Kaden continued his life within the forest. It took him a few weeks to realize how the the system worked. It did kind of make sense. Perhaps he had not just thought about it. In some ways it felt even familiar.

Stronger beasts had a territory. Within this territory there were smaller territories that belonged to beasts the stronger one didn’t care about. If you wanted a safe area, you had to own a territory. That you could only get by taking it from another. It would only stay safe as long as you could defend it from those who would take it from you. Then there were lots of homeless beasts wandering within the territories. They would either be strong enough to get their own territory or be eaten by others.

In other words, if he found and killed a beast that was defending its home. He would receive its territory as his own… as long as he could keep it.

It was quite a dog eat dog world, but such a definition sounds far more brutal than it really was. It was not constant danger and fight for your live, but you had to be prepared for such a thing. Death was normal.

Kaden wasn’t sure what to do. He could easily kill a weaker beast. He only wanted a safe area for the time being. Yet, due to his strength, the ruler of the area might not agree to it since Kaden was a threat. There was no getting around it, if he wanted to live in the forest and grow strong.

Finally he chose a certain hillside with a cave in it. Some beast must have dug it at some point. It was not a natural cave. Currently it was inhabited by a carnivorous elk! This particular beast left lots of trash, bones and other such matter, outside of its cave and was pretty aggressive. Most beasts prefered to avoid it. It would take some time before any passing beasts might notice it was no longer master of the area.

The fight was over in moments. There was simply a quality difference between something that was almost a dire beast in comparison to a dire beast. Kaden, knowing this clear difference, still did not dare fighting a dire beast.

For the moment he had a place to live at.

He truly needed such a place. Over the last few days he had thought up some ideas. Some even relatively crazy. Kaden wanted to reach Channel Opening. If he was ever to return back to human civilization and kill some people, he would have to be like human and still be able to fight like human. Once his special body was discovered, he guessed it was going to be bad… really bad. He was unique.

As for one of those ideas. He decided he would try it.

“This is probably a really bad idea”, Kaden muttered to himself as he prepared for his attempt. It was one of the crazier ideas he had thought up ever since his last failure. He still estimate high chance of success from it. It was still something he could try right away instead of taking other kinds of risks.

His plan? He would tear mana from his own core directly. Not release mana from it, tear from it. Humans could use beasts cores for their own mana cultivation. Kaden was planning on doing exactly the same with his own core. Basically eating himself. He couldn’t think of any other way to get himself more human type mana. His mana system was not working properly and whatever mana he could gather with it, went mostly to his core.

Kaden started. The pain almost blinded him. He would have screamed, if he could have produced the necessary actions to scream, but his body convulsed horribly and he could not act in any way.

The pain passed as quickly as it stared. Kaden vomited out large portion of the charred elk he had eaten.

“Gaahhh”, Kaden gasped for air. He breathed for a moment and calmed down. He then checked his mana channels. They indeed did have quite a bit more mana in them. The little portion of his core he had “eaten” had been converted into human type mana at relatively good efficiency.

As for his core. It seemed dimmer and had suffered obvious damage. He knew it would restore itself eventually, but he would be a bit weakened until then. Kaden ate rest of the elk to feed his core a bit more and then gathered some chaotic mana too. The chaotic mana was most useful, but it would still take a lot time to repair the damage.

“That… hurt”, Kaden said to himself. “I can’t do something like that again. My core might even destabilize and explode. In the case I still fail, I must use something else! I must risk hunting a dire beast. Even if I might be counted as one, I’m at the bottom level.”

That was the major reason he decided to try this path first. Kaden was afraid of dire beasts. Part of it stemmed from his life in Dashire. He had always known them to be monsters. He also did not dare underestimate anyone and surely not something he had yet to even truly encounter.

He rested for quite a while to reach optimal state. Then he started the process of creating a mana channel.

“Divert the core mana… gather all the mana in my channels...”, Kaden thought as he carefully manipulated his internal mana structure. He slowly began constructing the pathway. This time he had much more mana available! It was a slightly painful process, but it was nothing to him. Sixty percent complete! He passed his previous best attempt. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. He was almost running out of mana!

*Pop*

One could hear the sound as Kaden finished his first true mana channel and reached Channel Opening stage! His empty mana storage expanded. No mana came in, but it was due to the simple difference of mana volume. Almost like presure outside was much higher and then a hole was poked that allowed the presure to enter Kaden! This would allow his body, not just storage, to contain more mana!

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While he still needed to allow his mana channels fill up naturally, his mana storage had now much higher capacity and it could extend outside. He would now be able to cast actual magic skills and spells! He would be able to use magic tools! While still short range, he would be able to even use it to sense things nearby!

His core already had allowed him to extend slightly outside of his body, but it was in manner he could barely control. For stronger beasts that range would extend, but for Kaden it wasn’t much more than some centimeters. The range his Channel Opening cultivation allowed was at least a meter. This was enough to coat objects he held with mana. Even a wooden branch would be like steel pipe in Kaden’s hands.

As Kaden was rejoicing his success, something started to happen.

