Ebony manipulated the muscle under his skin and blasted the Shi Clan skill onto the cut of meat to tenderise the thing.

Due to his lacking baseline Strength, he couldn't produce an effect anywhere potent enough to be useful. But unaugmented, it helped tenderise Ancient-rarity meat.

At the very least, having watched a few Shi use their clan skill, he was able to incorporate parts of it into Phantom's Flicker. The movement skill was likely edited by his mother as an active skill using the same principles of the Shi Clan skill but taking into account his constitution as a creature born under the rules of Earth.

Now that he had higher strength than a regular human, more could be done with this muscular control ability.

Without moving his feet, his left calf and mid-torso muscles snapped. The snapping pushed his body to the right. Sliding, he reached the fridge and got an ingredient he had missed.

This was pretty nifty, if he was augmented it wouldn't be too shabby in strength. Then, he mentally reminded himself of the house rules and stopped fooling around. Now he had to fess up about rule-breaking, and it was just the first day as a married man.

Twelfth.

While the house was built with the highest level of privacy, it wasn't like it took away his senses. Having left his room's door ajar, he heard a soft rustling of the sheets from the kitchen.

She woke up a lot earlier than he'd liked as he was only on the seventh dish. Four of them are being steamed while the rest are boiling. He was preparing the more skill-intensive dishes now.

"E-Ebony!" She raised her voice.

He rinsed his hands and went up. "Good morning."

"I, I can't move my legs…"

"Shall I give them a massage?" Ebony said, fully knowing what his new skill led to the past few times he used them.

Vigour Kneading – A restorative massage technique targeting muscular stamina, accelerating soreness relief and stamina recovery in the treated area. Vigour kneading stimulates circulation, relaxes tension, and encourages rapid stamina regeneration by 100% + 2.5% per level.

It's been a while since he had a new Generic Skill. Although the negatives weren't mentioned, he understood stamina well enough to know that skills like these had a downside. From experience, he was thinking it either made massaged muscles weak for some period or sped up metabolism to convert food into stamina.

He had always used the same massaging technique on himself. It took too long before it finally became a skill, but better late than never.

"Nu-no." She blushed furiously, "put a tall chair at the washbasin and carry me there."

While he tried to find a suitable chair since they were relatively tall and the washbasin was placed high, she panicked all of sudden. "You can't cook for me! That's like my one thing going for me!"

"I can do it once in a while. If you'll eat what I make."

"I'll eat! But that's not the point. I already uh--underperformed last night, and you did everything for the house. I can't fail another basic duty."

"Nonsense, there was no underperforming."

"Don't try to push it under the rug. I know you couldn't quite completely let loose because of me; you were as gentle as you could be. But I'll get better! I just need more practice to take you."

He gave her head a rub and promised to wait while she brushed and took care of her dental hygiene. Only checking on the dishes already being steamed and boiled.

Regardless of the lectures on nightly activities, he adjusted accordingly. His wife was surprisingly in the know-how how but she had hypersensitive skin. It did not help that she felt his emotions. But their biggest challenge was physical, there was no one to blame for their size incompatibility. He couldn't help but feel bad when she was in discomfort, so they had to work each other up.

Ebony pushed the boiled and peeled potatoes through a sieve with a small spatula. Mixing milk, butter and a little cream, he heated before pouring the mixture with the mashed potatoes for a creamy mashed potato.

Taking baby steps over, his wife had changed into shorts and a t-shirt. She fell into the counter seat.

"Open wide." He scooped a brown liquid and pushed it towards her.

"Mm! Oh, marinade for fish. Baked? It needs 3.2 grams more of salt and maybe something citrusy..." She raised both arms in front of her.

'She's using metric naturally now.' Ebony felt like he had succeeded. He hugged her from under her arms and supported her already warmed up legs as she got into the groove of cooking.

"I don't think I can train today…" She muttered over the table.

"We have plenty of things to do." Surely, they had sufficient physical exertion for a while.

"Like?"

"Going through all the presents we got." They had many gifts to unpack.

❅❅❅

"Hearthkeeper broom, one wipe per decade." Ebony caught the broom that Xin had tossed out of one of the crates.

"OO! Do you think this works?" Xin rumbled through the messy living room with all the wedding gifts poured out.

"Spice Jar of Unending. Put a spice in and fill the jar with various natural ingredients. It'll copy the spice down to the atom and use mana to turn the natural ingredients into the same spice. Can store and copy ten thousand types of species. But if you're missing some natural compound, it wouldn't be able to generate the certain special spices." Ebony read the note and scrambled to find the crate this gift came from.

"It's from the Huo Clan. Should work as advertised." He figured with the faintest mana signatures still left on the item and the crate.

They moved around, figuring out where to display the furniture they got. There were about 8 statues of alien beasts he kept underground due to their aesthetic not fitting anyway outside his house.

The Wen Clan--individual did not come, but a gift was at his doorstep, he learned from Dusk this morning. There were actually 2 gifts.

