4 Chapter 4 - Rampant Strength

Then, I closed my eyes, trying to feel the Mana Flowing within my body.

"I'm not sure as to how to explain enhancement to you, might take you a while to figure it out so good luck. Anyways, let me explain how Mana works a bit more. Mana is constantly generated and stored by your Core, the amount of Mana you can store and the speed at which its replenished at are both determined at awakening. I for example, have an average Mana Capacity, the same goes for what I naturally replenish over time."

I opened the eyes, finally feeling the Mana in my body, before focusing on making it 'surge.'

"You on the other hand, and I'm sure I've said this several times now but your Mana Capacity is massive. Your Mana reserves may as well be inexhaustible. Even with the Mana inefficient Arcane Magic, I doubt you'd have any issues with running out of Mana unless you stop dodging attacks, or just start willingly taking blows."

Then, I caused my Mana to surge. Beginning to understand the concept, I then applied the same logic to my Arcane Magic and I felt noticeably stronger than when I enhanced myself with regular Mana. I felt stronger, faster, better.

I took a step forward with intent to attack him, in that instant my muscles contracted with an unnatural amount of force causing my bones to shatter, causing me to fall to the floor.

'Damn this hurts like hell-'

My thoughts were then interrupted by pain, the use of Arcane Magic to enhance my body was too large a burden for my body, or perhaps I was incorrectly enhancing myself.

Then, my body began to reflexively to heal itself. Causing a cycle of destruction and regeneration, it was a violent cycle that caused me immense pain. Blood, or rather, Ichor as they had called it, began to flow out my eyes, nose and mouth.

"Ah, I think I get what's going on. You caused the Mana, or rather Arcane Magic, in your body to surge unevenly. More specifically, you only enhanced your muscles and your bones shattered from the force they produced. And you're unable to stop enhancing yourself. Wait, hold on..."

He took a stop watch out of his pocket, and began to click on it whenever my bones shattered. I didn't have enough time to think about what he was doing, or why he was doing it. All I could focus on was trying to control my strength.

"I knew it, the time taken for your bones to shatter is increasing. Its incredibly marginal, but, the intervals are increasing. Though it could be due to weakening enhancement levels, I'm not sensitive enough to Mana to discern changes as incredibly miniscule as what would be needed to produce such small changes to the interval."

I focused, and managed to slowly decrease the output until I was no longer using my Arcane Enhancement. Steam flowed off my body as I breathed heavily, wiping the bloody tears in my eyes, I stood up.

"Try enhancing yourself again, but enhance everything. Normally, people learn enhancement early on and so they don't have enough power to actually hurt themselves even if they do what you did and they end up getting rid of the habit before it can cause harm. You on the other hand, it's like you're like you're bottlenecked by your own lack of understanding on Mana, which is understandable. You can't make full use of your body. But, you've been learning at a phenomenal speed."

"Tell me... about the God's Heart."

It had been a while since I had spoken and I was tired, and as such, that was probably the longest sentence I'd be able to utter for a bit. I didn't care about anything he had to tell me about Mana too much, I could always get more info out of other people. But I knew nothing about the God's Heart, and I don't think anyone outside this facility who knew about it would be willing to talk to me about it.

"Ah, the God's Heart? We were able to recover the Heart of a dead God from a dungeon, and we intended on finding a being capable of harnessing the strength of the fallen Sun Deity. However, the souls of all who tried harnessing the power of this heart were extinguished. Well, aside from you. Ah, and just so you know, you have the Heart of the Sun God."

"And what do I get from it?"

He smiled and shrugged.

"I have no idea, for all we know, you might not get a single benefit from it. It might just slowly burn away at your soul, or perhaps you'll be able to stand toe to toe with those who inherited the blood of those who inherited the power of the Gods, and the like. Bloodline Bearers. Well, I say that. But you'll probably get some sort of flame related ability since you know, your heart belonged to the God of the Sun and Fire, so I'd be worried if you got some other type of power."

Bloodlines. A concept I understood rather well compared to other concepts in this world, it was pretty self explanatory though. It basically meant inheriting power from your parents, or an ancestor or whatever. Occasionally, they randomly manifested in individuals, and they could pass it on to their kin.

Perhaps it was due to random chance, or perhaps it was something far more. Who knows, and better yet, who cares.

'I sure as hell don't, Reinhardt didn't have any ancestral powers or anything. His family did have a bloodline ability, but in the little we were told about Reinhardt in the novel, we were told he didn't inherit it. In fact, he had nothing that was really handed down to him. Not a title, not an ability, nothing.'

"Now, I hope you can harness that Heart's Strength. The Master hopes so too, we need you to dedicate your life to him and him alone."