Magus Reborn [Stubbing in Three Weeks]

If Kai had felt even a trace of happiness after killing Dravros, it vanished the moment Malefic reached out.

It felt like fate itself had reached down just to warn him that the end was much closer than he had thought, and that he was nowhere near ready for it. If he truly wanted to stop Malefic and keep the prophecy from becoming real, then he needed to grow stronger, and not just by himself. The people around him had to grow stronger too.

But before any of that, Kai needed to understand one thing.

How did Malefic manage to reach into my mind at all?

It couldn’t be just because he was powerful. He knew that much.

He spent the next few minutes thinking through every possibility and came up with one clear answer.

Malefic had used the dead mana that had seeped into his legs as a path to reach him. The dead mana Dravros released had clearly been a blessing from the dragon itself, but Kai hadn’t expected the connection through it to be that strong.

Fortunately, Malefic could not do much more through that link than show him visions and speak to him for a minute or two. If it had been able to do more, then things could have gone far worse.

So the moment Kai properly got his senses back, he immediately told Amyra to clean every trace of it off him.

As it turned out, she had already been doing that while he slept, but she had stopped the moment he began screaming.

For a brief second, another thought crossed his mind. If there had been more dead mana inside him, would Malefic have been able to keep those visions going for longer?

There was definitely a chance that had been its goal.

Not to kill him outright, but to break his will to fight. Or worse, to make him mentally unstable enough that he would end his own life.

Though that drew a silent shudder out of him, he knew better—his mind wasn’t so easy to break. If it was someone else, the consequences might’ve been different.

As Amyra slowly purified him, drawing the dead mana out of his body bit by bit into herself, he listened to the two Enforcers who had refused to leave his side. From them, he learned that he had been asleep for more than a day. In that time, Maari and the other tribal had already gone back to the rest of their people, and according to Neris, the tribes were likely preparing to move toward the sandstorms to rescue whoever might still be alive there.

For a moment, that made him think of the blood drinkers that could still be left in the desert.

But Kael told him they had seen a large number of them flying away from the area. Kai could only guess at the reason.

Maybe with Dravros dead and no leader left among them, they had simply lost their nerve and fled. Or maybe someone else had called them back. Either way, the desert was better off without them.

That was one problem less for him to handle.

And if the tribals were going into the storm to search for their own, then Kai could turn his mind to the things he had been forced to set aside. One of them was the poison still lingering in his right arm. He needed to fix that and get the arm fully usable again before the next major battle. He had been putting it off because hunting the drinkers had mattered more, but now he finally had the time.

Still, that was not the only thing weighing on him.

Part of his mind kept going back to the corruption zones. If Maleficia really had prepared traps there, then Kai needed to know before more people walked into them. And on top of that, there was another problem pressing at him from the back of his thoughts.

He needed to find a way to grow much stronger, and fast. Taken together, it felt like enough trouble for months.

But Kai didn’t even have weeks.

A few days at best.

And even that felt uncertain with the way new problems kept appearing from nowhere.

He was moving against a timer he couldn’t even see, and if he truly wanted to save the world instead of just struggling against its end for a little longer, then he needed to do better.

So, while Amyra kept drawing more and more dead mana out from around his legs, Kai told Kael and Neris to go check on the tribals and stop worrying about him. Only after they left did he close his eyes.

His mind was a whirlwind. He tried to control his breathing, steadied it, but it took longer than he wanted to truly settle himself.

And after a while he found himself once more inside his master’s room within his soul. He looked around. Everything was the same as before.

It was all… quiet.

He walked over, pulled out a few books along with some half-scribbled parchments he had worked on earlier, and sat down at the desk. Then he started writing down everything he could do to grow stronger in a short amount of time.

Reaching the seventh circle was the most obvious answer. So was clearing the poison from his ring arm so he could finally fight with everything available to him.

But the first would mean pushing himself into huge stress and risk only days after breaking into the fifth and sixth circles, and even the poison problem still needed him to go through Valkyrie’s library properly to understand what he was dealing with.

He needed something faster. Something he could make use of in a week.

In the end, the only answer his mind kept returning to was spells.

Now that he was in the sixth circle, his mana pool was much larger than it should have been for someone at his level, all because of the way he had built it from the very beginning. And with that much mana behind him, there were a lot of spells from his past life that Kai could finally consider using again.

But they might just not be enough either. Hence, he needed to develop some spells of his own.

If he wanted a true edge in the battles coming for him, then he needed to finally make some of the ideas he had once thought real, and the first spell he wanted to focus on was one that could solve his problem with the right arm in an entirely different way. It was a spell he had wanted to complete for a long time, one that would create multiple arms of mana around him and let him cast more spells at once.

A spell like that would raise his strength by a huge amount. The problem was that the whole thing had always been a mess.

Back in the past, Kai had spent too much time thinking about how powerful it would look and how useful it would be, and not enough time thinking about how it could actually exist in the real world.

