This chapter is the combination of yesterday's chapter that I couldn't publish and today's (Too lazy to split them up).
Enjoy~
*****
"What a disgrace, the mighty queen of the battlefield, harbinger of death, Liliana Bloodheart, dying from mere poison," a voice laced with pride resounded in Lilia's mind.
'Lilia Eswald, that's my name,' Lilia corrected the voice as she continued to cough up blood.
'Hmph, that name is not yours, it's just the name of your worthless husb-'
'Don't you dare insult my husband!' Lilia warned the voice.
'Or what? You are not even in a state to suppress me, you haven't been for a long time now,' the voice responded.
'Sigh, can't you just leave me alone?' the strength in Lilia's arms left her, and she slumped on the ground, black blood leaking out of her mouth.
'Whether you like it or not, we are stuck together from the moment you decided to forge me,' the voice responded haughtily.
'And I regret doing so; you have practically become a curse now. I now understand why he insisted that I forge you at that time in my life,' Lilia tried to sigh, but instead of air, it was blood that came out of her mouth.
There was a moment of silence before the voice spoke again, 'Look at you, on the verge of death because of a simple poison. You could have spared yourself, spared us, from all of that. All it took from you was to train a little more seriously, but instead, you've been wasting your time playing the act of a good housewife and mother.'
'And? I like taking care of my husband and daughters.'
'That's exactly where the problem lies. You are not supposed to like taking care of others; you are supposed to kill others!' the voice exclaimed. 'With your talent, breaking the curse placed on you wouldn't have taken so much time. One or two years of intense training would have been enough. Instead, you've been chasing after a chimera for eighteen years, eighteen! What is wrong with you!? You-'
'Shut up!' Lilia snapped, causing the voice to suddenly go quiet. 'Don't forget who you are talking to,' she warned.
'You know more than anyone that one or two years wouldn't be enough to erase that curse or regain my powers, and you are wrong; I have been training that whole time!' Lilia said.
'Here we go again, what training are you talking about? You speak of that nonsense you have read in that cursed book. Gods, Liliana, you are not that naive.'
'You know very well that it's not nonsense,' Lilia responded.
'It took you eighteen years just to see a glimpse of that power. How long will it take for you to master it? Fifty? One hundred years? If you have that much time, you know perfectly well that it's not the case for her.'
Lilia remained silent. Although the voice was annoying and kept talking nonsense, on that front, it might be right.
Despite that, Lilia wasn't willing to give up on obtaining this power now more than ever.
As explained earlier, when Lilia came to the Eswald for the first time, she still had some of her powers. However, as time passed, she gradually lost them. At that time, she fell into a depression, and if not for Alex, maybe she would still be in that state. It was during that period that Alex managed to get close to her, but that's not the focus here.
The important thing here is that, due to her not wanting to lose her powers, Lilia spent all her time in the Eswald's family library, trying to find a method that would allow her to do exactly that. At that time, Alex's father, one of the four dukes of the empire, was still alive, so the quantity of information they had access to was enormous.
Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, but Lilia couldn't figure out how to get her powers back. She read every book that touched upon mana, whether explicitly or indirectly, but found no clues in getting out of her predicament.
However, she didn't get discouraged and continued searching. Eventually, she even began reading books in other sections.
One day, while searching in the history section of the Libra, she stumbled upon a black book that seemed hidden in a corner. The book immediately attracted her attention, and she started reading it, but the first sentence of the book nearly made her want to throw it in a trash can.
"The human race, the best race to have ever walked on Wadata."
The bold statement of the author of the book was nothing short of ridiculous.
The human race, the best race? That was utter nonsense!
Although Lilia wouldn't say that the human race was at the bottom of the barrel, after all, humans had a decent position in most regions they inhabited, they were still far from the upper part of the social ranking.
Even their current ranking was mostly due to the fact that humans outnumbered most races; if not, only gods know how far down the social ranking they would be. So, saying that the human race was the best wasn't only ridiculous, it was outright outrageous!
Still, Lilia was desperate enough to continue reading the book even though it was absurd.
However, the more she read, the more her eyes shone with hope and excitement.
The book recounted the history of a time when the Fiore Empire didn't exist; in fact, none of the current powers of Imperion existed.
At that time, there was only one power, or rather, a family that ruled over the entire continent.
