The Next Day
I woke up normally — well, as normally as I could manage.
Today I had nowhere to be and nothing pressing to deal with, so I made the conscious decision to just... not worry. About anything.
I ate breakfast without rushing, had a nice conversation with Mom and Clara. Clara kept glancing at me with this suspicious look, like she was waiting for me to suddenly remember something stressful and spiral into my usual mess.
I could only smile helplessly at her.
It's not that I want to be anxious all the time. I just don't have much of a choice given everything going on in my life. If someone in my position wasn't anxious, that would honestly be the weird thing.
After finishing my morning routine, it was finally time.
I locked the house down so I wouldn't be disturbed, then shot Shane a quick message letting him know I'd be home all day and to not bother me. Once I was satisfied that everything was taken care of, I moved to the center of my room.
It was spacious enough for what I was about to do.
I sat down on the floor, closed my eyes, and took a slow breath. Then I recalled my conversation with Drake(short for draken).
"Start with the demon core — it's easier and less mentally taxing than a magic core."
Just to be safe, I had written the whole process down and gone over it again this morning, double-checking for anything I might have missed. When I was confident I hadn't overlooked anything, I began.
The first step was feeling the ambient mana around me.
Drake had explained that I'd already been using it subconsciously — that power burst from before had almost certainly been mana. Knowing that made it easier to believe I could actually do this.
I concentrated, and through my mind's eye I started to see them — tiny blue specks drifting lazily through the air around me. I focused on pulling them inward, guiding them in slow spiraling waves toward navel area my dantain.
That's the key difference between an aura core and a magic core.
An aura user pulls mana from the environment and drives it into themselves. A magic core user guides mana toward the heart instead. Different destination, different method, completely different feel.
Slowly, the specks began to gather. More and more, drifting toward me like moths to a flame, and I worked to compress them at the dantain, packing them tighter and tighter.
An hour passed.
I was soaked through with sweat, my shirt clinging to me, my breathing labored — but I didn't break concentration. I couldn't afford to. I was approaching my mental limit, the strain building like pressure behind my eyes, when suddenly something shifted.
Like a wall had been knocked down.
The mana started moving on its own — easier, almost eagerly — flowing toward the forming core without me having to fight for every particle.
Stage one, done.
Stage two was compression.
Now that the flow was established, I didn't need to chase the mana anymore. I just had to keep compressing what was coming in, shaping it, densifying it at the core site.
Another thirty minutes passed, and the speed of gathering increased sharply — exponentially, almost. I felt the shift in intensity and immediately knew: this was the most dangerous part.
Stage three would be cutting off the flow at exactly the right moment.
Mana follows momentum. Once you've built a current like this, stopping it too late means the core gets overfilled — flooded with unstable energy it can't hold. A burst aura core wasn't something I wanted to experience.
I held on, riding the violent pull of mana into my dantain, watching through that half-conscious third eye as the core slowly took shape. I started to feel full — that warm, deep sense of reaching capacity — but I thought I could push a little further and kept going.
Fifteen more minutes passed. Then thirty.
The core still wasn't fully formed. I could see it — not quite right yet, like a shape that hadn't fully set.
Then something strange happened.
Somewhere deep inside me, a thin thread of red energy appeared — different from the blue mana particles, darker and more visceral — and without any input from me, it wove itself into the stream and slipped inside the forming core.
The feeling of fullness vanished.
I blinked inwardly, surprised, but didn't stop. I wasn't sure what that was, but my instincts told me not to cut the flow yet. I stayed with it, wary, keeping my focus sharp.
More time passed — I genuinely lost track of how much.
Then it hit me again. That fullness. But this time it was absolute. A deep, bone-level sense of enough. I knew without question that I was at my limit.
I started slowing the flow.
The mana resisted immediately — thrashing, destabilizing, like a river suddenly told to run backward. But I held firm and gradually, decisively, began shutting it down. Little by little the current weakened. The resistance eased. And after a few tense minutes, the flow stopped completely.
The moment it did —
Boom.
A small shockwave rolled through my body from the inside out, and I felt the mana in my core begin to condense, then spread — cycling out through my body in a slow, endless loop. Like it was mapping me. Learning me.
Then the pain started.
It wasn't sharp at first. More like heat building under the skin. But it grew steadily, relentlessly, as the mana began carving pathways through my body — forcing routes through muscle and tissue and bone, making space for itself like water cutting through stone.
My body started absorbing it hungrily, like parched earth finally getting rain.
And then the changes began.
My skin lit up — veins glowing beneath the surface like rivers of molten orange lava, shot through with threads of deep red. Two horns pushed slowly through my forehead, curling upward. My hands darkened, the skin turning almost black, my nails lengthening into curved, claw-like points. My body expanded — growing larger, heavier, broader — until my head nearly brushed the ceiling of my room.
Then, gradually, I shrank back down.
The size receded. But the features didn't fully go away.
Ten more minutes of white-knuckled endurance, and it finally stopped.
I opened my eyes.
The sound that came out of my throat wasn't my voice — it was low and rough, like gravel and smoke, and it startled even me.
I looked down at my hands. Black skin. Dark claws. I stood up slowly and immediately felt dizzy — I was taller than before. Again.
I walked to the mirror and had to hunch slightly to see my full reflection.
Dark skin. Molten orange irises ringed with red. Glowing veins tracing across my chest and torso, pulsing faintly with that lava-like light. And in the center of my chest, a strange symbol — like a rune burned directly into the skin, clean and deliberate-looking, as if it had always been there.
I stared at it for a moment.
"I really do look like a demon..."
It didn't frighten me — Drake had warned me something like this might happen — but it was still a lot to take in standing there looking at myself in the mirror.
I sat back down and focused on returning to my normal form. It took a few minutes of concentration, but slowly the horns receded, the darkness faded from my skin, and my body settled back into something familiar.
Mostly familiar, anyway.
My height had gone up again, and my build had completely changed. The muscle that had packed onto my frame during the transformation was still there — but it had compressed down, refined itself into something leaner. Every cut was defined, every line purposeful. Not the size of someone chasing bulk, but the build of someone shaped for power, speed, and balance all at once.
I nodded at my reflection.
Then I thought about entering the mind space and there i was face to face with a fireball... .
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