There was no bounty slip system for the mana-rats. You either brought in a tail or you didn’t, and there was no limit to how many you could bring in. The Nords wanted them gone, no matter what.

  Instantly, Blake’s mind jumped to certain loopholes. What if someone just bred mana-rats and handed in their tails for money? Should he go and start a mana-rat breeding operation?

  Either the Nords didn’t think about that, didn’t care, or there was some other reason it wouldn’t work.

  But Blake was more interested in finding the mana-rats and getting enough to pay the admission fee for the tournament. He couldn’t set up a rat breeding operation in time, that much was certain. As soon as he’d left the government hub hall, he whispered to Ethbin, “How do I go about finding myself a mana-rat?”

  First off, they come in packs. Are you ready for a fight? Ethbin asked inside his head.

  “Sure. How big are they?”

  Big enough to be worth one pound of hacksilver.

  “Point taken.”

  You’ll find them chewing on the mana channels. They’re pests, which is why there’s a bounty on them. Head to the bottom of the cutout and you’ll find one or two. Anger enough of them, and you’ll find a few more than that.

  He strode along the walkway until he found a stairway that led downward. It was made of wood, but it was starting to rot. It passed between a row of buildings, then turned and spiraled around a thick stilt that supported a different house.

  Buildings grew on each other like barnacles down here. The smell of cooking meat wafted out from fires, tingling his nostrils, and sounds of conversation seeped from every crack. But the deeper he delved between the buildings, the more mildew and mold was growing on the walls. The more rickety the buildings became. Even up here, he found a few people who Ethbin identified as mortals.

  Most of the cultivators here were sitting on their porches or at their tables. As soon as they returned to their houses from whatever trading guild job they worked or sect they helped with, they began doing something. They held their hands out, palms glowing turquoise and began compressing a sphere of mana between their hands.

  It took great effort. Most of them began sweating, and droplets beaded down their foreheads. A few of them produced a pellet of turquoise mana.

  “What are they doing?” Blake asked softly after spotting the tenth person doing the same action, whatever it was.

  They’re Shaping pure-aspect mana to sell back to the government.

  “That seems…ineficient.”

  Correct. But it lets the Steerman recoup some of the operation costs of the manaship. He still has to import mana bricks from planets with naturally strong auras, where shaping isn’t as inefficient as it is here, but it helps.

  “This is a side-hustle for them?”

  Many people would kill for a life aboard the manaship. For a chance to rise above the squalor below and if not give themselves a chance at a better life, then to help their children. Rent is high, most of them don’t own their houses, food is expensive, and the only way to make ends meet is by shaping mana pellets to sell back to the government.

  “Doesn’t that put a drain on their cultivation?”

  Indeed. It’s a vicious cycle.

  “So why not just not…I dunno, make the auras weaker?”

  You cannot just make it weaker. It would defeat the purpose of crafting an environment high in mana in the first place. But it allows them to raise stronger cultivators, even if it’s only one in ten.

  After a few minutes of descent, Blake finally reached the manaship’s hull and the bottom of the Indent-City. The stairway deposited him on an unnaturally level plane of metal. Well, sort of metal. It felt like a combination between metal and stone, with how rough it was—like he was walking on sandpaper. There were a few abandoned houses built right on top of it, and a horde of salamanders with glowing blue lines on their backs ran away from Blake as soon as he stepped down.

  He waited until a pulse of mana ran through the ship, then he set off toward the glow. It erupted ahead of him in a vast wall of turquoise light, illuminating swirls of mist and smoke.

  Blake drew his staff from his backpack and approached the line. It was one of the channels that mana took to travel around the surface of the manaship, and though it wasn’t nearly as thick as some of the main routes, it was still about three paces across. Blake approached it, then knelt at the edge like he was dipping his hand in a stream of water.

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  The channel was deep, and it had edges so angular he probably could’ve cut his finger on them. What he decided to call ‘liquid’ mana flowed through it. It was loose, unlike the shaped bricks the longboats used to store it, and it flowed in the channel like a stream of water completely unaffected by gravity.

  Purely out of curiosity, he stuck his hand into it. The stream broke around his fingers like his hand was repulsive. It wouldn’t even touch his skin.

  Then, abruptly, the pulse of mana cut off. Liquid mana stopped flowing. It just ended, reaching whatever end point of the channel it desired.

  The channel had only been about five feet deep, so Blake jumped down into it, then used the Serpent’s Cloak to jump back out the other side. The metal around the mana vibrated, as if it was excited about just having mana near it. Worse, near the bottom, there was a mesh of clawmarks and toothmarks. Something had been here, and it’d eaten the channel walls.

