RVC

Gerald's body shook from deep, guttural laughter as his body was getting filled with Mana like a torrent. In mere moments his reserves were topped off and it still didn't stop.

"Elemental Avatar!" He shouted, and his body was immediately imbued with immense strength, speed, agility, and defense! And yet, despite the great thirst for energy coming from the spell, his Mana reserves remained full. 100%! Not dropping one bit!

"Oh, yes… That's exactly what I need!" he roared. He looked at the remaining two Void Cuffs on the ground as a toothy grin, worthy of a devil, formed in the shadows.

***

"Stop! Don't do that! It's too much, you are going to blow! Take it off, quickly!"

Murik Woods remembered how panicked he had been after seeing Gerald put that cursed object back on his hand, only this time it worked in reverse. The Void Cuffs, originally made to completely drain a person, were now filling him with Mana at an unsustainable rate.

Getting constantly filled with Mana? Wasn't that supposed to be a good thing? The answer was no! Just as Mana could be helpful and heal a person, it could also do the exact opposite. Getting your body filled with energy with no way for a release would just lead to an unpleasant death.

Of course, people came up with the idea to use Void Stone to make jewels and gear to keep them energized, however, sooner or later, there would be something that prevented Mana from leaving the body, maybe they would fall asleep, perhaps just unconscious from a powerful blow to the head, and there would be a corpse to clean up minutes or hours later, depending on the potency of the items.

The material was also extremely expensive and hard to make, so only the truly rich could afford to make weapons from Void Stone. A staff that is filling you with Mana for as long as you hold it, for example, was something that many nobles liked to play around with.

But even that was rare. Maybe 100 of those were made in the whole of the Empire. Most of Void Stone was used on the front lines, defending against Demons and their beasts. The rest found its way here, in the Howling Abyss in the form of Void Cuffs.

"Why would I blow up?" Gerald questioned his words.

"B-b-because it's too much! It's too much Mana for a person! In just a few minutes you will burst into flames, or even explode! Aren't you feeling bloated already?!"

Gerald patted his chest and then looked at him, "Nope, I feel great, actually. Like I'm filled with inexhaustible power!"

"Really? Oh..." Murik Woods fell silent. He couldn't understand how could someone say he was feeling comfortable when being filled with so much Mana. Common sense dictated that he should already be experiencing great discomfort, and son he should start burning from the inside.

Weirdly enough, it didn't seem that was so in this case. Could all the warnings from his superiors be just baseless lies? Perhaps he should try...

'No, no….' He shook his head to get the dangerous thoughts out of his head. He was just going to patiently wait for something to happen and go from there.

***

Nothing happened. Woods stared at Gerald, half expecting the man to suddenly explode. But he didn't. He just continued his work, going on to convert the other Void Cuffs as well. The work was painfully slow, but the end product was more than worth it. Though, he was pretty sure that if one blue bracelet wasn't enough, three were, without a doubt, too much.

He was right, of course. Gerald felt great with just one as he could keep the Elemental Avatar active at all times. However, going more than that was overkill. Unless he was in the middle of a fight and was burning through hundreds of MP every minute. Then having a few more would be useful.

"At what Realm are you at?" Murik Woods suddenly asked.

"What?" The question completely caught him off guard.

"What Realm of Cultivation have you reached to be able to handle so much power going through your body at once?" Woods repeated his question.

"Cultivation? So you also know about that…" Gerald noted it down in his mind.

"Every soldier does. It was part of our mandatory training."

"Really? Huh, I guess there are different customs between the nations. I assume there are many Cultivators in the Empire then?"

"Well, probably…" Murik said. "Only soldiers of the Empire get to learn it though. Common folk is aware of its existence, but they don't know it like we do. The most a few of them know are some basics," he pointed out. Being a Cultivator required a lot of time and dedication, something most people sorely lacked. Just knowing how to do something didn't mean you could actually do it. There were way too many roadblocks, especially if you were poor.

"So, what's your rank?" Gerald questioned further while still not giving an answer himself.

"2nd Stage of Spirit Accumulation. They said I had a bit of talent for it, apparently. I don't know though… Some of the Mages I've seen seemed impossibly strong. I doubt it gets easier the further down the road you go, so they must have had some godly abilities. I'm pretty sure a few of them stepped into the Nascent Soul Realm in their later years and-"

"How long?" Gerald disrupted his rambling with another question.

"How long, what?"

"Time. How long did it take you to reach this… stage?"

"Oh, it was about five years? I think… Might have been close to six, actually. I haven't been able to Cultivate in months for… obvious reasons." He shook his shackles to make a point.

"Five years?" Gerald exhaled deeply. It was about the same information he already knew. "That's too long… Isn't there a way to shorten it?"

"I don't know… Perhaps if you have better talent? But even then there is a limit to how fast you can grow… I think…"

"You think a whole lot…" Gerald pointed out.

Murik Woods shrugged his shoulders, "Look, I'm not sure, okay? I'm just going by experience. There was that one time when we had a day off and I took the opportunity to Cultivate, you see? But then, after three cycles, I couldn't do it anymore."

"What do you mean by that?"

"It's what I said, I couldn't do it. It started to hurt so bad I had to stop. But then again, it was already night by then as I have spent most of the day Cultivating, so I went to sleep. The next day everything was fine again, and I've never had the opportunity to do it again, so…" He shrugged again.

