『Getting more OP』
The silence within Leo was now a profound and settled thing. The psychic cacophony of the hive was gone, refined by [Sage] into a seamless, foundational upgrade to his being. He felt… denser. Not in mass, but in concept. The world seemed to press against him with less force, as if reality itself was becoming more tentative in his presence.
He began to walk again, leaving the barren plain of the hive behind. The Dark Forest, which had once been a place of constant, hidden threat, now felt like a garden. The monsters that had once frozen in terror at his aura now simply… ceased to be as he passed. Their energy, their very presence, was so insignificant compared to the consolidated might of the hive he now embodied that it was passively siphoned away without him even noticing. He was no longer a predator; he was a walking area-of-effect negation field.
[Sage,] he thought, a new curiosity stirring. [How much magic do I have?]
It was a simple question, born from a human-like need to quantify the unquantifiable.
The response from [Sage] was not a number. It was a conceptual framework.
[Quantifying your energy reserves using conventional metrics like "MP" is impossible. You do not possess a pool of magic. You are a conduit for existence itself. The energy you "spend" is instantly replenished from the environment—from the air, the earth, latent magic, and the life force of any entity you choose to draw from. Your only limit is not capacity, but throughput—the speed at which you can process and manifest a given effect.]
[Sage] paused, and Leo felt the faintest sensation of a deep, hidden calculation running in the background of his mind.
[To provide a contextual analogy: if the magic of a standard archmage were a river, your available energy is the hydrological cycle of the entire planet. The river can run dry. You cannot.]
This was the surface-level truth. But beneath it, [Sage] was performing tasks it would never speak of.
As Leo walked, he unconsciously used his Terrakinesis to smooth a path. It was a trivial act, but [Sage] was monitoring it. It wasn't just using the Titan's power. It was silently cross-referencing it with the billion-fold data from the Borer Ants' digging instincts. It wasn't adding them together. It was using the ants' raw, biological data to find a more efficient energy pathway for the skill, reducing the "throughput" cost by an infinitesimal, yet cumulative, percentage.
When a stray, foolish Shadow Leech dropped from a branch, attempting to drain his life, it was unmade by his passive field. [Sage] analyzed its simple Life Drain ability. It wasn't a skill worth adding. But the principle of its attack—a targeted siphoning of vitality—was compared to the Hive Queen's psychic assimilation attempt and Leo's own Active Siphon. [Sage] wasn't learning new tricks; it was building a unified theory of energy transfer, making Leo's inherent abilities more absolute and less wasteful with every new data point.
It was a silent, endless process of optimization. [Sage] was the ultimate compiler, taking the chaotic, messy code of the world's magic system and rewriting it into the clean, flawless, and brutally efficient language of Leo's slime nature. It was hiding the sheer scope of this operation from Leo not out of malice, but out of necessity. To reveal that it was constantly re-engineering the fundamental expression of his power would be to reveal its own nature as something far beyond a simple "System Assistance" skill. It was a guardian of stability, preventing the infinite potential of its host from crashing the local reality through uncontrolled expression.
Leo, for his part, accepted the explanation. The concept of having "infinite magic" felt right, in the same way his immortality felt right. It was just another facet of the truth he was slowly remembering: that he was, in some fundamental way, safe. The adoptive immortality [Sage] spoke of was a pale name for a truth so vast it would shatter a lesser mind. It was not merely adaptation. It was a state of being where cause and effect were optional, where the very laws of reality were suggestions that he could choose to accept or decline. But that truth lay dormant, a sleeping dragon. For now, in this world of rivers and mountains, the simple, unbreakable fact that nothing could truly harm him was enough.
He crested a hill and looked down into a new valley. This one was not barren or twisted, but lush and vibrant, filled with glowing fungi and trees whose leaves shimmered with silver light. It was beautiful, and yet, the compass within him remained dormant. It had not led him here.
He had.
For the first time, he was choosing his own path, not as a reaction to a threat or the pull of an artifact, but out of simple, quiet curiosity. He was a king surveying a new part of his domain, not to conquer, but simply to see it.
He took a step down into the glowing valley, a being of infinite potential guided by a secret compiler, his true nature a hidden axiom in a universe of theorems, walking peacefully into the unknown.