24 - Pain

I didn't have to sleep every night, I could sleep every 2nd night, so my schedule was returning to the nearest town every 2 days.

The entire rest of the time was spent searching the forbidden region of the desert.

I said previously I didn't want to have to run around for an entire day to get here, but now I was doing just that as I looked for sphinxes to massacre.

In the past month, I had only found 54.

There were a few a day at first, but then that number started falling, and now I'd be lucky to find just 1 every 2 days.

The technique manual recommended getting at least 100 mana crystals.

Making up my mind to replace these with another species' mana crystals for the remainder, I researched about other species that were as strong and had mana crystals as large.

A month later, I was in a forest sitting atop a giant tree that looked like it had been felled, except it was somewhat odd looking. That's because it wasn't really just a tree.

It was called a forest giant, and I was not just resting on top of it for no reason.

In front of me was a beautiful woman with flowing green hair, green eyes, and green clothes that left little to the imagination.

It was a dryad, a void magic stage existence.

Of course, not all dryads were at the void magic stage, it just so happened that this one was.

She called herself the protector of this forest, and currently, she was asking me what I was doing killing her kin.

"I'm collecting mana crystals. I need 40 more of them to prepare for the void magic stage."

Hearing this, the dryad didn't look as angry as I thought she would. I expected her to get furious that I had slain a forest giant for such a reason, but instead, she looked relieved.

"If that's all there is to it, you can stop murdering my clan now. Come with me."

She started walking, looking considerably more relaxed than when she first got here.

Meanwhile, I was very nervous.

I didn't understand, and not understanding meant danger.

'Why is she so relaxed now?'

A while later, she showed me to where I presume she usually lived, which was a little lair in a hillside inside the forest.

Inside, it was paved with pristine stone walls and oddly humaine rooms.

There were even couches in an area that seemed like a "lounge".

The facility went underground, but I wasn't allowed to see what was below.

I also couldn't see what it was with the compass map's wall hacks, since it was too far underground.

Looks like void magic stages were more prudent than anyone I had seen until now. Lethaps that same cautious nature was why she hadnt killed me yet.

Coming up, she handed me a ring.

"What's this?"

"An interspatial ring. It has a pocket dimension inside."

Hooooh. As expected of someone at the void magic stage, they had treasures I had never heard about.

"But, isn't this quite rare? Why are you being so kind to me?"

"Isn't it better to make a friend? I might call them my kin, but it's not like I was that close to that particular forest giant anyways. Better to have someone who'll enter the void magic stage in the future owe me a favor. Plus, this isn't anything that valuable. It's very common in other realms."

Right, at the void magic stage, you could traverse realms. I suppose there would be a lot of unique treasures across all the realms for me to collect.

I looked forward to it.

"To use it, just drip a drop of blood onto it."

I did as she said, and suddenly, I felt a connection to the space inside the ring, very similar or perhaps the exact same to what I felt with the treasury.

'Does this mean the treasury is the same kind of artifact as this ring? So if I learn how these interspatial rings work, could I get a clue as to the origins of the treasury?'

The origins of the treaury were very mysterious. So far, I still knew nothing about it.

Making a mental note to learn about spatial rings once I got to the void magic stage, I peered inside the space in the ring by willing it.

Inside, I saw 50 large mana crystals each the size of the one from the forest giant.

Seeing this, I widened my eyes.

Well, I guess it wasn't that surprising, the dryad could gather these like candy, I was sure, but I just hadn't expected such a big favor.

Geting up, I bowed deeply and expressed my heartfelt thanks.

"I won't forget this favor."

"Oh ho, well would you look at that. Not bad. You know, I've met some pretty rude people i my life. It's good you're not one of them. Alright, now skedaddle. Get out, go. Byeee~."

As she shooed me off and started walking away, I realized I didn't get her name, so I hurriedly asked,

"Umm, wait a moment. What was your name?"

"Hmm? Oh yes. I suppose that is important. It's Sylvia Truewell. Not scram."

***

Sylvia didn't care about the name of someone like me. As far as she was concerned, I was just a passerby, a minor investment.

After all, plenty of people ended up almost making it to the void magic stage but not quite. She couldn't be bothered to make any actual effort to expressly remember me.

If I made it to her level and visited her again, then I would have the right to tell her my name.

With this, I had enough. Actually, Sylvia had put in 10 more than I needed, so it was more than enough.

It was time.

Time to torture myself that is.

Heading back at max speed to a nearby town, I calmed myself down before beginning ths process.

As always, Ixtra stood guard.

He night be much weaker than me at this point, but he was still good enough to stand guard.

