Magus Reborn [Stubbing in Three Weeks]

385. Soul Cultivation (2)

Vaelthoros threw up hundreds of vines around itself just as the fire giant opened its maw and exhaled another torrent of flame.This blast was stronger than the last.

The vines blackened and burned as they shielded it, layers of living defense turning to ash almost as soon as they formed. Even so, they bought it a moment. Vaelthoros could feel the force behind the flames driving into it, pushing it back through the air despite its strength. The pressure was enough to make the spirit king’s roots dig down instinctively, then rip free again as it moved.

The roots coiling around its legs tightened, and Vaelthoros sprang away, dropping through the canopy below before launching itself back up in a violent burst of motion. Trees bent and shattered beneath the force of it. In the next instant, it slammed both hands into the fire giant.

Its arms extended as it struck, the stump-like limbs lengthening with a crack of wood and mana until they smashed hard into the giant’s burning flesh. Chunks of scorched skin tore loose under the blow, falling away in molten fragments.

But the giant only staggered.

That was all.

Vaelthoros felt anger flare hotter at the sight and cursed in its mind—something it had not done in centuries. Then again, it had not fought a battle like this in centuries either.

It still could not understand what such a creature was doing in the earth plane.

A fire giant had no place here. No path should have led one anywhere near its realm. The thing was clearly from the fire plane; every wave of heat rolling off it made that obvious. So how had it appeared here so suddenly, as if dropped into the heart of Vaelthoros’ dominion by some unseen hand?

Even while fighting, the question kept circling in its mind, and no matter how much it wanted another answer, only one possibility remained.

The humans had done something.

There was nothing else that made sense.

Vaelthoros did not know how a human Mage could have brought a fire giant into its world, but the evidence was in front of it, burning its forests and challenging it in its own skies. Once the creature was dead, it would pry apart the truth. It would find the method, the cause, and everything else behind it.

But another question gnawed at it too.

Why? Why had the human Mages done this? Had they come only to throw its plane into ruin? Had they decided to answer its realm with fire and destruction? Perhaps they had.

Humans, Vaelthoros knew well enough, were never a race above such things. But it also knew humans rarely destroyed anything without reason.

They were greedy creatures by nature, always moving for gain, always pulling at the world around them in search of some advantage. So what possible benefit was there for them in trying to ruin the earth plane? No matter how many times the thought circled through its mind, Vaelthoros could not find an answer that fully satisfied it.

In the end, it had no real time to keep thinking.

The fire giant let out a grunt and bent down, ripping another great tree from the ground as if it were nothing more than a weed. A moment later it swung the burning trunk toward Vaelthoros.

The spirit king answered immediately.

Vines surged out and caught the tree in mid-swing, halting it with a violent shudder. At once Vaelthoros felt the strain of trying to control something held in the giant’s grip. It hated this. Not just the battle itself, but what the creature was doing to the plane while it fought. The thing was not merely burning the forest. It was uprooting trees that had stood and grown for centuries, using them like clubs for its own mindless bloodlust.

That anger cut deeper than the flames.

It had already hurt the giant. It had smashed it into the walls of its own castle. Under the fire rolling off its body, parts of the creature were cracked and bleeding, hot red liquid spilling down from its wounds.

But Vaelthoros knew that it was still not enough.

The giant was stubborn and too driven by rage to fall from pain alone. There would only be one end to this battle, and Vaelthoros intended to force that outcome as soon as possible.

As the vines straining against the burning tree began to blacken, it summoned more.

They wrapped around the whole length of the trunk, coiling over it and then past it, rising toward the giant’s hands. More came after those, winding around its fingers, then its wrists, then farther still. Even while the older vines burned away, new ones replaced them. Layer after layer they climbed upward until they had reached the giant’s shoulders.

The fire giant grunted and tried to wrench itself back.

It let go of the tree and brought its free hand up, trying to tear the vines loose by brute force.

But it was just slow enough.

Vaelthoros pushed more mana into the binding vines, hardening them, strengthening them, and then it let the thorns hidden within them emerge.

At once, the spikes punched inward and a snapping sound followed. More thick, burning blood spilled from the giant’s shoulders.

It roared and almost dropped to one knee.

Flames burst up around its shoulders, burning the vines away completely, and ash scattered down through the air. But while the last of the blackened bindings fell, Spirit King Vaelthoros moved.

