The transition was jarring, a violent sensory whiplash that nearly knocked Lencar off his feet. One moment, he was standing on the precipice of the Thunder-Crag Peaks, his skin numbed by freezing gale-force winds and the sharp bite of ozone. The next, the world dissolved and reformed into a nightmare of humidity and rot.
Lencar stood in the center of the Venom-Haze Badlands.
It was a desolate, alien landscape that looked like the carcass of a world left out in the sun too long. Twisted pillars of eroded sandstone jutted out of the ground like rotting teeth, their surfaces slick with moisture and slime. Between the rocks lay pools of bubbling, purple sludge that popped with a wet, sickly sound, releasing plumes of gas into the air. But the most oppressive feature was the fog. The air was thick with a heavy, greenish-yellow haze that clung to the ground and obscured vision beyond ten meters. It felt less like air and more like breathing hot soup.
It was silent. Not the peaceful, rhythmic silence of his bedroom in Nairn, nor the roaring, majestic silence of the mountain peaks. This was the predatory silence of a graveyard—a stillness that watched you, waiting for a moment of weakness.
Lencar didn't cast a barrier. He stood there, the Demon-Dweller Sword resting heavily on his shoulder, and took a deep breath.
Inhale.
The taste hit the back of his throat instantly. It was metallic, sour, and cloying, like licking a battery that had been dipped in rotting fruit. It coated his tongue in a film of chemical waste.
He waited, his heart rate steady, analyzing the feedback from his own biology.
"It is quite toxic here," Lencar muttered, his voice muffled by the dense air.
He checked his body. His lungs burned slightly, a tingling sensation spreading through his chest like a mild sunburn on the inside of his ribs. He flexed his fingers, checking for tremors. He blinked, checking for vision loss.
But... that was it.
No coughing fit. No paralysis seizing his limbs. No skin melting off his bones.
"Interesting," he mused, looking at his free hand. "The toxicity levels here are objectively high enough to kill a normal human in minutes. The birds flying overhead drop dead if they dip too low. But my body isn't shutting down."
He realized then the true extent of his transformation. Months of Mana-Forging—the daily ritual of forcing high-density mana into his cells, tearing them down, and rebuilding them with the Breath of Yggdrasil—had done more than just build muscle. It had fundamentally altered his biology. He wasn't just stronger; his immune system was hyper-active, a ravenous defense force that had been swimming in foreign mana for so long that a little neurotoxin was just background noise.
"I have antibodies," Lencar realized, a detached scientific curiosity warring with a very human sense of relief. "My body treats the poison like it treats the gravity in the peaks—just another stressor to adapt to. I've become a cockroach."
But "resistance" wasn't "immunity." And in a fight against Mars, or the Eye of the Midnight Sun, "good enough" would get him killed. He needed to know the hard limit. He needed to know exactly how much poison it took to break him.
He walked deeper into the fog, his boots squelching in the toxic mud. He found a vent in the ground, a fissure where the gas was spewing out in a thick, concentrated jet that hissed like a serpent.
He stood before it. The concentration here was lethal. One breath would be like drinking a vial of arsenic.
"Massive exposure to the toxic environment here will overwhelm the body," Lencar stated, treating his own life like a science experiment. "Even my body might fail in ten seconds in such an environment."
He stepped into the jet. He opened his mouth and took a massive, greedy breath, filling his lungs with pure, concentrated neurotoxin.
One second.
It tasted like fire.
Two seconds.
There it is.
The reaction was instantaneous and catastrophic. His vision blurred into a kaleidoscope of grey and green. His knees buckled, sending him crashing to the mud. A wave of liquid fire raced through his veins, turning his blood to acid. His heart hammered an erratic, panicked rhythm—thump-thump... pause... THUMP—as his nervous system began to misfire.
He dropped to one knee, driving the Demon-Dweller Sword into the ground to prop himself up. He was drowning on dry land.
"So that's my limit," he wheezed, black spots dancing in his eyes like flies. "Body is already... cough cough... failing."
The fear hit him then. It wasn't the cool calculation of the Sovereign; it was the primal, lizard-brain panic of a dying animal. His throat was closing. His fingers were curling into claws. He was going to die alone in a swamp, miles away from the warm kitchen and the laughing children.
Panic is inefficient, he screamed internally, forcing his mind to override the terror. Access the ring. Now!
He tapped his silver ring with a trembling finger that felt numb and distant.
"[Void Vault]: Open. Breath of Yggdrasil."
He didn't take the crystal out. He opened the internal "valve" he had engineered, connecting the artifact directly to his mana circulatory system.
A surge of pure, emerald-green mana flooded his body. It didn't feel like water; it felt like light. It was cool, refreshing, and incredibly potent, rushing through his meridians with the force of a breaking dam. It clashed with the purple poison in his veins.
The reaction was violent. Lencar gritted his teeth, a guttural growl escaping his throat as his body became a battlefield. The refined natural mana didn't just flush the poison out; it devoured it. It broke the toxins down on a molecular level, disassembling the chemical bonds and using the released energy to repair the cellular damage.
In ten seconds, the nausea vanished. The pain receded like a tide going out. Lencar stood up, gasping, taking a deep breath of the clear air inside the spatial barrier he had instinctively thrown up.
"I am already restored completely," he noted, wiping a trickle of black blood from his lip.
But then, he noticed something strange. A lingering sensation.
He stepped back into the poison jet. He deactivated the barrier. He inhaled again.
Nothing.
No burning. No tingling. No fire in the veins. It felt like breathing fresh mountain air.
Lencar frowned, looking at his hands. "This adaptation speed... is instantaneous and also very abnormal."
He realized what had happened. The Breath of Yggdrasil—the refined mana from the dungeon—wasn't just a battery. It was a mutagen. By using it to purge the poison while his body was in a state of critical failure, the mana had rewritten his biological defense codes. It had taken the "data" of the poison and updated his immune system permanently.
"It's not just healing," Lencar whispered, looking at the ring with a new, terrified reverence. "It's like a vaccination, but countless times faster. The refined mana... contains a massive amount of life force. It forces the body to evolve to survive the environment."
He couldn't just call it "refined mana" anymore. That was too generic for a substance that could rewrite biology in seconds. It deserved a name that reflected its property of being the absolute, purest form of energy—the substance of the stars.
"Quintessence," Lencar decided. "The fifth element. The stuff that binds the soul to the body."
He felt a surge of confidence that bordered on arrogance. He wasn't just a boy with a stolen sword anymore. He was a self-updating organism. He was becoming the ultimate survivor.
"Quintessence," he repeated, liking the way the word rolled off his tongue. "With this, I can survive in environments that could kill a Captain. I can walk through fire. I can breathe water." He paused somewhat embarrassed at getting too excited"Cough... Oh well, maybe not breathe water. Yet."
He deactivated the barrier completely. He stood in the toxic fog, breathing it in deeply, letting it fuel him. He felt invincible.
Click-clack.
The sound was sharp, dry, and unmistakably organic. It echoed through the mist, shattering his moment of triumph.
Lencar turned slowly.
Emerging from the fog were three shapes. Massive. Armored. Nightmares given form.
Venom-Tail Giant Scorpions.