Elizabeth kept refining Quartzite and drinking her "soup" until it was completely gone. She only got through six or so refining sessions with just the spiritual meals sustaining her; adding on to the four rounds she did before the hunger kicked in. Now, even after all that work was done, she was still about six sessions short of finishing the refining process of just her arm braces.Fortunately, it was still very early into the morning, so Elizabeth continued on. Continued cooking that is… There was still that snake from earlier hanging around, and after seeing first hand how efficient subst.i.tuting spiritual meals for meditation was, Elizabeth became hooked.
She had already started getting used to dissecting and carving up dead animals, as shown by how quickly she prepared the snake meat. Moreover, with all the experience she had been piling up with her "knife" handling skills, Elizabeth finally got her Cooking Principles of Precision and Accuracy to the first level in her Cooking Skill Tree: Basic-level.
Her "Basic" level Precision and Accuracy would make world-cla.s.s chefs on Earth feeling like killing themselves based solely on sheer inferiority, and that was just the first level! The level of control Elizabeth possessed with her blade, whether it be for dicing, slicing, anything really, rounded down her margin of error down to about a millimeter.
It was with that level of precision that Elizabeth started portioning out virtually equal fillets of meat. With her lackl.u.s.ter a.r.s.enal of cooking tools, she roasted the snake meat over fire and set it aside as she had for the dog steaks. This time she didn"t have the luxury of water to make another soup, so the organs would be eaten without anything to make it less unappealing.
[+1,200 Cooking Exp
Cooking Level 4 (1,755/3,750) → (2,955/3,750)
Status
Name: "Snake" Fillet (x15)
Grade: Low-tier Mortal Grade Meal
Description: Crafted by the user, these are magical meals imbued with Inner Strength and some Basic level principles of the path of cooking. Literally just a pile of roasted snake meat; magical snake meat.
Effects: For Level 11 or below: + 1.7 Strength + 1.7 Speed + 1.7 Endurance + 1.7 Defense + 1.7 Intelligence for 6 hours + 600 Inner Strength recovered, and some fatigue alleviated.
Name: Roasted "Snake" Organs
Grade: Low-tier Mortal Grade Meal
Description: Crafted by the user, this is a magical meal imbued with Inner Strength and some Basic level principles of the path of cooking. Somehow, these "tiny" organs possess all this f.u.c.king energy within them.
Effects: For Level 15 or below: + 3.3 Strength + 3.3 Speed + 3.3 Endurance + 3.3 Defense + 3.3 Intelligence for 7 hours, + 2,100 Inner Strength recovered, a significant portion of fatigue is alleviated, and natural regeneration doubles.]
Even though the snake"s core was used in the roasted organs trail-mix of sorts, Elizabeth didn"t expect to get such insane effects out of the food. Double natural regeneration? That would definitely increase her chances of survival when she left the cave to conduct her breakthrough.
This time though, Elizabeth decided to start refueling her Inner Strength reserves with the organs first to prioritize getting the Stat bonuses. With her becoming somewhat less hesitant towards eating organs, she prioritized efficiency, and though the increases to her Strength, Defence, and Speed would do virtually nothing at the moment, the increases to her Endurance and Intelligence would allow her to keep refining for longer with the same capacity of energy in her reserves.
Thus, for the next hour or so, the never-satisfied Elizabeth continued eating and refining material until she ran out of food. It was insane when she looked back to find that she had eaten both a whole fifty kg dog and a ten-foot-long snake. It was even more frightening when she felt her stomach barely even react to everything she consumed. Where had all that meat gone? And why was she still able to continue eating?
When she thought of how she had yet to feel the need to go to the bathroom, dark creases developed on her forehead as sweat poured out her spine. Thankfully, P was always around to calm down Elizabeth before she entered an internal crisis.