One is signed with the Wen Clan Emblem, an Owl.

The other was smaller, just a handheld box size and was unlabelled or signed. "It smells like doom." His wife commented on the unsigned package but didn't stop him from picking it up.

The Wen sent a rotting arm, it was half mechanical. Ning Xin belched at the smell.

"Congratulations on your unification. This is a gift from our Clan. The Hand of Undying Devotion." The couple looked at each other after reading the short congratulatory message. There was no description of what the disgusting arm did or what it was for.

"I'll keep it." He could tell she didn't want to store this object in her Myriad Bracelet, even if it was stored properly. She kept too much fresh food to want something so gut-wrenching near.

The rotting, half-mechanical arm is a grotesque fusion of decay and machinery, bound by runes that felt ancient from their mana signature. The forearm is organic, its flesh darkened and withered, veins pulsing faintly with an unnatural dirty yellow glow. Though the hand and fingers are fully encased in metal, traces of decayed muscle lurk beneath, shifting within the rusted plating.

Etched across both flesh and steel, arcane runes flicker between ember-red and deep violet. Where organic and mechanical meet, sinew entwines with wires, and rust spreads like an infection, blurring the line between living and construct.

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He could stand to study the runes and slowly figure out what the arm did, but it was clear to him that this was completely foreign. There was hardly any overlap with the Korun runic language or any other runic languages he knew.

He looked at his wife before slowly opening the second unknown parcel.

"What are these sticks?" His wife muttered,

"It's a flashlight. A pair of them." He answered, recognising the modern construct.

After he said that, both of them recoiled from the box. Xin puked out over the porch while he held his head reflexively.

'Using Intent to send a message…a simple letter would have sufficed.' Ebony didn't know how these people thought, but thinking about how he was using Will to do little stuff more often, he couldn't exactly judge.

Taking on the Intent, it seemed like the handheld flashlights were now bound to each of them. Their functions were simple: as long as he turned it on, the flashlight would point towards Xin, and hers would point towards him.

No boundary could stop the pair of flashlights. He could be in a different Realm or Dimension, and the flashlight would point in the correct direction.

Different colours of light would tell them different information. For example, the light would turn blue if the target was in the Spirit Realm but spatially, they could be right beside each other.

If the Intent of the sender, the First Generation of the Xeng was not over-advertising, nothing could trick or stop the flashlight, and it only shows a true path. Including Divine intervention. The range limit was advertised to be essentially limitless.

He liked the gift a lot, and so did Xin. They made sure to take and store the correct flashlights and not take the one that pointed at themselves.

The rest of the day was spent packing their freezer room with all the alien and normal ingredients and also filling up the underground forge with raw materials that he could study or pass on to Kong Jing to craft.

During the evening, he was staring at the still full living room with Xin.

"What are we going to do with these?" She gave a longsword a gentle touch.

"I could let Dusk and the Numbers use the staves and wands…but the swords." He guessed right; almost every Clan had included a staff, spectre, wand or spell casting gloves in their gift but considering what Shi Qiang and her sisters got, the rest did not seem impressive anymore.

However, running his mana through them, every one of them could strengthen his spells. The best part was that, other than the gloves, the rest didn't require physical contact.

He could have mana hold onto the weapon a distance away from him and charge his mana through them to cast spells and they would still be powered. This meant nothing was affecting his close combat efficiency.

The only issue this method may have was having his mana current interrupted by other mages, but it was not a huge issue if the staff wasn't far from his main body. And considering his Will Relay Buffers, his mana didn't only have to come from one direction but many.

"I don't go through swords like disposables... displaying them doesn't sit right with me either." There were much fewer swords, 8 of them to be exact.

"We can give them away." It wasn't like they had a better solution.

The swords were made for Xin, the materials not suitable for ice magic or potent mana. However, her twin longswords were bound to her mask and were growth weapons. It was not easy for another pair to take their place. It wasn't a matter of how powerful the swords were it was more of a compatibility issue.

After another meal and shower, Xin shyly pulled him into their room for a 'practice' session. "You've been peeking at my thighs and chest all day."

"You've been displaying them every chance you get." He wasn't about to fall for her accusations, it was her who purposefully showed off every angle of herself whenever she leaned in towards him.

❅❅❅

"The potion of defilement makes it so that you no longer regenerate down there?" Ebony blinked in surprise. He never thought about this issue.

"Mmhmm."

"Now that you mention, has it never torn during training or your fights?" He recalled the resistance of their first night.

"My mother was careful when I was young. After I grew up it just got…durable. That's why it was so painful when you to-tore"

He covered her lips and stole her breath before she recalled the pain. She no longer slaps his chest in surprise.

They never skipped another training session after their nuptial night.

Using the Training Field's actual functions for the first time, he was amazed by the Xu's construct. They were not kidding when they said they make one of the best training fields.

He felt like his bones would shatter. But he was finally able to exert himself so intensely with external help that exertion was far more efficient now.

