Port Nyanzaru, the Laboratory.
Inside Laboratory Two, which connected to the Shadow Plane, Alice was assembling the components before her with a grave expression.
Soren stood nearby, quietly watching Alice work. Today's experiment had quite a lot to do with him, because one of the items involved had come from him.
"Assembly complete."
On Alice's workbench, a massive gauntlet was now fully assembled. Other components lay beside it, but they had not been put together. She turned and bowed slightly to Soren, then slipped her hand into the gauntlet and said solemnly, "Begin testing!"
"Activate the Magical Powered Armor [Arm]!"
"Begin charging!"
Magical energy flowed into the pale purple crystal conduits. The enormous fist enclosing Alice's hand, roughly thirty centimeters across, shuddered, and faint glimmers appeared on its surface. Alice first tried moving her fingers, then rotated her wrist joint and recorded, "Average flexibility! Equivalent to an ordinary human!"
"Begin strength testing!"
With that, Alice walked over to a heavy iron block, grabbed it with one hand, and lifted it straight up. She recorded, "Test weight: 1,000 kilograms! Complete! Very easy!"
"Increase the test weight."
Alice moved on to the second weight. After three consecutive tests, the final weight was established at 1,500 kilograms.
Nearby, Soren quietly watched everything. What Alice wore was the arm section of the Powered Armor he had once obtained. He had waited until Port Nyanzaru's alchemy tech tree had advanced sufficiently before bringing it out for research. The upper limit of strength an ordinary human could attain was 18 points. According to records from the Interstellar Era in his previous life, the men's Olympic weightlifting champion's record was 275 kilograms. Such strength was already one in ten thousand; converted into a stat template, it would fall roughly between 18 and 19 points. Once repaired, the