Kai and Onyx returned to cuddling on the bed, this time in simple silence as the fatigue finally took over him, and began drifting to sleep. However, right before he could properly fall into unconsciousness, he heard a gentle knock on his door, followed by a soft creaking sound as it opened.
“Kai, are you awake?” Aina’s low voice rang in his ears, and he stretched his arms while getting up. The woman silently closed the door behind her and sat down next to Kai and Onyx. She wore a gentle smile on her face as her hands ran through the Obborik’s gentle fur. Her motherly eyes stared deep into Kai’s soul as she asked in a concerned, low voice, almost as quiet as a whisper. “This technique of yours, tell me again how did you come up with it?”
Kai, slightly taken aback by Aina’s disposition, sat in silence for a second before beginning to recount the night he burned through idea after idea, omitting of course the part where he used Rodney’s memories. The woman’s eyes widened as she heard Kai tell of the theories he had in his head, which he eventually scrapped for the crude technique he eventually settled on. “How did you know all of that?” Aina’s slightly shocked voice landed in his ears, and he gulped as a drop of sweat ran down his forehead.
“I… it’s information from my parents’ library. I read a lot of books on different topics before leaving, but I could only take one out due to my lack of mana…” He quickly came up with a lie, albeit weak, it would have to do to satisfy Aina’s curiosity.
“I see, too bad I can’t open it myself, I would have loved to read all that new material.” She sighed while grabbing his arm, sending a bit of mana into his fingertips. It quickly traveled upward, integrating into his mana veins as a sharp pain spread all over his body. “What you’re doing right now has been attempted before, as Elizabeth said, however, it is very rare and there hasn’t been much research done on it.” She explained, freeing Kai’s hand. “It seems your veins were already sturdier and better developed from before… although I can sense a lot of micro wounds that have turned into scars. What happened before the Haniard incident?”
Upon hearing that, Kai gave Onyx a weird look, and for the first time in a while, found himself unable to give a direct reply. “Well… you see, I had to run from a very scary beast,” the Obborik’s ears twitched slightly, and he raised his head before quickly lowering it in shame. “And ended up using two pools of mana before running out, so I was forced to use raw mana to keep my speed boost up.”
Aina’s eyebrows raised slightly as she looked at the two, however, decided not to press it further as it was mostly irrelevant. “Anyway, it seems like this lucky unlucky encounter was the sole reason your mana veins didn’t break in your last stand, although that doesn’t explain the core… hell it barely explains the veins…”
“Haha…” Kai scratched the back of his head as he spoke before Aina could question him any further. “Right, so I thought that if I considered mana veins to be muscles, which they seem to be given my unlucky encounter, then the more I train them the higher the chance they’ll heal.”
“Yeah but… Kai, you do realize that if you were wrong…”
“Yes, I’m well aware. But it was either that or nothing…”
“You could have waited to arrive here,” her voice broke slightly she said in an anxious tone. “I’m sure we could have-”
Kai interrupted Aina mid-sentence, her worried words stuck in her throat. “But it all ended up well, so let’s not dwell on that.”
“Right, right.” She calmed down her nerves and the cogs in her mind began turning once again. “It seems that by constantly ripping and healing your veins, they slowly begin healing, although at a very slow pace. It would take decades for them to be where they were before. Not to mention your core…”
“I don’t need them in that state… I just need them to work.” I need them… to kill Haniard… to avenge my parents… to appease my anger! To give a reason for my existence! Kai’s crimson eyes locked gazes with Aina’s own, his will sending a shiver down her spine. A soft smile creased her lips, and she nodded gently as she said.
“Very well, then. Time to brainstorm ways to improve it. First, the biggest problem right now is that you’re ingesting the plants directly, and they’re weeks old by this point, so you’re losing a lot of medicinal efficiency. Second… Even though you managed to guide the energies toward a single limb, a single mana vein, they are untamed. Wild mana and life force constantly clashing inside your body will do you more harm than good in the long term. Finally, the method you came up with is decent, but not quite enough. As I said, decades.
This is the part where I will need your help. We need to figure out a way to control the energies, tame them, and use them at your own will.”
Kai listened attentively to Aina’s words, taking mental notes of everything she said. Blood rushed through his arteries as his heart raced like a rabbit’s, his eyes finally opening to the flaws right under his nose.
“Is it possible to preserve the medicinal efficiency of the plants? Or, a way to get more out of them?”
His question brought a frown upon Aina’s face, and they stood in silence for a while before her lips finally parted. “There is a way, it’s still an experiment in its infancy but it could work. So, I’m sure you’re well aware of potions, they're brewed using special plants, much like the ones you used, by alchemists. However, their biggest downside is that their medicinal efficiency decreases rapidly as soon as it's brewed, that’s why they’re stored in spatial rings. But-”
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“But I don’t have that option…”
“Yes, so… my ancestor spoke of a lot of weird things. Amongst them, recorded in the annals of our history, were something called pills. Small pellets filled with medicinal powder that could be ingested directly. They never said anything about how they are made, or if they were even a thing we could make. But I think I figured it out…” As she said that, her palm opened, revealing a small, golden bead.
“This is the pill, made from several plants rich with life force, we managed to trap almost eighty percent of its energy, and the best part is… it's barely losing any even as I hold it like this!”
