The triumph of the feast lasted exactly four hours.
Clyde had gone to sleep with a full belly, a sensation he hadn't truly felt in a month. The roasted meat of the Iron-Hide Boar had sat heavy in his stomach, a warm weight that promised strength and recovery. He had curled up in his elevated root-hut, listening to the distant shrieks of the forest with a newfound sense of detachment. He was a survivor. He was adapting.
Then, the fire started.
It didn't begin as a stomach ache. It began as a pulse—a rhythmic, thudding heat that radiated from his solar plexus. It felt less like digestion and more like he had swallowed a radioactive isotope.
Clyde woke with a gasp, his back arching off the woven moss mat.
"Ghh..."
The sound was strangled in his throat. He tried to sit up, but his muscles locked. It wasn't a cramp; it was a seizure of the nervous system. The heat in his gut flared white-hot, sending tendrils of agony shooting down his legs and up his spine.
He rolled off the mat, hitting the wooden floor of his hut with a heavy thud.
The meat. The boar meat.
Parasites? his mind gibbered, panic flooding his system. Poison? Is the meat toxic to humans?
He clutched his stomach, his fingers digging into his own flesh so hard he broke the skin. It didn't feel like food poisoning. There was no nausea, no churning of the bowels. This was energy. It felt like he had hooked his internal organs up to a car battery. The mana of the beast—the "High Level" energy that allowed a boar to grow iron plating and breathe heat—was now rampaging through a digestive system evolved for processed grains and cooked poultry.
"Get it out," he wheezed.
He dragged himself to the edge of the hut's platform. He gagged, forcing his diaphragm to spasm, trying to induce vomiting. He stuck a trembling finger down his throat.
Nothing happened.
He retched dryly, saliva dripping from his lips, but his stomach refused to purge. It was as if his body had clamped down on the energy source, greedy for the power even as it burned him alive from the inside out. The meat wasn't sitting in his stomach anymore; it was dissolving into pure, volatile essence, soaking into his bloodstream.
Clyde's vision swam. The darkness of the hut was illuminated by flashes of red static. He could hear his own heartbeat, booming like a war drum in his ears. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. It was too fast. Way too fast.
Dehydration, a remnant of his logical brain supplied. Dilute the poison. Flush the system.
Water. He needed water.
He tried to stand, but his legs were jelly. He crawled, his fingernails scratching against the rough bark floor. The pain was blinding now, a solid wall of white noise that obliterated his thoughts. He felt like his veins were expanding, stretching to accommodate a pressure they weren't designed to hold.
"Water..." he croaked.
He reached out in the darkness, groping for his supplies.
He kept his water in dried gourds near the entrance. He swept his arm out, his coordination shot. His hand struck a gourd. It tipped over.
Splash.
The sound of precious water hitting the wood was the most despairing sound he had ever heard. He groaned, a low, animalistic sound of misery.
He scrambled forward, his hand searching frantically for another container. His fingers brushed against a heavy, rough-hewn pot made of Titanwood bark. It was the container he used to collect the sap.
In his delirium, Clyde didn't register the difference in weight or texture. He didn't register that the container was open, or that the substance inside didn't slosh like water.
He only knew it was liquid.
He grabbed the heavy bark bowl with both hands, his knuckles white. He lifted it to his lips, his head thrown back, desperate to cool the furnace in his gut.
He tilted the bowl and gulped.
It didn't flow like water. It was thick, viscous, and slow. A glob of golden nectar slid into his mouth, coating his tongue, his teeth, his throat.
It was the concentrated sap of the Titanwood. He had collected it over a week, intending to boil it down for a resin glue to fix his spear. It was raw, potent, and undiluted.
Clyde realized his mistake the moment the sweetness hit his tongue—a sweetness so intense it felt like a physical blow. But it was too late. His swallowing reflex, driven by the agony in his stomach, took over.
He gulped down a mouthful. Then another. The thick sludge slid down his esophagus like molten gold.
He dropped the bowl. It clattered to the floor, spilling the rest of the precious sap.
Clyde fell back, clutching his throat.
If the monster meat was fire, the sap was ice. But not the ice of a freezer; the ice of a glacier, heavy, crushing, and ancient.
The sap hit his stomach and met the raging storm of the beast mana.
BOOM.
Clyde's back arched so violently his spine popped. A shockwave went through his body that had no sound but was felt in every cell.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The chaotic, violent red mana of the Iron-Hide Boar, which was currently trying to tear his cellular structure apart to make room for itself, collided with the dense, stabilizing, golden mana of the Titanwood.
It was a chemical reaction of the soul.
The sap didn't extinguish the fire; it contained it. It wrapped around the volatile particles of the beast energy, binding them, cooling them, forcing them into a structure.
To Clyde, it felt like being torn in half and then stitched back together by a sewing machine running at light speed. The burning heat in his veins turned into a heavy, throbbing pressure. It felt like his blood had turned to mercury.
His vision tunneled. The red static turned to gold. The agony didn't stop, but it changed. It shifted from the pain of destruction to the pain of forced expansion.
He couldn't breathe. His lungs felt solidified.
I'm dead, Clyde thought, as the darkness rushed in from the edges of his vision. I survived the monsters, only to kill myself with dinner.
His last sensation before the void took him was the smell of the forest—ozone, pine, and the sweet, cloying scent of the sap on his lips.
Then, there was nothing.
The dream was not a dream. It was a schematic.
