27 - Void Severance, Void Magic Stage

In a room, I was reading the [Basic Void Severance Technique] properly. I had only skimmed through it before.

It had become a habit of mine to read through a technique manual start to finish before practicing it.

The essence of the technique was to nurture a strike of immense power to slash through the fabric of space.

More precisely, there was a "void" hidden "underneath" the realm, a kind of dimension that other dimensions are built on top off. This background dimension is called "the void", and the void is separated from the realms that exist on top of it by a kind of cover, called the "dimensional fabric of space".

Yeah, it's a real mouthful.

Mana, demonic energy, and many other energies have a special property where when they get too dense, they cause this fabric to crack and break, allowing entry into the void.

The void isn't actually a void. It's not hollow. Instead, it's filled with chaotic, dangerous energy that slices and cleaves anything that comes into contact with it, called void mana.

I was still too weak to go into the void myself, but I should've just barely been able to absorb some void mana.

To do so, I'd have to slash through the fabric of space to open the way to the void and absorb some void mana before the rift closed. This is what was meant by the technique's title, "Void Severance".

In order to do this, the density of mana needed was too high, more than I could manage.

After all, if it was that easy, anyone could do it.

Be default, someone at the peak of the class blood stage couldn't possibly have enough mana to open a rift to the void. It needed some 1000x more mana than someone at the peak of the stage had.

It wasn't even trying to be fair.

That's where techniques came in. A special technique could increase the power of a set amount of mana, allowing more energy than the raw mana would generate on its own.

The void barrier didn't shatter due to the mana itself, but the energy emitted by it, so strengthening power in a given spot would allow for breaking open the fabric of space.

My only real technique so far...well, I didn't have one. I had techniques to cultivate, to increase my level, but not any attacking techniques. The best I had were my spells, but they only made the mana flow differently to exhibit a given effect. Maybe it increased the power somewhat, 1.5x, 2x, maybe even 3x.

But I still needed 300-700x more power.

The entire [Basic Void Severance Technique] focused on one single thing, an attack technique called the [Void Severance Slash].

Besides this, it also explained everything else I just explained.

The [Void Severance Slash] had multiple components. The mana had to be circulated in a particular way, then a basic 5th circle spell, [Compression], had to be forcibly upgraded to the 10th circle, which I already knew how to do since it was what I had done to the mana crystals back then, and then it had to be continuously cast on one's mana and aura, and finally the slash had to completely empty out my compressed mana and aura.

The sword had to be made of at minimum mythril, which I could go out and buy at an exorbitant price, and I needed an array to hold me in place since the void rift would try and pull in anything near by. The array was detailed out in the book too.

It had to be said, having a complete guide for something instead of fumbling around yourself really was quite nice.

I practiced the mana circulation route, but I failed partway through. I tried casting a modified 10th circle [Compression] while circulating, and that failed even faster.

Oh goodness. This would take a while.

***

Months passed, and it turned out to be more tough to get a handle on than I thought. Half a year later, I had the basics down, and I just had to get better at it.

The compression spell casting and actual compression of mana and aura were the easiest parts. Doing so while following the circulation pathway were what made it so difficult.

Everytime I compressed my mana, the circulation pathway would get messed up. I couldn't compress all my mana except the mana I was actively circulating because the mana needed to form a circuit, and that circuit needed to be supplied new mana.

This new mana needed to be uniformly compressed going into the circuit, but I couldn't control what mana would go into the circuit without controlling each and every mana particle individually.

This meant I either had to have precise enough control to control every mana particle, or compress all my mana in a uniform manner while actively casting the spell. At least the latter was doable, albeit difficult. The former was close to impossible.

So I practiced uniform compression on the very mana used to cast the [Compression] spell, slowly growing more proficient in doing so. Still, I wasn't that great.

After half a year, I had only managed around 100x compression. I still needed 10x more than that.

However, here I hit a bottleneck. No matter what I did, I couldn't manage the control required for further uniform compression while casting.

I was hard stuck.

I tried to ask Sylvia, but she told me not to talk to her anymore for some reason.

The only out I saw was developing my mana control more, but that was easier said than done.

It was already at the absolute peak of what a human at the class blood stage could do. The only thing that could change that were skills.

I had learned [Mana Proclivity], which made me more sensitive to mana, by emptying out my mana, refilling it, and emptying it again, over and over.

I had a theory that doing so again but going even further could let me learn another new skill.

A month later, I had learned a better [Mana Proclivity], which I called [Mana Proclivity II].

With that, I managed to keep practicing and improving until I reached 500x compression, but I hit another bottleneck.

I tried to get an even better [Mana Proclivity], but it didn't work even after half a year had passed.

Yeah I spent another half a year on trying to get a skill I didn't know existed. It's my life, I get to choose how to waste it away.

I was 44 now.

I didn't see Sylvia again since, after all, she was in the void magic stage. If I really annoyed her, she could kill me with a flick.

I tried to look for ways to further increase my mana control, but found nothing anywhere I looked.

Sighing, I decided to focus on something else for now.

The compass and treasury.

One of the treasures there was Jackal's wand that he used, as a mage.

This implied other tools that people at the class blood stage created with all their capabilities and used would also clunt as 2nd floor treasures. I had tested this previously and obtained a few more of such items before stopping. It worked, but I wasn't wealthy enough for it.

I needed 1000 treasures to upgrade the compass. A few more, especially mere tools and weapons, wouldn't make a dent.

Books also didn't count.

