Chapter 116
The room was dark, as Lucas's eyes opened at two in the morning, as they always did.
No grogginess, no hesitation—just the shift from sleep to wakefulness, smooth as a blade leaving its sheath.
He rose from the bed and crossed to the desk in the corner of his room.
The ink bottle sat where he had left it, its contents glowing faintly in the darkness—a deep, liquid silver that caught the light crystal light he turned on.
The queen had given it to him before he left Eldoria, a parting gift for a student she would not see again for months. It was expensive, rare, and nearly impossible to find outside the royal palace.
He dipped the brush.
The rune took shape slowly, each stroke deliberate, each line precise.
A cultivation rune—one of the first Ashely had taught him, designed to gather ambient mana and draw it toward the user.
He had drawn it a hundred times with ink on paper. This was different.
The ink itself carried power, and the rune seemed to hum as he completed it, the lines glowing silver before fading into the wood of the desk.
Lucas set the brush aside and settled onto the cushion before the rune. He closed his eyes.
The mana came to him easily, drawn by the rune, flowing into his core like water into a vessel. He cultivated for two hours, letting the energy fill him.
At five in the morning, he opened his eyes.
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He stood and crossed to the corner of the room where the weights waited.
They were not ordinary weights. Each one was inscribed with gravity runes—dozens of them, layered and interlocked, designed to multiply their effective mass beyond what the physical material could achieve.
He strapped them on, one by one. The weight settled into his bones, pressing down on his shoulders, his hips, his lungs. His body adjusted, muscles tensing, breath shortening.
He stepped out into the darkness.
Lucas began to run.
It was not the blurring speed he could achieve without weights. His movements were slow, almost clumsy, the kind of pace any normal person could match.
Sweat beaded on his forehead within minutes. His breath came in ragged gasps. His legs burned.
He ran for an hour.
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He returned to the manor as the first light of dawn was breaking over the walls. The training ground behind the house was empty, the grass wet with dew, the sky pale and soft.
He did not stop.
The weights remained on as he moved through his forms—punches, kicks, knees, elbows. Each movement was heavy, deliberate, the gravity runes pulling at him with every strike.
He worked through the exercises methodically, the same sequence he had performed every day for months.
The punches came first—a thousand of them, each one thrown with perfect form, each one dragging against the weight that pressed down on his arms.
Then the kicks—five hundred on each side, slow and controlled, the muscles in his legs screaming.
Then the combinations—strikes flowing into strikes, movement without pause, the relentless rhythm of someone who had done this so many times that thought was no longer required.
Two hours passed and then three.
The sun was fully risen when he finally stopped.
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He stood in the center of the training ground, his chest heaving, sweat dripping from his chin.
The weights felt heavier now, his body trembling with exhaustion. He did not remove them.
He closed his eyes and reached for the summoning.
The spell was simple—a reverse summon, keyed to the laboratory he had built in the Dark Forest. The mana flowed through him, and the world shifted.
He appeared in the lab.
The underground chamber was cool and quiet, the only sound the soft hum of the runes that lined the walls.
The tube waited for him in the center of the room, filled with cyan fluid that glowed faintly in the darkness.
He removed the weights, setting them aside, and stepped into the tube.
The fluid rose around him, warm and thick, seeping into his skin, his muscles, his bones. He closed his eyes.
The cyan fluid was his own creation—a refinement of the green and blue fluids he had used before.
It tempered the body, strengthened the muscles, healed the micro-tears that training left behind.
An hour in the fluid was worth hours of natural recovery.
He floated in silence, letting the fluid do its work.
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When he stepped out of the tube, his body felt lighter, stronger, ready for the next phase of the day.
He crossed to the desk in the corner of the lab, where his research materials waited.
Books on biology—the structure of the human body, the flow of mana through the meridians, the interaction between flesh and energy.
Scrolls on runes—the ancient symbols, their meanings, the ways they could be combined.
Texts on seals—the theory, the practice, the limits of what was possible.
He studied for three hours.
His mind moved through the material quickly, absorbing, analyzing, connecting.
He had read most of these texts before, but each reading brought new understanding, new questions, new possibilities.
The runes he had drawn this morning, the cultivation technique he was developing, the soul methods Scarlett had given him—they were all connected, all pieces of a larger whole.
He was beginning to see the shape of it.
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Sorry for cutting in the middle of the story but
Thanks so much for your support and for sticking with the story so far! The upcoming chapters are absolute bangers I won't spoil anything, but if you want to see where things are going, head over to patreon.com/KingAlex738, where you'll find 10 or more chapters ahead.
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After studying came experimentation.
He moved to the workbench at the far end of the lab, where the latest iteration of his clone project waited.
The tissue samples were suspended in glowing vials, each one tagged with a label: Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Lightning, Yang. The Yin sample—his own—sat apart, pulsing with a faint silver light.
He had been trying for months to create a stable clone body. The theory was sound. The execution was failing.
He worked for an hour, adjusting the nutrient solutions, calibrating the mana flows, testing the stability of the tissue samples.
The results were the same as always—partial success, followed by collapse. The clones would form, would grow, would begin to develop mana cores.
Then they would destabilize, the elemental affinities clashing, the bodies tearing themselves apart.
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He traveled back to the city in the early afternoon. The weights were back on his body, the gravity runes pressing down, the familiar weight settling into his bones.
He found Aris in the training ground.
The blind boy had been living on Lucas's land for weeks now, training alone, pushing himself past the limits that had held him back for so long.
ucas had studied his pathways, had mapped the flow of mana through his body, had opened the first three pathways one by one.
Aris's mana core had grown, his talent expanding, his potential reaching toward the Platinum stage.
Lucas watched him train for a moment—the sword moving through its forms, the body flowing.
He had work to do.
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The rest of the day was consumed by study.
He returned to the lab, to the desk, to the books and scrolls and notes that covered every surface. The experiments had failed again. He needed to understand why.
He read for hours, cross-referencing texts, comparing theories, searching for the flaw in his approach.
The clone bodies were stable—that was not the problem. The elemental affinities were compatible—he had tested that a dozen times.
The issue was something else, something deeper, something he had not yet identified.