CAIUS: Crown of Threads and Shadows

The following evening, Caius sat cross-legged inside the ruined stone structure with the strange beast core resting before him. The fire had been reduced to a low flame, casting a dim orange glow across the ancient walls while most of the chamber remained buried in shadow. Sereth sat across from him, watching carefully as he prepared to begin the technique he had explained the previous night.

Sereth had gone over the process several times, ensuring Caius understood every part before attempting it. The beast core would normally be placed against his sternum, allowing its mana to enter his body through his pathways. Along with the useful energy, however, would come the remnants of the beast’s instincts, elemental traces, and foreign mana signatures. Those impurities were what made absorbing a beast core dangerous.

The Calamity Forge was designed to deal with them. A practitioner would circulate his own mana at increasing speed, creating friction within the pathways until the energy generated the internal Calamity Flame. That flame would burn away the foreign impurities while leaving behind the usable mana. Once purified, the remaining energy could then be forced into the practitioner’s own core, strengthening its structure and increasing its density.

Caius understood the risks; Sereth had made certain of that.

Placing the violet beast core against his sternum, Caius closed his eyes.

”Remember what I taught you,” Sereth reminded him.

”I will.”

”Do not rush.”

Caius steadied his breathing and reached inward, searching for his mana core.

Sereth watched him closely. At first, there was nothing unusual. Caius’s breathing slowed as he entered meditation, and his aura gradually became more concentrated. Then Sereth felt something change.

The strange presence he had sensed before began to emerge.

Sereth’s eyes narrowed. He had never been able to see the true color of Caius’s mana core. His abilities allowed him to perceive mana and sense its movement, but he did not possess the gift necessary to see another person’s core clearly. With Caius, however, there had always been something peculiar about the energy surrounding him.

Every so often, Sereth would catch a brief glimpse of something dark, only for it to disappear. It never remained long enough for him to understand what he was seeing, appearing and vanishing so quickly that Sereth had begun to wonder if his senses were deceiving him.

Now it appeared again. For the briefest instant, Sereth sensed a darkness within Caius that seemed deeper than ordinary mana. He could not properly see its color, yet he could feel its presence before it vanished once more.

Sereth had barely begun to wonder what it meant when the beast core against Caius’s chest began to glow. Violet energy seeped from the sphere and entered Caius’s body.

Sereth expected the process to begin normally, anticipating that Caius would circulate his mana through his pathways, generate the Calamity Flame, and begin burning away the impurities. Instead, something completely unexpected happened.

The air around Caius suddenly became heavy as an unfamiliar pressure spread through the chamber. For a fraction of a second, Sereth caught another glimpse of the darkness within Caius, and this time it moved.

It was fast enough that Sereth could barely follow it. The dark energy appeared within Caius’s body and moved directly toward the beast core.

The violet sphere trembled, and then it disappeared.

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Sereth stared at the empty space before Caius. The beast core had not cracked, nor had it dissolved; it had simply vanished.

”What...” Sereth began, stopping himself as he realized what he was sensing.

The beast core had not disappeared. It had been consumed.

The violet energy that had entered Caius’s body was being pulled inward at an incredible speed. Sereth could still sense the beast’s mana, but it was rapidly vanishing.

He had expected the impurities to remain within the energy until the Calamity Flame burned them away. Instead, the impurities were disappearing with everything else.

Sereth leaned forward slightly, his eyes fixed on Caius as an unsettling realization took root: the impurities were not being burned, they were being devoured.

Inside Caius, however, the experience was completely different. He had activated Inner Sight, the physical world fading from his awareness as his perception turned inward. His mana pathways appeared before him, glowing with the energy moving through his body. At the center of his inner perception rested the black sphere that had become his mana core.

Caius had seen it before, but he had never seen it behave like this.

The beast core appeared within his perception, surrounded by violent violet energy. Its mana was chaotic, carrying the residual instincts of the creature that had once possessed it.

Caius expected flames, having been told to generate the Calamity Flame to burn away the impurities. There were no flames. Instead, darkness began moving around his core as the black energy started spinning.

At first it moved slowly, but its speed rapidly increased until it formed a dark vortex around the beast core. The violet energy resisted the pull, twisting violently as the remnants of the beast’s instincts surged through it.

Caius felt something foreign: a hunger, a predatory instinct, the memory of stalking prey through the darkness of the Abyss.

Then the black vortex pulled harder, dragging the entire beast core toward the black sphere. Caius watched as the darkness swallowed it whole.

There was no fire and nothing burned. The beast’s impurities were not destroyed; they were being transformed.

The chaotic violet energy began twisting within the black vortex as its foreign mana was compressed and reshaped. The residual instincts were stripped apart, while the poisonous traces within the energy were broken down and incorporated into something new.

Caius watched in silence as the impurities themselves became part of the forging process. The energy condensed until what had once been chaotic and poisonous formed into a new sphere of dark violet energy within the vortex.

It pulsed once, and then the black core moved. The newly formed energy was pulled toward it and disappeared inside as the black core consumed it.

Everything was gone: the beast core, the foreign mana, the impurities, and even the residual will of the creature. Nothing remained.

Caius waited for his core to change, expecting it to become larger or brighter, or to feel some overwhelming surge of power after consuming such a powerful beast core. Instead, the black sphere slowly stopped spinning, the darkness settled, and the core became still.

Caius continued watching it through Inner Sight, but nothing happened. The black core simply returned to the same quiet state it had occupied before, almost as if it had eaten the beast core and then gone back to sleep.

Caius slowly opened his eyes to the ruined chamber around him. The fire still burned beside the stone walls, and Sereth was staring directly at him.

Caius looked down at his hands before touching his chest. ”Something happened.”

Sereth remained silent.

Caius frowned and looked toward the stone where the beast core had rested, his eyes widening slightly. ”The beast core... it disappeared.”

Sereth looked at the empty stone before returning his gaze to Caius. ”Yes.”

Caius placed his hand against his chest and searched inward with his perception once more. His black core was still there, feeling almost exactly as it had before. There was no violent surge of energy, no foreign mana remained inside his pathways, and there was no sensation of the beast’s instincts. Everything was gone.

”I don’t feel anything,” Caius said, looking up.

Sereth continued studying him. ”Do not attempt to use another beast core until I understand what happened.”

”All right,” Caius nodded.

Sereth looked toward the darkness beyond the ruined structure. His expression remained stoic, but his thoughts were anything but calm.

The Calamity Forge had not worked as it was supposed to. There had been no Calamity Flame, and the impurities had not been burned away; the black core had simply consumed everything.

Sereth looked back at Caius, remembering the brief glimpses he had caught ever since the boy formed his core. That strange darkness had always appeared for an instant before vanishing, almost as though it wanted to remain hidden from the world. Now Sereth wondered whether the core itself had been hiding its true nature.

The Vel’drin family had kept records of generations of warriors who possessed their unique mana cores. Their abilities had been documented, their techniques preserved, and their bloodline carefully studied. Yet nothing in those records had prepared Sereth for what he had just witnessed.

The black core had devoured the beast core, devoured the impurities with it, and then gone silent again, as though nothing had happened at all.