The silence of the laboratory was broken only by the sound of my own ragged breathing. Every inch of my skin felt like it was being pricked by thousands of electrified needles. It wasn't just pain; it was a sensation of overfilling. My body, which had spent twenty-odd years as a "mana vacuum," was suddenly trying to accommodate a force it wasn't built to contain.
I looked down at my arm and saw a faint, pulsing glow beneath the skin—veins of silver-blue light tracing the path the mana had taken from my palm to my shoulder. My muscles cramped, and a cold sweat broke out across my forehead.
"Steady," Akhtar's voice boomed, though he sounded like he was speaking from the bottom of a well. "Your nervous system is being 'etched.' The mana is carving pathways where there were none. If you fight it, the energy will backfire."
I gritted my teeth, trying to force my heart rate to slow down. The "relief" I felt earlier was being replaced by a grueling physical reality: I was being rewritten.
I don't know for how long but after what felt like centuries the pain was no longer a sharp needle; it had become a heavy, rhythmic pulse, like a second heartbeat trying to sync with my own. My skin felt tight, as if the very atoms of my body were being pushed apart to make room for the energy Akhtar called "Refined Essence."
But as the physical agony peaked, my mind underwent a far more terrifying transformation.
The "Arcane Vision" didn't just show me the room; it drowned me in it. Every object in the laboratory began to scream its history in a language of vibrating light. I saw the glass vats, but I also saw the jagged, unstable "scars" in the mana surrounding them—evidence of the hurried, desperate repairs Elara and Akhtar had made after the Demon King's breach.
The "strings" I had noticed earlier were actually complex braids of intent and power. I looked at a pile of discarded scrolls on a side table, and my eyes burned as I perceived the "echo" of the scribe who had written them—a faint, lingering trail of yellow energy that smelled of old ink and anxiety.
"It's too much," I gasped, clutching my head. My brain was trying to process three-dimensional space while simultaneously interpreting a fourth dimension of magical pressure.
I looked toward the map of Earth—the "grey corpse"—and saw something the mages had missed. There was a thin, violent fracture in the stabilization field they were using to hold the coordinates. It wasn't a clean break; it was a "leak" caused by the physical laws of Earth resisting the magical laws of Avulum. To them, it was just a flicker in the light. To me, it looked like a jagged tooth tearing through a silk sheet.
"The map..." I wheezed, pointing a trembling finger. "The bottom-left quadrant... it's fraying. You're losing the anchor because you're trying to bolt magic onto a world that rejects it. You have to... you have to ground it in the physics."
Elara spun around, her staff flaring a startled violet. "What are you talking about? The stabilization field is—" She stopped, her eyes widening as she adjusted a floating lens in front of the map. "Akhtar! Look at the resonance. He's right. The coordinate drift isn't random; it's being pushed by the lack of conductivity."
But I couldn't celebrate the observation. The effort of articulating what I saw felt like trying to speak while submerged in boiling oil. The "information overload" was reaching a breaking point.
My nervous system, the "blank slate" they were so excited about, was starting to short-circuit. The purity of the mana I had absorbed was now reacting to the sheer volume of data my eyes were taking in. Every flicker of light in the room felt like a physical blow to my skull.
"Shut it down," I managed to choke out.
"The absorption is too high!" Akhtar shouted, his deep voice sounding like a mountain collapsing. "His body is trying to process the entire laboratory's ambient field because he doesn't know how to close his 'pores'!"
The silver-blue veins beneath my skin began to pulse with a violent, erratic light. I felt a pop in my ears, and the metallic taste of blood filled my mouth. The "strings" of the world turned into a blinding white static.
My legs gave out first. I didn't fall so much as I folded, my bones feeling as soft as wax.
As I hit the floor, the connection snapped. The "Arcane Vision" vanished, plunging me into a darkness that felt heavier than the void between worlds. I could hear Elara chanting something rhythmic and sharp, a spell designed to dampen the energy, but it felt miles away.
My heart gave one final, agonizing heave against my ribs, and then the world simply stopped. I wasn't dead, but the "bridge" had collapsed under its own weight. I was a human mind that had tried to eat a star, and the star had won.