Chapter 293: Betrayal
Mercury walked off the peak of Mutilation with his own two legs. His mind was clear, his body remade. He felt more himself than before.
There were things he’d healed from, worries that had been dispelled. He’d been terrified of forgetting, even with resolving not to be and to simply make new memories. But now, some of those worries were dispelled.
His mind was tougher than even he knew - and more capable of healing than he’d expected. He breathed in and out. Taking in the world, squeezing Zyl’s hand with his own. Su ShouFan waved him a simple goodbye, giving one short bow.
She’d taught him much, and he had taught her a similar amount. That was what students did, after all. By reinterpreting the material, they would open up new perspectives. As much as Mercury learned, he’d also pushed the boundaries of their techniques and made them his own.
And, in doing so, he’d won his bet.
-
[ completed!
Reward: mastery, mastery, mastery, Reforging affinity pass, mastery.]
-
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
[ has levelled up! 10>]
[ has levelled up! 3>]
[ has levelled up! 2>]
Mercury smiled faintly at the notifications, calling up his status proper for the first time in a while.
=
Status:
Mercury Rainfall Starlight
Level: 14 -> 16
Species: Lumyron
Titles: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Alias: Beast, Mittens, dum-dum, Yr’enzel, Biso
===
Hp: 1250/3050
Mp: 4054/4124
Sp: 1500/1724
===
Strength: 151 (+5)
Vitality: 300 -> 310
Dexterity: 172 (+30)
Agility: 197 (+30) -> 201
Intelligence: 255 (+40) -> 260
Wisdom: 265 (+2) -> 270
Willpower: 525 -> 535
Luck: 364 -> 370
===
Ability points: 220
World points: 15 000
Skill points: 2200
===
Gold: 51 950
Beast familiars: 2/2
=
He smiled faintly at the numbers increasing a little more. The most important value there, he thought, was the Skill points. He needed those for when more things eventually evolved. Right now, for example.
[ has met the necessary qualifications for evolution. Evolve? (400 Skill points)]
[Evolution confirmed. Engaging. Please pick an option to evolve the Skill into. The price will be the same (400 Skill points), no matter which you choose.]
[1.
2. ]
For once, his choices were simple. Just two of them. Wonderful, really.
[: Condense your mana into a solid shape, forming crystals from it. The density of the individual’s energy will be improved.]
Were the descriptions both gonna be this elegant, Mercury wondered. There was only one way to find out, really.
[: The individual’s mana gains more momentum, spinning in their core. Increase skill activation speed and control over energy.]
Mercury was fairly sure that both of these Skills really just did what they said on the tin. They both also gave him hints on how to achieve their effects without them - he hadn’t known that rotating his mana would change its activation speed or improve his control over it, for example.
But now that he did know, he could emulate it. He’d spun his mana before, mainly to use it as a “drill” against the walls of his core to grow out his mana veins. Since then, he hadn’t paid a lot of mind to the technique or maintaining it actively.
However, when it came to solidifying his mana, he had less of a clue on where to start. He did know to some degree, of course - regenerating his mana pool was in transitioning his mana from gas to liquid, so this had to be similar. He just had to freeze it somehow, pack the particles even more densely together. But he didn’t quite know how.
So, the choice was easy.
[Evolution selected.]
[The individual has acquired the Skill through Skill evolution!]
The change that ripped through his core was immediate. It was a stinging sort of cold, ethereal and surreal. Only for a brief moment, though - then it turned into pressure. His abs tensed, and it felt like his stomach contracted as energy coursed through him. Almost naturally, his core was attracting the environmental mana, pulling at it.
Without Mercury’s intervention, it didn’t actively enter his core, though. Instead, it just formed a thick coating around him, increasing the pressure. The mopaaw focused on his insides, visualizing the magical organ, and the way it was changing.
In a moment, his perspective split. He saw both the outside world and his insides at once, and with the vision of his core, he saw the crystals crawling through it.
Like an infection, crystalline growths spread across the no-longer placid surface of his mana. They grew, consuming the waters that usually suffused his core, turning them static. That was the price of crystallization, after all. Density meant less control, less fluidity.
A dozen seconds passed, then a second dozen, and then, it was finished. Mercury’s entire mana pool had flash-frozen, turned into a solid. It felt dull and cold in his core, like standing on the shore of an icy lake. But still, he smiled.
