During the last three months, Jason neither neglected his mana absorption, further reduced his Heaven's Hell practice to receive more soul energy units, his body refining with the Netherworld's fort technique nor his martial art and affinity practice.

Thus, his whole day was filled to the brim and it was only fortunate that he could passively absorb mana which however didn't mean that he forgot to actively absorb mana as it was much more efficient.

In the end, Jason just slept less, at most three hours a day which was also already considered long for him in the recent days.

He just didn't feel the need for more sleep and felt vigorous enough to work for days with the nutrition and mana inside him.

After he reunited with both Shane and Dalia, they started to experiment with the Terra-Intermediate body refining technique, Netherworld's fort, and Dalia purchased bulks of nutritious food, medical baths, and mana stones to do so.

As such his finances were still relatively high and Jason was happy to have such great masters who supported him in any way even after they found out that he might be from a foreign race.

However, they didn't change even a tiny bit in their behavior which caused Jason to feel gratitude towards them as this was one of the things he feared by revealing his highly likely origin.

The only thing that changed was their teachings because they felt the urgency to force Jason to release his full potential that might still be within him as a foreign race.

Additionally, there was also the issue with the foreign races, Argos planet being one of the weakest planets among an unknown number of others that might even be in the millions, and mankind as a problem itself.

If they figured out everything Jason told them from someone else without having met him, Shane and Dalia would most likely end up in despair which was fortunately not the case.

Somehow without them knowing their small disciple turned into their ray of hope because his talent and demeanor were great and allowed them to nurture him thoroughly.

Through this, Jason was able to reach the 2nd Expert rank without much issue and by only absorbing mana for a few hours every day which was not that much.

Nevertheless, with his mana core rank alone and the further body refining he underwent, he would already be able to fight low-evolved beasts only with his physique alone without the need to receive amplification from his soulbonds for it.

This overjoyed Jason but more shocking was that his combat prowess was much higher than a 2nd Expert after receiving his soulbonds amplifications because all three soulbonds wreaked the peak-Unblemished rank after three months.

While Scorpio's required soul energy increased to roughly 1900 units, Artemis' required now around 1970 soul energy units and was extremely close to reaching the magical rank, once she compressed her first mana drop.

Her strength increased faster than Scorpio's because she could digest mana cores directly without the need to absorb the mana out of normal food that had many unnecessary things inside.

Mana cores had also fewer impurities and there was much more mana inside them than in high-grade beast meat which Scorpio ate.

Even if his masters gave him resources to nurture himself, they were not enough to feed Artemis and Scorpio which forced him to purchase the expensive food.

Through this, his fortune decreased to 50 Star notes over the last three months and the expenses would only grow if he wanted to maintain the accelerated maturing process he initiated by giving them expensive food.

The only unfortunate thing that was also fortunately on the other side was that Scorpio would soon reach his racial limit as a Radiant Sapphire Scorpion which would mean that his food expenses wouldn't rise anymore.

However, this was rather bad in Jason's opinion because he would rather pay a lot for food and see his soulbond becoming stronger than having to pay exactly the same, knowing that his soulbond's strength was stagnating.

This lead Jason to ponder if he should search for items to increase his potential at least a small margin which was harder than he initially thought because he would require something that could forcefully expel the impurities within a beast that already had the potential to reach the magical rank.

Thus, he just decided to not do it because it was more important for Scorpio and Artemis to reach the magical rank by compressing their first liquefied drop of mana which was only the starting point to enter the Lique state.

Sighing deeply it was obvious that this step would take longer than a few days to achieve and Jason would rather give his soulbonds enough time to reach the Lique state than to pressure them.

In the end, he had more than enough time to wait patiently and it would be useless to force his soulbonds in doing something under huge pressure as it could damage their core or create internal injuries which was something Jason wanted to prevent by any means.

Nevertheless, there was something else he was still unsure of because neither he, Shane nor Dalia knew anything about it.

After adjusting the black origin flame's soul energy, increased strength in its fire affinity, and accuracy with more annexed soul energy, it finally reached a soul energy of 2000 units.

Under normal circumstances, origin flames would have already evolved at that point but that was not the case with his black origin flame that seemed to have no desire to annex more soul energy units than it currently had.

The flame's strength already reached the peak-unblemished rank and Jason could perfectly adjust the flame's temperature however he wanted, without many issues or obstructions.

His Netherworld's fort's body refining helped him out with this while his soul connection with the black origin flame seemed to slowly fortify which overjoyed Jason and it would only be a matter of time before this would happen.

Nevertheless, a fortified soul conjunction with an origin flame was not something humanity ever heard of, or openly announced so nobody knew anything about it, and it was also weird for his greedy origin flame to reject the possibility to annex more soul energy units.

With this in mind, he and his masters estimated that 2000 soul energy units were most likely its first requirement to evolve into a Tier-1 origin flame.

This scenario was rare because not only were 2000 soul energy units an extremely high amount for an origin flame to evolve for its first time but his black origin flame was weird, to begin with.

Instead of stagnating at its rank, the black origin flame's affinity strength increased consequently once the amount of annexed soul energy units increased.

As such, Shane and Dalia were not even that shocked about the fact that Jason's origin flame had more requirements other than a large number of soul energy units.

Unfortunately, nobody knew exactly what the requirements were and only Jason would be able to figure it out when his black-origin flame told him so.

The only thing Jason knew was that Dalia's words about the discount according to the soul world's amplification were most likely true as he felt a weird sensation coming from his black flame.

Thanks to his soul world amplification of 33%, it looked like the black origin flame's initial requirement of 3000 soul energy units to evolve for the first time had been reduced to 2000 soul energy.

Figuring out that Dalia's words were true was already reassuring but it was also frustrating and annoying on the other side.

If his prior experience was not wrong, his black origin flame's strength would have increased to the magical rank by crossing 2000 soul energy units which was now however obstructed and somewhat a small disadvantage.

Nevertheless, he couldn't do anything against it and instead of being frustrated and bothered about this fact, he thought that it was more important to find out the other requirements to evolve his black-origin flame.