By the time Leonidas found his meditative equilibrium, the sun had long since shifted in the sky. What began as a forced attempt at meditation had softened into something deeper—an instinctive rhythm rather than mere discipline. Time melted from a consideration to an irrelevant metric, and he found himself immersed in the sensation of stillness. He didn’t need to count the minutes to know he had long since surpassed the one hour Ceruviel had given him.

But she hadn’t stopped him.

That, however, came as no surprise.

The Duchess, he had come to realize, did nothing without intention. She had given him an hour, but she had not stated that she would stop him at the end of the hour. With his eyes closed and his focus turned inward, it was only a small part of his mind that paid attention to the fact he was technically in breach of the allotment Ceruviel had granted him.

Not that it mattered.

She’d stop him if she cared enough.

Leonidas’ focus was instead fixed upon the bubbling and boiling energy of the [Cataclysm Core] within him, and the mana it even then sought to unleash through his body. Something he noticed as well, almost as a side note, was that the original ‘blue’ energy of unaspected mana, or pure mana, was entirely gone.

His core had completely subsumed it, leaving only the cataclysm power in its stead. Had he not already somewhat expected that to happen, it might have forestalled his attempt. Instead, he simply rolled his shoulders in unconscious preparation and accepted what was. After all, his [Radiance Core] had done the same eventually on Elatra—so he was hardly surprised.

Ceruviel had decreed that, in place of sleep, he would learn to cycle Psi and Mana into a meditative rhythm—one that would restore his body, sharpen his mind, and replenish his power without ever dulling his awareness.

The self-evident part of this, of course, was that he could do so while [Psionic Focus] was passively active. It was a detail Ceruviel had not explicitly mentioned, but only a fool wouldn’t key into it. What manner of idiot wouldn’t want a permanent state of heightened awareness in a world out to kill the unwary?

So first, I need to try to cycle my energy.

The first and most glaring issue was that cycling his Core’s mana was an ordeal—painful, volatile, and unrelenting. The power of his [Cataclysm Core] did not simply enhance or heighten his mana capacity, it actively eroded his physiology and built it back up in the same breath. It was akin to the process of cyclical forest fires, but dialed down to a microcosm within his body.

His mana ‘burned’ away the impurities and blockages in his body.

It then subsequently ‘regrew’ his anatomy instantaneously with improved structure. It wasn’t a perfect analogy, but it was the only way his mind could rationalize the sheer brutality of it; and given the native affiliation of his Core to natural disasters like wildfires—well, it just made sense.

With the knowledge in mind, Leonidas braced himself for the inevitable deluge of pain to come and took another steady breath in and out. His mental focus shifted solely to his Core, and he reached down to wrestle with the chaotic mana within it. It was, as always, like trying to wrestle down a literal force of nature within himself—but at this point, Leonidas had practice. Combined with his [Mana Sage] title and native understanding of battle meditation, the process was at least relatively achievable in a short span of time.

The real battle had never been with the mana—it had been quieting own mind.

Channelling his mana through its pathways elicited another involuntary hiss of pain from him when he started, and he felt the molten heat, arctic cold, and eviscerating sharpness of his power scourging his mana channels once more—but Leonidas forced himself to pay no heed. Instead, he started to consider how he was meant to circulate his power.

Ceruviel had not said he needed to flood himself, after all; she had said he needed to circulate, and that phraseology had not been made idly. Nothing the Duchess ever said was lacking in calculation. If she used the phrase, then she meant to use it—and that was not just a statement, it was an instruction and hint all its own. Leonidas breathed again and started to pull up a mental awareness of his mana channels.

They ran across his entire body, but they were not like veins or blood vessels really; they were more like arteries, with limited amounts in each limb and attached to each organ. They spread out from his core across his entire body, but what they didn’t do was loop around. Mana channels had a startpoint—that being his Core—and an endpoint, that being whatever part of the body they were designed to ultimately provide energy to.

This energy pooled in ‘chambers’ within his anatomy, like the soles of his feet, his pectorals, his abdomen, the palms of his hands, his shoulders, his back, his biceps, and each organ, et cetera—but it ultimately had a linear progress. How, then, did he circulate it? The logical step would be to inverse the flow mid-motion, but that would also be exceedingly difficult, and wholly painful. Circulation implied constant motion, and reversal was a stop-start, not a consistent movement.

Perhaps he was overthinking it, but somehow it felt correct.

He had done something similar on Elatra with his [Radiance Core], but that had been more along the lines of passive flow—like imitating his blood—than it had been true and purposeful circulation. He had simply let his Light Mana move, and it had done what it had needed to do. He could not be so liberal with his Cataclysm Mana.

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So what about the chambers, then?

When water did a barrier, it did not cease flowing when sourced by a river or an ocean, it simply crashed against it and created waves. Eventually, it overflowed past the barrier, over the barrier, or through the barrier. His particular mana was no exception: it wanted to move, to flow, to sear, to rush. Constraining it was against its nature. He had to let it surge, but if that was the case, he ran into a new complication: oversaturation.