“So that’s how it works,” he said. Having seen the process himself, it was fairly simple, really.
Mana wanted to be a gas - in order to bind it together, energy had to be added. That energy came from willpower, much like mechanical energy, putting pressure on the mana. Rotating it fast enough also would have crystals form, but they’d break from the rotation, then be consumed by the liquid again.
But now, Mercury knew how to create that pressure. With environmental mana, or his own. He could just condense the mana in his core tighter, constrict it or somesuch. Even using his Qi would work.
He did still have to figure out a way to get control over it all back, but it didn’t worry him much. Even right now, he already had an idea of how to do it. After all, Mercury did understand , even if just a little, so the universe was rather prone to opening up its secrets to him.
For a brief moment, he sunk into ihn’ar.
Then his eyes exploded.
Ah. He wasn’t quite ready to glance at mana itself that way, that was still a little out of reach. How fun, though. It made him so curious. To know that even now, there were still things he was only touching the surface of!
Still, even that faint glimpse of it gave him sufficient insight to know that his silly plan would work.
In an instant, Mercury ground his entire mana pool to dust.
The crystal that he had so arduously earnt and grown fell apart with one roaring crack. It shattered, then shattered again, pulverizing perfectly. Instead of a frozen lake, Mercury’s core took on the aesthetic of a fresh field of snow. Tiny pieces of crystal that, in total, were more like sand than anything else.
And then, he spun that ‘sand’.
Tiny fragments of crystal lifted in the air at his behest, then moved. They circled around his core, grinding against its walls, but this time, those held steady. In fact, Mercury stopped relying on the walls of his core, and instead controlled his mana with his mind, drawing the ring tighter.
Tighter, then tighter again. From the size of his entire pool, down to about half that in diameter. The grains of mana-sand spun tightly, faster and even faster. Mercury focused, for the first time since a week ago he really focused. With his mind restored to its prime, he felt it was so easy to direct all that energy.
He requested and it obeyed, forming a ring that spun so blazingly fast it became impossible to differentiate the grains.
[ has levelled up! 2>]
Mercury almost laughed at the instant progress, but instead, he focused on the ring. Maintaining its spin passively, keeping it tight, locking a part of his mind in a shape that would maintain it permanently.
His zeyjn split into their ystirs, components meant for these menial tasks, components he now had hundreds of, each one of them easily powerful enough to handle this.
Compared to what he usually did, handling this amount of energy was easy. His mind was no longer cascading, but instead resonant. Each zeyjn the same strength, each ystir empowered. He kept the ring up, spinning it faster and faster, until the pressure matched what a single sub-sub-mind of his could handle.
Then, he opened his already regenerated eyes, and looked down at his chest. There was a faint humming sound coming from it, visible only to his ears, so quiet he thought he might’ve imagined it. But he did see the changes in environmental mana.
Crystallization increased the density of his mana, and as such, the intensity with which it attracted more from the world around him. In that way, it increased regeneration, too. Rotation did a similar thing - by moving his mana quickly, he was effectively forced into generating an inward pull, and the mana reacted with itself.
In short, right around his core, there was a ring of environmental mana. At first it spun slowly, but as Mercury sat still and meditated, it gained speed, keeping up with the internal one in his core. It spun faster and faster, growing tighter, and spreading out just faintly. Until it stabilized.
Just a finger’s width apart from his mana core, a ring had formed around it. A disc of external mana, something Mercury technically should have no control over, at least not easily. And yet, here it was, readily orbiting his core.
And he also had absorbed it before. Even in just tiny amounts, he had done just that. What an odd thought that was, huh? What made environmental mana so special? Why wasn’t it his to do with as he wanted?
A question mages must have been asking for eons, he imagined. So he asked. “Why?” And then came the .
Mana didn’t want to belong to anyone. By default, it resisted assimilation with any mage. It was simply there. In the same way that air didn’t want to enter your lungs, but environmental pressure might force it in if you formed a vacuum.
There was no will to it, no greater power that governed it, but controlling it was hard. Plucking tiny pieces of it from the air and taking those in was doable. Large scale control, though? It required an ironclad will and a great tolerance for the substance, otherwise it was easy to carve channels through oneself.
Knowing as much, Mercury reached out to the ring that orbited his core. Through interacting with his mana, it had inherited the rotation. It had the same speed and shape as his mana. It was like an external manifestation of it. A mana-circle, he thought.