His internal mana channels began slowly filling again with calm human type mana from within his body. Not all mana was inside the storage to begin with. A lot of it was within his physical body making it stronger, better. This was what usually filled mana storage, if it was emptied even if a mana system was not used to refill. Overuse of mana would deplete this mana too and that was harmful due to the strengthened body suddenly losing mana that supported it.

This body mana was now being pulled into his expanding ball of channels. It also triggered the core, which dragged in most of this mana not allowing his channels to fill. The presure lowered and his channels thinned again. Then expanded. Repeating the process. It was like his internal mana structures were pulsating and quickly wasting his body mana as it was dragged inside his core instead.

“Crap!” Kaden cursed, but had no idea what to do. He was starting to feel dizzy. This was a problem! His core was interfering with his human side. He was likely first to experience something like this. “If my core is taking all the mana, I better return it! If not, my own core will likely drain me dry and, if I don’t die, I will likely be crippled!”

Kaden ushered his core to release mana in hopes that it would restore his body mana. It did seem to work, but the pulsating process did not stop.

“I can’t keep releasing my mana forever, can I?” Kaden lamented.

Kaden tried several methods to no avail. He could not keep releasing mana endlessly as he was. If he was stronger, he would be able to do so for far longer times. A high beast might keep going for days. Anuu had kept at contant combat for days and without interference even longer. But Kaden was not that strong.

He eventually got tired and it became more difficult to keep releasing mana.

“What can I do? Do I have to cut my mana channel?” Kaden desperately thought. He wasn’t sure what kind of damage that would cause. “I can’t do this much longer. I… wait. Hmmm.”

He noticed something. As his mana was releasing slower and slower he noticed the pulsating process slowed down slightly too.

“Balance?” Kaden suddenly though. “That must be it! I got two sides that need to work together. They have to be equally strong!”

His core had weakened and that allowed his channels to do their thing right.

He had to act quickly before he would become unable to balance his core and mana channels. He slowed down mana even more and then noticed the pulsating change to almost opposite way. Thats it! He was right, it was balance! He increased power slightly, carefully.

Kaden felt relief as his insides finally came to balance. His core silenced and mana channels were filling naturally. There was still the pulsating process, but it was going only between his core and channels and was slowing down on each pulse. They were equalizing.

“I need to be careful in the future!” Kaden said to himself and relaxed. “I’m something that has not existed before. No one knows what happens when I keep cultivating. There was no way I could have expected something like this. I could have died!”

He spent quite a bit of time examining himself as well as he could. What if there were more conflicts with his two sided nature? He found none, but noticed something else. His body didn’t get all that much stronger, a bit, but not too much. He did already have a core which should have had similar effect to creating proper mana channel. Perhaps their compounding effect was only slightly better than only having a single one.

Kaded practiced his use of mana a bit as soon as he could. Indeed, he could reach further than ever before, but there was still the control problem. His core activated always when he did something. He could spare some attention to divert it from causing problems, but this itself meant he had to split concentration and thus lose efficiency on whatever he had been truly trying to do.

He could let core do its thing and it did allow him greater reach with beast style mana and his mana channels. That was definitely a positive thing. He had power. He had reach. Yet he did not have control. That was not an immediate problem, but Kaden was well aware that he would have troubles using magic techniques and spells as he was.

As for future magic cultivation, that was problem too.

He wondered what problems he would face. To reach Formation stage he would require to expand and strengthen his mana channel. He did not know much about what he should do with his core. Would they work together? At the end of Channel Opening, he would create more mana channels needed to build an internal formation, like the Formation stage name suggested.

Creating just one had been a problem, but he would also be stronger then. It would get harder each time. The more channels you could create during and stepping onto Formation stage, the more powerful you would be. It would be extremely difficult to impossible afterwards to add more.

There would have to be far better preparations at that time.

As for Condensation stage, he did not know anything about it.

Kaden sighed. “I don’t need to think of this right now. I’ll cross that bridge when I need to. Somehow. What I need now is a rest. I’ll live here and keep hunting. My mana system does not work right so I only have one path open. The beast path.”

He decided to sleep. Despite his power that had risen, he still felt mental fatigue. He needed the rest. Over the last weeks, he had slept only a few times. He would have slept more, but he noticed he suffered from nightmares that made his sleep somewhat restless. In his dreams he watched people die around him, villagers he knew, his mother, his father, he himself. Over and over again.

To get past it, he had decided to take his nightmares as reminder that he had things to do. Draw strength from it instead of letting it kick down. He used it to feed his rage that he had bottled up inside him. It would be useful when he starts to kill people.

During the night, he woke up once again due to the nightmares. He walked out to clear his mind before intending to sleep again.

Then hear heard noises from distance. He ignored it first, sounds were normal, but then he realized it was something unusual. There were lots of beasts sounds. More than several. It would have been two or three types, if it was just normal fight, but there was a lot of them.

In fact he had probably heard it much earlier too when he came to his new home to kill the elk. He had ignored it thinking it was nothing interesting, but now he noticed these peculiar points about it.

“I wonder what is with all the commotion?” Kaden thought and decided to go check it out.