Asceticism Journey (1) — Plans

A/N: Hey guys, sorry about not uploading for over a week. Due to some health complications, I wasn't able to write but I'm better now.

So, I'm back.

I know what I said about the time skip, but I decided to change it and make a mini-arc instead. A small chapter that adds to a greater conspiracy.

Happy reading :D

"Pft hahaha."

I laughed as I burst through a hedge, leaves stuck in my hair and on my clothes.

"Oh man, that's funny."

In truth, I hadn't actually disappeared so quickly. I jumped and hid in a tree when I felt no one was looking.

The cackling was a particular type of plant I found in one of my adventures into the forest. Called a "repeolia," you could record sounds into it, and it would repeat it when mana was injected into it.

In any case, I kept snickering as I recalled the princess's scarlet face as she roared after me.

Was it mean?

Yes.

Did I enjoy it way more than I should have?

Absolutely.

I managed to stoop wheezing after I burst out laughing a few more times. It really was just too funny.

"Whoo!"

Exhaling, I stood up, but even that action made me remember the princess's heavy huffing while she was barely held back and caused me to burst out laughing again.

"Kekek, dammit! Stop laughing!"

My stomach was cramping, and I was in pain, but I kept laughing.

"Why am I laughing!?? It's not that funny!"

I squeezed my stomach and curled up as I continued to laugh.

I kept laughing, but I began getting suspicious. It was hard to think through the pain of my stomach, but there was no reason for me to laugh this much.

Eventually, the pain from laughing grew too much, and I fell to the ground.

After constantly laughing for more than 5 minutes, my stomach and core felt like it was on fire, but my body refused to stop laughing.

I thought it was because I hadn't laughed so earnestly and freely like this in a while, but I should be able to at least limit the laughing to snickers.

Clutching my torso, I looked around and finally found it.

Clown Monkey.

"Kyahahahah, that's scary!"

With a terrifying face that was seemingly messily painted with various bright colors, it looked like a downright terrifying clown. But the real issue was that the monkey could make people laugh until they died.

However, they were only D-ranked mana beasts despite their seemingly overpowered nature.

This was because most of the time, they could be fought if there were a group of people as each monkey could only target one victim at a time and only use so much strength, but as I was alone and...

One, two, three...

There were four of these walking nightmares, and I felt like I was about to die, for real. My body felt like it was on fire.

"Oooohahaha! Food!"

"Yes! Kik!"

The talking monkeys began approaching me.

I sighed internally.

I just started this journey thing, and I'm already in a crisis.

Finally able to think through the ever-growing pain in the pit of my stomach, I did my best to move, but I honestly couldn't even voluntarily twitch a muscle right now.

"Oh no, pfttt, I'm gonna die ahahaha!"

I kept laughing, so the situation seemed a lot less dire than it actually was. But my journey in life was seriously about to end at any moment.

"Kiiik!"

I rolled to the left, and the ground where I was exploded with dirt as the monkey's tail powerfully slammed against it.

Still bubbling with laughter, I did my best to stand up, ignoring the serious cramp in my stomach.

"Pft, summon! Kyahahaha!"

Obeying my will, pure, white mana appeared, taking the form of a spear. It was extremely simple, but it was the most I could do with my skill level.

"Kikiki!!"

"Oookha! What!?"

The monkeys immediately hopped away, seeing the glowing white mass.

"Ahahaha! Die! Die! Die you pieces of— Kyahahaha!"

I threw the spear, and it cleanly impaled the monkey in the hear—

"Ahahahahat!"

...I promise it's the Clown Monkeys.

"Die! Kyahahaha!"

I bent my back backward as I put a hand over an eye, cackling whilst throwing another spear into the head of a monkey.

"Huhahahahaha..."

The remaining Clown Monkeys, seemingly intimidated by my male dominance(?), slowly retreated into the bushes.

"Hey, hey, hey! Where y'all going!?"

My laughing became far more menacing as I summoned another spear, my eyes glowing as I cackled ominously.

The monkey's faces seemed to pale with fear as I laughed and laughed, walking closer and closer towards them.

"KYAAAAAAAAAAAAK!!"

"AHAHAHAHAHAAA!!"

On that day, the screams of talking monkeys and the sadis- malicious laughing of a child could be heard throughout the forest.

**

[4 days later]

"Agh, dammit."

I cursed as I chomped on a piece of meat.