Hm. Had he finally reached the realm of a first-circle mage? Was this the amount of willpower it required? What an odd thought.
[ resonates with your mana-circle.]
[ spins and grows.]
Instantly, the flow of mana stabilized even further, dragged into magnetic orbit by the dense white-hole of power in Mercury’s soul.
And still, with his mind, he reached for that external ring, and plucked it away from his core. Almost instantly, it wanted to lose cohesion. It stuck to the core as if by magnetism, and when Mercury pulled it away, it slowed, growing sluggish and dispersing as a new ring began to form. But instead, he spun it faster.
It was hard. This mana didn’t want to obey him. It had no incentive, and largely wasn’t his to control… but he still pushed it. He slammed his mind into the impossible task he was presented with, and spun that ring of mana.
It hovered above his open palm - a thin ring of perfect blue, a little wider than his closed his. It spun so fast that the air whined faintly at the motion. It was so dense it had turned solid, into a razor-sharp spinning disc of solid mana.
Mercury tilted his head at it, then tilted his hand, moving the ring with it. It was hard to keep under control - maybe a hundred times harder than manipulating mana inside his core. But, evidently, he could do it. He wasn’t even bleeding or anything.
With a small flourish, he forced this mana to crystallize. Rather than a spinning disc of liquid, he turned it solid all at once. The mana resisted for a moment, but Mercury’s ironclad will still assembled it into a lattice. Triz by triz, drop by drop, the mana froze, taking the shape of a simple bracelet, still spinning fast enough to turn its colour uniform.
Mercury widened it, then slipped his hand through, wrapping the disc of mana around his wrist. By now, a new, faint ring had formed around his core. It was odd to think about. If he lost focus for a moment, if he didn’t sync up his movements with his improvised bracelet, it’d just chop his arm off.
Would it?
A quick experiment ended with him losing a finger. Yes, the disc of mana had effortlessly parted his flesh, with the whine of a saw. The crystalline structure created microscopically thin but jagged edges, making it both sharp and coarse.
It didn’t take much time for Mercury to restore his regrown finger, and yet, when he did, there was someone in front of him.
Kang Tae-Yoon, the peak master of Honest Treachery. A handsome young man, with messy brown hair, wearing a pair of glasses, and a chemical burn scar from his forehead wrapping to his ear. With a calm, careful smile, the peak master pushed his glasses up. “My apologies, Mercury, but weren’t you here to develop your cultivation?” he asked.
“I am,” Mercury readily agreed.
At that, the young man faintly tilted his head, his curls falling down to cover half his face, his lips drawn into a sly smile. “And yet, you are practicing sorcery. That seems odd to me. Have you grown so bored of us already?”
Mercury shook his head at the silly question. He smiled, though. “I haven’t. Are you going to be my next teacher?”
“So it seems,” the man nodded. “It will be my task to show you my techniques, and maybe take you into the Gilded-Realm.” With a lazy, elegant motion, the man rose to his feet, dusting off his robes, then extended a hand to Mercury, still wearing that same charming smile. “Will you learn from me, even if I betray you?”
The question was asked with such assured sincerity that it momentarily caught Mercury off-guard. “You’ll betray me?” he asked.
“I will,” Kang Tae-Yoon nodded. The smile on his face looked almost a little sad at that. “I don’t know when, but inevitably, I will stab you in the back. That is my way of life. Honest Treachery. I will tell you outright, now, that I will lie to you. I will betray you. Because, you see, I cannot stand liars.” His smile turned manic. “So, Mercury. If you lie to me, I’ll kill you, okay?”
“Even if I warn you?” Mercury asked.
Kang Tae-Yoon shook his head. “If you warn me, then I won’t.” He seemed gleeful at that. “Or maybe I will? Well, at least I won’t hate you. Or so I say.”
When the man didn’t continue speaking, Mercury sighed softly and considered the conversation over. Instead of pointlessly trying to force more words from the sneaky man’s lips, Mercury just nodded. “Alright,” he said, grasping Kang’s hand. “I won’t be upset if you stab me in the back.”
Kang Tae-Yoon gave the most gentle, polite smile Mercury had ever seen. “What a relief,” the man said with a genuine quiver to his voice. “Especially since I already poisoned you.”
“What?” Mercury asked.
A second passed, then a dozen. Kang scratched the back of his head. “Huh,” he said, “that’s odd. It should have kicked in by now.”
