It's been a month since I escaped the Chimera Hydra. Since then, I've lived off the monsters I catch and a river I found. The monsters taste much worse than the mana imitations but are much healthier. Besides living off the land, I also condensed my mana. I am preparing for the final stage of creating my core.
Flooding my body with mana was surprisingly effective. It opened my mana channels and made magic a lot easier, not to mention the help it had with tempering. Yet, I needed a real mana core for actual magic.
All humans, as well as most animals, are born with a mana core and refine it throughout their lives. Since mine broke, I would need to do what the body does by instinct. The mana core is a crystallized ball of mana. It is embedded in the body to store and regulate mana. It is also the only mana that is part of the soul.
Upon reaching the fifth rank, magicians could regulate mana in their bodies. Until then, they relied on the mana core to do so. Because I had advanced enough, I could use magic without a core; alas, it comes at a higher cost.
To make a mana core, the body pressurizes and crystallizes mana. The body does this generally over a year, from a three-month-old fetus to a six-month-old baby. At six months, the mana core reaches full development. It then continues to grow without intervention until the age of five.
It is usually around then that humans can start to use magic and manipulate mana. After that, magicians continue to grow and refine their cores via cultivation. The core grows through the gradual addition of mana over time. After reaching the required size, magicians must condense their core. It's a painful process, but if the magicians succeed, they go to the next rank of magic.
Cores rank by color: red is the lowest. Then, it's scarlet, orange, sienna, gold, yellow, lime, mint, green, emerald, teal, and blue. People said that the eight legendary heroes were magenta-cored magicians.
Cores are sorted by color. The denser they are, the higher the light spectrum they reflect. A denser core could store more mana and is a reasonable estimation of a magician's rank. For example, an orange core would generally signify a rank-one magician.
Sometimes, the magician is more or less competent than their core suggests. But those are rare cases. In those cases, the core would show a certain rank. But the magician can have a higher or lower magic circle. Magic ranks depend on mana, while circles measure magic.
Red cores would only be able to manipulate mana; Scarlet would be able to do zeroth-circle magic, and so on. As a ninth-rank magician, my mom has a Teal core. Following the natural progression, I could create a red core and work my way up.
Another quicker way was to jump levels and create a higher-level core. After a month, my body could store as much mana as a gold core. I could make a yellow core by using all the mana in my body and drawing in more from the outside.
With a plan in mind, I set up defenses before focusing inward. Unlike in novels, mana cores here take up actual space. The biggest cores in humans are 3 inches in diameter. The core was like a secondary heart, connected to the magic circuits all over the body.
As such, the mana core formed opposite the heart on the right side of the body. Since my mana core was gone, my other organs and tissues had filled the previously occupied space. I planned to insert a much bigger mana core, which would hurt more than the ranking process.
With defenses ready, I began leading all the mana in my body to where it would settle. Mana is immaterial in its gaseous form, so I wouldn't feel anything until I began crystallizing. Drawing in more mana, I gathered the required amount for an hour.
With the preparation done, there was nothing to do but start. Mana, in its usual form, was like a gas, but by pressurizing it, it would turn into a liquid and then a solid. The mana core was a solid mana shell containing more mana. Only the mana inside would be usable and stored as a semi-liquid mixture.
For the next 10 minutes, I condensed all the mana into liquid. It already started to hurt as the pressure pushed my organs back. Struggling to contain the liquid mana, I started the last stage of solidification.
I would first form a shell of thin, crystallized mana and then add more until I used up all my liquid mana.
I would create a hollow mana sphere and connect my magic circuits to recognize it as the core. After I connected the sphere to the circuits, my soul would recognize and envelop the core.
The hollow sphere would take up more space than the liquid, so I was in terrible pain for 30 minutes. It was nothing compared to what I experienced with that daemon, so I held on. The surprise was that connecting my magic circuits hurt the most.
I had to connect only six main lines, but each felt worse than when the daemon crushed and ripped my leg off. Somehow, I managed, but I fell asleep right after.
-----
It was the same dream of ruins.
This time, it was more vivid.
The corpses let out a rotting stench, blanketed by the smoke of the blood fires.
I would have gagged, but I couldn't. I recognized the corpses.
Maria, my nursing maid, had cared for me all my life—Linda, the manor's housekeeper, who was always nice to me.
A pillar crushed Balhem, my sword instructor. Next to him lay Mary Cassinova, my grandmother. She shouldn't have even been here.
I saw the bodies of my loved ones everywhere: my friends, my family, and the kind villagers. No one had deserved this—a cruel, agonizing death torn to shreds by the monsters. Thousands had died.
And all this is because of me—it's my fault. I could have prevented everything. I shouldn't have even been there.
I walked forward. My foot stumbled over a body. I looked down. Charlie, my best friend, sacrificed his life for me.
I looked to the side and threw up.
-----
I woke to a pile of dead bodies.
My defense arrays had done their job. They killed any monsters that approached my defenseless body. The mana core took my complete focus. I passed out without time to defend myself.
All the monsters were low-level. So, the arrays were more than enough for them. Washing up by the river, I looked at my new magic core.
'That's odd.'
My mana core was more extensive than expected. It was much larger than it had been last night. I monitored it for a minute. As I was about to give up, I saw a thin string of mana wrapping around my core.
Over time, the thread thickened and pressurized. Every minute, a strand of mana solidified around my core. I would add half a millimeter to my core daily based on the rate it was going.
My mana core was already a millimeter thicker than it was last night. I concluded that the mana thread would slow production until it stopped or slowed to a crawl. My mana core's circumference had increased too little to explain the time gap. So, the mana had to be slowing.
I guessed the nanomachines had adapted because I had absorbed mana while making my core. They were now absorbing mana on their own. This was excellent news for me.
Mages had to concentrate and cultivate to increase their core size. My body would do it for me without conscious effort. Cultivating myself would still be faster, but I couldn't always be cultivating. Passive gains would help me regain and surpass my previous attainments.
After finishing my morning routine and cleaning up all the monsters, I tested my core. First was the load test. After checking its mana, I continued the stress test. I fired off magic until my core was empty and beyond.
The core performed as expected, and I learned I could redirect the mana string to refill my mana. This gave me the idea of making more mana strings. I experimented for the rest of the day before falling asleep.
I managed to create a second mana string to refill my mana. My body would be unable to handle any more strings; it was already strained by the two thin strings I had. Thickening the strings was also out of the question at this point.
After playing with magic a bit more, I determined my rank to be around the fifth circle. I could already cast spells at the fifth circle and higher. My mana core also held as much as a small lime core while being yellow.
I was even better than before, so it was time to leave. Leaving this dungeon wouldn't be easy, but as long as I had enough time, I could explore every inch of this place. With a plan formulated, I began exploring the dungeon.