If he let his mana pile up too much in one of his ‘chambers’, he risked moderate or even severe damage to both the chamber and the physical anatomy the mana channel that fed it was attached to. So, what was the solution? He had to create some sort of redirection or tidal pushback. More than that, he needed to ensure that the circulation was consistent—uninterrupted, unimpeded, and unbroken.

First Leonidas guided the mana he already had flowing toward the left side of his body, allowing it to traverse enough to fill his left arm. With his limb as a focus, he honed in on the chamber of his palm; one of those he was most used to making work for him. In the battle against Synthra, he had used that chamber to evoke the manner out of himself—and used its reaction with her own energy to detonate her shield.

This time, he was trying to keep it internalized. Instead of evocation, he wanted to simply let it flow, and then return.

The second step he took was to peel back swathes of the mana he’d released and return it to his solar plexus to resume its chaotic spiral, twist, dance, and flow within the space occupied by his [Cataclysm Core]. He needed a specific amount of mana for what he was attempting, not a deluge.

At least, not for now.

When the energy seared its way down his arm and into the chamber of his palm, Leonidas focused carefully. He let the mana build, pushing it along the chamber’s interior. As more flowed in he spread it out, occupying as much space as was plausible while allowing for unimpeded movement. Mentally, it sloshed and raged; burned and shook; crackled and detonated—a constant myriad of cataclysmic impersonations happening at once.

Mana was not a liquid in the same way as people thought: it was an energy, formless and potent, and flowed as a gas, a liquid, a solid, and something else entirely—all at the same time. He was just thankful that his time on Elatra, whether real or not, had allowed him to adjust to mana’s nature enough to not be shocked by its illogical and at-times shocking state of existence.

There it is. He thought to himself with quiet satisfaction.

The mana had all but filled the chamber—which was itself shockingly dense and spacious for what one might think—and yet remained able to flow and surge freely within. That was, of course, the signal for the hardest part of the process.

“Control,” he muttered to himself bracingly whilst he felt perspiration on his forehead from both pain and focus, “maintain control.”

The longer the cataclysm mana stayed in his hand, the more potent its sensations: feelings of being burnt, frozen, flayed, shattered, cracked, and more rippled through him from the volatility of the mana in escalating severity, and it took all of Leonidas’ focus not to lose himself and abandon the experiment due to the pain. Part of him wondered if his mana would ever not hurt him, but that was a consideration he could worry about another time.

“Channels are clear…” he muttered to himself while ensuring there was no interceding flow “...so begin the inversion.”

The words, as they often had in Elatra, helped to stabilize his thought processes and allowed him to more smoothly execute his vision. The mana in the chamber of his hand was seized by his will, and Leonidas pulled, pushed, and guided it in a paradoxical combination of cajolement that saw the energy coil within his palm and then surge back up along his mana channels.

A hiss of pain followed again, this time from the force required to not simply recall the mana—which was in fact relatively simple—but to invert its flow against the normal process of his channels. It was like making water flow upstream against the natural current, with nothing but one’s own willpower. There was no countermanding force actively impeding him, but mana channels had their own intrinsic ‘direction’ as many things did—like their own version of gravity, wherein it directed the flow of mana.

To go against that was, as one would imagine, supremely disconcerting.

Slowly however, and with thankfully manageable discomfort, he managed it.

Leonidas felt the cataclysm mana flowing inverted along his channels, back toward his core, and through his body. He felt the difference when he did, as well—the subtle change from divesting energy to multiplying it. It was difficult to explain, but the lack of expression of power created a feedback loop of invigoration. It was a subtle thing of course, not something particularly overt or blatant—but it created a sense of something loosely akin to cyclical recharging.

Pins and needles erupted along his arm, but they weren’t unpleasant.

It was roughly akin to the subtle feeling of an electrical current.

The mana flow surged up his channels with steady, albeit coerced progress and Leonidas let out a sigh of relief when it flowed into his core without issue. The moment the last eddies of energy returned to the cradle of its origin within his solar plexus, he mentally prepared himself for what came next.

He had achieved the first steps of cycling as Ceruviel had presumably hinted at, but he had not completed cycling itself. Without his extensive experience as the Hero of Elatra, he very well might have ended up severely damaging the mana chamber in his hand as well.

Definitely not something a rookie should attempt.

Despite the risk, however, there was also a clear sense of excitement. He had achieved something determinedly difficult, and did so on his first attempt—that was worth celebration, as far as he was concerned.

Now comes the second step.

Leonidas took another steadying breath and, choosing momentum over caution, opted to step away from the idea of limiting himself to a single achievement. His battle meditation combined with his instinctive understanding of mana was working wonders, and there was no reason to quit before he hit a true barrier. The world would not wait for him to progress at a leisurely pace, and he had no option but to take his journey at a full sprint if he really wanted to achieve his goals.

“The world belongs to the brave.” he muttered to himself, and subconsciously breathed out to expand his chest for what came next.