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Chapter 6. Crystal

I woke up to a sharp kick in the stomach—an early morning alarm, courtesy of Valera. My injuries were mostly healed, but I stayed down, feigning weakness. Let’s see if they’d serve up more energy.

That bastard, he woke me up before even five hours had passed since I fell asleep. Ideally, I would’ve slept at least three times longer. Still, I had managed to heal most of my injuries, so if it came to it, I was more than ready to show the guards who was really trapped here.

On the outside, however, I didn’t let anything show. I continued to lie there, pretending to be as weak and helpless as possible, hoping for a second course of the feast. Unfortunately, the bigger guard turned out to be slightly less of a jerk than his fat companion. Pushing the latter aside, he carefully shook me awake and helped me lean against the wall. It seemed that beds for prisoners didn’t exist in this era.

“Look at that, he really ate it all,” Valera sneered mockingly, clearly annoyed that he hadn’t had the chance to land a few more fresh blows. “Guess he really was starving!”

“Yeah, I see,” the big guy, Vasya, grumbled, pulling out a strange board from under his jacket that resembled ancient abacuses. Instead of wooden beads, though, it held colorful crystals.

“Well, weakling, ready for your morning workout?” the fat one laughed, making it clear the question was rhetorical. Meanwhile, Vasya detached one of the crystals from the board and examined it with interest.

“Too small,” Valera declared in his expert opinion. “Give him a bigger one, since he’s so lively, running around and eating a week’s worth of food all by himself!”

“How much bigger?” Vasya retorted, clearly annoyed. “He might keel over just from this one!”

“Doesn’t matter, Vasya,” Valera snapped, glaring at me. “He’s gonna die soon anyway, so what’s the difference when exactly? Sooner we start, the sooner we finish.”

“You’ve got a point,” Vasya conceded, handing me a significantly larger crystal. “Here you go, battery, and no funny business!”

The moment the crystal touched my hands, it began draining energy from me.

However, it was difficult to even call this thing a crystal, and its feeble attempts to drain my energy were more amusing than discomforting. Perhaps, if I didn’t currently have this cursed energy within me, I might’ve had to put in some effort. But even the meager amount I’d managed to accumulate overnight by processing necrotic energy was more than enough to resist.

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The focus was close by, and the connection between us had significantly strengthened during my rest. I didn’t even need to touch it for sustenance. True, the range of this energy transfer was laughably short—barely two or three meters—but given the size of this chamber, it was more than sufficient.

I sent a pinch of my energy into the crystal and performed a surface analysis of this miserable artifact. Unfortunately, I was still too weak to activate magical vision, so I had to rely on these makeshift methods. But even so, I saw more than enough.

Compared to the creations of the Blood or the Epidemic, this trinket didn’t even come close. Even Ashshuhatt, the god of sacrifices, would likely lose a significant amount of divine energy just from witnessing such a spectacle. Instead of a solid, organic structure, the supposedly pristine crystal contained a chaotic mess, held together by little more than the blind faith of its creator.

I wouldn’t just refrain from using such a disgrace—I’d be embarrassed to even take it out. Out of basic respect for someone like Ashshuhatt, if nothing else. Not to mention that it was blatantly unsafe. While the exhausted, nearly desiccated prisoners might lack the energy to overload it, any mage with even a couple of properly functioning cores would immediately lose a hand if they tried to pour their mana into this mess—and that’s the best-case scenario.

“Are you asleep back there, weakling?!” barked the brute, theatrically detaching a telescopic baton from his belt and snapping it open with a click. “I said no tricks! We’ll drain you dry anyway, so don’t waste your energy on that crap!”

Well, aren’t these some interesting inventions they’ve got here? I wonder if they came up with this themselves, or if Tekhars gave them the idea? That snob loves things like this—cheap, effective, and painfully brutal. Of course, he gets a tiny, but still lucrative, percentage for it.

“All right, all right!” I croaked in a hoarse voice, pressing myself against the wall. “I’ll do it properly, just don’t hit me…”

Judging by the smug grins, these two idiots immediately believed me. That was easy. And to think, I’ve never been much of an actor—I usually preferred breaking faces to faking smiles. Though, compared to other high-ranking demons, I was practically a pacifist. If Slaughter or the equally combative Drought were in my place, that baton would already be somewhere very unpleasant for Vasya. Fully extended, I might add. Of course, after that, those airheads likely wouldn’t survive an encounter with the rest of this place’s guards.

Not that I planned to let such treatment slide either, but as befits a Dormant Volcano, I acted without rushing. The main issue now was energy—I didn’t have much to begin with and had no intention of handing over what little I’d honestly “acquired.” Still, I could spare a bit for a few tricks.

I let another grain of cursed energy into the crystal, along with a tiny fraction of “regular” energy, taking complete manual control of it. Denying the crystal any chance to operate according to its creator’s design, I calmly and deliberately spread these fragments along its rim, producing the glow the idiots watching me so eagerly awaited.

My control over this body’s mana was still severely lacking, but with cursed energy in play, it wasn’t as critical. All I had to do was spread my influence just beneath the crystal’s rim and then apply a bit of pressure, turning the mana fragments into a sort of shell. A brightly glowing shell, I might add. Granted, this compressed brilliance wouldn’t shine for long before exploding spectacularly along with my cursed energy, but that wasn’t my problem anymore.

“See? That’s more like it,” Vasya barked contentedly, snatching the crystal from my hands and immediately attaching it back to the “counter.” “The faster you start, the sooner you’re done!”

The two guards burst into theatrical laughter, and I allowed myself a moment of relaxation. But then something seemed to click in the fat one’s head, and with obvious delight, he kicked me again. Naturally, I was ready for this and immediately siphoned off a little more of his energy. At this rate, he might lose a significant amount of weight in just a few days—if he survives, that is.

“Wait a second, Vasya. Don’t you think he managed that a little *too* quickly this time?!” the fat one squealed, pointing his sausage-like fingers at me. “Before, he was dragging his feet! Now look at him—he’s eaten, and suddenly he’s efficient! How aboutwe charge up another crystal, while we’re at it?!”