

Rank 6: 1 fragment of the Spirit Smith’s knowledge, standard participation present

All Ranks Below: Standard participation present

Will you compete for the Spirit Smith’s Inheritance?

Yes/No

As the message appeared, coming from whatever artifact was controlling the Spirit Smith’s demiplane and not the System as the System still couldn’t be accessed, Aalam felt a slight opening show up in the subspace he’d been trapped in for the last 36 days, and this enabled his sensory domain to expand and pick up a lot of information. First, there were 107 other depressingly bare 12 meter cubic subspaces like his own, 106 occupied by human cultivators, and each subspace’s small opening was located at the vertices of nine rotating icosahedrons, the shape of 20-sided dice, in nine separate spatial planes, all of which overlapped each other to Aalam’s senses. In each plane, the 12 subspace openings were roughly 32,672 kilometers from each other, a rather far distance, and there were four other larger subspaces with openings in the center of the icosahedrons, 36 in total, including one which held a green grassland surrounding a pond of what looked to be the A rank material elder nymph tears where he could see his master meditating. Then, finally, in a tenth spatial plane, there was a large floating mansion where nine seemingly divine artifacts were floating around a screen which showed all the various subspaces at once, including the one Aalam was in.

More than the cool spatial nature of the former residence of the Spirit Smith, however, Aalam was focused more on the other potential inheritors.

Of his competitors there were 3 G ranks, 22 F ranks, 14 E ranks, 43 D ranks, 9 C ranks, and 16 B ranks, all significantly weaker than him even if he couldn’t access the power of his Territory due to the closed off nature of the residence. And, due to their weakness, he could get a good sense of their abilities even if he couldn’t see past their aura defenses and into their souls like Mila.

The first thing which was obvious was that they all had their stats maximized, even the B ranks, and they all had very high grade races, the three G ranks all with races at Legendary grade and even the higher grade cultivators with races only one or two grades behind the maximum possible. The most impressive of the cultivators, however—and the one Aalam assumed had solved the puzzle book the Primordial Sovereign had bought during the Universal Auction—was a D rank cultivator with a Mythic grade race.

She, like most of the 107 cultivators, specialized in time and space Laws, the same as the Spirit Smith. But she also had equal grade Laws of the fire, water, earth, and wind elements, her cultivation technique the Universal Balance Code, one of the other three cultivation techniques at the same level as Yin Yang Cosmology, Cosmic Cycle of the Five Elements, and Stormlord Rebirth. But the most important thing to Aalam was the bloodline he could feel from her, Primordial Titan, the same bloodline Diana had inherited from their mother, the same bloodline all his half siblings had inherited as well.

Mila had done research while infiltrating Sunrise Valley, and the only known living Primordial Titan was the Primordial Sovereign himself, the Empyrean grade race Primordial Titan having been the elder god’s race back when he was an A rank. And his genetic power had been inherited by his children as a bloodline, who could then pass it on one more generation, their grandchildren instead inheriting the weaker Mythic grade bloodline Primordial Human.

This meant the woman was either another of his half siblings or, more likely given how her bloodline felt slightly different from the children of Bellessia, a child of his uncle, the Master of the Eternal Forge, held in slowed time for ages from some point after her birth so she’d be ready to compete for this inheritance.

Whatever the case, it didn’t matter.

Mila had learned from her infiltration of Sunrise Valley that the original 105 puzzle books in the Primordial Humans’ hands had been solved hundreds of billions of years before, and, from overhearing several conversations, she was pretty sure the puzzle book bought at the auction had been solved a little over a thousand years before the start of the C rank Universal Tournament.

Given the limits on how much a soul’s time could be slowed down, no one living under A rank could have solved one of those original puzzle books, even if a god had slowed down their soul’s perception of time by the maximum amount, so Aalam would be competing against just one other potential inheritor who had personally solved a puzzle book. 

More important, however, the challenges would almost certainly be based on crafting skill and Aalam was confident in that area.

Accepting the competition, Aalam then waited for all the other potential inheritors to do so as well, a process which took about three seconds, and a block of unmagical iron then appeared on the floor of his subspace, about 1 meter long, five centimeters tall, and 15 centimeters wide.

Challenge I

A blade for a mortal

Directions: With a time limit of one hour and no other materials than the iron given to you, make the best possible sword for a mortal

Grading Criteria: How well your sword performs as a sword

Using his Triforce Kinesis and Triforce Construction skills, Aalam raised the block of iron into his hand and infused his energy into the material, transforming its properties with his Laws and changing its shape to that of a perfectly balanced longsword suitable for an average adult. Then, after putting away the excess iron, he continued transforming the weapon’s properties for about five minutes, not making it more suitable for mana but infusing the weapon with the power of balanced Laws, transforming the iron into primordial iron, pristine, manaless, and clear of all external influences.

All materials, be they magical or otherwise, had elemental leanings. Iron, for example, as its name implied, very heavily leaned toward the metal element Law of Iron, and this, in a metaphysical context, helped to make weapons made from the material have the properties of iron, such as sturdiness, the ability to be magnetized, and high malleability when heated.

Aalam, however, as someone following the path of the Heavenly Spark with order category Laws, could modify materials so they were truly blank slates, removing the inherent properties of any material if he so desired, and this is what he’d done to the sword.

With its inherent bias toward the Law of Iron removed, Aalam could do whatever he wanted with the material, and, over the next fifty minutes, he used Triforce Construction to infuse different Laws into different sections of the sword, drawing out a complicated set of runes throughout the inside of the weapon which, if his connection to Mila weren’t cut off, she would have been able to use her Omniglot Reader uniqueness to read as ‘Primal Sword’.

When he was done, the blade still couldn’t handle energy, even G rank energy, meaning it was not an artifact, but, if swung by a mortal, it would be able to cut through even a weak D rank creature like the Rollie-Pollie Queen Aalam had fed a nuke to back in the tutorial, and it could be used as a dao guide for the Law of Sword up to the Law Pupa stage.

This, at least by Aalam’s definition of performing well as a sword, made it better than any sword for mortals he’d ever heard of, and at least a level better than what he’d seen any of the other potential inheritors create, so he felt pretty confident.

When the hour was over, however, and he got his results, it seemed the panel of divine artifact spirits felt differently.

Challenge I over!

Your rank was 17th.

No points gained.

Current Inheritor Points: 144

Aalam first studied the swords created by the other potential inheritors and thought about other possible definitions of ‘performs as a sword’, but it seemed all but five of the smiths he was up against had gone with the same rough definition he had, how wieldable the weapon was and its cutting power, so that didn’t make sense.

Was it possible the divine artifact spirits couldn’t see just how much the sword he’d made had been transformed? That seemed possible at first thought, but two of the artifacts were divine swords, so there was almost no chance they couldn’t sense the Law he’d infused his weapon with.

This then left three options. First, Aalam was missing something about the nature of the challenge. Second, he wasn’t as good a crafter as he thought he was. Or, third, and most likely, something was going against him in the process of judging.

He hadn’t been fully paying attention to the divine artifacts within his sensory domain during his crafting process, but energy had been flowing between them quite rapidly and, looking back, that was probably their version of discussion, the knife artifact seemingly rapidly sending out energy to the other eight artifacts ever since the results came out.

“Master,” Aalam sent over the more powerful bond he had formed with the Alchemist of the Deep Woods after she’d accepted a role as one of his servants during the end of the Universal Tournament, “are you okay? Some of the divine artifacts seem like they might be biased against me for the inheritance competition.”