Until then, it had kept a little distance between them.

Now it closed it.

Its body swelled larger as it rushed in, roots thickening, bark stretching, until it was broad enough to seize the giant properly. Both of its hands clamped onto the wounded shoulder at once.

The fire giant reacted immediately, swinging one of its remaining arms to swat it away, but Vaelthoros took the blow and held on.

More pressure poured into its own limbs as it shifted its grip and pulled.

The giant screamed.

Its flaming fist came down at once, but before it could land properly, Vaelthoros called more vines up from the earth below. They surged between them, catching the strike and coiling around the giant’s other arm. Then Vaelthoros pulled again, harder.

The sound it had been waiting for came. A crack, then another. Then the wet snapping of flesh and bone under strain.

The giant pushed more flames through its body, trying to burn Vaelthoros’ hands away and force it back, but the spirit king did not care. It had fought worse things than this, and a little fire was not enough to make it loosen its grip. It only called more vines, each one laced with thorns. They wrapped farther around the arm and tore into it again and again, opening more flesh as they tightened.

More thick, burning blood spilled down onto the already scorched ground of the earth plane.

Vaelthoros could feel the giant’s panic growing.

It began ripping at the vines with more desperation now, trying to break free, so Vaelthoros answered by forcing even more strength into its body. It leaned fully into the pull.

At first the arm came loose only a little, the flesh stretching with ugly sounds that made the air feel tight.

Then it tore free all at once.

The fire giant’s scream rolled out over the plane, sharp enough to shake the forest below. Blood sprayed outward, splashing over the burned trees and the earth beneath them as the giant collapsed hard to the ground, writhing in pain.

Vaelthoros looked down at the severed arm still in its grasp. Then it threw it aside and moved to finish the giant while it still had the opening.

But before it could take another step, something brushed against its senses.

“Huh?!”

It let out a loud growl as the spirit king realised its sacred ground had been breached.

***

Even though most Mages never made it past the first five circles, those stages were still considered the simpler part of the path compared to what came after.

The fifth circle was difficult, certainly. Hard enough to stop most people for life. But the first four, for all their demands, did not truly contain anything exceptional in principle. The sixth circle was where that changed.

Because the sixth circle did not really begin with the body. It began with the soul. That was what made it so dangerous.

Very little of the process touched the flesh directly. What it truly affected was the soul itself, and that was exactly why people like Elias or Veridia had never seriously attempted it. The first step required something that, to most Mages of this era, might as well have been suicide.

You had to draw your soul out of your body.

With the magical knowledge available in this age, that alone was enough to kill a person. Kai was almost certain that most Mages didn't possess the proper understanding needed to anchor the soul safely to the body during the process. Without that, trying to reach the sixth circle would risk severing the bond between the two entirely.

And once that happened, death was all that remained.

That was why most Mages only attempted the sixth circle near the end of their lifespan. By then, if the attempt failed, there was at least some comfort in the fact that they had been close to death already.

Kai did not need to approach it that way. He knew the process.

He had never reached the sixth circle in his past life, but that had never been because he lacked the knowledge. It had been because he never had the environment for it. The mana required for a safe and stable ascent had always been beyond what his surroundings could provide.

That was no longer true.

Here, surrounded by the Elder Trees and drowning in more pure mana than most Mages would ever feel in ten lifetimes, Kai doubted he would find a safer place to attempt it.

So after drawing in a slow breath, he began circulating mana through his body.

He did it carefully, preparing himself for what he already knew was going to hurt far more than he liked to think about.

Reaching the sixth circle was not as simple as entering his astral space. That would have been easy by comparison.

What he actually needed to do was tear his soul out of his body, and to do that safely, he needed a soul spell. Not some simple one either. The structure for it was painfully complex. He had no doubt that Mages of this era used some other method, if they had one at all, because the spell he was about to use had only been developed during the second golden age of magic. Even so, nothing else matched it in safety when the goal was to sever the soul from the body temporarily without truly breaking the connection.

So he began with that.

He gathered mana into one hand, weaving it first into fine threads, then spreading and layering those threads until the spell structure began to take shape. It was dense with symbols, many of them delicate enough that a single flaw would have ruined the whole thing. Worse, the spell needed unaspected mana to function properly, which meant Kai had to remain careful not to let any of his elemental affinities bleed into the structure by accident.

