Gen was rudely woken up to seal the red-haired woman. Ebony knew the turtle was just resting and didn’t go deep into meditation just from the aura the turtle exudes.
‘Gen has been moody recently…is his lifespan running out?’ He made a wild guess. Twelve thousand years was a period of time that Ebony couldn’t imagine. A Grandmaster shouldn’t even be able to live past half that time. Not even a long life species but he could be wrong about that.
He might as well observe Gen’s casting again since he had the chance. This time, Gen seemed to use a different spell. The masked woman who looked like a hospital patient in her garb was in a liquid where she could still move around. It was similar to his liquid mana and wasn’t elemental. They eyes met for a moment before she started licking the orb. Fortunately for her, or perhaps unfortunately, a few licks was all it took before there was a reaction from the orb. It was dead but alive. Ning Xin noticed and worked her magic, absorbing and consuming it but a small volume of liquefied red orb flowed to wrap her body.
And then she burned.
Gen’s spell bubbled and boiled over but not for long as the turtle got it back under control. “Would that affe-”
“It won’t.” Ful answered him before he finished the sentence.
Staring and watching her body melt as the fires consumed her, the fire mage did the same and consumed the fire.
Ebony returned to his meditation with his eyes closed. ‘Empty your mind Ebony.’ The images of Ning Xin getting pierced and burning alive firmly surfaced and imprinted themselves deep within his mind. Her weak grip and bedridden plagued self. Her crushed leg when she got pulled under. The images, the recollections got clearer over time. His clarity was ground against roughness and was polished even further.
His new roar spell. The situation in which he heard the roar the first time. The man who wore Ning Xin’s mask that appeared in Ordina. Ebony remembered them more and more clearly but he kept forgetting the man. Regardless, he was able to pinpoint that gap. The reason why he felt so pressured to stay in captivity despite how easy to escape it was.
Ebony fell into a trance. As if time reversed, he re-experienced his life in his mind backwards. When his memories got back to when he was 8 years old, he chuckled out loud without his knowledge as his mind disconnected from his body.
“You’re not resting tonight unless you land a hit on me.”
“But, mom. I’ve already landed a hit on you before.”
“...Since when did you learn to lie?”
“I’m not lying. Actually, I landed a hit long ago. I kicked you before I was born.”
“...hahahaha. As expected of my son, to think I’ve been beaten for years and didn’t even notice.”
That was the most memorable head rub and the only day he skipped training. The happiest he ever saw her.
The experience went back as far as he could go back as a baby and accelerated forward again. Ebony’s breathe got icy. His exhalation contained a gentle stream of ice mana that coiled together. He opened his eyes and put a open palm out. Conjuring a tiny sphere of mana above it, it slowly swirled inwards. The swirling kept speeding up till the mana sphere was visible to the naked eye. The sphere of liquid mana didn’t stop compressing at an accelerated pace till it reached his current compressive limits and faced the mental strain that resisted compression. Forcing it to compress any further would result in his skill levelling up, it wasn’t easy but nothing that he wasn’t familiar with.
However, the next step was controlling its unravel and decompressing the sphere till nothing was left. Finally, a strand of hair thin mana formed. One. Two. Three. The short strands wrapped and coiled themselves. Another copy of the three-stranded mana formed and started swirling with the first string. One by one, the number of strings increased and before long, they were swirling towards a single point in space above his palms just like his usual formation and compression exercise.
Similarly, the formation only sped up exponentially as he got more and more used to the mental muscle required. There would be far more gaps within the mana sphere no matter how tightly he squeezed them and the end product was less dense but not if he filled the gaps up with even finer strings.
Mana was a fluid.
That was his categorisation after playing with it for years. His own was gaseous and very…smooth and malleable. Ambient mana was a little more viscous. Frost Elves’ were colder, denser than humans and ambient mana, but also more rigid. Naturally, mages manipulate their mana and change its form and elemental mages change their properties.
Figurative hammers pounded on his mana sphere but even without it, the coil or ball of yarn like mana which had their gaps filled was like an alloy despite being made of one component. Before long, thousands of such balls were formed over and over again. Then shards of ice with the same woven mana were made. Swords, bows, shields and every type of weapon he had seen were slowly recreated in the same manner. For better or for worse, he would find out with a bit of testing. With ice magic done and dusted, the coiled and woven mana combusted into ice cold flames.
