Lightning Is the Only Way

With that said, Gravis immediately got to work. Surprisingly, even Ferris seemed to have become inspired by Gravis' words, and he also started looking at different stuff in the area.

Gravis' first stop was the mountain range. He already had quite the knowledge about metal, but this mountain range had more than simple metal. Especially these crystals on the mountain range looked different from everything Gravis had seen.

Gravis went to one of the crystals and took one into his hands. After that, he simply stared at it.

Gravis had a lot of experience regarding pure metal, and he had also learned a lot about different kinds of alloys. Sadly, Gravis wasn't able to manipulate alloys. He knew how he could create them, but his understanding regarding their Composition was lacking.

There were a lot of alloys that were harder than the pure kinds of metal, but without being able to compress them while forging, these alloys would be even weaker than his current equipment.

Out of interest, Gravis used some of his lightning on the crystal. He expected the crystal to melt, but, surprisingly, it simply broke apart and started smoking. After some minutes, instead of melting, nearly the whole crystal transformed into a kind of smoke.

'Interesting,' Gravis thought as he scratched his chin. 'These crystals feel like metal, but when I use my lightning on them, instead of melting, they act more like living matter and burn away.'

'Yet,' Gravis thought as he saw the black ash remaining in his arms, 'not all of the crystal burns away. Some parts of it remain in my hand. If the crystal were made of only one material, all of it would have vanished. This means that this crystal is not a pure material, but a complex material, like alloys.'

Gravis grabbed some more crystals and burned these too. After he was done with that, he took the ash he had created and tried to manipulate that with his lightning.

Gravis used more and more lightning until, finally, even the ash started to vanish into smoke.

Then, he grabbed more crystals and created another usable pile of ash. After that, he used some metal he found in the mountains and combined it with the ash.

It took several hours and a lot of crystals until Gravis managed to find the right temperature and correct manipulation to make the ash fuse with the metal.

Clank! Clank!

Gravis flicked the new sheet of alloy some times to test its hardness.

Crack!

alloy is about the same as the pure metal I have

BZZZ!

lightning until the alloy started to melt again. 'Sure enough, it can withstand more heat now. So, if I'm correct, this ash should be Pure Fire Ash. Then, if

were not metal. So, because of that, Gravis knew the names of the non-metal materials he needed but didn't know their properties. Due to that, he couldn't search for the non-metal materials. He had to discover

Pure materials, so I should be able to extrapolate the workings of

acted way differently from metals. Instead of

surprised him quite a bit. 'Interesting,' Gravis thought as he scratched his chin in thought. 'This crystal looked the same as the other one,

know about. This means that it is not a Hard-Pure material. Yet, the crystal is most definitely hard. This makes it impossible for this crystal to be a

shouldn't act like one single material when put under a lot of stress or heat. The whole thing liquified evenly and at the same time, like it was only one

also turned his head to look at the

sighed. 'I might have bitten off more

Complex, Medium Complex, Hard Complex,' Gravis thought. 'These are already six different Laws. Yet, I can't know which materials correspond to which Law without experimenting on them

the corresponding materials for one of the Laws and only look at them, or try to comprehend five additional Laws

don't know how the Laws combine. It could be that Soft Pure, Medium Pure, and Hard Pure combine into Pure, but it could also be that Soft Pure and Soft Complex combine

Area. Either we have the Pure and Complex Law,

tried to think about a way to find out which Laws he should try to comprehend first. 'Father has told me the

part. Material refers to dead things, and to remove Material, I need

Law. I don't even need to think about attempting to remove

Middle-Tier Material Composition Law. This should be a level three Law. This encompasses the knowledge of every dead material

Medium, but I don't know which ones are Pure and which ones are Complex. Earth is probably a Soft material, but that can't be the only thing. So, what else

what is dead by simply looking at everything and

Whooom!

stretched out his Spirit Sense and only used a minuscule amount of his Will-Aura to check everything.

he looked, the more nervous he got.

What was dead?

kind of dead, if one ignored the small living beings. Mountains were dead. Sand was dead. Crystals

Water was dead.