Chapitre 50: Alive

Race: human

Age: 16 years old

Constitution: 6.61

Mana: 0 / 50

Spirit: 11

The data given by the Essence Stone didn't make any sense, but Rohan felt numbed already about that, so he didn't care anymore.

He had already finished his session of meditation. It was the last one he would ever do with employing this technique. From today onward, he was now a powerful rank 5 Beginner Warrior.

In more than three years of meditation, he had ranked up again and again, and from a normal boy of thirteen years old, he was now a young man of sixteen, almost seventeen in a few months.

But this day, even though he had become one of the most powerful warriors in the city along with the captain of the guards, it only made him feel a bit of happiness.

He was now a formidable rank 5 Beginner Warrior. He felt a strength he had never experienced running across his body. His bones were as hard as iron, his skin was as tough as leather, his muscles were filled with energy. But all that was insufficient.

Since he had discovered that he indeed had a mana stone inside his brain and that he could transform into a wizard, he couldn't help but be excited and be in a hurry to become one.

Since he knew the method to activate the stone and he was confident to be able to engrave the first rune he had learned by heart, he could have activated his mana stone one at any time.

But he had chosen to not do so, as long as he wouldn't have completed his last meridian. The reason for that, was that he didn't want to absorb the exterior mana while his meridian wasn't completely opened and consolidated.

The risk that something bad happened to his meridian was far too large for him to do it. That was why he had decided to wait once he would be a rank 5 Beginner Warrior.

And now that he was such a powerful warrior, the time had come to absorb the mana and gather it inside the mana stone.

He calmed himself and breathed in and out slowly. This time was without a doubt much more dangerous than when he had become a warrior back in the days. Gathering the dangerous mana inside his head, made Rohan feel a rare apprehension.

He put out the Essence Stone on the side and closed his eyes.

He concentrated on his body, and like he had done on this fateful day more than three years ago, he opened the pore of his body to let the mana enter through them. But compared to before, there were three differences.

The three distinctions were that he only did so with his head to make the mana engulf only there, his body was way tougher, and he didn't have this strange red stone that had made the mana mist appear back then.

All these reasons made the operation much more difficult and strenuous than what the young warrior had expected.

Bit by bit, small waves of mana entered inside his body. He felt as if an insane pressure was crushing his mind, and slowly, the mana that entered inside his head was attracted by the mana stone.

Without it, the mana would have been inside his brain without any place to go, and such a thing would simply damage by corrosion all that could be found inside a skull.

Suddenly, he felt as if his mind was becoming clearer, as if his whole body became lighter and lighter. The pain was always here, and he didn't dare to lose himself within this incredible feeling. The mana continued to sip through his head to rush at the mana stone.

All he needed to do now was to continue like that until the stone was filled.

If he stopped at any moment, then the mana he had wouldn't be enough for the next step and he would have to do it again. But even in this short lapse of time, and even without taking into account the pain that Rohan was enduring, he was still damaging his mind.

It wasn't enough to be irreversible, but if he couldn't continue until the end, he would have to wait a few weeks before doing it again. And even though he wasn't in a hurry, he still didn't want to waste too much time for nothing.

The time flowed, as well as the mana surrounding Rohan. A few moments later, the purple stone that was inside his brain began to glow: it was finally filled. He stopped all the mana from coming, and Rohan decided to drink a weak recovery potion to heal any damage.

He felt as if he had found something he had lost a long time ago, he felt as if he finally could breathe again after having lived for 16 years without being able to do so. It was as if he had walked out from a swamp that had restrained his movement all his life.

The sensation of clarity was even more breathtaking than when he had become a rank 5 Beginner Warrior. At that time, he had felt his body growing up, strengthened, and becoming more powerful. He had better control over his body, and the sensation was one of the best ones.

He could even understand if some warriors were ranking up in the only goal to feel this sensation again. But compared to what he was experiencing at this moment, it was truly negligible.

He was on a cloud, floating in the sky as the fresh wind caressed his body. He was inside a volcano, burning by an intense but harmless fire. He was sitting in the middle of a tundra, bitten by the friendly cold. He was standing under a tempest, hit by the strengthening lightning. He was flowing within the ocean, cleaning up by the water.

It was the power of the element, a new sensation, a new control, but a familiar feeling that appeared inside the mind of Rohan. A stupid smile appeared on his face, still with his eyes closed.

He had activated his mana stone and was now what the wizards called an apprentice.

But that was only the start. He didn't wait anymore in these strange emotions and began to familiarize himself with the new mana resting inside the mana stone. The first thing that he noticed was that he could manipulate it without any restriction as if it was an extension of his own body.

Even when he had felt the mana inside his mana core when he had become a warrior, it wasn't that easy to move it.

With a single thought, Rohan moves the mist of mana inside the stone. For now, since he didn't have the first rune, the mana he had actually was the only one he possessed. If he used only a few of it, he wouldn't be able to recover it, and so he would have to be extra careful when he would draw the rune: he had only one try.

With his eyes still closed and making the mana take all the form he wished, he moved his hand to the left and palpated on the ground to take an open book.

He wouldn't look at the information inside it since he didn't want to lose the control he had over the mighty mana, but he was more confident with the idea to be near these records.

He reminisced about the method he would use, about the more than two hundred strokes he would have to draw that he had learned during these past few months. There were exactly 223 strokes to do, with a beginning and an end.

Although the way to draw the rune was as strict as possible, there wasn't a time limit, and he could even stop after one of the lines if he wanted to.

Once he would have had to draw the second rune, he wouldn't have the choice but to stop at some point to continue later. That was because the difficulty of the rune was much more developed, and even if he learned everything in one go before drawing the rune, the 10 points of mana he would have wouldn't be enough to do everything.

He shook his head to come back to his affair, and after taking a large mouthful of air, he initiated the delicate operation. He gathered all the shiny mana and concentrated in the center of the stone, then, controlling it at perfection, Rohan made a thin thread wrapping around itself.

He manipulated one of the ends of the white thread and approached it toward the edge of its small empty area.

In front of the string that would be used to draw the rune needed, was the blue-purple wall of his mana stone.

A lot of colors had been found for the stones, some were blue, yellow, green, red, or purple and others were like this one, a mix of colors. But Rohan didn't know what these colors were supposed to mean, as there wasn't any information about that inside the books he had read.

Then, with a total concentration that he had never put himself into, the thread began its dance. It jumped on the wall of the stone, and as it touched it, the mana began to inscribe an intricate pattern.

Rohan made the thread snake on the left, then a slow curve on the right, before making it thicken toward the top. The difficult moves succeeded each other beautifully and divinely.

If someone could have been a spectator of such a show, they would be dumbstruck before it. No matter if it was a Beginner Warrior or an Advanced Wizard, they would all find this scene to be the most astonishing usage of mana they would have ever seen.

And for the Supreme mana users of the world who could see such a thing, they would have without a doubt fought among each other to have such a disciple.

But sadly, or, fortunately, no one but Rohan could see such a scene.

He was fully immersed inside this marvelous drawing he was doing, and for the first time in a long time, he was feeling a new emotion. He was feeling alive.