The next morning, I woke up to the sensation of a tiny, enthusiastic drummer practicing a solo directly behind my left temple.
I groaned, dragging my hand across my face. The dull, pulsing headache was annoying, but compared to the agonizing, full-body meat-grinder sensation I'd been waking up with for the past week, a headache felt like a luxury.
I blinked my single eye open and stared at the wooden ceiling. The room was quiet. Sunlight filtered through the cracks in the window shutters, painting thin, dusty stripes across the floorboards.
I pushed the heavy quilt off and sat up. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, bracing myself for the inevitable flare of pain in my ribs.
It didn't come.
Oh, I still felt stiff and sore, like I'd been used as a punching bag by an ogre, but the sharp, breathless agony was gone. I stood up slowly. My knees wobbled for a second before locking into place. I didn't immediately pitch forward. I didn't need to frantically grab the wall for support.
'Well, would you look at that,' I thought, tentatively rolling my right shoulder. 'I'm upgrading from "dying corpse" to "moderately injured peasant."'
As I turned to stretch my back, my foot bumped into something heavy on the mattress.
I looked down. Resting right in the center of the indented sheets was the crystal sphere.
I frowned, rubbing the back of my neck. 'Didn't I leave you on the bedside table last night?' I could have sworn I set it down next to the water cup before I passed out. But my memory from last night was a foggy, exhausted blur, so I shrugged it off.
I picked up the heavy glass orb. Inside, the little blue wisp of light was still floating around, but it looked different today. It was brighter. Denser. It didn't look like a dying ember anymore; it looked like a tiny, contained heartbeat.
Curiosity, as always, got the better of my survival instincts.
'Just a drop,' I told myself. 'I'm not going to fry my core for a rock.'
Closing my eye, I carefully squeezed out a microscopic drop of my recovering mana and pushed it into the surface of the glass.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The crystal didn't just accept the mana. It inhaled it. It slurped the energy out of my hand with the greedy, aggressive suction of a starving beast.
"Woah—!" I gasped, my eye flying open.
I tried to pull back, but a strange suction held my palm against the glass. The sphere pulled more, dragging my pathetic reserves out of my pathways. I grit my teeth, letting it feed just a little longer, watching the blue wisp inside flare and dance frantically with the new energy.
When a sharp, familiar ache finally bloomed in the center of my chest, warning me that my core was nearing the danger zone, I forcefully severed the connection.
I yanked my hand back, panting lightly.
The crystal sphere dimmed back to its normal, lazy glow. It sat perfectly still in my hand, looking completely harmless and inanimate.
"You little parasite," I muttered, glaring at it. "You look so innocent, but you just robbed me blind."
Still, I couldn't bring myself to be truly angry. I set the orb safely on the bedside table—making absolutely sure it was there this time—and walked out of the small room.
I didn't need the makeshift wooden cane today. My balance was still a little off due to the missing left eye, but my legs felt solid enough to carry me. It had to be the System, I reasoned. Even completely fractured and offline, my passive biological regeneration was probably working in overdrive.
I stepped out into the main living area. Silas was sitting at the sturdy wooden table, polishing a weathered leather boot, while Elara hummed a low tune near the hearth, stirring a pot of porridge.
"Morning," I rasped. My throat was still dry, but my voice sounded a bit more human today.
Silas looked up, his thick grey eyebrows raising in surprise. "Well, look who's walking on his own two feet. Figured you'd be bedridden for another month, boy."
"He's too stubborn to stay down," Elara added without turning around, though I could hear the smile in her voice. "Sit. Eat. You need the meat on your bones."
I washed up quickly, pulling on the set of Silas's old clothes they had lent me. The linen shirt swallowed my shoulders, and the trousers had to be rolled up twice at the ankles, but they were clean.
After forcing down a bowl of porridge, I felt a restless itch in my muscles. Sitting around was driving me crazy. I needed to know exactly what I had lost, and what I had left.
I excused myself and walked out the back door into the small, fenced-in yard behind the cottage. There was a chopping block, a rusted axe, and a pile of unsplit logs. Lying near the fence was a perfectly straight, sturdy branch about the length of a broadsword.
I picked it up.
It felt incredibly light in my hand. I adjusted my grip, sliding my feet into the opening stance of the [Void-Walker Swordsmanship] I had acquired from the underground trial.
Or, at least, I tried to.
I stood there, the stick raised, my feet planted in the dirt. I waited for the instinct to kick in. I waited for the profound, reality-bending knowledge of spatial strikes and conceptual cuts to flood my mind.
Nothing happened.
My mind was blank.
I lowered the stick slightly, a cold chill washing over me. I squeezed my eye shut, digging into my own memories, trying to recall the footwork. The angles. The breathing technique.
It was gone.
It wasn't just suppressed by my lack of mana. The actual knowledge had been erased. It felt like walking into a massive library only to find the entire history section burned to the ground.
'He didn't just steal the Authority,' I realized, my grip tightening on the wood until my knuckles turned white. 'He ripped the knowledge right out of my brain. He stole the art itself.'
A wave of pure, concentrated frustration boiled in my chest.
"Fine," I hissed through my teeth. "If I don't have the art, I'll just use my arms."
I raised the stick high above my head and swung it downward in a basic, brutal arc. The wood whistled through the air, stopping abruptly an inch above the grass.
Pain immediately flared in my shoulder joint.
I ignored it. I pulled it back and swung again. And again. No mana. No pressure. No spatial distortion. Just pure, pathetic physical exertion from a broken body.
By the tenth swing, my arms were shaking so violently I couldn't hold the grip. The stick slipped from my sweaty palms and clattered into the dirt.
I stood there, chest heaving, staring at the fallen branch.
"Pathetic," I whispered.
I let my legs give out, dropping onto the soft grass. I crossed my legs into a lotus position, resting my trembling hands on my knees. Physical training was a bust. Let's check the engine.
I closed my eye and sank into meditation.
I looked inward, visualizing my mana circuit. It was a depressing sight. My core, which used to blaze like a contained star, was shriveled and cracked. It barely registered as an E-Rank capacity.
I took a slow, deep breath, reaching out to the ambient mana in the air. Without my Authority, it was like trying to drink an ocean through a cocktail straw. I pulled the microscopic particles of energy into my body, guiding them through my damaged veins with agonizing care. One wrong move, one sudden influx, and the pain would drop me to the floor again.
It was like trying to thread a needle while riding in a carriage with square wheels.
Hours drifted by. The sun climbed higher, baking my shoulders through Silas's oversized shirt. My progress was so slow it felt like the world itself was mocking me. I had managed to increase my capacity by maybe a single, pitiful drop.
But then—
Deep in the absolute quiet of my meditation, something shifted.
Down near my dantian, right beside the cracked remnants of my core, a tiny spark flared. It was a speck of white light. It lasted for only a microsecond—a blink-and-you-miss-it flash—but in that fraction of a second, I felt a distinct, humming connection.
It felt exactly like the crystal sphere.
My eye snapped open. I gasped for air, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm.
'What the hell was that?' I thought, pressing a hand to my stomach.
The spark was gone, but the ghost of its warmth remained. It wasn't my mana. It was something else entirely. Something sleeping inside me.
"Mr. Not-Superhero!"
Lily's voice shattered the quiet of the backyard. I turned to see her leaning out the back window of the cottage.
"Grandma Elara says if you don't come wash up for lunch, she's feeding your portion to the neighbor's pig!"
"I'm coming!" I called back, pushing myself off the ground. My mana capacity hadn't improved in any meaningful way, but my mood had completely flipped. My thoughts were consumed by that tiny white spark.