The twins William and Marcus Corvinus exchanged a glance.
They were apprentices sent by Whitewoods Castle solely to provoke bloodshed and drive a deeper wedge between Sage Gotham's Hut and Abyssal Bone Forest.
Alexander, their team leader managed to escape by using a magus rank consumable item given to him by his master for protection.
Unfortunately, they have no such means available to themselves. They bore witness as their memories are slowly erased, edited, replaced, their loyalties rewritten, and their purpose remade.
They died in a sense.
Then they've been reborn.
As Peak Rank 3 apprentices and something more.
They gave a solemn nod to one another, then parted ways, heading separately to carry out Leylin's orders.
Leylin the subject of their thoughts and loyalty finally neared his destination.
Instead of two to three days, it took him close to two months 1just to reach the outskirts of Extreme Night City.
The reason for this is that along the way, he would often pause to investigate reports of wandering ghosts or demon sightings.
Most turned out to be mere illusions, mutated beasts or just plain rumours, but some did lead to rather interesting discoveries.
One strange ritual caught his eye, he chanced upon a certain secluded village sacrificing living people to in a ritual to beg for greater strength.
Leylin watched them summon the will of an otherworldly being but the strength they gained is only the meagerest, fleeting power in return for sacrificing their loved ones, he left quietly without alerting them or doing anything against them.
As soon as his shadows approached, knights greeted him with close to worshipping reverence and offered to escort him into the city. Escorted by elite knights, he entered Extreme Night City without much fanfare.
Above ground stood striking buildings of gothic victorian architecture. Tall spires, carved stone, lantern light glowing through misty streets.
But as they descended deep underground, the scenery shifted completely. Layer after layer, the ancient style vanished, replaced by gleaming, precisely structured facilities that are neither purely magic nor plain machinery, but seamless fusion of both, a true magi‑tech advancement.
Runic lights with motion detection and mana gathering function lit the hallways; micro monitoring arrays could be seen even before the entered the city; transparent reinforced alloy walls revealed labs, energy cores and assembly bays.
The marriage of arcane principles and scientific engineering had sparked a booming new era of new materials, hybrid enchantments, efficient energy generation uncovered daily, progress so rapid that system updates had to be scheduled in shifts so as not to disrupt ongoing critical work.
When he reached the 30th basement level, behind reinforced shielding and containment barriers, he saw the creature he had come for, the juvenile Great Withering Mankestre Snake.
A massive magnificent thing of beauty coiled lazily atop a raised observation platform, its body already stretched dozens of meters long, thick as a massive tree trunk, covered in neat overlapping scales of dull yellow‑brown that shimmered faintly with metallic hardness.
Deep crimson eyes glowed slitted and intelligent, watching him with calculated craftiness rather than mindless ferocity.
Its low, rasping voice sounded like dry leather rubbing together when it stirred, unpleasant and chilling to hear.
A faint, sickly grey haze constantly drifted from its form, the signature Withering Aura of a Mankestre snake. Vegetation placed nearby turned brittle, dried out and crumbled into nutrient dust within moments.
Internal parasitic organisms swarmed invisibly, capable of infecting living beings, subduing minds and turning them into obedient servants, the very trait that made this species so dangerous and valuable.
Though still young and far from the colossal size and official Magus‑level might of a fully mature adult, it already possessed formidable vitality and defensive scales able to shrug off ordinary rank‑0 spells without much effect.
As a distant descendant of the glorious Kemoyin Serpent bloodline, traces of greater potential lay dormant within its blood, waiting only for the right methods to awaken.
Leylin observed every detail, data scrolling clearly across his vision. This was exactly what he has been looking for, a precious foundation for further bloodline research, experimentation, and evolution.
The origin of this Mankestre is another mystery, the species is ruled out to have long been extinct in the South Coast.
Leylin smiled while appreciating the thing of beauty in front of him.
[Material Preparations Completed]
[All Containment & Resonance Circuits Online.]
The neutral female voice echoed clearly through the magi‑tech reinforced chamber.
"Let's get on with the procedure," Leylin intoned calmly as he triggered the massive magic circle beneath his feet.
Instantly, deep blood‑red light flared to life, spreading outward in intricate, glowing runic patterns that filled the entire space with a heavy, ancient pressure.
He stepped forward and laid his hand gently but firmly upon the snake's car‑sized, scaled head. The moment contact was made, ambient mana began to surge.
The fluctuations was felt not only within the facility, but resonated upward and outward, sweeping across the entirety of Extreme Night City, making lanterns flare brighter, crystals hum, and animals stir uneasily in their dwellings.
Beneath him, the super‑sized gathering formation roared into full operation, channeling vast, torrential streams of raw, concentrated elemental mana directly into his body.
Every cell of his frame worked in perfect overdrive while his body began sorting, balancing, purifying, and converting that chaotic flood into pure, stable spiritual force without waste or stagnation.
The refined and potent spiritual energy flowed onward, pouring steadily into the Mankestre Snake who absorbed it greedily, instinctively, while the nanites inside it helped further refining and assimilating it to nourish its own bloodline and vitality.
Leylin recalled the data with a touch of pity for the creature's wasted potential. Under normal circumstances, the daily ration it managed to gather through its subordinates would barely keep it alive.
Most of its meager intake was burned just to sustain its low‑activity, dormant‑like state and only less than ten percent remained for actual growth and strengthening.
That was the cruel truth, this beast possessing a genuine Rank 1 bloodline had been forced to hide and skulk in the wilds, scraping by on scraps, only ever managing to display the combat strength of a mere Rank 2 apprentice.
