"Ouch, ouch, ouch..."

Cecil groaned as he softly massaged his aching legs. He was inside of a carriage that was was currently on course back towards Angla City. It took him some time to destroy the Orobos by only relying on his legs, but he still managed to defeat it at the end of the day.

"Tsk...What kind of guardian was that thing... it was more like some end game boss monster," he grumbled while pulling out a small black crystal from his white ring and rolled it around in his hand. "Can't believe this little thing was actually that monster's nucleus..."

Cecil thought back to his fight with the Orobos. It was the most difficult fight he had gone through ever since he arrived on Alterna, other than his first encounter with the Blade Ursa. The Orobos had 3 different forms, reminiscent of the boss monsters in games that he's seen before while on breaks with his brothers.

The Orobos' first form was the spiky exterior red crystal form. The next form was the purple crystal form that had the red crystals covering its outer shell. It lost its spikes, but the disgusting part about its second form was that it could shoot petrifying death beams from all the red crystals that were dotting its outer shell. The purple crystal was also a pain in the ass to deal with. The large purple beam that it shot out had the ability to bring life to the surrounding earth. Basically the Orobos was splitting its consciousness with the earth and creating smaller versions of its self to assault Cecil.

The fight only became hard with the red beams of petrification flying about and the mini-orobos' moving around erratically and smashing itself onto his body. It was a hard fought second round, but Cecil still pulled through.

The final form of the Orobos was actually kind of easier. The black small nucleus that Cecil was holding in his hand had actually flown out of its protective crystal shell. Then the mini-orobos' were reinforced by the Orobos' nucleus with the earth in the cavern so there were 4 bigger mini-orobos' by the time Cecil finished the fight.

While still dodging the red beams of death launched from the Orobos' main body, he waved his way through and solely focused on destroying the small black nucleus. The problem was that it turned out to be much harder than he had anticipated. Cecil could only break his promise and pull out his spear. He then kicked the spear and it flew, piercing through the black nucleus.

Of course, he justified it as him using his legs to 'kick' a projectile which then ended the Orobos' life. The crystal, after being punctured by the spear, lost control of the 4 mini-orobos'. They crumbled into dirt once more while the main body just fell down from the air powerlessly. The odd part of the nucleus was that after Cecil pulled out his spear, the nucleus quickly recovered into its original shape, only turning a little smaller.

It began to harden from its polymorphic state and was now the small, fist-sized crystal currently in his grasp. It resembled a piece of obsidian and Cecil now had the perfect 'gem' to use to craft a necklace for his foster mother. He didn't tarry and quickly made his way out of the mines, he almost came across Jena's group while he was heading back up to the exit, but they just missed each other on a corner.

Cecil was going back up the way he came down, but Jena's group was cutting corners and taking shortcuts through heavily infested monster areas to quickly head down and rescue him, thus the two parties missed each other.

After the tension died down, Cecil didn't forget to check the condition of his aching legs while he was on his way up. It was surprising but at the same time disgusting. He smelt a foul odor coming from his legs on his way back up. He quickly ripped open his pants and saw thick black-colored foul-smelling liquid oozing out of the pores of his legs.

It almost caused him to retch and throw up in disgust. He thought that he must have really damaged his legs to the point of no return and regretted being so reckless. He quickly pulled out some of the potion medicine his foster mother gave him and quickly drank a couple of vials while pouring the rest all over his legs. The potion did help alleviate the aching pain he was feeling, but it only caused the black liquid to ooze out even more than before.

Cecil even had to use some of his drinking water to wash out the black liquid sticking to his legs, but to his surprise, once the oozing stopped, he felt his legs brimming with energy. He tried testing his kicks and felt them much more powerful than before. His kicks even caused the mana inside his body to flow and circulate naturally, which in turn enhanced the strength behind each of his kicks.

After scanning his legs with Mana Sense, he found the pathways inside his legs had already healed back up and they had also successfully transformed into Mana Circuits. It was fortunate that he wasn't actually crippled or anything. The black liquid that was oozing out of his body just turned out to be the impurities that had piled up inside his lower body.

The process was actually the marrow cleansing that his elders have always been ranting on and on about. It was his first time experiencing this, but he felt awfully good after all the pain he went through. It was odd, however, that his arms hadn't gone through the same process, but he could only let it rest since such an occurrence couldn't be foreseen or controlled.

With his powers upgraded and body healed, Cecil happily got onto a carriage and decided to kick back for the rest of his return journey to the city. After this, they would be participating in the Dueling Tournament. There was much to hope for, but Cecil thought he could at least unwind during the tournament. Using only his martial arts and no mana would be thrilling.

At first he was planning on just bulldozing through the tournament with his abilities, but after fighting with the Orobos and limiting himself, he felt that the tournament would be more fun if he didn't use any mana at all.

He also wanted to test his newfound powers, but he didn't want to get ahead of himself since there was still more to do even after all of this. The Mana Pathways in his arms and legs had upgraded to Mana Circuits, so now it was time to develop the pathways in his torso and abdomen regions. The awesome feeling of control that he got from channeling his mana through the circuits in his arms and legs were something he wanted to experience with the rest of his body.

