Chapter 28 - Crystals

His acquisition of an entire pack of mana cores was an incredible haul but also infinitely frustrating. He couldn’t absorb the elusive shadow magic no matter how hard he tried. And so began a long and tedious process of trial and error as he did everything he could to devour the black mana.

He attempted to saturate his entire body with the black magic but discovered how incredibly hard it was to contain. The fact that he was in the dark depths of a cave probably had something to do with why his body was acting like a leaking sieve. He could see black wisps of magic smoke emanating from his body as he struggled to contain the foreign mana.

His goal was to push huge amounts of the mana toward his core in the hopes that at least some of it would be sucked in. But this unfortunately didn’t happen as most of the magic continued to elude his control or simply dissipated back into the air.

He even swallowed the grey mana core from the wolf he had sliced open, as a way to get the creature's core close to his own in order to minimize the dissipation rate. But even that was a failure as the mana continued running about his body and never getting close enough to his core.

Next, Adam remembered fishing nets and how fishermen would trap many fish in them by simply waiting for the creatures to get close before pulling the net back up. He tried to achieve the same effect by constructing his own mana net around his core like a cage. The shadow mana was his fish, so he opened a gap in the net and pushed his mana until a portion ended up in the white net. He was then able to close back up the cage with the shadow mana inside. The mana didn’t react but simply stayed unmoving at a safe distance from his core.

Adam smirked at his genius plan before shrinking the cage around his core and forcing the shadow mana ever closer. When the black mana was moments away from being sucked in, however, the black magic somehow flipped sides and appeared on the opposite side of the construct.

Adam was puzzled and outraged at the ridiculously elusive magic and expelled it all from his body in anger. He had spent at least an hour trying different approaches to absorb the shadow mana, but none had succeeded, and he had actually lost the mana of an entire grey core by now. This wasn’t the end of the world since he still had many other cores, but it was still a significant loss considering how valuable these cores were.

He sighed in frustration before lowering his head to the ground in defeat. All these cores and he couldn’t even use them. Sure, he had already upgraded his core to the late stage but all this supply would get him very close if not push him to his next core evolution.

As he stared at the ground in defeat, he noticed a flickering light at his feet. This caught his eye since the were no small bugs or fluorescent plants down here to emit the light. But instead of some small firefly, he found a small patch of those white crystals that were spread out across the cave.

This was the first time he had seen one change brightness so he focused his mana sight on the strange crystal. Adam was surprised to see the black shadow mana he had expelled from himself was reacting with the crystal.

His exploration of the newly inhabited cave had been at the forefront of his mind ever since he came upon these white crystals. The vibrations that now couldn’t really be felt anymore, had forced him to ignore the strange crystals at the time.

But now that he was alone and out of ideas on how to make use of the shadow mana, he returned his attention to what these strange crystals could be.

He knelt down and touched the slowly flickering light but nothing happened. He could tell that it was made from pure mana but couldn’t extract that mana like he could an idle mana core. This crystal was something entirely different.

He watched carefully as the black mana surrounding the crystal was slowly absorbed without issue and only caused some small flickering in the white color of the crystal.

He almost burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. He had tried everything he could think of to absorb that mana and here this little crystal was, drinking up the black mana without issue.

Adam easily removed the crystal from its spot in the rock but still wasn’t able to extract the mana from the crystal. It was a strange thing, he assumed that it was similar to his core but it appeared to be completely formed out of solid mana, unlike his core which he now was fairly certain had a soul component involved.

Since this strange magic crystal was somehow able to absorb the shadow magic, he intended to make good use of it. He found a flat bolder and began to smash a stone against the white crystal to crack it open.

It seemed like the obvious thing to do since he couldn’t extract its mana from the outside, but he was unfortunately reminded of an important ability of the mysterious magic. That of strengthening its host, in this case, the small white crystal.

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His now upgraded late-stage grey core made him superhumanly strong so smashing small rocks wasn’t an issue in the slightest. The issue was that the rocks would always smash without ever doing any visible damage to the crystal. After turning several increasingly large rocks into powder, he resorted to striking it with his bare hands and feet but nothing worked.

It wasn’t helping that the crystal was only the size of a finger, meaning that it was far more compact than anything he had seen before. He was beginning to doubt if these crystals actually had a softer inside or were simply pure condensed mana all the way through.

His mind had gone on a rollercoaster of emotions these past few hours, from near-death encounters to huge discoveries of his abilities, then from a large upgrade to his core to the realization that all these mana cores were useless to him. And when he finally discovered a way he could remove the annoying shadow affinity from the wolves' cores, the crystals are then proven unbreakable.