It has powerful bloodline… yet starved and stunted, beaten down by malnutrition long before his forces ever tracked it down and secured it.
But not anymore.
Now, instead of scarcity, it was drowning in abundance.
No more rationing, no more starvation, no more slow stagnation.
Under Leylin's precise regulation and the formation's endless supply, the Mankestre Snake would finally receive the rich, high‑quality nourishment it needed to grow, evolve, and truly awaken what slept within its blood and more.
The Mankestre Snake grew visibly before his eyes thickening, lengthening, its dull yellow‑brown scales deepening to a richer, more lustrous hue as faint crimson patterns began weaving across them.
All around the perimeter, the mountains of high‑grade ores, life crystals, and concentrated vitality extracts placed earlier dissolved steadily into shimmering motes of light, drawn into the magic circle and consumed to fuel the transformation without waste.
Such explosive, steady growth would normally tear a creature apart or drive it mad. But this was no wild, unguided evolution.
Everything had been prepared long before: precise regulation via implanted bio‑chips keeping instinct and aggression in check; adaptive nanites circulating through every vessel to repair, strengthen, and expand tissues as fast as they stretched; prolonged force‑feeding to build up massive energy reserves and plump its body full of surplus nutrients; and now flooding it with purified spiritual force and concentrated vitality to trigger the final leap.
Even so, the sensation was far beyond mere growing pains. It was a deep, searing remodeling, cell splitting, mutating, rewriting its genetic memory, forcing dormant ancestral markers buried deep in its blood to surface and take hold.
[Biological Resonance Processor — Active]
[Analyzing Bloodline Fragment Sequences…]
[Mapping Ancestral Genetic Blueprints…]
[Stimulating Epigenetic Unlocking]
[Suppressing recessive defects, amplifying dominant Kemoyin traits…]
[Recombining mana‑energy frequency with life‑force resonance...]
[Stabilizing mutation pathways…]
[Forcing atavistic regression...]
[Discarding degenerated traits...]
[Recovering ancient vigor and innate affinity…]
The process hummed on, guiding the surge rather than letting it run amok and turning raw overload into controlled, concentrated evolution… until finally, the intense fluctuations faded, leaving only calm, powerful vitality radiating from the now colossal serpent.
*****
High above the treetops, Leylin rode silently aboard a sleek, broad‑winged flying drone. Shaped and cloaked perfectly to blend in as a distant predator bird of the upper skies.
As he neared his intended stop, the faint shimmer of invisibility faded away. The craft descended steadily, tilting to settle with a soft whir onto the shadowed floor of the Abyssal Bone Forest.
Metal plates shifted and rippled the moment landing gear touched earth. The machine reconfigured, its frame compacted and reshaped, flowing like liquid alloy.
In a mere seconds, the aircraft‑form vanished completely, in its place is the fiery‑maned Nightmare steed which Leylin had ridden when departing the academy.
This time, the flight from Extreme Night City back to Abyssal Bone Forest took less than half an hour.
The vessel's advanced cloaking mechanisms rendered them all but invisible to beasts, scouts, and non magical detection.
The 'Knightmare', as Leylin liked to call it marched forward with leisurely pace while heading towards the Academy grounds.
Leylin spent his leisurely stroll calmly sifting through the backlog of reports and data he had set aside during his weeks of research and travel.
'Page twelve of Lowian's Teachings?' he murmured, reviewing the newly acquired text.
"What an absolute steal…"
He moved on to the operational summaries, his expression sharpening slightly.
'They've raided another trading post barely days after receiving new gear and intel… the Farlier have grown far bolder ever since they realized that the dominant peak power across this region of the South Coast barely exceeds rank two magus. Occasionally, like with the lighthouse's case, there's a single rank three magus in an organization who serves like a nuclear deterrent.'
He paused, considering the gap in his understanding. Although Leylin wouldn't claim to have explored the entirety of the South Coast, the general situation is quite easy to understand.
And one undisputed fact is that no one has seen a rank four magus powerhouse within the South Coast for the last 10,000 years.
For the infiltrators, who are composed mainly of machine phase matter units with equivalent strength and battle effectiveness of a rank 2 magus, this can only be good news.
'But it still begs the question... where could all the rank four magus be?'
In all their boldness, his Infiltrator teams remained meticulously cautious whenever actual Magi were involved.
To date, they had only ever engaged a rank one magus in open combat twice now and both times had only done so against a target already under a weakened state or isolated from their support.
Those selected for action were almost exclusively forces backed by long‑standing Magus bloodlines and ancient families that had outright refused to enter any form of cooperative or tributary arrangement with the Farlier network and its allied branches.
And even then, no Magus had been killed. Every operation was calibrated to disable, secure, and capture the target alive. It's just the same principle with the Mankestre snake, maguses are rare resources that are too valuable to just kill simply.
When used as the core of a mana gathering formation like the one in Extreme Night City, the effects are multiple folds better than when using a rank three apprentice.
With the magi‑tech capabilities at his disposal, a single restrained magus represented a concentrated source of energy and knowledge equal to an entire harvesting facility processing tens or even hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.
Wasting such a prize by killing it would be sheer idiocy. Leylin's gaze returned to the twelfth page of the recovered text, his interest piqued once more.
This page alone could lead to his legions of augmented knights and infiltrators to have a huge leap in power. So much so that the one on one with a rank two magus is entirely possible with the right resources.
"Regardless… this section alone makes it worth every effort. It contains advanced runic inscription methods, lost artifact refinement protocols, and a complete catalogue of rare materials and their proper applications."
This would save him precious weeks or months of data processing. He made sure to transmit a command for his forces to be on the lookout for Lowian Teaching articles for reference in the future.