When Dex woke the following morning, it was not sunlight that roused him. It was pain.
His body was burning with a punishing fever. The wound in his left arm throbbed to a frantic rhythm, fighting against the spreading poison, and his broken ribs had turned every breath into a slow act of torture. He tried to stretch, and every muscle in his thin frame screamed in protest.
"Damn it..." he groaned, wiping cold sweat from his brow.
His mental status screen was blinking in a deep warning red. Vitality: 18% (in continuous deterioration). Mana: 15% (regeneration severely impeded by physical injuries).
"Natural recovery will not be enough," Dex analysed his situation with cold rationality despite the fever gnawing at his mind. "In a Rank E body, broken ribs and tissue torn by acid require a month of clinical rest with expensive healing potions. I have neither the time nor the money. If I remain like this, my cells will die from the infection within two days."
He reached his uninjured hand into his leather satchel and withdrew his small treasure. Resting in his palm were three small stones glowing with a sickly green light-the Mana Cores of the Rank E+ Acidic Gloom Lizards-and a fourth stone, slightly larger, pulsing with deep, dark shadows like a fragment of the night sky itself: the Shadow Wolf's Rank D- Core, kept from his earlier battle.
In the world of the novel, absorbing beast cores was the fastest path to augmenting a sorcerer's power and accelerating recovery, since the Mana contained within cores carried Life Force. But there was a strict law governing this: a weak sorcerer could not directly absorb a core from a beast of superior rank. Beast Mana was violent, feral, and impure. If a Rank E sorcerer attempted to absorb a Rank E+ core, the narrow Mana channels in their body would rupture, and their Core would detonate like a balloon packed with glass shards. Nobles used expensive Filtering Arrays to absorb cores safely.
But Dex had no Filtering Arrays. He had the mind of a prisoner who was an expert in improvised chemistry.
"In prison, when we wanted to distil bad alcohol into something drinkable, we used filters made from toasted bread and activated charcoal scraped from pencil cores," Dex smiled a feverish smile. "Mana is energy. And energy obeys the laws of thermodynamics. If beast Mana is contaminated with violent instincts... I will use my elements as a chemical filter."
He began the most dangerous experiment of his life. He placed one of the green Gloom Lizard cores in his right palm. This core contained high levels of life energy and regenerative properties, despite its acidic nature. Rather than drawing the Mana directly into his own Core in his chest, he activated the Water element in his right hand and enveloped the green core in a small sphere of water.
"Water is the universal solvent, the element of purification," Dex thought, closing his eyes with a concentration that nearly burst his blood vessels.
He began forcing the lizard's violent green Mana out of the core and into the water sphere. Inside the water, the Mana thrashed and churned like boiling oil.
Then came the second step. He activated his Earth element in his left hand, pressing it hard against the wooden wall of the hollow where it met the soil.
"Earth is the absorbing element-the grounding rod for violent electrical currents," he deduced from his knowledge of physics.
He began drawing the green Mana from the water filter through his arm. The moment the feral Mana entered his veins, Dex screamed with pure, unmediated pain. It felt as though sulphuric acid were flowing through his bloodstream. But he did not halt the process. He wielded his iron will to direct the rampaging energy. The clean portion of the Mana-the Life Force-he steered toward his chest, his ribs, and his injured arm. The violent portion, the animal impurities and toxins, he drove with force toward his left arm and expelled it from his body into the Earth element, blackening and killing the bark he was touching until the wood turned rotten and dead.
The process lasted a full two hours. The green core dissolved in his palm, crumbling to white ash. Dex collapsed onto his side, gasping like a dying animal. But when he opened his eyes, he witnessed the miracle. The pain in his ribs had halved, and the deep wound in his arm had stopped weeping pus-pink tissue was forming over the raw flesh at a startling rate. The prison's magical chemistry had worked.
Dex did not leave the tree hollow entirely during the three days that followed. He transformed that cramped space into a savage training camp, a field hospital, and a planning chamber all in one.
On the second day, driven by a killing hunger that had begun to hollow out his stomach-the consequence of the enormous energy consumed in cellular regeneration-he was forced to venture out into the immediate vicinity of his tree. He was in no condition to fight large beasts, so he relied on his mind. He used his Earth element to fashion concealed traps and shallow pits hidden under leaf litter, and his Water element to kill prey silently by drowning them in clinging mud. He hunted horned rabbits-Rank F creatures-and large but blind ground spiders.
He ate the meat raw or barely singed over a small fire struck from flint, ignoring the revolting taste. He looked at food purely as fuel.
On the night of the second day, he absorbed the second lizard core using the same chemical filtration method. This time, he focused the energy on expanding the Mana channels in his body. He felt a terrible internal tearing, as though someone were threading barbed wire through his veins and pulling it taut-but the result was that Mana now flowed through him noticeably faster.
The third day brought the greatest challenge: the Shadow Wolf's core. This core was not about healing, as the lizard cores had been. It concerned agility, silence, and explosive muscular power. Dex repeated the complex absorption process-but this time, the impurities nearly killed him. The shadow energy attempted to seize control of his mind, whispering to him to surrender to animal instinct. It demanded that he dredge up the harshest memories from his years in solitary confinement to keep his human consciousness dominant over the encroaching dark.
When he absorbed the wolf's core, a subtle but decisive physiological change took place. The muscles of his thin legs became denser and harder. He found he could walk with a terrifying lightness-his feet producing no discernible sound even when stepping on dry leaves.
Three days had passed. On the dawn of the fourth, Dex stood upright inside the hollow. He was no longer coughing blood. His ribs had healed to eighty percent, capable now of enduring moderate combat movements. The wound in his arm had become a thick violet scar-raised and strange-looking, like a foreign mark burned into the skin.
But the most significant change was in his Mana Core. Through absorbing three Rank E+ cores via his improvised filtration method-which had expelled the impurities rather than allowing them to settle-his Core had swelled and stabilised. He was no longer at the bottom of Rank E. He had reached the peak of Rank E, standing on the very threshold of Rank D. His Mana gauge had doubled in capacity, and he no longer feared losing consciousness after two minutes of combat.
Dex placed his hand on the clay wall he had built three days prior. He did not push it aside slowly. He pumped Mana into his fist and struck it with force. The dry clay shattered and scattered into the air, and cold morning light flooded into the hollow.
Dex stepped out of the tree and stood upright, breathing in the air of Falus Forest in long, deep draws. He was no longer the frightened, frail nobleman who had stumbled into this forest days ago. Nor was he merely a convict, bitter over the ruins of a past life. He had fused both of those existences in the crucible of pain and magic, and what emerged was something new. His dark eyes radiated a lethal, professional coldness, and his body was coiled like a compressed spring.
He looked east, where the silver mist was rising on the horizon. The convalescence was over.
"Lake of Silver Tears... I am coming," Dex said quietly.
He surged into the forest with a speed and a lightness he could not have dreamed of days before-leaving his wooden cell behind forever.