Clyde floated in a void, but he wasn't Clyde. He was a network of pathways. He saw himself as a nervous system, a complex tree of glowing white lines.
But the lines were frail. Thin. Brittle.
He watched as a red torrent—the essence of the boar—slammed into the white lines. Where it hit, the lines frayed and snapped. The energy was too crude, too heavy for the delicate human conduits.
Then, the gold came.
It seeped in from the center, a slow-moving tide of amber. It didn't fight the red; it absorbed it. The gold wrapped around the red torrents, pressing them against the white lines of his nervous system.
The pain was distant, abstract.
He watched as the gold forced the red energy into the white lines. The lines bulged. They vibrated. They threatened to shatter.
Adapt, a voice seemed to hum. It wasn't a voice of words, but a vibration from the Titanwood itself. Grow or break.
The gold acted as a lattice, a scaffolding. It held the white lines together as the red energy infused them. The white lines thickened. They grew brighter. They branched out, forming new pathways where none had existed before.
The frailty of his human form was being rewritten. The dormant, vestigial pathways that all humans possessed—the evolutionary leftovers of a time when magic might have been real—were being blasted open by the sheer force of the beast mana, and then reinforced by the structural integrity of the Titanwood.
It was a forced evolution. A biological hack.
The schematic pulsated one last time, shifting from a pale white to a faint, thrumming blue.
Clyde opened his eyes.
He didn't wake up groggy. He woke up on.
His eyes snapped open, and the first thing he saw was the grain of the wood in the ceiling of his hut. He could see every groove, every knot, every microscopic fiber.
He sat up.
There was no pain. In fact, there was a frightening lack of sensation. no stiffness. No hunger. No thirst.
He looked at his hands.
They looked... defined. The callouses were still there, but the skin looked tighter, cleaner. Under the grime, his veins appeared slightly more prominent, tracing blue lines up his forearms.
He took a breath. The air rushed into his lungs with an ease he had never felt before. It felt like his lung capacity had doubled.
"What..."
His voice sounded deeper. More resonant.
Clyde looked around the hut. The spilled water had dried. The spilled sap had hardened into a resinous puddle.
He stood up. He felt light. Not dizzy-light, but gravity-defying light. He took a step and nearly slammed into the wall. His muscles fired with way too much power.
"Okay. Easy. Easy, Clyde."
He stepped out of the hut.
It was night. But it wasn't dark.
Clyde froze, staring at the forest.
He could see the heat signatures.
It wasn't Predator-vision exactly, but the world was painted in hues of energy. The Titanwood above him wasn't just a tree; it was a roaring waterfall of golden light, cascading upwards into the sky. The moss on the ground hummed with a faint green luminescence.
And beyond the barrier...
He looked into the deep woods. He could see them.
Moving shapes of red and purple fire. The monsters. He could see the aura of a Shadowstalker perched in a tree three hundred yards away. He could see the dense, compacted energy of an Armored Behemoth sleeping in a ravine.
"I can see mana," he whispered.
He looked down at his stomach. He placed a hand over his abs.
He could feel it inside him. A pool of energy. It wasn't vast—compared to the Titanwood, it was a drop of water in an ocean—but it was there. A reservoir of power that hadn't existed yesterday.
The sap. The meat.
He remembered the accident. He remembered the agony.
"I didn't die," he realized. "I processed it."
He felt a sudden, sharp pang of hunger. Not for food, specifically, but for fuel. His body had burned through everything to survive the transformation.
He climbed down from the hut. He moved differently now. He didn't climb; he flowed. He dropped the last ten feet, landing in a crouch that was perfectly silent.
He walked to the nearby stream of the Titanwood sap—the source he had tapped. He broke off a chunk of the hardened amber resin and popped it into his mouth.
It dissolved, and he felt the energy rush into his "reservoir," topping it up.
He walked to the edge of the barrier.
The Shadowstalker he had seen earlier—the one three hundred yards away—lifted its head. It looked in his direction.
Before, Clyde would have frozen. He would have hidden.
Now, he looked back. He focused his eyes. He willed himself to see better.
A headache spiked behind his eyes, sharp and sudden, but the image zoomed in. He could see the individual bristles on the monster's neck. He could see the way its muscles bunched.
Mana Sense: Awakened.
The thought wasn't his, but it felt like a label his brain slapped onto the phenomenon to make sense of it.
Clyde stepped back from the edge. He raised his hand and looked at his palm. He focused on that pool of energy in his gut. He tried to move it.
It was sluggish, like cold syrup. He gritted his teeth, visualizing the energy flowing up his arm.
It moved. Slowly. Painfully.
It reached his hand.
His palm began to glow. A faint, flickering white light, barely brighter than a candle, hovered over his skin.
He held it for three seconds before the energy sputtered and died, leaving him panting, sweat instantly beading on his forehead.
He laughed. A breathless, incredulous laugh.
He wasn't just a survivor anymore. He wasn't just a monkey with a stick hiding under a big tree.
He was a cultivator. A mage. A user.
He looked back at the darkness, at the terrifying, high-level world that wanted to eat him.
"You're still bigger than me," Clyde said softly, his eyes gleaming with a faint, residual light. "You're still stronger. But now..."
He clenched his fist.
"...now I can catch up."
The Titanwood rustled above him, a million golden leaves shimmering in approval. The sanctuary was no longer just a cage to keep him safe.
It was a dojo. And training had just begun.