Instead of directly combusting the mana in his body, he wove the threads and allowed them to form the new and improved Stalwart Endowment before combustion. The same woven threads swallowed his blade, coated its edge and embers of flames danced on it. Even within his trance, he was able to get feedback that not as much mana was being burned away compared to usual.
Thousands upon thousands of these woven threads eked out and surrounded his body. Unable to control and form many precise strings at the same time he had to create them 7 at a time. Holding onto them before forming another and extending them to the limits of his reach over 700 metres away from himself. Millions of them fluttered, even digging under the ground. All of it with but a fraction of his regenerated mana.
Despite his trance, he was aware of the passage of time. Unusual but appreciated.
Even with his abundance of mana, fast conjuration and unreasonable mental endurance, it took nine days before he filled his entire reach with these fragile strings of ice. The strings didn’t break and weren’t solid ice but were silky smooth. When Gen twitched, he could sense every single muscle movement. When Ful’s leaves dropped, he felt every vibration. Every shock and impact. Predicting where the vibration would end or be unnoticeable isn't impossible either.
In between these uncountable strings, the woven strings extended like a tree growing a new branch and a flower bloomed. In the midst of the plum blossom blooming, they combusted. They were as short lived as the speed of their birth as a single point of mana was supplied. Nothing more.
Woven petal blossoms continued to be birthed and scattered. In time, the petals lasted long enough to fall off their ‘branch’ disappearing right after. The woven tree carried on flowering without a care in the world of its dying flowers.
Twenty days later.
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All the while, Ebony’s body had burned at a low intensity. Every nook and cranny of his body was bathed in Frostblaze Augmentation that continued to change. Sometimes, as still as a lake. Others, a raging torrent tearing along his blood vessels.
The very first flaming petal that spawned from the height of ten metres managed to touch the ground before dissipating.
Ebony’s eyelids had to be broken free from their frozen embrace the moment the petal touched down and he awoke from his trance.
Without checking his status, he stood up. Then he fell flat onto his face, allowing the snow to catch him. He shook his body once more to shatter the frozen joints and muscle. It was oddly painful. The pain was nostalgic. It felt like his pain receptors were alive again and meditation did nothing to it. ‘Pain is great’.
With that, his stiff body made it into the trailer with difficulty and some dry rations were slowly ingested with a generous gulp of water to rejuvenate his frozen body. When he felt his stomach and body didn’t give up on him thanks to his inhuman Constitution, he boiled some eggs and had the remaining Blue Sparrow stewed. Cooking could take hours but eating didn’t even take minutes.
He tossed the cloth napkin into the kitchen sink after wiping his lips as he exited the trailer. The robe he had on was similarly tossed inside. Standing at the head of the trailer, he didn’t spare a glance to the hibernating turtle, tree or dark blazing light and vanished from his spot. The dome wasn’t small but it wasn’t large either.
The gargantuan progeniturtle had a massive tree on its back. Near the top of its trunk laid a protruding hilt.
“I would advise agai-” The Tree spirit would have been almighty here on Elcra if it wasn’t for the thousands of years of impending death and easily sensed his speedy intrusion. Ebony’s left hand grabbed onto the hilt without any hesitation.
He was strengthened and enhanced but the hilt didn’t even budge with both his feet planted onto the tree trunk and his right hand pushing against it to support the pull. No matter. He didn’t expect to be able to pull out something a creature with a massive stat and physical advantage couldn’t.
Although he wasn’t able to budge the weapon, he was up close with the leaking sap. Not much collected over the years but the leak was present. Now that Ebony was superhuman, the sap looked white but also blue. Without freezing his eyes and hands off.
In that awkward position with both feet and right arm planted on Ful’s trunk and his left arm gripping the hilt, Ebony stopped moving. As still as a statue.
His mental touch caressed the diabolical mana within the sap. No magic turtle saving and protecting him from the intense cold and solid embrace.
Ebony's fight to take over control from the Ful’s sap was uncontested by the tree spirit but contested by its very nature. Gradually, his mana managed to be in contact with the sap. Catching ablaze, his statue-like countenance didn’t let the difficulty of ripping the sap towards himself be shown. Luckily for him, the ancient creature’s mana defences seemed to be shut down and his mental influence was able to do its magic. He would’ve been helpless if Ful were like the elder Frost Elves and his mana couldn’t be conjured near them or manipulated as easily as it should.
