The quarry chamber was a tomb of silent, absolute darkness, a perfect, unforgiving crucible for Kael's rebirth. The air was thick and cool, smelling faintly of ancient rock and deep earth. Here, thirty feet below the desolate surface of the Wastelands, he was utterly alone, his only companion the ghost of his future and the searing pain of his present.
Kael sat cross-legged, a posture ingrained into his muscle memory from a life of war and relentless self-improvement. Before him lay the first of the six Grade 4 Monster Cores—a smooth, violet sphere that pulsed with restrained, heavy energy. This single core held enough raw Aura to power a normal initiate through their first year of training. For Kael, it was merely the first drop in the ocean he had to fill.
He reached out and closed his fingers around the sphere. The crystal felt warm, vibrating with latent power.
Forget everything you learned, Kael, the voice of the dead warrior commanded in his mind. The sphere fails. We build the void.
Conventional Aura training was a slow, meticulous process of drawing external energy into the body, gradually compressing and purifying it into a stable, white sphere in the core. It was safe, taking years to hit Level 1.
Kael was attempting a catastrophic shortcut. The Void Core technique wasn't about gentle accumulation; it was about internal implosion. He focused his will on the nascent spark of Aura in his core and simultaneously commanded his body to draw the power from the Monster Core at a terrifying, unrefined rate.
The Grade 4 Core instantly began to dissolve, releasing a torrent of raw, violent energy. It rushed into Kael's center, a tidal wave of pure power hitting a fragile, thirteen-year-old body.
Agony. Not the manageable ache of muscle strain, but the feeling of being inflated from the inside.
"Aaaargh!" Kael gritted his teeth, suppressing the scream that threatened to tear from his throat.
The energy was too much, too fast. It surged past his weak muscles and bones, overflowing his tiny, underdeveloped Aura core. Conventional training would have led to instant, fatal internal rupture. But Kael had anticipated this.
His mind, sharpened by years of battlefield calculus, took command. He didn't try to store the energy; he forced the Aura spark to spin. Faster and faster, turning the tiny point of light into a microscopic whirlpool.
The pressure inside him mounted, and unpurified energy began to bleed out through his skin. Steam rose visibly from his head, the heat scalding the rock floor around him. He was venting the excess power, losing 99% of the core's energy just to keep his body from tearing itself apart.
The remaining 1% of the energy, however, was caught in the spinning vortex. The constant, extreme centripetal force of the nascent Void Core didn't purify the energy; it fractured it. Impurities were flung out, and only the densest, most fundamental particles of Aura were allowed to settle at the center.
This was the secret of Level 10: absolute density, not volume.
For six hours, Kael endured this controlled implosion. He consumed the entire Grade 4 Monster Core in a single, brutal sitting. When the crystal finally dissolved completely, Kael collapsed, hitting the cold rock floor with a weak thump, his whole body shaking violently.
He wasn't tired; he was spent. His nerves were raw, his internal structure was screaming, but when he checked his core, the familiar sight was gone. The white spark had been replaced by a dense, minute speck of charcoal grey, swirling slowly like a miniature galaxy.
The Void Core was formed.
The Two-Week Transformation
The next two weeks were a blur of pain, hunger, and relentless discipline. Kael barely slept, dividing his time between intense meditation and minor calisthenics—mostly push-ups and bodyweight squats designed to toughen the muscles that would now contain the volatile energy.
The process of forming the Void Core was done, but now he had to fill and stabilize the structure. He couldn't risk leaving the tunnels. He survived on the meager rations he brought, rationing the biscuits while his body went through an agonizing metamorphosis.
The raw, Grade 4 energy he had consumed, though mostly vented, had kickstarted his latent growth. A thirteen-year-old boy's body was a sponge for high-grade energy. Within those first fourteen days, Kael shot up three inches, his limbs lengthening painfully overnight, forcing him to stretch and groan in the dark. His childish face sharpened, his muscles began to cord, and his voice deepened, losing its youthful instability. The change was so drastic that if his mother saw him now, she wouldn't recognize the frail boy she'd kissed goodbye.
The most critical change was his Aura Level.
He was no longer Level 0. The dense, compressed energy of the newly formed Void Core, despite its small volume, was so pure and refined that it immediately registered as Level 1 Aura. A level that traditionally took six months to achieve. Kael had done it in two weeks, entirely on his own.
This speed is necessary, he confirmed, inspecting his now much harder fists. But the inefficiency is criminal.
He still had five Grade 4 Cores left. If he continued to consume them at this reckless pace, he would spend them all in the next ten weeks, barely reaching Level 4, and be completely broke and exposed. He needed to make the energy stick.
