Bro, I'm not an Undead!

Knowledge.

Such a thing was precious in any setting that anyone could imagine, whether it be business, pleasure, combat or an amalgamation of all three.

Knowledge was a commonality as far as the separate communities of beasts and humans were concerned, though beasts as they were groomed to learn that brutal reality of life earlier and with a robust touch of cruelty.

Knowledge wasn’t readily afforded to them. They had to fight for it to unlock the chance to ascend into something higher and better than their previous meagre existence.

It was all about moving forward.

Skullius had learnt this in the same way from the Tremur Forest, though in a harshly unlucky setup where his numb mind had to be forced to awaken. Unconsciously, the way the goblins he had met struggling for life against each other, their power being borne against him, had gotten Skullius through the earlier processes of jolting his mentality for what was to come.

Lucky or unlucky enough, he had pushed through but regardless of what caused him to pull forward, one could NEVER discount the fact that Skullius himself worked hard to get here.

If he didn’t act, struggling to remain intact, he would have lost his two states of existence.

Perhaps it was a perk of knowing where you’d go after dying… again that motivated him.

With weeks having passed after his struggle in the Tremur, as a Discount Human his Direction swinging him in the hands of strong human beings, Skullius had been forced to grow once more and taste another degree of growth in a frustrating sense.

Add that to his latest experience and one would find a Skullius who was slowly approaching a permanent state of mental rigidity.

A firm mindset.

….

“Fuuuu….” Skullius breathed out… consciously. “It’s finally done.”

Yes. It was done.

The Centre to the new mana core was done.

As a ridiculously condensed point of pure mana twice the size of a pinhead within Skullius’ body, it was eerily powerful.

Skullius had hypothesised on account of how he felt a strain in his abdomen, the layer of his body overlapping the core, that there was a limit to how much the initial size of a core could be.

He had been right.

A day and a half since he began his rigorous routine of absorbing pure mana from the forest and exposing himself to danger on the stout mountain with a mix of Distorted Gravity, Spatial Lightning and Stagnant Space, he felt that he couldn’t grow his Centre any larger than it was already.

This to him meant that he had reached the limit, officially marking that it was time to move on to the Refinery.

During the aforementioned time period, Skullius had thought about this concept.

Why there was a limit and how cores were formed in humans and beasts.

How did they gather pure mana when they were young?

From his first time seeing a collection of normal humans with cores in Namu, to now, this spawned a great deal of curiosity for him.

A brief exit into the real world had lead Skullius to feel with his growing [Elevated Mana Manipulation] that the air possessed different types of mana.

With what he had been learning and experiencing in the past few days, he could easily distinguish the various types of mana that roamed in the different places he roamed.

This led him to believe that asides from Energy Formers and high tier Class Branchers, the majority of combatants probably didn’t know the finer intricacies of the energies around them. Unless they studied aggressively, they wouldn’t know just how many components were in the air they breathed.

Mana was naturally friendly to living things, with the opposite arguably being true as well. The result was essentially that mana naturally flowed into humans and beasts to compound different effects.

One common method that mana invaded humans through was air, which, as Skullius had discovered contained pure mana as well. It depended on where one was at the time but generally plant life gathered and cleansed mana into pure mana just as it did when it took in air to expel a substance that humans needed for life.

Essentially, places with great quantities of vegetation bore the greatest reserves of pure mana.

Over the course of a normal human’s growth, pure mana would steadily continue to build within them until it formed a Centre, then the rest of the core with time.

The limit, as Skullius hypothesised, likely had to do with their own growth and for Skullius, this became a weird thing to think about as he thought he should have been able to construct a larger Centre given how he was stronger and all.

Perhaps, much like the average human growing their first core, he was treated as being a new born. As if the natural first limit of everyone else was the norm for him to begin at as well.

“Hmm… there should still be ways around it, right?” Skullius said as he stood in mud.

With the Centre done, Skullius understood the mechanism with which an entire core followed.

The Centre composed of the small point in the middle with an encirclement of not-as-condensed pure mana around it, anchored into the body and created a firm reaction with Skullius’ soul!

It wasn’t exactly a turbulent sensation but Skullius had felt it briefly.

A link was formed when the Centre had been finished, leading him to believe that the mana core was a dangerous thing to lose under normal circumstances.

‘I see now. Whatever the Creed thing was, it safely sacrificed the mana core in order to not kill me instantly…’ Skullius thought. ‘The Centre is linked to my soul and body, huh? That’s actually terrifying.’

Skullius shivered before making sure that everything was alright with his Centre. He now had to move on to the next step.

SPLSH.

Skullius sat down in the cool mud.

‘I honestly don’t know how to tackle this one. The Refinery isn’t what I thought at first. It’s an area where I have to carve out a way in which my mana moves and what kind of properties it will get. The problem is, I have to do it quickly, otherwise…’

After the Centre was done, Skullius discovered that while it was stable, capable of existing on its own, he had to keep mana from softly flowing from the damn thing.

It wasn’t some strange leakage.

No.

It was the Centre fulfilling its purpose.

Producing mana to feed into the Refinery.

The intricacies of this were still not exactly clear to Skullius but he was at glad it wasn’t some kind of defect.

Now, he had to act quick otherwise the mana would naturally start forming a generic Refinery!

‘Gah… The other problem lies in the fact that even after more than a day, I still can’t perfectly replicate the mana that causes Distorted Gravity.’

With each stretch of time Skullius had spent exposed to the high level concept, he had managed to get bits of knowledge on Distorted Gravity. Vaguely significant bits.

Much of it was small hints at the pattern of the mana that created the concept.

The ‘spices’ in the mana that gave it its effect were not something that Skullius’ core could produce. Even if he pulled the Gravitational mana into his unfinished core, asides from being useful for his skills, it didn’t generate anything extraordinary and eventually faded.

Skullius couldn’t replicate it.

The flow was the easier part.

It was like watching water run through a complex canal.

Such a thing Skullius could imitate with at least 70% accuracy.

For the mana’s texture, Skullius wasn’t sure.

Perhaps this was something Mages were very good at.

‘Well, I can’t wait any longer. If I just create a normal core in the end, what was the point of all this?’ Skullius thought with a frustrated frown. ‘Dammit! If that’s the case, then I’ll just try to copy the mana strand by strand! I probably won’t succeed in creating the same thing but… at least it will be different somehow right? Maybe I could get a less effective version of the mana that causes Distorted Gravity. Or maybe something different…’

The Refinery essentially governed the type of mana one would be producing. After pure mana streamed from the Centre it was Refined into a individual’s signature form, its texture and feel along with what attributes it could potentially gain being governed here along with how it flowed.

Though this explanation would then cause one to ask if Skullius had been cheating by learning elemental skills from simply extracting all th- yes! Yes he was!

After having felt that mana for so long, he couldn’t forget how it felt when he grasped it with his [Elevated Mana Manipulation].

Its feel.

Its texture.

Having experienced handling mana for many years, Skullius was at least adept at that much.

Like how a master forger could recognise mineral components with a touch.

Skullius was far from being a master, but his fond relationship with mana allowed him to be just a teensy bit gifted.