"It's only the first few days, and I already almost died."

It had been a few days since then and I had succeeded on a hunt and was enjoying the fruits of my victory.

Biting down on a juicy thigh, I nibbled on the thick meat as I reflected on what I would be doing for the following year.

Surviving was easy. So long as I hunted something on the size of a boru*, I could ration it out for around 20-30 meals, 40 if I pushed myself. And doing some quick math, eating 2-3 rations a day could last me roughly 10 days.

Plus, nothing in the regions of the Elshire Forest that I was going to be spending my year in could even try to harm me, so safety was not a concern either.

In other words, my primary focus was and could only be training.

I stared at the succulent, glistening thigh, its lush sheen producing a shimmering reflection of the crackling fire.

Overcome with hunger, I began to seriously eat it.

Finally finishing off the meaty, luscious thigh, I stretched and relaxed.

"..."

—Crackle, snap!

Getting comfortable in the warmth of the fire, I closed my eyes, my lips curving ever so slightly.

It was a practice I had adopted in my past life.

Meditation.

It wasn't meditation in the sense that I was spending time gathering mana but actual meditation.

Meditation focused on training attention and awareness to achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm or stable state of mind.

It was the training I did to enter "the zone," as it was often dubbed. Before fights, you might've noticed that my eyes would "clear."

That was me entering the zone or Form Zero, as I liked to call it. The fundamental essence of the ability was removing all distractions and focusing entirely on the battle in front of me. Unlike those with talents, I needed to train this skill extensively, and meditation was the path I took.

And, after years and years of diligent practice, I managed to be able to summon Form Zero at will.

It wasn't a flashy skill like Flash Thunder or Flash Rend, but it was a skill that supported my battles like an unseen hand. Using Form Zero heightened my senses and reaction speeds to the point where my reaction time was about 0.1 seconds, far beyond a regular human's and even a trained fighter's.

I wasn't sure how fast I could get it with magic, but that was the limit I could do with just my raw physical ability if memory served right.

After spending a good enough time like this, enjoying the comfort of the fire and the tranquil peace, I opened my eyes.

In a good mood, I decided to start thinking about training again.

I summoned some pure mana and gazed at it.

The white stuff was a side effect of my ridiculous absorption speed that devoured all elements of mana in the atmosphere without restraint.

I was essentially a melting pot of all the elements I took in. The atmospheric raw mana I absorbed was mushed and mashed together during the processing making it virtually impossible to summon a singular element.

"Then again, if I was somewhere where only a single element existed, then I might be able to use that element."

...But where would a place like that exist?

Right, different types of mana existed everywhere. Even at the bottom of the sea, where one would expect just water mana, earth mana would also be present and perhaps even fire mana if one were near a submarine volcano.

So, that meant I had to learn how to use pure mana.

The basic technique I was using involved creating weapons out of pure mana. It was simple and, though it could be powerful, as of now, it was arguably weak as an ability. Sure, it was capable of blasting away the Clown Monkeys, but by weakness, I meant it in an objective context.

Virion could easily wipe away 100 of those things and hardly break a sweat.

Meanwhile, I had almost died with just 4 of them. Though I was inhibited from augmenting due to the Clown Monkey's ability, I should be far stronger in conjuring. I was a conjurer, after all.

So, the focus of this training would be to cover for my low conjuring power... or a better word would be technique.

As I mentioned before, the primary issue was that I couldn't hold enough mana inside me without closing my acupoints past the event horizon to create any objectively powerful spells. So, the basic solution of putting more mana into the spell wouldn't work.

The easiest answer would be continuously fine-tuning my mana control to be able to create larger effects with the same amount of mana. Basically, calculating even the most minuscule movements of mana and perfectly commanding it to make the maximum power I could.

But that would draw a line on my full potential.

Though I would be able to create results, I would eventually reach the ceiling of what I could manipulate with my limited mana pool.

That didn't mean all hope was lost, of course. I just needed to come up with another solution.

That was where the hint came in.

In my fight with Claire, I managed to summon yellowish golden flames, if you can recall.

I conjured fire due to the overabundance of that attribute's mana in the atmosphere, which completely dominated any other elements, but that's beside the point. What I'm trying to point out is the color of the fire.

Why was it gold? Why wasn't it just the normal fiery red?

This wasn't the only occurrence of this phenomenon, and it wasn't the first time I asked this either.

