Lucas woke up to the early birds singing their songs. A clear blue sky was a welcoming sight. Without any worries, Lucas could wake up and check his progress. The ground he laid on was hard and filled with cracks as if all the water had evaporated. His little experiment left a circle of pure death and decay.
"Not the most secret or hidden technique, but better than nothing. We could do this again, but I can tell we would need something big and filled with life force if we want any progress with our core."
Inspecting his core a small change was visible, part of a run had started to form on the outer shell. Having read the books over and over again, he knew how to grow in power.
In order to reach the next rank, the one where Venion ended, he needed to form certain runes on his core, 15 in total. In order to form a rune, he needed either a big chunk of energy that could immediately form a rune, or he could do it gradually.
The second approach took a lot longer but was also a lot safer. Simply absorbing the energy in the air and circulating it in his core was beneficial. The only problem was that it took a painstakingly long time, something Lucas wanted to avoid if possible.
With the first tactic, he would have to be careful not to absorb too much energy and overload his own core. So the Life Drain technique described in the book would allow him to gather a large amount of mana, at the cost of whatever was used as fuel, was the perfect tool to quickly reach Rank 1 and beyond.
While this thought was somewhat correct, the moment he would reach Rank 1, the technique would become useless, but that wasn't something Lucas realized yet.
When the runes formed a circle around his core, he would achieve Rank 1, what happened after that, he had no clue. For now, all he needed was a large amount of energy.
'We could just get a few humans you know? Or beast from the area, they should be filled with energy.'
'And then incite a manhunt against us? Needless slaughter doesn't give us anything but a bad reputation.'
'Like I care about reputation.'
'You might not, but I do. We could use the core from Venion, most of the magicules inside are gone, but the core itself should be useful in some manner.'
He had Venion's core in his backpack, it looked like a small marble that had an ice blue color after washing it. With the technique he learned from the books, he could probably form all the runes that were needed, but he didn't know what would happen when the circle completes.
'Don't even bother, do you think we can simply absorb a core from an entire Rank above us? We don't even have the very first rune on our core, and you want to absorb an entire core? Idiot!'
Lucas sighed, he needed more information, but where would he find that? A school? A new mentor? A library? All of those things could only be found in a city or town, thus he needed to move.
Besides the fact that he would achieve the next Rank, he had no idea how that transformation transpired. Would he go unconscious? Would he face a certain trail? Or would his core overload from the energy and explode?
Part of him was too pessimistic to think nothing strange would happen. 'Being completely prepared for anything is the absolute best way to succeed in everything. Don't take random risks, I will only accept calculated risks if you're so desperate.'
But to do this he needed to travel to a populated place first. 'For now, the best option would be to scour the towns in Frigus. They allow dark magic, more than the Holy Kingdom.'
'I don't think it will last long. We need to hurry up. Liam and most likely Robert escaped from that place. The moment they tell someone, I can't believe they'll leave the mansion alone. There won't be any kind of investigation for now. Let's just hope we have enough time to move.'
Hunting animals along the way and fishing were his main sources of nutrition. Eating grass or worms like he would do to survive wasn't necessary anymore. He wasn't the strongest out there, but he was capable enough to handle a few monsters by himself, especially if he was prepared, so a few bunny rabbits weren't that much of a problem, besides finding them of course.
Making his way to the first city or town he could find, he circulated the energy in his core whenever he possibly could. Doing it too much would give his core a "cramp", hurting him whenever he would use his core. Though that didn't stop him. He kept going even if it hurt.
To Lucas, it felt like overextending the use of his core would lead to a similar effect as overcompensation that happened with his muscles. In actuality, while the core functioned similar to some muscles, circulating the core over and over without giving it any room for rest only hurt it in the long run. Not that Lucas noticed. In his blind desire for strength, he trained his body to its limits, even if that wasn't beneficial.
The pain from overcirculation wasn't crippling, but it certainly was annoying. But even that wasn't enough for Lucas, he wanted more. His body was already suffering from straining his core, yet it couldn't satisfy him.
'The things that differentiate a mage from a normal human are the core and Mental Sphere. The core we can train with the circulation, but what about the dome?'
'The hell do you want to do? Train our mind? What? Do I need to give you some riddles or something?'
His mind wasn't occupied with something, besides talking to himself of course. And while the books he had with him were fascinating, he had read both a bunch of times. The only things he didn't understand were the paragraphs that contained words he just didn't know or recognize.
Thinking back on the book about Magic Principles, Lucas was surprised he was able to learn so much from it, even though there were a few complex theories and ideas. The way the author easily explained it through simple to understand analogies genuinely impressed Lucas.
'The author had to be a genius to explain even complicated things so easily. I wonder if he signed it somewhere, if he made multiple books, we would have an immediate goal. Just search for that dude's books.'
"Signed S.R."
'There we go, thank you S, you helped us in ways you couldn't even imagine.'
And while the book was useful, there wasn't a single practice on how to improve his mental sphere in it. The mind sphere was nowhere to be found, so he had to try to create his own training method.
At first, he started to think hard about a lot of different things, going as deep as possible into a certain subject to try and strain his mind.
That didn't give him any kind of result, his mental sphere was a lot stronger than a normal mind, so mental exhaustion was harder to reach except if he used his willpower for something, but that wasn't training. That merely sucked the energy out of it, it didn't improve anything.
Then it occurred to him, 'What if we both think of things at the same time as we did with the memories back when we encountered the Aruna Bat?'
As he tried his randomly thought of exercise, his head started to become heavy as he stopped in his tracks. It didn't work in the slightest, his mind became fuzzy, and he started to get a headache.
That sign of pain was something that Lucas interpreted positively. He believed that through the pain you could grow, so he kept going. Every time his mind was cleared he made it fuzzy again, he wanted to get a headache, because he could see that he could hold on a little longer or the headache wasn't as bad after a while.
Nothing changed visually, the sphere stayed the same, but he could focus longer on two subjects at the same time, so it was good enough.
During his travel he kept forcing himself to train to be occupied with something, his body and mind were starting to get really exhausted from all the stress put on them. Even a good night's rest didn't fix anything, but that didn't stop Lucas, he simply kept going, kept moving forward.
Overstimulating his core and stretching his willpower to its limits, Lucas wasn't really improving his core or dome. In fact, those incremental improvements would disappear the moment he stopped his training.
While circulating the energy would start the creation of runes, doing it so much only slowed down the process. The only things he truly gained from this intensive training was a higher pain tolerance.
His journey on the path of magic had only just begin, but Lucas was being too hasty, only resulting in slower results. The path was long and arduous, only through slow and calculated steps would he ever reach the end.
Eventually, he could see signs of human civilization in the distance.