This family name was "Drakonel".
According to the book, the members of this family were able to destroy mountains with their fists, reshape landscapes with a mere touch, move at speeds that blurred the line between motion and stillness. They were depicted as beings of immense strength and unparalleled powers.
But despite hearing all of that, Lilia wasn't impressed and read with a bored expression.
"Destroy mountains with their fists, reshape landscapes with a mere touch?" She knew people capable of doing things like that.
However, her boredom was quickly replaced by a dumbfounded expression when she learned that the members of the Drakonel family did all of those things without mana, treasures, artifacts, or things like that. In fact, they didn't use any kind of energy.
Lilia knew people who could perform the feats described earlier, but those individuals couldn't achieve such things with their physical strength alone. They required external energies to accomplish those feats. This intrigued her even more, prompting her to continue reading.
As she progressed further, Lilia learned that, contrary to her initial assumption, the members of the Drakonel family did use an energy; it just wasn't an "external" one like mana and the like.
The energy they used was called "Zid," and according to the author, this energy was internal and present in most races.
Zid was an energy that determined the physical proprieties of a being.
There were several physical attributes a being could possess, but the Drakonels distilled them into four: Strength, Agility, Stamina, and Defense.
The better one controlled Zid, the more enhanced these physical attributes became.
Considering the fact that Lilia, or anyone she knew, was aware of this energy, it was easy to imagine that being able to control or even sense that energy was something extremely difficult to do, something evethe author of the book emphasized.
However, there was a method to control that energy, and luckily for Lilia, some steps of the method were explained in the book she was reading.
The first step consisted of completely purging your body of mana. This step was more or less the same as when one transitioned from mana to aura, for example, but here, it was pushed to the limits.
When you transition from mana to aura, you need to give up on mana; however, there are still some small, insignificant particles of mana inside your body. Thankfully, those particles won't hinder your path forward, and you could use aura without feeling any unease due to those particles.
However, when you start training to control Zid, then you need to completely purge your body from any sort of external energy, even those tiny and insignificant particles need to be dealt with, which usually takes one year to accomplish.
Reading that part, Lilia wondered if this step was really necessary or if it was just the author of the book's hatred for external energies speaking. From the way the one who wrote this book spoke of external energy as if they were...parasites, Lilia had come to understand that this person particularly hated anything that wasn't tied to Zid.
Nevertheless, Lilia wasn't overly concerned about this step. Having lost all her powers and the ability to use mana, her body was already devoid of any trace of mana, making the first step irrelevant in her case—an ironic twist of fate.
The second step involves undergoing intense physical training, including exercises to make the body stronger, more resilient, improve stamina etc...
Then only, after constant and perpetual training of your body, would you be able to sense Zid.
Unfortunately for Lilia, the book ended exactly at that point; there was no information on what to do after you start feeling Zid.
There was only one sentence explaining why the author of the book had stated at the beginning of the book why the human race was the best among all races. This sentence was:
"Of all the races in the world, humans alone are not bound to a single one of the four principles."
After that sentence, there was nothing. There wasn't a method on what to do with Zid after sensing it, how to control it, nothing! Worse, there wasn't a sequel to the book, neither in the Eswald family library nor in the imperial library that Lilia managed to visit after Alex's father asked permission to the emperor.
It was as though the author of the book, whom she suspected to be a Drakonel, only wrote this sole book—an introduction to Zid, according to Lilia. Despite the lack of information, Lilia decided that she would begin training to control Zid.
Two reasons drove her decision. Firstly, she didn't want to lose one of her abilities. There was always the possibility that she could heal her condition and recover her powers; thus, there was no way she would give up on mana and opt for Aura. While there was a risk of losing her abilities when using Zid, similar to switching to Aura, she didn't believe such a thing would happen, as the book's author didn't mention it.
From Lilia's point of view, with how much disdain and hatred the author spoke of external energies, if Zid couldn't combine with other energies, he would have definitely said so. One could argue about the fact that the first step required purging the body from mana or other energies, suggesting that you could never use mana again.
However, Lilia understood that this step was just there to prevent distraction from any external energy, thus, she was perplexed when it was said that you needed to purge your body from even the tiniest particle of mana; nonetheless, she was still certain that you wouldn't lose your mana even if you used Zid.