  “What does the mana actually do?” Blake asked. “Or is it just to look cool?”

  You think the cultivators would do something simply because it looks cool?

  “Sadly, I doubt it. They have no style.”

  No, the periodic pulses create a field of ambient mana around the ship. It gives the entire ship a natural aura similar to Kinghaven—rich in mana, making it much easier to cultivate. You would have noticed it if you could sense mana better.

  Blake kept walking, weaving between the pillars of the Indent-City, looking for more mana-rats.

  “So that’s what Foundation is partly for, right? I’ll get better arcane senses—”

  Spiritual senses. Most cultivators won’t take kindly to you calling it magic.

  “Yeah, so you’ve scolded me.”

  But you are correct—the foundation stages will grant you better senses as you progress through them.

  After a few seconds, Blake circled back to their earlier conversation and asked, “So if we can create auras that make it easier, why stop at Kinghaven auras? Why not go higher? Why not make the mana as dense as possible and everyone just rockets up to Spirit Severing or whatever the highest stage is?”

  Nord scholars discovered long ago that Kinghaven had the strongest natural auras that are actually effective. Any higher, and the ambient mana would begin damaging your channels as you tried to take it in, as well as having diminishing returns.

  Blake nodded. “And since Earth is so low in natural mana, the cultivators need to create an aura like this.”

  Correct.

  “Now, I’ve been wondering. If Earth and all the other four planets Integrated into Shell were made specifically for powerful Nords to consume, then why do we have such low ambient mana?”

  Because the Nords could not seed a planet with any higher mana and actually get a return on investment. There are many worlds like yours throughout the galaxy that were barren nothingness before the Nords came. Yes, it takes thousands of years of waiting, letting the population expand until it hits a critical mass, which is why they’re always seeding planets for future generations to Harvest.

  But if they spent the mana required to improve this world’s ambient auras, they would never get it back from the Harvest. It’s best to just draw in the wisps from a large population of souls, killing them all in the process.

  Blake nodded.

  Now keep your eyes out. I’m sensing a pack of rats ahead of you.

  He tightened his grip on his staff. He couldn't see anything, but that was no indicator.

  Ahead, there was another mana channel, but this time, the sounds of scraping and clawed feet scrambling on the manaship’s hull sounded in front of him. Something squealed softly.

  He leaned over the edge of the mana channel. It was slightly deeper and slightly wider than the one before.

  And it had five mana-rats in it.

  There was nothing else they could be. They were shaped like rats—normal rats, not Blended—except they were as large as a wolf. Their bald tails snaked out behind them, glowing with evenly-spaced turquoise rings.

  None of them paid Blake any attention to Blake. They were too busy gnawing at the metal walls of the mana channel, ripping off shreds of the metal, chewing it, then swallowing it in a single gulp.

  “I’d hate to see their shits,” Blake muttered.

  That’s the first thing you think of?

  “Well—”

  I forget that you’re only twenty-some years old, some days.

  “You’re the one who unironically says ‘thinking with your scrote,’ so I’d pipe down, old man.”

  By now, three of the mana-rats were looking up at him. After a few seconds, they seemed to forget all about him and turned back to their business—gnawing away at the channel wall.

  They sense people’s mana and chase after them based on whether they can Harvest enough mana from you. They’re where the Nords learned Harvesting techniques from.

  “So I’m invisible to them. How strong are they?”

  These guys are Foundation five. But that shouldn’t be a problem. They won’t fight back until it’s too late.

  Blake activated the ‘Lightning Fists’ half of his Serpent’s cloak, then sprang down into the channel, slamming his staff down on the nearest rat’s head. It buckled, skull crashing down into the ground, letting out a horrid crack. It didn’t get up again.

  Moving to the next rat, he twirled his staff, building up a Black Palm, then struck the rat and flung it into the wall of the mana channel.

  The other three rats turned to him, baring their front teeth. Proportionally, they were more like a beaver’s teeth, but they were meant for crushing metal, not killing cultivators. Blake darted between two other rats, smashing them in the head with aftershocks and knocking them both into the same wall before blasting them both with a pulse of black lightning.

  The last rat sprang up behind him, trying to clamp onto his shoulder. Its teeth bit in, and it tried to Harvest him, but a pulse of black lightning aspected Honour surged out into its teeth, growing thick, then exploded in its mouth, sending it flying back into the wall behind it. Blake crushed it with a heavy staff strike.

  Once all five rats were dead, he ripped off their tails and said, “Five down.”

  You’d better call it for the night before the Silk Fans get nervous, Ethbin warned.

  Blake nodded, then glanced down at the corpses of the rats. “I’ll be back tomorrow for more of you guys.”