I had this question since I first used magic when I was around 2 years old.

Why was it gold then but white now?

It made no sense.

At least, until my duel.

There I managed to figure something out.

The simple answer was compression.

The long answer was increasing the mana's density by compressing a hypothetically infinite amount of mana to its absolute limit.

Doing this would mean my limited mana "pool" could hold the same amount of mana as a mana "sea" without even needing to expand in size. Using this Reinforced Mana could increase the scale of a simple spell, magnifying the power of a lowest-grade spell like Spark into something on the level of Grand Conflagration.

Of course, this was going to be difficult.

The times I managed to do it before required my acupoints to close awfully near the event horizon, which was a no-no.

So, I needed to be able to do this differently.

It sounded like a significant issue, but I already had the answer.

That was another part of the hint I had gained.

I had only ever gone beyond or extremely close to the event horizon twice. The first time was when I had first used magic as my acupoints hadn't ever been ruptured at that point.

The second was in my battle with Claire. Then, I had purposefully closed my acupoints to keep up.

I was too inexperienced to understand what was going on the first time. However, the second time, I was trained enough to be fully aware of everything going on.

During my processing of raw mana, the sheer force of absorption and clashing of the waves of mana within my core caused it to compress.

Right, so I needed to compress it before I even used it instead of compressing the pure mana I already summoned.

This was the concept of "Reinforced Mana," as I've dubbed it.

"Easier said than done though..."

I blandly chuckled.

Still, it was the way to go if I ever wanted to cast greater spells.

But before I started any training...

"Spear!"

My hair fluttered as a white spear that I had been summoning flew back, striking what I suspected to be a mana beast.

—Kyaak!

A high-pitched cry of a mana beast echoed.

"..."

It seemed whatever was following me didn't notice me shaping the mana I had summoned to create the spear.

Standing up, I waded through the grass and found a bird-like thing.

Upon focusing my eyes, I figured out what it was.

A coal pterodactyl.

I furrowed my brows immediately.

"...Here?"

Coal pterodactyls were a species of nocturnal mana beasts that presided in the windy mountainous region of Darv, their coal-black color assisting them with camouflage during their nightly hunts. They were relatively small for mana beasts in the area, but their hefty wings and powerful muscles allowed them to fly.

"...But that's only in places where there are enough winds to carry them."

This adaptation was the result of evolution for the sole sake of surviving in the harsh climate down south. They were incapable of flying anywhere else due to their weight.

So, there shouldn't be any conceivable way that one of these things could fly all the way from the south up to the northern forest.

"So, how did it get into the forest...?"

And it was stealthy too. Extremely so. If it weren't for the extremely minute shift in the flow of mana, I would never have noticed.

In fact, if it were just a few centimeters farther away, it wouldn't have even been picked up.

But this also didn't make any sense.

According to everything that Sophus had been stuffing into my brain, mana beasts in the region of Darv had very little need for stealth due to the almost constant winds that were a blight in the area.

The sound of the raging winds masked any sounds, making any evolution in that direction unnecessary.

"Then again, it could always be a mutant... though it's quite unlikely..."

A mutant that gave the mana beast stealth abilities and flying capabilities outside of the harsh winds just didn't add up. None of it was helpful, and being so light would've probably have killed the thing before it could make it out of Darv's territory.

I looked around, taking everything in before closing my eyes, increasing my sensitivity to mana, sound, smell, and everything else to the absolute maximum.

"Nothing..."

Eventually, I muttered solemnly.

That was natural, though.

This was the southernmost part of the Elshire Forest, where weak monsters like the Clown Monkeys would've reigned as apex predators. Now that a new apex came, me, most living creatures would stray away from me.

...Which only increased the suspiciousness of this mana beast as these coal pterodactyls were only D or even E ranked.

"Perhaps an illegal trade and this thing escaped?"

It was possible.

Older soldiers, guards, and knights told me stories about how they had caught humans conducting illegal trade in the forest, away from the eyes of their home kingdom.

"But..."

But there was a certain feeling I had in my gut.

That this was something more.

Something different.

Confirming that nothing else was around, I cautiously reached for the black corpse.

I picked up the body but almost dropped it immediately after.

My face distorted as I sputtered out words.

"This is...!"

A/N: So that's the first chapter of this arc. Do comment thoughts, feelings, complaints, etc. I use it all in thinking about writing.

*Boru –Basically a boar but I wanted to make it special.