Regius touched down hundreds of miles later at the entrance of what looked like a village but on a massive scale. It was easily the size of a small city filled to the brim with huts but what was baffling was that an elderly goblin was wobbling towards him. He heard a scratchy voice in his mind shortly after the goblin came to a stop about ten yards from him.
"Ha you humans are so audacious you send children to cleanse us from this world but no matter we have been preparing to invade anyway the legions are gathering you will only be the first to die of many as we take your world and its resources." said the goblin.
The goblin didn't wait for a response; he raised the stick that was in his hand and from each hut came around ten goblins. The goblins were tiny, no bigger than children but their green skin was slightly wrinkled. There was no hair on their heads and their eyes were all solid black. They all looked in the same direction as they left the huts. They held makeshift weapons in their hands. Some had crude bows while others had sharpened stones and few had metal weapons. The ones that held actual weapons were taller than the rest, the skin was less wrinkled and they looked well fed.
Finally, one last goblin came out of each hut towering over the rest, each one taller than Regius by more than a head and wielding odd weapons of all shapes and sizes. They all got into a battle stance. Regius smirked he'd never fought this many people at one time but it was time to test the extent of what he could do now. This wasn't a mission for Macarthur to recover some object or teach some thugs a lesson. It was a real battle, his life would be on the line.
There was something he hadn't told anyone: his father left him something in the lab. It was short and related to the cultivation of mana. It was a note that simply read
"No mana user can reach the top of the pyramid while sitting by and gathering mana, a battle must be used to polish the self as well as the mana center you must treat yourself like a billet of iron. You must turn yourself into a blade and each strike of the hammer is a battle. I spent much of my young life in battles and all of these people wondered why I was the strongest. It wasn't my inventions or anything external for that matter. There were countless life and death situations. Fight on and win and you will stand apart from the rest. I don't know which of my children is reading this. The cabinet was designed to open at the touch of any one of my kids after my death. I'm sorry there isn't more. I can say the practice of mana is detailed several times throughout this warehouse in countless ways but everyone must find their path in this regard and I'm sorry that I won't be there to see you embarking on your own. I love you."
Regius remembered the note and then shook the thought from his head. It was time to get to work. "Armor of the demon king switch to speed mode."
The gold letters wrapped around his body once more and the top morphed into a black Haori with the same lotus symbol on the back. His pants clung to be nearly skin tight while a long sleeve shirt adorned his chest. It was a solid black long neck that gold letters flowed through it at all times, sometimes forming a symbol and sometimes just flowing.
The mask of Owari melted, slid into a half mask, and took on the visage of a snarling wolf as it became a menpo. "Creation spell equip Stella Sanguis. The mana this time was there and gone in an instant. In his hands appeared a sheathed longsword. The sheath looked like it was outwardly plain a solid Crimson leather but upon further inspection, it was anything but simple. Three Dragons could be seen on the sheath spiraling down the Sheath and right before touching the bottom they would almost look as their images left the sheath as they executed an aerial maneuver to switch places before going back up the sheath.
Regius lowered the sheath to his waist and held the sheathe in his left hand with the flat of the blade parallel to the ground as he focused and poured mana into the blade. The Handle seemed to be the same crimson red of the sheath but the handguard was two dragons pressed together by their bellies while the blade came from smashed between them. The dragons were cast in what looked like dark gold. The dragons were entirely too lifelike; they seemed to almost be trapped in a vain attempt to soar up the blade only to be struck by the gold like a net holding them in place.
The eyes on each dragon stood out as they were shaped like stars and were two different colors. The dragon currently facing the ground currently had eyes that shined a brilliant amethyst and the dragon that faces the sky had eyes of the most resplendent emerald.
Regius time in the last 5 years had not been spent in vain. He used the knowledge of the library to create a unique set of equipment with creation mana that in different ways would grow as he grew stronger; they weren't like Astra but at the same time without Astra, he would not have been able to do it. Regius had created a system inside of his body that allowed him to passively grow stronger for every second of the day.
He had created thousands of swords by year 2 and he had kept one of the blades in each of the mana spaces throughout his cells. This was different than the disposable weapons that only had one purpose that populated his cells in the many mana spaces. Regius referred to these blades and other miscellaneous weapons he left in here as batteries; they had only 2 functions.
Function one was that they would always passively pull mana into his body and the micro mana spaces that held them. Function two was just as simple: it made them send all excess mana they got after reaching capacity to the main mana space.
They stopped all growth at the max of his current stage and each time he broke through a new level head had to reforge them and fill them all to start supercharging his primary mana space in the center of his chest. They were absorbed by the creations that he had dubbed the 12 Empyrean Items and each of them carried the strength of a Forbidden Rank Astra series.
Regius struggled for a while to help these items escape the fate of all Astra much like his battery weapons. He needed to remove the cap on these twelve items because this was Regius' only way forward and with his ambitions, he couldn't allow his strength to ever stagnate because he needed to break into another Rank. It was Link that solved the problem though. He had come from the mana space and began to silently use Regius' concept against him by creating a bunch of oversized chew toys with different effects we had recently acquired and were saving for later.
Initially, Regius was ready to freak out and stuff Link in the mana space for wasting their backlog of collected abilities It was when Link approached a water mana concept about blood that he was saving for the final Empyrean Item. So by using his concept in his spirit he was able to create what he had begun to call strands from his concept. The strands are what other people's abilities looked like after being digested by Regius concept, they would float around his main mana space until he was ready to infuse them into something.
Regius discovery after 5 years about creation mana is that while the user may not be able to use elemental mana so they couldn't formulate any spells by normal means but if they managed to create something, anything then they would be able to use the mana of any and every element through their creation as long as they developed a means to channel it. The act of combining this with his strange concept that silently ate people's mana and digested them is what gave birth to Regius's strands. He could infuse them into his creations giving them a portion of the person's style and strengths as well as their concept if they had one. Regius had come to treat his concept as a 2 sided coin.
The first side, the Eater depicted by the maw of a hungry dragon, existed to eat the mana and concept of anyone that opposed him, sometimes even those that just chose to be in his vicinity. Then there existed the other side of the coin which depicted a library and each book a different strand he had digested from someone else.