BXBX NOVEL Chapter 309 Inventory Oddities
"Are we close yet?" Asra muffled from the wrapped noon-leather blanket.
"Hmm, about half-way. Is something wrong? Don\'t you usually sleep while we travel?"
"I was sleeping to help my recovery. Even while I was being tossed and turned, it was easy to sleep. But I\'m okay now, and I don\'t actually need that much to function, just a little blood."
"Hmm, can you drink animal blood?"
"No… we need about five animals to make up for a sip of a human blood. It has something to do with mana in your blood, but I didn\'t really pay attention in class. Some animals have mana in their blood, but its strength disperses before it reaches our stomach, making it less nutritious. That\'s as much as I remember. I cared little about the subject as I never had to worry about getting blood… until I left Luna, anyway."
Jay noticed some sadness in her voice, so he didn\'t question her further. But Asra continued.
"Say… did you see any other cocoons? Any other vampires when you found me?"
"I thought you would have forgotten about that. You seemed almost dead when I found you… and no. All the others had only bones. Mostly animal bones, I think."
"Any human-like skeletons?" she asked, opening the blanket slightly.
"I don\'t think so… some were unidentifiable though, broken down by time and the surrounding roots."
Jay expected a response, but Asra went quiet.
The skeletons continued to march.
"Hmm. Something horrible happened… I won\'t press her for answers." He thought, and gave his skeletons silent orders from then on, not breaking the tense silence.
Jay quietly began crafting the first bone bow for Archers.
He wanted to make the bow as large as possible to increase its damage, but it had to be small enough for the goblin-sized skeleton to hold without touching the ground, and its little arms had to pull the bow back.
Jay took out two long, slender arm bones; the radius and ulna.
At first, he joined them together at one end, but they were simply too brittle. They would not bend at all.
"Hmm… this sucks." Jay thought, holding the conjoined bones. "It\'s more like a skinny club than a bow."
Jay tried a different approach, and holding the two bones, he channeled his mana into them, melting them completely.
First, he mixed them together into a floating milky ball of bone. He then made it into a long rod, which went from being thick at one end to being as thin as hair at the other.
This wasn\'t a bow, but was to help him test at what thickness the bone would bend.
"Alright… let\'s see how much this can bend." He thought, giving it a flex.
Immediately, he snapped away some of the small end.
He applied as much pressure as he thought would be put onto a bow, and snapped away more of the skinny end.
It was a simple but effective way to find the right thickness of the bone bow.
He found its right thickness was about half as thick as his finger. A pretty skinny bow.
He got to work, melting the bone back into a sphere of bone before he tried to push it into a long shaft.
It was a simple task, as he had become used to making shafts for his bone spears, only that this was much skinnier.
Jay found he had too much bone matter and ended up having a bone shaft, which was twice as long as he needed.
Applying some mana, he split them in the middle.
Two long rods of bone were hardly bows, so he using one of them he applied some more mana and began to slowly bend it into a curved shape, though he curled both ends back in the opposite direction from the middle curve, copying a bow design he saw at Losla.
"Hmm, not too bad." Jay thought.
However, as he tried to bend the bow, it hardly flexed at all, not nearly enough to pull back an arrow, and knowing what bone was like, he knew it would snap if he tried to flex it more.
"Dammit… bone is just way too brittle. The only time it does bend is when I infuse it with mana, but it doesn\'t bounce back… I guess I can\'t rely on bone for everything." He shrugged.
"As for a bow, I\'ll either need to find one as a dungeon reward or craft one from wood." Jay thought.
For a moment, he considered using life\'s wood, an oddity he found in the Helvetian dungeon.
< [Life\'s Wood] >
[Life has touched the tree this wood came from, permanently blessing it.]
[Time resistance 100%]
[Curse resistance 100%]
[Resurgence. Can grow back to its former self.]
However, as soon as he took a plank out, it sprouted tiny green buds.
"Yep, that won\'t work." He shrugged, stashing it away. "I guess we\'ll just need to cut trees down."
Jay checked a few other things in his inventory.
<[Warp Disruptor]>
[~Charged~]
[Prevents warp, teleportation and trans-reality effects]
[Requires mana to function]
[Current charge: Can disrupt (4) times]
"Hmm… I thought it had more charges. I suppose it has been a while since I checked it. Maybe I\'ve just forgotten." He shrugged.
< [Highborn Helvetian Ring] >
[Protection from a single calamity]
[0/1 charge]
[Can be recharged - 0%]
"Huh. I suppose now that I have decent mana regeneration, I should start charging it." He thought, wearing it on one of his fingers.
He added twenty mana into it, and felt the ring pulling it in, but it didn\'t even go up by one percent.
"Hmm, must need a lot of charge. It will be better to have it charged and ready. Just in case."
Jay also retrieved another item from his inventory.
[?]
"Hmm, seems like it\'s gotten bigger." He thought, holding the large oval stone in his hands.
"But what the hell is it?" He wondered, staring into its galaxy-looking star-like surface before stashing it away.
Jay also checked a few other things in his inventory, including his [Undead Wyrd Seed], the [Soul Stone] which still had a soul inside it, any lastly a hexagonal sphere of bone which he plucked from a skull-shield projector.
"Hmm, I still need to study this." He thought, but seeing the tiny filaments on the sphere, he knew his scrimshaw level was not nearly high enough.
He had a few other things in his inventory, odds and ends he had picked up along the way.
Then, he retrieved the stealth shard. It was a type of communication crystal.
< [Stealth Shard] >
[~Attuned~]
[~Uncharged~]
[Can be attuned to another stealth shard, forming a connection.]
[Exchanged Senses - activated when charged with mana]
[Exchanged Senses: no longer visible, but can now communicate]
"Hmm… that person gave me this… what was her name? Laura? Lana? Eh, I suppose it doesn\'t matter now. They were liars anyway, giving me false promises of safety." He shook his head, "there is no such thing as safety. At least in the sense of safety from other humans." He nodded.
However, he did decided to charge it, adding some mana to it until it turned invisible, and then stashing it away.
The skeletons had carried Jay and Asra half-way across the moss-stone plain, and it made Jay feel a little odd to not really have a goal or objective.
While taking her back to Luna was an option, he would not do it without having some sort of security or something to gain from it.
If he needed to, he would hold Asra captive. Perhaps for ransom. He had not thought that far ahead, he simply wanted the necromancy research from her academy.