I took the first large mana crystal and used a certain magic to compress it to the size of my body.

I'd have to literally eat all of this in one day, every day for 100 days.

Taking the first large bite, I crunched it into pieces until it became mashed and swallowed.

A couple seconds passed without anything happening, but then suddenly I felt a growing burning sensation in my stomach, and in the next second it grew from barely noticeable to more than I could handle.

I screamed and felt my muscles spasm out of control as I almost passed out.

Thankfully, Ixtra managed to cast a pain reduction spell on me in time before I did.

There was also a powerful array around us to stop sound from exiting, so there wouldn't be a commotion.

I had rented a large warehouse at the outskirts of the town to do this in.

With the pain reduction, I could just barely stay conscious, but my teeth were gritted and I was sweating all over. The chaotic mana was rampaging inside my body, and my blood was refusing to take it in, constantly rupturing and healing.

Thanfully, [Lesser Blood Burst Resistance] was helping make it just slightly better. Normally, all my blood would burst the moment it came into contact with the chaotic mana and tried to absorb it, but now only some of it was. Most of it was only bursting after some time, and a small amount of it was even absorbing some of the chaotic mana.

This continued for an hour, and took another hour to fully settle down.

That was one bite.

The whole thing was the size of my body, over 1.5 meters long.

It'd take maybe over a thousand bites like that to "eat" it all.

That wouldn't just take days, or even weeks, but several months.

100 crystals would take not years, but decades.

Thankfully, I'd get better at the absorption process, so it shouldn't take that long.

The manual described this. At first, it'd take hours to absorb a little bit of chaotic mana, but over time it'd become as easy as breathing.

Taking a deep breath and steeling myself, I took another bite.

Once again, the same searing pain. I was expecting it this time, but that didn't help much.

When night fell, we were still going, and when the sun rose, I was in despair.

This was hell. Literally, even Ixtra said he had never gone through anything this bad.

And he never talked about it, but Ixtra had been through some shit.

I seriously contemplated giving up, but just barely convinced myself to keep going.

Taking bite after bite, the days passed, and along the way so did my fervor. It grew into an obsession, either I ate this damn crystal all the way through or I died trying.

Thinking that, there came a point where I could just barely move through the pain, and I, extremely foolishly, took another bite out of the crystal.

'If I eat two bites at once, it'll half the time.'

Of course, I didn't consider the recovery time doubling too, which was why it was foolish.

Suddenly, another wave of searing pain, somehow much worse than the first, assaulted me from across my body, and I passed out.

Thankfully, skills were techniques ingrained into the body, so as long as I didn't deactivate them before sleeping, and they weren't techniques that deactivated as part of the technique, I didn't need to stay conscious to keep them on.

So I stayed unconscious as my body worked to barely heal the growing damage.

That's right, growing damage. My condition was slowly getting worse and worse, as my body could not heal in time.

Seeing this, Ixtra began to panic. He'd incur a severe penalty if his contractual master truely died during the contract period.

Thinking rapidly, he used demonic energy to forcefully invade my body, suppressing the chaotic mana while ensuring the demonic energy didn't get absorbed into my body and cause harm.

As he did so, he was unable to control his demonic energy from simultaneously not being absorbed by my blood, not harming my aura, and suppressing the chaotic mana while not combining with it.

So, he slipped up in a few places and the demonic energy combined with the chaotic mana, resulting in even more chaotic raw red mana.

Red mana was more chaotic than blue mana, and raw red mana was thus even more chaotic than raw blue mana, which was already close to killing me.

Seeing this, Ixtra hastily stopped what he was doing, but it was too late.

The wisps of red mana tore apart my body even more alongside the cascade of chaotic blue mana, and I was on my last breath.

Suddenly, Ixtra stopped casting pain reduction and replaced it with healing spells. My skill, [Advanced Healing Factor], was better than the strongest healing magic he could cast, 6th circle magic, so we had decided it was better to focus on pain reduction, but now that was thrown out the window.

Any small bit of extra healing was an absolute necessity right now.

With that, my condition slightly improved for a moment, before getting worse again.

Suddenly, I woke up.

The searing pain all across my body, the wisps of chaotic raw red mana wreaking havoc, the blood bursting, the death that was close at hand.

I felt it all, wide awake.

However, all of a sudden, the pain disappeared. The moment I woke up, I registered the unimaginable pain for precisely one moment of consciousness, and then it just disappeared.

My body was still being destroyed and hastily rebuilding itself before further destruction was wrought, but I no longer felt it.

My brain's pain sensors had short circuited.