Coming into contact with the weapon hilt was indeed deadly. Whatever properties it used to have had changed. It had soaked in sap that was so dense with Ful’s mana that he was impressed that all the previous mage had was her arm sliced off in time. His assumption was right. All that energy had to go somewhere, where else but the very object killing Ful?
Unlike his predecessor, Ebony was not a mere ice mage. These flames were what strengthened him on a daily basis but he was greatly mistaken for comparing his measly copy with the original. It was an opportunity that he could’ve used to observe and understand the fundamental difference with his own but he did nothing of the sort.
Hours felt like seconds as the weapon didn’t allow him to steal what it pilfered and was as unmoving as he was.
Seconds felt like hours as the flames that encroached and enveloped him without giving him any delectable sap. Setting him ablaze with flames whiter and clearer than the flames ablaze Ful’s leaves.
Time trickled.
Mana ignited.
Health plummeted.
Now wasn’t the time to store excess mana.
Yet, the sap. The sword. Did not yield to him.
The plummeting of his health, bone deep freezing from his hands and feet started to fade from his mental register. Gen’s intervention wasn’t cutting his limbs off and neither was it dragging him away. He was shot with Gen’s mana seal.
The pace that he was freezing, dying didn’t change but his recovery sped up. Resisting the chill.
But it wasn’t enough and his pain continued to prevail against his healing. Not even the disconnection of his reception of pain worked. He had a taste of intense frostbite unlike any other as if he didn’t have any pain resistance. If he wasn’t in a trance, he might have linked its similarity to Gen’s snow magic.
Gen’s seal didn’t stop the frigid immolation and it didn’t help channel the sap to him.
His dying body didn’t bother him. The cold reached his mind and even impeded mental activity but that was simply another opponent for his mental muscles. The pain…made him feel more alive than ever.
In his trance, he only had one main objective. Absorb the sap and assimilate it. Use it to jump start the permanent damage to his mana chassis. In the midst of the permanent damage, reforge the body in a controlled manner. The same way he mentally practised the past month and more. First with his Glacial Models in Arcta, then with his own flames and body just moments ago.
At present, he just had to rob the damned unmoving sap.
❅❅❅
Having fallen deeper into his trance as time passed, his connection with his body had long been lost. Was his body even in one piece? Was his body actually dead and he didn’t realise in his trance?
Ebony did not know.
The calm lake that was his mental space kept getting colder. His mind was about as numb as his body was. It was then, the very centre of the lake of unknown depths started to freeze on its surface. A single drop of water fell into the centre but not a single ripple formed.
At the same time, his frozen white fingertips had just come into contact with a stream of sap. Stream was an overstatement with how thin the fluid was. It was exactly the same as one of his mana threads.
Shockingly, Ebony’s entire body was frozen through. He was just a frozen statue.
Frozen skin
Frozen muscles
Frozen bones
Frozen nerves
Frozen organs.
Frozen heart.
Warm brain.
Slushy blood, pushed with sheer Will transported poisoned, condensed, frozen air from the contained capsules in his lungs.
One didn’t need numbers to tell how close they are from death.
A light wind could’ve shattered him into bits. Maybe into atomic ice dust. Thankfully, there were no natural winds underground and he was encased in a weird mana.
His brain got hotter.
His blood had a strengthened push with Firm Path guiding them. His control over gravity had never been so fine and the effect was indeed as weak as it could be.
Extremely faint vibrations pulsed from within his heart. Gradually, warming his body back up.
His mental pull greedily tugged the stream of sap onto his arm, over his body. Into his mouth.
Disconnected from his sense of time, his body gradually revitalised. The sense of sight came back first. Then his hearing. Then his touch. Scent. Taste.
The only one that registered was touch.
His eye shifted but the lids stayed closed.
His fingers twitched and then it gripped tighter causing a layer of ice to fall off.
‘Time to punch my body into place…hot damn, I’m taking damage even faster now.’ Without a hint of panic, he kicked his mindless thoughts out and returned to his trance. A single mistake was all it took to cause more harm to his Physique than benefit but it was too late to stop the process.
The dome fell back into silence after his ice coating fell.