That alone demanded complete focus.

Even with his improved control, it still took him more than a minute to finish building the spell.

Only once it was complete did he give it a last look and activate it.

The effect came immediately.

A jolt tore through his body so suddenly that it felt as though someone had driven lightning through him. For several seconds, the sensation did not fade. It only sat there, sharp and invasive, before something else followed it—a pull, deep at the center of him, so strange and unnatural that Kai froze before a groan escaped him.

Then the pulling intensified.

Within moments, it felt as if something had latched onto the core of his being and was trying to rip it free by force. Pain flooded through him with such violence that he almost lost track of everything else. He dimly heard voices behind him, knew the others were saying something, but he did not turn and did not answer. There was no room left in him for anything except enduring the spell while it kept tearing at him again and again.

Until, all at once, it worked.

One second he had been on the ground, half-curled into the pain, groaning and shouting through clenched teeth.

The next, he was floating above it. It was a strange thing to experience.

For a brief moment, it felt almost like regaining consciousness after death.

The world around him tilted, then seemed to bloom outward in light, and he immediately understood that he was no longer standing in quite the same world he had been in a moment ago. Souls did not exist fully within the same realm as physical beings. They occupied a different dimension entirely, one that merely intersected with the material world. And now that Kai existed there as a soul, that dimension was pulling at him.

It wanted to claim him.

He could feel that much clearly enough. Some greater current was trying to drag him deeper into itself, to pull him away from the physical plane and draw him into the place where countless other souls drifted after separation from flesh. But the spell had done its work well. Tendrils of soul-magic still tethered him to his body, holding him in place with fine strands that stretched downward to where his physical form now lay limp on the grass below.

Kai looked at it for a few moments.

Then he turned his attention outward.

The world in this state was almost painfully bright. Everything around him seemed flooded with a sharper kind of presence than before, and when he glanced toward his party members, they looked strangely slow, almost sluggish, as though their motions no longer belonged to the same pace as his own. That too was expected. Souls moved through a different layer of existence, and time did not flow there in quite the same way it did for the physical world.

That was one of the reasons Kai had been confident he could finish this in minutes.

He turned back toward his body and then tested himself properly, sending a wave of mana through his own soul to feel its structure.

As expected, it was stronger and more compact than he would have guessed from his own old standards. Merging with parts of Arzan’s soul had clearly changed it for the better. In some ways, that made the ascent safer, and reduced certain risks.

It didn’t, however, make the process easier.

Kai made a small motion that resembled breathing, even though true breath meant nothing in this state, and used it to feel the mana around him.

It was everywhere.

Not merely dense, but radiant like standing in a sea filled with lightning and trying to comprehend it all at once.

Souls felt more than human senses ever could.

And in a place like the spirit king’s garden, that became overwhelming very quickly. The mana was so dense, so alive, that Kai soon began feeling its ripples moving through him in waves. He took that as a warning to hurry. However strong his soul might be, remaining separated like this while still tied to a physical body was not something he could maintain for long. Every second that passed weakened the connection a little more.

So he began.

Using what was no longer just mana sense but something closer to soul perception, Kai spread nets of energy from himself and cast them wide through the garden. Through those nets, he started drawing in raw motes of mana.

The effect was immediate.

The moment the mana entered his soul, a strange tingling spread through it, sharp enough to make him tense. The feeling only grew the more he absorbed, but he kept going. That was the point of the sixth circle. It was not about the body. It was about expanding and cultivating the soul until it became strong enough to hold a denser, stronger form of unaspected mana—one powerful enough to support spells no Fifth-Circle Mage could cast no matter how large their reserves were.

Once he had gathered enough, Kai began moving it through his soul.

He made the mana swirl around him, pushing it into the structure of his soul itself, forcing it to ripple and glow brighter with each turn. The sensation was difficult to describe cleanly. It was like forcing yourself to keep eating long past the point of comfort, stuffing in more and more when your whole being was already telling you to stop. Unpleasant. Painful. Wrong.

But still, he endured it. That kind of discomfort was not enough to make him stop now.

So he kept absorbing. And then, all at once, something brushed against his soul.

The contact was light, but it was enough to snap every part of his attention outward. Kai turned immediately, instincts going taut, and there—

He saw it.

Something resembling an imp had pushed through the dimensional boundary and was rushing straight toward him.

***

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