Adam once more collapsed to the ground in defeat. He had really hoped to avoid this, but it truly seemed like he would have to waste all those precious mana cores simply because of their affinity. This was a serious issue for Adam because he assumed that the stronger creatures would also have specialized mana to help them survive. If he didn’t find a way to absorb their cores, then he would no doubt stagnate and never manage another evolution.

The thought darkened his already foul mood as he sat down surrounded by the many corpses. The smell was starting to get to him and he knew that he would soon have to leave this place.

The shadow wolves definitely appeared to be the dominant predators around here but he knew that they weren’t the only ones. A couple of spiders had survived the encounter and he figured that they would be back sooner or later to retrieve the spoils.

The ants too would probably come looking for their lost brethren, especially since that big guy looked important to them…

Before he could finish his thought, he suddenly had a realization. The larger white ant that glowed with white mana before it was killed had some sort of thick gasious mana clouds in its body.

Could those sacks of condensed mana be the result of these mana crystals? If the ant had managed to digest the crystal and extract the mana, then those ants might actually be his ticket to victory.

His mind was once again filled with excitement and anticipation, completely forgetting the depression that controlled him only moments ago. His mood swings aside, he really believed that he had cracked the case. He would simply have to lure out another group of ants to devour the crystals made from the mana cores of the shadow hounds and let them convert the mana into pure clouds of white magic before taking it for himself.

It was the perfect plan, except that he had no idea where the ants lived and if only the larger white ones could consume the crystals.

But those were questions he could ask later. With newfound enthusiasm, he formed blades of white mana and extracted the cores from all the remaining mana beasts.

He then went looking for as many loose crystals as he could. He stacked them both into piles to see if the crystals would absorb the passive cores automatically if they were close enough. This, unfortunately, ended up not being the case. The crystals were pretty good at absorbing the mana clouds, but not when they were encased in a solid shell.

As so began yet another hours-long mission of extracting the shadow mana and releasing it toward the pile of crystals. It was slow and repetitive but at least this time he was advancing.

The crystal's brightness changed with every cloud of shadow mana sent their way. He couldn’t tell how much of the mana was being absorbed but knew that at least some of it was definitely getting sucked in. Most people probably wouldn’t waste their time on such a speculative task, since he wasn’t even sure if the mana he would receive if everything went according to plan would even be worth it or not.

But Adam had come too far to give up now, he would see this through to the end if only to prove his own conviction. He refused to stay weak in this new world of his. He had promised himself to live a better life and not to drift to the background again. Even if he needed to convert all the mana cores, he would ever get into a terrible conversion ratio crystal to then feed to an insect to be able to finally harvest those cores as pure mana, then he would do just that. Whatever it took to keep getting stronger.

Adam lost track of time as he emptied core after core into his surroundings in the hopes that a decent amount would be absorbed by the crystals. He used their changing brightness as a guide to how fast they could absorb the shadow mana. He still didn’t understand why the slippery black mana didn’t fight back against the white crystals but refused to allow him to absorb it.

Finally, after many hours, the time came when only the larger red core of the pack leader remained. He had saved it for last as higher-grade cores were always harder to deal with but with all the other cores dissolved, its turn was up.

The core was heavier and emanated a stronger power than the others. Using his own mana to manipulate the shadow affinity residing inside was similar to dunking a paper boat in a stormy ocean. His own mana was completely destroyed as soon as he attempted to invade the core.

He had experienced a similar effect with the other cores but could simply brute force his way with little trouble. The red core, however, had such a large amount of foreign mana that he wasn’t able to use his usual method. Each time his tendrils entered the core, they were displaced at such a speed that the construct fell apart.

A sudden stroke of genius then overcame him as he used this mana’s innate property against itself. The shadow mana always hides from the light. It thrives in the dark, and therefore, he simply needed to make it so that the core would willingly release its mana.

He used the previous mana net construct to encircle half of the core before shrinking the construct down until it entered the red core. The shadow mana wasn’t able to disperse this larger and more durable construct so it instead sled to the opposite side to escape.

After a few tries, he was able to empty out the core by gradually pushing his mana further and further into the core and letting the shadow affinity seep out in an attempt to escape and be absorbed by the nearby pile of crystals.

At last, he had done it, he had finally converted all those shadow mana cores into admittedly still unusable crystals but that was where part two came into play… Time to find the ants.