P said "Hey, did you forget you have Inner Strength nourishing your body? Sure, right now you"re still in the Mortal Stage, working on refining your skin. But, that doesn"t change the fact that static Inner Strength is always present in all the remote corners of your body. You might not be able to use that type of energy actively, but pa.s.sively, it improves all the functions of your body..."
"Mhmm? Improves my digestive system to the point where I can literally consume two whole animals and then some? Sounds pretty sketchy to me..."
"Hey, isn"t one of your sidequests to go up to the highest levels of Heaven and take revenge on Sovereigns? Remind me what const.i.tutes as sketchy when one of your tasks, not even the main one, by the way, consists of killing some of the highest ranking G.o.ds to ever live."
"Touche..." When Elizabeth recalled some of the abilities those at the upper ranks of the Mortal Realm possessed, it didn"t seem that farfetched to be able to consume a "bit" more food. Besides, since she was technically a demon it might suit her to be a gluttonous maniac…
In such a fashion, Elizabeth averted having her mind collapse and returned her focus to the pieces of Quartzite she had refined. After treating the snake as a basket of potions this past hour, she managed to get through a whole kilogram"s worth of Quartzite; enough for her to make the leg and arm pieces of armor.
Elizabeth would have continued on with the regular cycle of meditating and refining to get through the entire armor set in one go. But time was fast approaching the rise of dawn, and there would be insane benefits after pa.s.sing to level 5. Thus, the refining process would need to hold on for a while.
Still, there was enough time for her to at least try her hand at Enchantment, so she took a small and rough spherical ball of Quartzite that was laying by her pile of material and began Enchantment inscribing.
With her inscribing pen on hand, and the mantras of the [Spatial Meditation] technique floating through her mind, Elizabeth visualized the path her pen would take while carving out a runic diagram and the trial run began. But before, the pen even touched down on the sacrificial piece of Quartzite that would undoubtedly be ruined through the test run, Elizabeth had to stop as her intensely radiating s.p.a.ce-type Inner Strength started pinging and resonating with something nearby.
Elizabeth"s focus on her pen dropped, as she turned her gaze to one of the corners of the cave behind her. No audible sound was coming from the place she stared at, yet the high-pitched screaming of grinding metal kept a.s.saulting Elizabeth"s mind as she kept up the intensity of s.p.a.ce energy around her.
Curious and hopeful to an extent, Elizabeth dropped what she was doing and went over to the completely normal looking cave wall across the campfire. Even as she stared at the wall with her face mere inches away, she couldn"t find anything that would visually indicate a rare material. Yet, when she checked with s.p.a.ce energy filling her head, she could hear that G.o.d-awful screeching even louder than before.
Elizabeth cleared her head of Inner Strength as she didn"t want to go deaf, before pulling out her blade and testing the waters — so to speak… She didn"t go for the risky Muay Thai or guns blazing route as one might cause her backlash and the other might attract predators; so the blade won out yet again.
Though, even if it was a probing run, she added Inner Strength to Inferioria to increase its sharpness and penetrative ability. Luckily, with her current strength and the buffs added to it, Elizabeth could start chipping away at the cave wall with her blade; albeit at an embarra.s.singly slow pace.
But, that was enough for her, as the source of her s.p.a.ce energy"s resonance was discovered before she even had to cut in a foot into the wall. If it weren"t that close to the surface, it was probable that she wouldn"t have been able to resonate with it while trying out Enchanting.
Elizabeth looked into the shallow grove she had cut out of the wall, and her eyebrows raised. Then her mouth opened as if she couldn"t believe what was happening, and full-blown shock ensnared her body like a constricting cobra.
"Holy f.u.c.k! Isn"t this supposed to be a starting area? How could these crystals even grow in a place as spiritually inert as the Forest of Beginnings?" Elizabeth asked no one in particular as she didn"t really care or want to know the answer to these questions in the first place. She was just happy to be around, as this windfall couldn"t have come at a better time.
She stopped eying the various glowing crystals on the wall as her hands reached out to confirm whether or not her appraisal was correct with a status check.