“I don’t feel anything,” Mercury noted, suddenly confused. Then, he focused. Actually, there was something. A faint feeling of sluggishness spreading through his veins.
Oh, yeah, no, he could tell. Now that he found the feeling, he definitely was poisoned. In fact, his brain was shut down and effectively unconscious. It was just that, well, Mercury was a little bit more than his brain!
Still, to stun his reforged organs into silence was definitely powerful. He hadn’t expected that to happen so soon after he’d just remade his body. Just out of politeness, he faked a sudden sway on his feet. “Ah, sorry, yeah, I feel it now,” he said, clutching his face with his hand, closing his eyes. “Ah. What have you done to me?”
Kang smiled sweetly. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I just want your new home to be a surprise. Fall asleep. You can trust me, right?”
Stifling a roll of his eyes, Mercury listened. He fell to the side, closing his eyes, his lips moving weakly. His body did feel numb, even if he was in full control over it. His mana still obeyed him, the ring keeping the tight formation around his wrist. Really, he was just playing along out of politeness.
With his eyes closed, Kang Tae-Yoon picked him up, holding him easily. The scholarly man hummed to himself. “Ah, I feel a little bad,” he said, quietly. “Well. Now I just need to fetch his boyfriend, I suppose. How to go about it, I wonder? Maybe just a blindfold.” Mercury felt the man's gaze linger on him. “I think this one wouldn’t forgive me if I harmed the dragon.” Another pause. “No, you wouldn’t forgive me at all, would you, Mercury?”
After his brief monologue, Kang laughed, then set off with steady steps, heading towards Zyl, carrying an ‘unconscious’ Mercury in his arms.
When the dragon saw as much he was briefly worried, then mad when the explanation began, then annoyed when it ended. He looked at Mercury, and the mopaaw had to resist sending a message with his qi - one which Kang would no doubt have picked up on. So, instead, he just kinda hung there.
Zyl insisted on carrying Mercury in Kang’s place, and the peak master obliged with a shrug. Then, he asked Zyl to enter his storage ring. It was a pocket dimension, apparently, and when the dragon accepted, Mercury felt the lighting shift through his closed eyes. It was warm in the ring, warmer than it had been atop the mountains.
In fact, his skin burnt a bit. Was that… acid?
A moment later, Zyl’s wings wrapped around him. Yes, he noted, it was acid. It only touched his back, so it must have been about waist high for Zyl. Who kept acid in the same place they kept people?
Mercury noted the light shift again. “Sorry,” Kang said with an apologetic tone. “Wrong storage ring.”
“Right. Sure,” Zyl replied, annoyed. The next time, their ride was a lot more comfy.
All of it really just left Mercury wondering what kind of person he was to be spending his next week with.
- - - - - -
The next time the light shifted around Mercury was a few hours later. He reappeared inside a building. Passively, he drank in the definition of his surroundings, his swiftly finding every crack and crevice.
It was a bunker. Not a wooden hut on a mountaintop like his last place, but instead something buried deep under the ground. It had no windows and no measure of sunlight entering it, so Mercury couldn’t even tell the time of day.
Soon, he was laid down on a soft bed. “So,” Zyl said. “This is the peak of Honest Treachery?” he asked.
Kang smiled amicably in response. “No,” he said. “This is my personal torture chamber.”
The heat in the room rose. “I see.”
The cultivator laughed at the dragon’s rage, waving him off. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I lied. It’s not a torture dungeon at all. It’s a safehouse on the peak. See, most of my peak’s members are a little on the eccentric side. They lie, they cheat, they stab each other in the back. But they usually don’t go too far.”
He paused, taking a deep breath. “Safehouses are our bottom lines here, you see? If you step into one, its owner will kill you or die trying. That’s one of the few rules we have in place, you see? For the duration of your stay, this one is yours. I know I entered it, but I ask you forgive my intrusion this once, since it was about transferring ownership,” he said, cupping his hands and giving them a small bow.
Before Zyl even replied, Kang turned around. He raised a single hand, giving a lazy wave. “Feel free to explore at your leisure,” he said. Then, with a smug note in his voice, he added something else. “Oh, and try not to die, yeah? Too many corpses really stink up the place. I’ll be back tomorrow~”
Then, he vanished, leaving Mercury and Zyl alone in the safehouse.
“What a character,” the dragon said with a soft sigh.