Merely 6 hours of training would make him suffer a stamina regeneration deficit.

After adjusting to married life for a month, their cycles had adjusted relatively easily.

Due to the efficient training field and both of them applying the methods they had long wanted to but couldn't, he needed more sleep than before. The need for sleep was quite closely linked to stamina and Ethereal Fluid Blitz drained him with his new training methods.

At the 3rd hour of the day, they would wake up and train till the 9th. Xin showered while he got the ingredients ready. After she was done, she would start working on food while he showered. Then, do his daily reading either from the presents they received or going into Eidolon for the library.

The noon was spent individually. Xin would work on recipes or her cooking skills, preparing dinner dishes that took hours, if not days. She would spend time in her smokehouse, etcetera.

He would be refining skills, studying runes or practicing with Dusk.

Playing with his new staff. After he first ran his mana through it, he knew it had a total of 22 layers to its seal.

Immediately breaking 6 of them, he was left with 16 layers to break. Each one was exponentially harder to break than the last.

Having run his mana through the nameless staff before the first and second seals were broken, the staff essentially did nothing to his mana. After the second was broken, he felt as if his mana was filtered, becoming purer.

Kong Jing told him that names could help form Spirits within a craft. But Xu Ru's craft supposedly killed off any chance for Spirits to form or birth.

Ebony's mana density had already reached its limit; his mana compression skill's growth halted because his mana couldn't get any denser. But that changed when mana purity increased.

Purer mana allowed his mana to condense even more. Still, the support wasn't that great. He didn't have time to estimate the help he would have received since he immediately broke the next few seals.

Having broken the 6th seal, his mana could not even reach or caress the 7th. A feeling that would replicate when he went from one seal to the next. Sort of like scaling a wall; no matter how much he tried to push his mana through, he wasn't sensing a ceiling to break.

Although it wasn't time for training, he stopped reading and entered the training field. A different space.

Using the staff, he conjured a turtle-scale shield and various projectiles.

First of all, the staff was recording or learning his spell formations. After 28 casts of the same spell, the staff remembers the spell formation. When Ebony pushed his mana to form in a certain way, it accelerated his mana to form the spell faster.

It took him under an hour to go through every one of his current spells, excluding internal augmentations and combined spells with Xin. And he had to say, this acceleration function alone was amazing.

The staff never messes up. Even the slightest difference in mana motion was studied and wouldn't accelerate his mana into a different spell, no matter how similar they were or what variation of each spell he wanted to cast.

From thought to pushing his mana out to converting it into ice elemental mana to the formation of his spells, Ebony's cast speed was essentially increased by 380% or so.

His cast speed was already at the point of thinking 'ice cube' and one would spawn pretty much instantly. But speed was relative. He would have a far greater chance of stopping Xin's lightning burst.

Ning Xun must have taught or shown her how the lightning step was done because their newly-wed spars have been going terribly with her newfound speed. Not to mention her evolved Sword Art after his proposal duel.

The Ning Clan must have given her experience in mental buffs for spell casting as well. Most obvious were her fire and blood magic; they were manifested so fast his Will had trouble forming anything in time.

The only advantage he had was that magic still wasn't her strong suit and he could technically ignore her spells to a large degree. With Dusk, there was no need for casting speed as the weakening effect was always in effect. Most hastily cast spells wouldn't even hurt him if they landed. Larger spells that would take time were far too easy for him to interrupt and dispel.

Secondly, his mana purity was pretty much filtered to the point where he wondered if it was equal to any of the Xengs of the same generation if his baseline traits weren't focused on his soul and its current genetic traits.

As far as he could tell, purer than most King-ranked Elves he'd personally witnessed the mana of. Except Vent and the Archduke and Archduchess of the Elves.

With the increase of purity, the maximum density of his mana increased with an additional 70% from the base density of regenerated mana. It wasn't much, only equal to 7 more levels in his Profession skill, but that was still a sizable boost. The main form of spell augmentation from the staff comes from the purity and not the density.

For the case of ice magic, purer mana made his ice colder, more structurally sound and compact, and it took on properties of his Fortifications better.

Gravity mana becomes more structured but retains its natural pull.

Ice seeping or digging through matter with greater ease. His flames turned a lighter shade once more, it was hardly light blue anymore but not quite white in colour like Ful's flames. The effect Ebony tried to add to it needed a target to test on, but he could tell it also strengthened.

Near the end of the stage of spell formation, the staff will give one final push. This was the biggest power boost to any spell he cast through the weapon. Ebony didn't know how it worked, but the staff essentially took more mana to stamp out a copy of the spell he had already cast.

He was able to consciously adjust the staff to duplicate his spell, strengthen his spell further or give them a direct kinetic boost, depending on the type of spell he used.

At 6 seals broken, if he conjured an ice sword and had it duplicated, it would cost 30% less mana for the second conjuration. The magical part was that it barely took any additional mental processing capability to conjure the second, and to control it took less than 10% of the effort needed to control the first.

It was multicasting made easy.

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