Gerald remained silent. It was a great thing that he could talk with someone that had experience in this area, but just this bunch of speculation and maybe's didn't do him much good. He made sure to commit it all to memory though. Just in case.

"But enough about me, you still didn't tell me your rank. What Realm are you at? Did you already reach the Nascent Soul perhaps?" Woods curiously probed.

"No, I haven't begun my Cultivation yet," Gerald admitted frankly. It didn't matter if they knew anyway. Zeph just sat on the ground and watched while the two were having a conversation. He seemed to be interested in the topic, though it didn't look like he wanted to speak about it. Which was fine too. Gerald also liked to just listen sometimes.

"What?! You didn't?! Murik nearly jumped at him in surprise. If it weren't for the chains keeping him in place, he would probably grab him by the shoulders and shook him while shouting something along the lines of, "How can you say you haven't Cultivated yet?! How can you do all that then?! Explain yourself!"

But instead, the chains yanked him back and he lost his footing, which resulted in him crashing to the ground.

"Ow… that hurt." Murik rubbed his aching lower back and looked up at Gerald, this time in a much calmer manner, "Seriously man, you didn't Cultivate?"

The one in question simply shook his head. "I found out about it just a few weeks ago and didn't have the time to do it yet. By the way, can you use Magic Eyes?"

"The what?"

"Can you see Mana?" Gerald rephrased his question.

"Oh, yeah, sure! That's the first thing we had to learn. It was a really long, itchy, and overall annoying experience." His body shuddered as the unpleasant memory resurfaced and he got goosebumps. Or maybe that was just because of the cold draft in the prison cell. Hard to tell.

"Can't see it now, though. Need Mana to see Mana, hehe..."

"No problem!" Gerald took his iron key and unlocked the Void Cuff on the guy's hand. It seemed all Void Cuffs had the same lock for some reason. A fatal flaw in his opinion, but hey, he didn't complain. He then unlocked his chains as well, because why not.

"Alright, alright, thank you! Freedom at last!" Murik grinned. "Let me see now…" he rubbed his eyes and then looked at Gerald with the special vision active. His expression remained frozen as his eyes blinked rapidly a few times.

"W-What the fuck! Holly shit! Holly shit! Holly shit, man!" Murik Woods jumped in place as he looked at the burning sun in front of him.

"… Wow! I don't know what to say!" He was almost rendered speechless. Well, except for the few words he kept repeating over and over.

"You could stop screaming for one," Gerald suggested.

"Right! Right! Sorry!" the guy nervously laughed. "… But man! It's just… so much! Wow!" For some inexplicable reason, he felt like he should be doing a little happy dance. Though it was unbecoming for someone of his age to be doing that, so he just kept nervously shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

He had never in his life seen such an intense concentration in Mana in a single person. Some monsters had more, of course, but seeing a human like that was… emotional, to say the least.

"Is it that obvious?" Gerald wondered.

"Are you kidding? I couldn't ignore you even if I wanted to! It's so bright and beautiful that I can't look away!"

"I see," Gerald nodded. He then turned his attention to the inside of his body and willed his magic powers to subside. It was not easy. With Elemental Avatar, the massive amounts of Mana were constantly leaving his body, getting replaced by the siphoning effect of the RVC. The Reverse Void Cuffs. Not to be confused with many other meanings the abbreviation had.

In any case, as he released the Elemental Avatar, his Mana stores started filling up rapidly, threatening to do untold damage if not put under control. Luckily it seemed that keeping Mana out of the body was drastically easier than dragging it in. He just had to will it, and his body would be cut off from the rest of the world, at least in the magic sense.

That made it so much easier to mimic the natural fluctuation in the surrounding Mana, and as such, his Aura started rapidly diminishing, like a bonfire being snuffed out.

"Close your eyes and see if you can still detect me," Gerald urged.

"Okay!" Murik quickly closed his eyes, turned with his back facing Gerald, and concentrated. "I can still see you, though not as clearly as before… Still there… Now it's getting difficult… Barely there…"

Then he started straining his mind, poking and prodding, but couldn't find a trace anymore.

"Wow, you are good! It's almost like you…" He opened his eyes and turned around. "… disappeared. What the heck?!" He looked left and right, up and down, but Gerald was nowhere to be found.

"Where did he go?!" He turned questioningly to Zeph who was observing the two the entire time.

"He turned invisible," the man admitted in a monotone voice.

"Invisible?" Murik started flailing around with his hands like a blind man, trying to find the missing person. But, no matter how he searched, it appeared like Gerald truly vanished.

"Is he a ghost? Where did he go?" Woods scratched his head. He searched left and right, high and low, but didn't feel a thing.

"Over here," he heard a voice behind him at the same time as someone tapped his shoulder.

"Aha! Gotcha!" Murik jumped, arms wide open, to where he heard the voice from and expected Gerald to be, only to get nothing.

"Huh?"

"Haha, wrong… Up here," he heard the voice again.

"Huh?!" Woods rotated his head towards the ceiling just in time to see Gerald reappear while seemingly relaxing on the ceiling, hands behind his head and all.

"You can fly?!"

"Haha, what? Did you think I was joking when I said we'll blow this dump sky high? I was dead serious."

"Holly… shit!"

"I'm starting to like this new guy, he is crazy," Zeph quietly said and stood up, visibly excited. "What are we waiting for then? We have nothing to lose, right? Mister Gerald? You got a plan?"

"Oh, my friend," Gerald answered and jumped back down with his signature crazy grin. "You have no idea..."