"What? You didn't feel any magic at all?" Cipher asked in surprise.

Iris nodded.

"I suppose it's not that surprising," he thought. After all, his cheats didn't consume mana to activate, so he supposed it was fair to assume they didn't use mana. Then how did they work?

His eyes widened.

"~Does it..." he began, but the Heavenly Demon responded before he could complete the question.

[No need to worry. There is no energy similar to a god's in you] she said.

Cipher sighed in relief upon hearing this. The Heavenly Demon, however, held her chin in thought. "That being said, this energy does resonate deeply with something inside me. But what is it?" she thought.

A few minutes later, Iris looked down in disappointment. "I still can't sense it. Maybe it's just too high level for me."

Cipher placed his hand on her shoulder. "No need to feel down. We're still not out of options yet."

"You think so? We've tried everything..." she said.

"No. Not everything." He got into position. "Don't try to read the mana flow anymore. Just watch how the item is instantly created. To me, it just looks like stuff being smashed together really fast. But to you who understands the blueprint deeply, you'll understand every little thing that's happening. If you can study it and try to recreate the same smashing of objects on your own, you might be able to make your own skill that's similar to this."

Hearing this, her eyes brightened. He smiled. "What do you think?"

"I'll try it," she said enthusiastically.

An hour later, Iris stood over her fallen materials, breathing heavily.

"Maybe you should take a break..." he said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

"No. I'm so close," she said. "I'll get it this time." Her expression became determined and she extended her hand toward the fallen items.

"But you said the same thing ten minutes ago," Cipher thought, though he didn't dare bring it up.

A mana vortex began forming on her palm and split into strings. The strings then captured the fallen items and quickly brought them together. She showed a smile. "It's working." But suddenly, it let out smoke and the items were thrown apart. She fell to her knees, breathing heavily.

"You're already out of mana. Why don't you take a break and we can try again tomorrow? It's getting late too." Cipher helped her up.

"No, I can't give up. I..."

Cipher looked at her. He had never thought Iris was this kind of person. He wondered if this was her obsession. He wondered what his own obsession was. Would he also be like this when he faced his obsession?

"I'll help." Suddenly, a voice came from the other side and a door opened. The two turned to look.

"Brother Cipher..." Elara shouted as she ran toward Cipher. She jumped on him and he hugged her back.

"Be careful," he said. It seemed her brain still had a long way to go before it could recover fully, he thought. After all, running around in Iris's lab probably had a 90% fatality rate.

"Why did you guys come out?" he asked as they parted. At the same time, Elaine had walked over to them.

"Me and little Elaine watch ago," she said.

Elaine extended her hand toward Iris. A golden glow spread over her and she seemed to be restored completely. "Cipher, why don't you go back and rest? I'll help Iris practice. I also need to talk to her about a few things."

Cipher sighed. "Alright." He then turned to Iris. "Don't push yourself too hard," he said before turning around and leaving.

…

Back in his room, Cipher lay on his bed after refreshing. He summoned his system. He was still three rerolls in, so he couldn't get any cards at the moment - unless he wanted to be broke. He looked at his owned cards:

[Owned Cards: Delete, Merge (2), Fork, Class (2), Patch (3), Optimize (3), Mirror (2), Rework (3), Seed (3), Blank (4) & Export (2)]

Although he couldn't get any new ones, he could still use these ones. He decided to start with Optimize. "Hehehe, three Optimize. Hehehe," he muttered happily.

[-_-]

"Mmh? Why do I feel like someone is judging me?" he wondered.

Well, nevermind that, he thought, selecting the Optimize card and using it on his mana recovery.

After the first Optimize, his recovery when out of combat became .86% of maximum HP and while sleeping became 1.72%. He used another Optimize. Now it was 1.03% out of combat and 2.07% when sleeping. It was improving quite fast. After the final Optimize, it became 1.24% when out of combat and 2.48% when sleeping.

This meant that while out of combat, he would recover about 58 mana a minute. At this rate, he just needed 20 minutes give or take to recover his full 1200 mana. And when sleeping, he would recover 117 mana every minute and take roughly 10 minutes to recover his full 1200 mana.

With these rates, he could make 360 demonic qi an hour while out of combat and 720 an hour while sleeping.

He shifted his attention to the other cards.

Before, he had thought of performing an experiment on sacrifice type skills. When he had patched the Resurrection skill, the sacrifice had been eliminated and the skill became cost free.

He wanted to see if this was a standard among all sacrifice skills. The only other sacrifice type skill he had was Battery, which took his HP in exchange for recovering the HP of someone of his choosing. He took the Patch card and activated it on the Battery skill.

[Skill: Battery (C-Rank)]

[Type: Sacrifice]

[Cost: 0 Mana]

[Description: Restore HP equal to your current HP to a selected target. Can target up to 5 allies simultaneously.]

"It actually worked," he thought, reading the description.

It seemed that sacrifice skills were indeed like this. Since sacrifice was a negative effect, the Patch card would always take it. He could take advantage of this to get even more free skills.

He just needed to invert them so they would cause negative effects, then mutate them to see if something beneficial would come along. Now that he thought about it, actually, what he needed was not the Mirror card but the Exploit card, which gave the corrupted edition.

Well, not that it mattered all that much at the moment as he still needed loads of Fork cards to begin experimenting without harming his main skills. He also needed Delete cards as a safety precaution.

"Looks like I still have a long way to go."

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