The problem wasn't the core's capacity; the problem was his body's ability to act as a proper conduit. The Level 9 Kael knew the solution: an obscure mental control technique called The Sealing Mantra. It was a method developed by the ancient masters to allow the body to temporarily expand its cellular structure, allowing it to absorb far more energy without rupturing. It was incredibly complex and mentally taxing, but it maximized the percentage of energy absorbed from a core.
The Sealing Mantra
For the next four weeks, Kael dedicated himself solely to mastering the Sealing Mantra. He put the remaining cores aside, forcing himself back to the slow, miserable process of drawing ambient energy from the cave air—a process that was now infinitely more frustrating, given the speed he knew was possible.
The Mantra required him to mentally map every single cell in his body and, using his infant Aura as a tool, gently stretch the energy permeability of the cell walls. It was like trying to thread a needle with thick rope while blindfolded.
Hours blurred into days. The quartz crystals embedded in the rock walls of the quarry seemed to mock him with their stubborn stability. Kael would enter a deep meditative state, pushing his mind to its absolute limit until blood trickled from his nose.
Focus. If you fail this, you fail the world. You already died once. Don't die now over a few cells.
He remembered the smell of the burning capital, the feel of his greatsword shattering, and the look of indifference on Xylos's face. The memory was a potent, bitter fuel that kept his mind from collapsing. He was fighting not for power, but for survival, and the memory of failure was the greatest teacher.
He began to see success in small increments. A minute increase in his body's ability to hold the ambient energy. A slight dulling of the explosive feeling when his Aura tried to rush in.
By the end of the sixth week in the quarry, Kael knew he had achieved a rudimentary control. He couldn't sustain the Mantra for long, maybe twenty minutes at best, but it was enough for core consumption.
He picked up the second Grade 4 Monster Core. This time, there was no hesitation, only grim determination.
He initiated the Void Core spin, drawing the massive energy flood. Simultaneously, he activated The Sealing Mantra, commanding his cells to expand and hold.
The pain was still intense, but it was managed. Instead of 99% of the energy being violently expelled as scalding steam, Kael managed to hold nearly 20% of the core's immense power within his system. This twenty-fold increase in efficiency was monumental.
The energy that flooded his body was instantly caught by the spinning Void Core. The core didn't just store it; it acted as a living grinder, relentlessly spinning, purifying, and compressing the energy. It absorbed the entire second core in fifteen minutes.
When it was done, Kael didn't collapse. He was panting, exhausted, but exhilarated.
He checked his core. The speck of charcoal grey had doubled in density and size. The speed of the spin was visibly faster, creating a small, silent hum that resonated through his skeletal structure. His control was absolute.
His Aura flashed, not white, but a deep, stable silver-grey.
Level 3 Aura Master.
In six weeks, Kael had leapfrogged over two years of normal human progress, not by simply training hard, but by implementing secret, forgotten techniques designed to break the human ceiling. He was now stronger than 80% of the village guard forces.
The Long Hunt
Kael stood up in the dark, stretching his newly powerful, rapidly maturing body. He was no longer a child who needed his mother's protection. He was a weapon in the making.
He had four cores left. At his new efficiency, they would last him another four months, pushing him to perhaps Level 6 or 7. That was astounding speed, but it wasn't enough. Level 7 was still miles away from the strength needed to even defend a town, let alone face Xylos.
I have to get to Level 9 in five years, not twenty. That requires Grade 6 or 7 cores, and those cost a fortune, or they come from monsters I cannot possibly defeat yet.
His immediate survival plan had run its course. He couldn't live on biscuits forever, and he couldn't afford to buy more Grade 4 cores from Farbridge without raising massive red flags. He needed an independent, sustained source of income and cores.
The only way to get high-grade cores was to kill high-grade monsters.
He was Level 3, deep in the treacherous Wastelands, an area known for unstable reality and random, powerful monster incursions. It was suicide for a novice.
But Kael wasn't a novice. He was a Level 9 master with the body of a Level 3 boy, armed with twenty years of battle knowledge.
I have the knowledge of every Level 5 monster's weak points, every Level 6 monster's movement pattern, and the most efficient Aura-use tactics for fighting above your grade.
He walked to the entrance of the quarry chamber, pushing aside the large, sealing boulder with surprising ease. The outside world, bright with the afternoon sun, looked like a new battlefield.
He needed a base of operations closer to the real monster zones—the corrupted forests bordering the human territory.
First, I hunt the weakest Level 4 monsters in the Wastelands. I need to test this new body and this new core. I need a small mountain of silver to buy proper survival gear, and a weapon.
He looked down at his empty hands. He needed his greatsword, the weapon he had trained with for a lifetime. But that sword didn't exist yet.
"A training sword first," Kael said, the sound of his deeper voice echoing off the quarry walls. "Then, Level 5. Then, the frontier."
The solitude was over. It was time to enter the war, twenty years too early.