Even his master had pointed that out to him more than once. The cost of maintaining multiple arms made of mana alone would already be heavy, but if Kai truly wanted to cast through them, then each arm would also need something like artificial veins running through it. Otherwise, they would not be able to build spell structures properly.

At best, they would be useful for grabbing or striking an enemy at close range.

And for a spell like this, that was not enough.

So as Kai pulled the parchments closer and began sketching out fresh designs, he forced himself to take a different approach than his younger self ever had. Instead of trying to make the whole spell perfect in one attempt and wasting months on it, he broke the problem apart.

Step by step.

First, he focused on a single pair of artificial arms. It didn’t need veins yet, nor the need to cast.

It only needed to exist properly, stay stable, and move the way he wanted it to. If he could manage that much, then he would have a working frame. And once that frame existed, he could start building everything else on top of it.

And honestly, that part was not difficult.

Making a shape out of mana was nothing special. Even Amyra could do that much. But making the shape of an arm and making something that truly functioned like an arm were two completely different things. For that, Kai needed more than form. He had to connect the arm to his Mana brain so he could control it properly and keep it attached to his body without the whole thing collapsing apart.

The more he thought about it, the more problems kept appearing.

If he poured enough into the arm, it would obviously work better, but he still needed a way to keep it going on its own. Otherwise, it would just break down, and Kai didn’t want this to become a spell that kept draining mana from him every second. Even with his large reserves, something like that would still be ridiculous. If he went with his original idea of four artificial arms around his back, then nearly thirty percent of his reserves would be tied up just in maintaining them.

That was not practical.

So the arms either needed their own stored reserves, or they had to draw mana from the atmosphere around them. But the second option created another weakness.

If one of the arms got shattered in battle, rebuilding it would become too slow if it had to start drawing mana from the outside all over again.

One question kept leading into another and he wrote all of them down.

Some of them he could answer. Others he had no real answer for yet, but he was sure something would come if he kept pushing at it. So he did. He kept writing, sketching, changing, and crossing things out for what felt like at least two hours. In the end, he managed to build a basic prototype for two hands, something he could at least try to conjure and connect to his Mana brain.

Once the diagrams in front of him finally made enough sense, Kai took a slow breath and raised his hand to build the structure in front of him.

Unlike his usual spells, this one came together with faint static crackling around it, as though the structure itself was unstable from the very beginning. Kai noticed that immediately, but he did not stop. He pushed through the instability and finished the spell.

Then it activated, and Kai held his breath.

***

As it turned out, the spell didn’t work the way Kai wanted it to.

There were several smaller issues in it, enough that he had to spend another hour going over the structure again and again before he finally managed to make it function. Even then, it still was not exactly what he had first imagined. But for the amount of time he had put into it, even that much felt like a real success.

Once he was done, Kai left his master’s chambers and found himself back in the real world.

He was still on the bed. Amyra was sitting there, looking right at him.

There was still concern in her eyes, but when Kai glanced down at his leg, he saw that it was fully healed. There was no dead mana remaining.

Just to be certain, he sent a thread of mana through his body, checking every part of himself.

Other than the poison still in his arm, there was nothing foreign left inside him.

That made him smile.

“Thank you. You must have been working on my legs the whole time.”

Amyra nodded at once. “It’s okay, Lord Arzan. I only wanted to help.”

“And because of that, I can finally get off this bed and start finishing the rest of what I need to do.”

Amyra frowned immediately. “But you should rest. You were hurt really badly, and you were screaming too.”

Kai gave her a crooked smile, not knowing how he was supposed to explain that the reason for that had been Malefic itself. Instead, he slowly pushed himself upright until his legs were hanging over the side of the bed. “You don’t need to worry. I’m better now. I just need to go to the library and look through a few things.”

Amyra’s eyes scanned his for a moment. “But you aren’t only going to do that, right? Are you just planning to stay in the library for a whole week?”

That question made him wonder when she had gotten so sharp.

“Well, no. I’ll be moving toward the corruption zones after this. I’m sure there are more enemies there that I don’t even know about yet. Killian and the others will probably need my help.”

Amyra looked like she wanted to argue, but in the end she only nodded. “So you won’t be back for a while.”

Kai didn’t answer that right away.

But he had no intention of leaving Amyra behind alone, especially not now that he knew Maleficia already had hints about her existence. If Malefic could reach into his dreams from wherever it was, then it was only sensible to assume that the tower might not stay hidden for much longer either.

“No. Once I’m done with the corruption zones, I’ll come back to you. You won’t be left alone now,” he said after a few seconds.

Amyra blinked, clearly not expecting that answer.

Kai stood up and started walking toward the door. Just as he reached it, he paused and looked behind.

“Are you not coming?” Amyra looked at him in confusion. “I still need to help you build your third circle.”

Her eyes widened at once, and she nodded quickly before hurrying after him. Together, they left the room and made their way toward the library while Kai quietly wondered whether he would actually find an antidote there.

***

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