Arcane Frame was not merely biological. It was metaphysical. With every drop of ambient mana it absorbed, it traced paths across his veins, embedded circuits into muscle memory, and etched arcane pathways into the very architecture of his being.
Already, Arin felt the change. Not in the form of a burst of power or a dramatic awakening, but in the subtle shift of pressure within. His inner mana channels—once narrow and erratic—had widened, streamlined, and smoothed. The flow wasn't turbulent anymore. It was smooth, coiled like a spring—but without tension. It was waiting.
And the most astonishing part?
He didn't have to do anything.
No breathing patterns. No focus techniques. No mind-numbing meditation marathons beneath a waterfall while chanting the hundred sacred vowels of the elemental planes.
His body did it all on its own.
Arin sat on the cold floor again, staring at the walls of the chamber as if they might collapse from sheer disbelief. Then he laughed softly to himself. It wasn't a loud or triumphant sound—it was the quiet, delirious laughter of a man who had just rewritten the rules of his own survival.
"This skill," he murmured to the silent chamber, "is everything I wanted. No— needed."
He remembered Section B of the Arcane Library. Tattered reports, expedition logs, and posthumous journals of Awakeners who had died not because they lacked power, but because they couldn't adapt. One man had asphyxiated the moment he stepped into a realm with nitrogen-rich air. Another had frozen solid during a planar transition to the Glacial Expanse. A team of five had perished in the Abyssal Trenches because their lungs had collapsed under the water pressure within minutes.
With Arcane Frame, those deaths would've been footnotes.
His skill made survival the default state. No need for spells to resist cold, no talismans to purify air, no enchantments to protect against pressure. His body learned—no, remembered. One burn? His skin would evolve resistance. One exposure to acidic fog? His lungs would build filtration pathways. One trip to a high-gravity plane? His bones would thicken, strengthen, adapt.
It didn't just react. It evolved. Permanently.
And that was just one trait.
The absorption aspect? That was something else entirely.
Even now, he could feel it. Mana flowed into him, subtle but constant, like a gentle breeze passing through an open window. It wasn't the kind of surge one felt while drawing power from a crystal or during deep meditation. This was passive. Quiet. Automatic.
Mana simply wanted to enter him.
A low-level hum buzzed beneath his skin, almost like a purr of satisfaction. His core—a colourless sphere floating deep within his spiritual vessel—swelled slowly with every passing second. Unlike most Awakeners, who had to draw mana manually and purify it through conscious effort, Arin's body did it without a whisper.
No spells. No rituals. No effort.
Just a walking, breathing mana-sponge.
A black hole in a world of luminous stars.
And when his body reached capacity? It wouldn't just stop.
It would compress.
It would refine the mana into denser forms, high-purity cores that could be stored without bloating his reserves. And once even that overflowed, the true ability of the skill kicked in:
Evolution.
His mana circuits would expand. His organs would reinforce. His core would shift—its internal structure evolving to accommodate the increase.
Compression. Expansion. Evolution.
A cycle of endless growth.
And the most beautiful part?
Nobody would see it coming.
It was passive. It had no incantation. No dramatic glow or system-notified aura. The growth was invisible, silent, insidious.
While others shouted, "Firebolt!" or summoned dragons of flame, Arin's bones would be reinforcing. His mana would be thickening. His lungs filtering. His everything preparing.
He grinned again. A grin that almost felt criminal.
"This," he whispered, "is how I will tread my path."
There were only thirteen known SSS-rank skills in the entire world. Each one belonged to a Guardian—beings so powerful their names had become geography. Mountains named after their footsteps. Oceans marked by their tears.
And every one of them wielded a skill that defied all logic and physics.
Some said only those with an SSS-rank class could unlock those skills.
But Arin didn't have an SSS-class.
He wasn't a Guardian. Not chosen. Not divinely blessed.
He'd simply built something that shouldn't be possible.
And while Arcane Frame hadn't reached SSS, it had settled at SS.
That alone placed him into the uppermost tiers of awakeners.
SS-ranked skills weren't just rare. They were hard earned.
To most, they were the last gift of dying dragons, the legacy of fallen civilizations, or the result of rituals so long and dangerous that only one in ten survived them.
But Arin had used nothing but a craft system, a desperate idea, and twenty-one days of obsessive research.
He remembered one of his instructors once laughing between swigs of bitterroot ale: "The strongest don't win because they're flashy. They win because when everything else burns down, they're still standing. The best skill is the one that doesn't let you die."
Arcane Frame was that skill.
It didn't make him stronger today.
It made him stronger forever.
And it did so without asking.
It was several hours before he finally stood again. The chamber's cool floors had gone numb against his skin, but he didn't care. He stepped out of the sacred crafter chamber and into the hallway.
Even then, the mana didn't stop.
It couldn't stop. It was part of him now.
Like static clinging to clothes, except this static rebuilt bones, hardened organs, and hummed through blood like a promise.
He passed a group of students descending the staircase, a trio of second-year Elementalists balancing stacks of textbooks and enchanted notepads.
None of them noticed him.
Good.
Let them overlook him. Let them believe he was a quiet researcher with weak elemental affinity. Let them think he was just another non-elemental Awakener with no fire, no thunder, no spectacle.
Because he didn't need an element.
His mana was colourless—the raw, unbound potential before the world had branded it. Elemental mana was coloured by alignment: red for fire, blue for water, green for nature, violet for arcane. But Arin's remained pure. Untouched. A blank canvas.
And blank canvases?
They could become anything.
His mana didn't need to be flashy. It needed to grow.
And he'd read the theory—Gods, had he read it.
He'd formed a core.
Will use spatial mana to craft a private dimension around it.
Let the core implode—like a singularity—and explode outward in a controlled Big Bang, forming a pocket universe rich with self-sustaining mana.
A self-contained cosmos.
And once that happened, the he will never ran out of mana.
This is Arin's prototype. His grand theory.
He was taking steps toward it already.
His core had formed—colourless, suspended in stillness.
And now, the frame—the Arcane Frame—was preparing the vessel.
Not just absorbing mana, but conditioning the body for what came next. For the day when he'd spark a singularity within himself and become not just a vessel of mana—but a source.
Not a sorcerer.
A cosmic phenomenon.
He looked up at the star-scattered sky beyond the library's upper balconies. The world didn't know him yet. Not really.
But it would.
Soon.
And when it did?
It wouldn't know what hit it.