I thought about how much I would need to buy 1000 treasures of that level, and steeled myself.

Well, I was stuck at a bottleneck anyway, why not. I'd spend the next few years procuring funds and buying items.

My goto source of cash? The various clam colonies, of course.

Other class blood stages could also gain resources from the clam colonies, and it wasn't exactly an unknown tactic, but most couldn't be bothered. It would take an entire day to go out, raid the colony solo, and come back.

One trip to the colony was worth a day's time for a class blood stage. It took weeks to make top tier equipment, so that equated to an average of 20 days of grinding per item I wanted to buy. In fact, after 100 items, the clam colonies were nowhere to be found.

I had gotten a decent amount of treasures, all weapons and armor, but it was still a little under 900 more that I needed for the upgrade.

So, I left it at that.

I had pretty much eviscerated the pearls and even mythril in the clam colonies in the process of this. Normally, one person would never need over a hundred treasures, so this was not normal. Thankfully noone cared what happened to the clams, so I didn't get into any trouble.

The vendors also stopped selling after a while, so I had to seek out multiple vendors.

For a moment, I became somewhat well known in the class blood stage circle in and around Axel kingdom. I used this to my advantage and asked around the sellers I met for skills to improve mana control.

Most gave me [Mana Proclivity], which we all separately came up with the same name for somehow. Come to think of it, everyone in every kingdom, empire, and both realms I had been to used the same language. I wondered if it had something to do with that.

Anyhow, I was losing hope, until one of them told me about a skill called [Adrenal Moment]. Going from not using mana or aura at all to blasting forth with it to stop a fatal attack was the training procedure, and it would allow a moment of intense focus and mana control right upon activation. It was the first skill I had heard of that had a long cooldown, a whole 5 hours.

Thanking the man who told me, who surprisingly asked for nothing back, I rested up and got ready to engage in that training method with Ixtra. He couldn't pose a threat to me if I had my aura active, which normally I would have active all the time unless I was asleep, so I turned my aura off. That was necessary for the skill anyway.

I asked Ixtra to randomly attack me throughout the course of the day, with intent to injure but not kill. Well, hopefully that'd be good enough.

It was.

6 months later, I had obtained [Adrenal Moment].

Not all skills took the same amount of time to learn. Some took longer and some shorter. Learning more skills just increased the time it took to learn another skill relative to the time it would've taken before, for that specific skill.

Nonetheless, that isn't to say it wasn't truly an amazing skill, because it was. In the moment of activation, and for about half a second afterwards, I felt my mind expand and take in every sensation as I apprehended my attackers position and attack, and willed all my energy towards blocking it and attacking back.

With this, and bit more practice, I finally managed to reach the threshold of compression needed to break through the void barrier.

When I first saw that little crack in the void, I became estatic. This was my goal for the past year and a half.

Sin e [Adrenal Moment] had a 5 hour cooldown, I could only practice one attack at max compression every 5 hours.

It was abysmally slow training, but thankfully I already had the hang of the basics, so I still progressed rather quickly.

Another half a year later, it happened.

I executed the [Void Severance Slash] perfectly, and the void barrier cracked before finally breaking open.

When it did, the spot where it broke looked like broken glass, and through the rift that appeared in midair, there was a black nothingness beyond.

However, through the nothingness, I could feel a subtle, turbulent energy that threatened to tear me into pieces the moment I stepped through to the other side.

At this moment, the void rift created a strong suction force and started pulling things into it before starting to close, but I had the array active the whole time start to finish, every day that I practiced, so I didn't get pulled in.

Well, the rift had been the size of my palm, so it's not like I could've gotten sucked in completely anyway, but I could've lost a finger or something, so I was still thankful for the array.

I hadn't managed to absorb any void mana, since I hadn't expected today to he the day, and the rift only stayed open for less than 2 seconds.

It took a while to calm down from the exhilarating rush of accomplishing my objective of the past 2 years. Thankfully, I had the next 5 hours to calm down.

After the cooldown was over, I used the [Void Severance Slash] again, but this time when the void barrier broke, I plunged part of my sword inside before taking it out as the rift closed.

My sword that came out was completely severed from the point of entry, but at the edge of the broken blade were small wisps of void mana.

I quickly willed my body to absorb the void mana, but it refused, so I used [Gluttonous Limb] on the edge of the broken sword and broke it further, eating the bit that had void mana on it.

All this happened in under a second, but the havoc the void mana caused in that second was incredulous.

The ground around me for 100 meters was torn and slashed, Ixtra was far away staring in horror, and if I wasn't wearing top quality cloth, it'd have been ripped apart too.

These wisps of mana were about as strong, when not aimed at anyone expressly but just through existing, as a peak solid crystal mana knight releasing his aura.

When I absorbed them, the phenomenon was slightly different to what happened with the raw mana.

Instead of my blood bursting, or my insides getting torn apart, the wisps of void mana directly melted my blood without entering it, and heated up my blood vessels, flesh, and bones to an absurd temperature.

I hurriedly drank a mana potion and used my aura to barely hold on, gritting through the pain, and depended on my strong vitality to recover my blood as it constantly melted.

Half an hour later, I had absorbed all the wisps of void mana, and immediately obtained a skill for fire resistance, which I simply called [Fire Resistance].

There were still 4.5 hours left till the cooldown wore off and I could break open a void rift again, so I panted and sat down on the broken ground as sweat dripped from my every pore, and heartily rested.

Absorbing wisps of void mana was considered the entry point.

I was finally in the void magic stage.