The Innkeeper

Chapter 1941 Crafting

Although Soulforge Unity made all three aspects of himself into one,

technically speaking, the abilities to turn into thought or enter the soul state were gained later on. They were made possible due to the physique, but weren’t aspects of it. That made it hard to truly test Soulforge, but he might be able to test Empyrean Resonance. After some thought, though, Lex concluded that there was no need.

The effects of his self evolution were too slow, and he didn’t intend on staying here long enough for it to matter.

Just for research, though, Lex tried running a few cycles of his cultivation technique to see if he could somehow evolve to resist the suppression. The two cycles of cultivation, however, showed no improvement.

It was still possible that cultivating hundreds or thousands of cycles might show some change, but once again, the issue of time made such an option unviable for Lex at the moment.

The only thing that Lex could do himself that might help with his percentage was to improve the amount of Primordial aura he had. For that, he needed to endure more primordial tribulations, as that is what allowed him to gain the aura in the first place.

Lex’s exploration of the limits on him was quite thorough since he needed to know exactly what he could or could not do. It would be quite awkward if he faced a dangerous situation but failed to react in time because he just figured out he couldn’t teleport.

By the time Lex was done testing his limits, he had finally walked outside the forest, and finally got a good view of his surroundings. The forest was on the border of a mountain range, spreading as far as Lex could see. On one side he had a dense forest, and on another a series of mountains covered in tall bushes and rocky outcrops, with no signs of any kind of habitation or sentient life.

Yes, though there were technically trees behind him, each of them felt like the trees from back on earth, without any ability to cultivate or show signs of intelligence. All vegetation was as such, including the strange, cotton blobs floating above the forest. Calling them blobs was inaccurate, since they all came in distinct shapes, but that didn’t change there was floating cotton above the forests.

Lex concluded that they were likely part of some ecology he had never experienced and didn’t question it too much.

After a quick survey, he decided to climb the mountain as that would give him better visibility of his surroundings. Considering that the mountains were of a relatively normal height, and not impossibly tall, it only took Lex half an hour of continuous jogging to reach the top, though that had left him sweaty and out of breath – both sensations he had not felt from exercise in a long time, neither of which he missed.

Yet the climb had been worth it. Besides the picturesque views, he discovered that he was actually on a large island… situated atop a massive purple crystal… that was gently floating over a stream of sparkling something.

No, upon closer observation, it seemed that there was a long stream of sparkling lights, or maybe they were something Lex wasn’t familiar with, that was gently travelling across the sky. A few other such streams were clearly visible from where Lex stood atop a mountain, and each one of those streams seemed to support a few islands with a base of purple crystal.

Hundreds of thousands of feet below, an even larger expanse was visible which seemed to be the main landmass of Arch-Heaven. At least, from where Lex stood, that is what he concluded. It was entirely possible that what he saw was merely a larger island, or perhaps a continent among many.

Regardless, it seemed that his chances of finding other living or sentient beings, or maybe the Heavens puppet, would be far greater down below than up here.

Given that Lex could no longer fly, and his powers, and even arrays did not grant him that power, he would need to do something he hadn’t done in a long time. He climbed down the mountain, approached the nearest tree, looked at it fondly, and then punched it.

Anyone and everyone who had ever played a crafting video game knew that to begin the crafting journey, you had to start with wood. From there, he would work his way into the plant fibers, then possibly stone and dirt… before he knew it, he would have a castle, an armor plate of gold and a healthy farming community.

Or, in Lex’s current predicament, a parachute.

But unlike his video games, Lex could not punch a tree until it broke. With his abilities suppressed, he was unable to break the tree, though at least he avoided having his knuckles bruised too badly. So, he changed his plans. He first found rock of a suitable shape, and then used that to hack at the tree.

Though the process was awkward, and slow, and slightly painful, Lex finally managed to chop down a single tree after some effort. Unfortunately, unlike in video games, the tree did not break into easily manageable parts. That was something he would have to do manually.

Anyone else might have been frustrated at the tedium of the task, especially since without being suppressed he could have taken apart a tree with a mere thought. Lex, instead, found the experience novel and interesting.

It was like he was playing Mindcraft, but with super high quality mods to make it look realistic and change the rules of the gameplay.

So, it was with an excited smile that Lex broke down the branches, stripped off the trees bark, removed all the leaves, gathered the sap, dug out the roots, and began to process all of them so that he could use the parts to make a reliable

parachute.

He had to account for his weight, so the parachute needed to be strong. Fortunately, while he could not manipulate laws traditionally, he had enough experience in the ways of defense to know how to trigger the natural flow of laws. The actual chute of his parachute would act like a barrier, resisting the attack of the air rushing against it, and all he needed to do was ensure the barrier did not break.

The challenge of the situation sparked his creativity, forcing him to think of new ways in which he could use the rules and laws of this place in his favor. The habit ingrained in him to search for loopholes existed even now, within the all might, all terrible Arch-Heaven.