The second reason she wanted to master Zid was precisely because of this annoying voice that was pestering her even now as she endured harrowing pain.
'There's no proof that this "Zid" exists, yet you wasted your time trying to master it, and here we are eighteen years later with you on the verge of death and nowhere near mastering it,' the voice said disdainfully.
Lilia coughed up a mouthful of black blood again and tried to sit up, but failed as there was practically no more strength in her body.
'You are wrong; I did manage to-'
'Yeah okay, you can sense Zid, but so what? You still can't use it!' the voice interrupted.
Lilia fell silent, acknowledging that what the voice said was true. A few months ago, she had finally managed to sense Zid, and this day was perhaps one of the happiest in her life because just the fact that she managed to sense it caused her strength to soar by leaps and bounds.
However, since the book she had read didn't have more information on how to proceed next, she had been stuck for quite a while until those last few weeks during which she felt that she was on the verge of a breakthrough. That was actually why she spent all her time meditating.
She was confident that if she had just a few more days, no, hours, she would definitely succeed.
'Well, that's not going to happen now. The only thing your current pathetic self is on the edge of accomplishing is death,' the voice said with a chuckle.
'You do realize that if I die, you would also die, right?'
'I think death is better than continuing to watch you lose everything we have achieved so far,' the voice said nonchalantly.
'You mean the things I achieved; you were just a tool, don't forget it!' Lilia replied, 'and you don't need to worry. I don't intend on dying here. I have too many unresolved matters, plus, I can't leave my husband and daughters behind.'
'And how would you manage to survive? For information, your heartbeats are slowing down,' the voice said calmly, as if its own death wasn't nearing.
'By controlling Zid, that's how.'
The voice remained quiet for an instant before bursting into laughter, 'hahaha...that's the Liliana I know, arrogant, proud, and confident in herself. However, I don't think you can pull it off thi-' Before the voice could finish speaking, Lilia used the last bits of mental strength she had and shut it off, leaving only the sound of her own thoughts echoing in her head.
'Much better,' she sighed, or attempted to because the only thing that came out of her mouth was blood, but Lilia didn't pay it much attention and dove into a state of meditation, ignoring the excruciating pain she was feeling.
'What is Zid?' she contemplated.
After several months of training and attempting to control Zid, Lilia had come to understand that what she was lacking wasn't something like a method that would allow her to control Zid; no, what she lacked was comprehension. There was something about Zid that she needed to grasp before being able to control or manipulate it.
In those few seconds in which the fate of Lilia was hanging on a delicate thread, she reviewed everything she knew about Zid, yet, she couldn't find that last piece of the puzzle.
As frustration began creeping in, she refused to give up and focused all her attention on the deepest recesses of her being, where she could sense Zid, always shimmering like a guiding flame.
However, contrary to the usual, where that flame shimmered intensely, it seemed to be flickering in and out, as if her impending death was causing the flame to die out.
It was then that everything clicked in Lilia's head, all her comprehension of Zid coming together and forming a cohesive whole.
Exactly at that moment, her breathing stopped, and her body went completely limp.
"Did she finally die?" Niya wondered as she stood up.
"This person was quite boring; she didn't scream in pain like the usual ones," Niya hissed in disappointment and turned to leave.
"The person is finally dead; that's all tha-"
Niya's words suddenly got caught up in her throat when she felt an oppressive pressure bear on her.
Turning to stare at the spot Lilia was lying a moment ago, Niya's eyes constricted into pinholes.
"I-Impossible."
On Alex's side,
"W-Wait-"
Boom
Tobias, who was trying to speak, had his head bashed against the ground.
"Hm? What were you trying to say?" Alex asked Tobias as he pulled his head out of the ground.
"I-I was-"
Boom
Before Tobias could speak again, his head got bashed against the ground another time.
"I can't hear you, mind speaking again?" Alex asked again with an evil smile on his face.
He pulled out Tobias' head from the ground and was about to bash it against the ground another time when he suddenly stiffened, feeling a formidable pressure descending upon him.
Turning his head to the direction the pressure was coming from, he remarked that it was coming from the exact same spot Lilia's fight was happening.
He suddenly felt a pang of worry for his wife's safety, but it lasted only for a brief moment. An instant later, a wide grin crossed his face.
"I guess she is having fun," he murmured before turning back to Tobias.
"W-Wait-"
Boom