Kai’s eyes widened as soon as he laid eyes on them, a small shiver running down his spine as memories from his past life appeared in his mind. That thing… looks exactly like those pills from the cultivation mangas I read… And wait! Body core… body… However, a sharp pain spread throughout his skull as the rest of his memories faded away.
“Kai, are you alright?” Aina’s hand flew to his forehead, checking if he had a fever before verifying his pulse. “It’s a bit irregular, I didn’t expect you to be this shocked…”
“Ha… well, it’s… it’s an impressive creation. This way even people like me who can’t use spatial rings can get an advantage in battle. How did you make it?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say, as even I don’t know. We’ve had a secret group of alchemists work on this prototype for the past three centuries… you’re the first person to see it.”
Kai reached toward the pill, curious about its weight and feel. However, before he could even feel it with his fingertips, Aina pulled her hand back and hid the pill in her spatial ring.
“It is still a prototype, so I’d rather be careful with it. I hope you understand… Now, I thought of a way to tame those energies, so hear me out. What if we introduce a third one into the mix? Something to balance the life force’s brutal vitality and something to act upon the raw mana’s destructive force. I just can’t figure out what…”
Something that can act as a link between the two different types of energies… Destruction and Healing… they’re already opposites, Yin and Yang… What if the balancing problem is internal? There is no healing in destruction and no destruction in healing, they’re a single element. What if…
“What if, instead of a third element… you merged a bit of each one in the other, creating an internal balance?”
Aina’s expression turned solemn, and a frown quickly appeared on her face. “How can we do that? I… I’ve never thought of it like that… internal balance.”
“We could use those pills.” Kai’s mind began to race as he theorized. “When making a mana pill, add life force, and when creating a life force pill, add mana… I think that would work.”
“But we barely managed to make a stable one with barely any leaks, mixing two energies… I’m not sure about the result.”
“But it’s worth a try, isn’t it?” Kai added, his eyes gleaming with hope as he looked at Aina.
Aina sighed, resigning to her fate as she placed her hand over Kai’s head. “Yes… it is worth a try.”
…
The next few weeks passed like a breeze, with Kai, Aina, and Euphridia continuing their routine, which changed slightly every few days. During the day, Kai learned Elvish from Aina before training using the Hippocatrus Healing Technique, making slow progress toward perfecting it every day. Although Elizabeth protested, Kai assured her time and time again that he’d be fine, so in the end she gave up.
After training with the technique, he ran to the training course, either the manor backyard or the elven training ground. There, he did the most hellish training he had ever experienced before sparring with Euphridia, although the progress was clear. His body, although still pale, became more muscular, and even his stamina and speed improved. However there seemed to be no progress with the creation of the pills, and Aina would sigh with disappointment each time Kai inquired about it. The two sat in Kai’s room, and he leaned on Onyx’s large frame as he asked the same question again.
“We’ve wasted so many medical herbs already, we’re lucky some nobels from the court are helping us fund this project, otherwise we’d have been forced to stop already. No matter how much or how little foreign energy we add to the pill, it keeps devouring and assimilating it, eventually blowing up or turning to ashes before even being fully concocted. Our alchemists said it’s almost impossible to control it.”
Kai listened attentively, his heart racing with anxiety as he tried to look for a solution. “How are the pills usually produced?”
“That… well…” Aina hesitated briefly, stuttering before letting out a light sigh. “It’s a bit complicated. First, we use a large vat of water to boil the medicinal plants, and we then filter that water through a nanomesh. Oh, nano is something very small. It’s made using magic and Wyvern Hair and takes an incredibly long time to make, so we only have a few of them. After the water gets filtered, we are left with the raw energy, which we then clean into a bowl. Using a combination of degradable, digestible leather and, using a combination of healing and water magic, create the outer shell.
It’s not that difficult, but it took us centuries to figure out this process, and it works well enough for a single type of energy… but two energies at once… difficult. The energies mix in the nanomesh and again when poured into a bowl. When creating the inner and outer shell, the dominant energy will ‘consume’ the other and then…”
“I see…” Kai nodded as his brain raced, calling upon both his and Rodney’s memories to find a solution to this problem. Eventually, he sank into Onyx’s fur with a sigh. I should have figured, although Rodney was a scientist, he was by no means a medic, the creation of pills didn’t interest him either so he doesn’t have any information about it… I guess that leaves me with what I knew… which isn’t much. All I can remember… are those damn xianxia stories! How am I supposed to figure out a way to…
“Aina, how do you control the energy, or whatever, for it to stay together?”
“We use a special magic to control it, why?”
Kai’s heart skipped a beat as an insane idea popped into his mind, and he began blabbering with ideas. “What if you used heat instead of boiled water? Sort of, cooking the plants in the air, and controlling the energy as it cooks? That, and just scrap the leather inner shell, just use the energy itself to form a shell, that way, there could be much less loss, right?”
“This… Kai, you…” Aina stared in shock at the boy, her lips trembling as she jumped to her feet. “That… worth a try!” She said, storming out of the room without even saying goodbye.
“Well…” Kai sat in awe at her speed and leaned back onto Onyx as he drifted into sleep.