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Through this experience, Cecil learned where he had to focus in order to grow stronger than he was currently. He had inspected his body numerous times and he found out that Mana Pathways weren't limited to the ones located in just his muscles and bones. The pathways could also be found within his organs though it was hard to detect them because they were so fine and narrow.

Cecil decided to call these pathways minor pathways while the prominent and noticeable ones that were located throughout every muscle in his body would be the major pathways. Once he completed the upgrades to his Major Mana Pathways, he would then focus his attention to his Minor Mana Pathways.

This was an incredible find on his part since the information he had wasn't documented inside any of the files that his foster mother had sent him. However, his greatest find was in regards to the usage of mana. Mana wasn't something that could only be used for casting spells or temporarily enhancing your own physical abilities. One could use mana for so much more than that.

From his experience alone, Cecil felt that he could practically transform and change his body using mana on a more deeper level which would result in a permanent upgrade which was definitely better than a temporary enhancement. He had Mana spread throughout all of his body due to his unique physique, but he felt that they were 'locked' in place and were dormant until he started circulating his Mana into his Mana Pathways. Once they were inside of his pathways, only then would they turn 'active'–at least, that's what he felt.

So, when he accidentally ruined the pathways in his legs during his training before they eventually healed and transformed into Mana Circuits, all of that 'active' mana permeated into the muscles, tissues, and ligaments of his legs and qualitatively transformed them and washed all of the impurities that had accumulated in them.

It was a transformation unlike anything he's ever seen before and it seemed to be as important or even more important than the transformation of his pathways into circuits. The transformation was good and all, but it was very painful to do, and he literally had to destroy his mana pathways in order to achieve it, but the resulting transformation was something he dearly wanted.

Although he desperately wanted this qualitative upgrade, there was a lingering sense of fear hidden deep within his heart. He had to destroy his Mana Pathways first, let all of his 'active' mana permeate his body before healing the broken pathways and then transforming them into Mana Circuits.

He was fearful not only because of the pain that he would have to go through in order to achieve the transformation that he wanted, but also because if he didn't do it correctly and something unfortunate happened, he might become disabled for life, losing all of his power and becoming a cripple. And who knows, maybe what happened today was just a fortunate coincidence and if he were to emulate it again, it might not go as planned and he would just be ruining his future instead.

Not to mention that this time, he needed to destroy the pathways in his torso and abdominal regions. Although it would only be the Major Pathways that would be destroyed and not the Minor Pathways, but since the region he was concentrating the transformation on was so close to each other, one side was bound to influence the other side whether he wanted them to or not.

Just thinking about the pain he would experience because of it caused Cecil to shiver a little bit in fear. He also didn't know what would happen to his organs if they were to be subjected to such unbearable all at the same time for a prolonged period of time. He might just ruin them before he could even upgrade them. It was a really big gamble–a gamble Cecil was still hesitant to take.

The potions that his foster mother had given him were going to play a crucial role to the success of that gamble since it also helped alleviate the pain he was feeling on top of healing his broken pathways, so he had to procure more of them if he wanted to go through with his plan of upgrading his body.

'Once I get back to the city... I better write a letter to mother...I hope she has more of that potion, if not I'll try and help her gather the ingredients so she can craft more.'

It was already deep into the evening by the time his carriage had set off, so after a few hours of travel, they now had to camp out for the night before it got any darker and monsters started appearing on the road.

Cecil quickly set up his sleeping bag and quietly went to sleep. It was a good thing that the carriage had hired adventurers to escort them back. None of the adventurers recognized Cecil as the adventurer, Silent Sword, because they were one of those parties that constantly traveled from one place to another and never really stayed somewhere for too long.

Of course, they would recognize his name if he declared himself. It wasn't like the party of adventurers on this escort mission were ignorant. They knew all of the names of the prominent adventurers in the country including the rising stars like Silent Sword and Inferno Witch, but unfortunately, since they were constantly moving around, they couldn't put the name and the face together which was why they didn't realize who Cecil was.

If they knew, then his presence would surely cause a commotion since just earlier today, there was an emergency quest that was issued for his rescue. They wanted to take the quest, but unfortunately, they were already on an escort mission and they couldn't just back out of it since it would cause the people they were escorting and the guild some problems.

Cecil, of course, didn't even know that most of the adventurers in the Liyang Mining Valley were on an emergency quest to save him, so he just silently snoozed away on the carriage and because he was so exhausted, he even forgot about the party that had gone down into the mines with him and just left the place without bothering to inform them that he was okay or not.

It was truly a blunder on his part, but since he was okay and it was pretty obvious that he had destroyed the Orobos since he didn't bother cleaning up and just took away the crystal core of the monster, it wouldn't matter, right? Unfortunately for him, his 'disappearance' would cause the Liyang Mining Valley another few days of trouble, which he unintentionally caused.