Second Life as a Soldier

I had mixed feelings leaving the Lieutenant’s office. A little sad because I would no longer be part of the lieutenant’s company, a little disturbed after learning the lieutenant’s family history and the darkness of noble society. But most of all, I was afraid. Even without knowing the exact details of my mana segregation experiment, I had received the attention of the Council and the Count. All of them were nobles and at least Tier-6 individuals. I did not know what would happen if they discovered the success of my experiment.

I also hoped I would not get assigned to some lieutenant who would restrict me. Working with Lieutenant Cicero had been a unique experience. While he was strict with rules, he also gave me freedom, allowing me to run my squad however I wanted while providing me with the knowledge required to do so efficiently.

Today, my fighting prowess, where I could go toe to toe against a low-level Tier-3 mercenary, was all thanks to Lieutenant Cicero. Even after the past year of limited conversations and a slightly strained relationship, I was only thankful for the time and effort the lieutenant had put into turning me from a low-level intelligence soldier into an officer.

Even in his last act as my superior, he provided me with journals which, even if they did not contain anything useful for my research, would still provide me with the method of how a mana core was formed. That was highly important for my next experiment.

I could use that theory to form a core outside the body and see if something like a non-elemental core even existed.

As soon as I entered the sergeants’ quarters, I made my way to the study table and started reading the journals.

Just reading the first few experiments made me almost sick. It was easy to see that these researchers were just people with almost no scientific understanding, fumbling around and hoping to hit some sort of jackpot. And in doing so, they had tortured the very people they were supposed to protect.

In the first journal, almost all the experiments were focused on trying to raise the elemental affinity of someone with around 40% affinity to 80%. From this, it was easy to guess that the lieutenant’s elemental affinity should lie somewhere between 40 and 50%.

The major inspiration for these experiments came from two things. The first was the already existing process left behind by the princess to increase a person’s mana affinity. The second was cases like Leif’s, where after being attacked by high-level elemental beasts, some people’s affinity increased to 80% or more.

The guiding principle in both cases was the same. If the human body was exposed to a high quality of elemental mana corresponding to their affinity, the affinity of the body would increase.

The princess’s method involved exposing the mana system of an unawakened child or someone in Tier-1 to high-quality mana through mana crystals and meditation techniques. It was a slow, painless method that required 10 to 15 years for affinity to increase from 65% to 80%, along with an exorbitant amount of wealth.

This made it a less suitable method for the experiments they were conducting, so they tried to replicate Leif’s situation, or what they called the shock method. In this method, they shocked the entire mana system of an individual with high-quality mana.

What they did not expect was that the results generated from this method were completely random. It did increase elemental affinity, but sometimes only by 5%, and sometimes by 50%. The problem was that none of their test subjects survived the shock method, with most of them dying within 15 days.

A poor, malnourished farmer could take only so much damage.

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Though there was a mention of a young kid whose affinity had been increased to 75% and who had survived until the end of the first journal, there was no mention of him in the second journal, so his current status was unknown.

But if I had to assume, he was dead by now. The last entry related to him was 70 years ago, and it was very hard for a normal commoner to survive that long, much less someone whose body had been severely damaged.

By the time I finished the first journal, I had lost my appetite to read any more of these torture methods. I knew I would have nightmares about what I had read.

Even though I was only reading about it, I could almost feel the pain those subjects had experienced. I had seen Leif after his injury. Even under the influence of painkillers, moving had been impossible for him. He had spent nearly a month unconscious, surrounded by people desperately trying to save him, not kill him.

Just imagining the despair those test subjects must have felt in their final moments was enough to make my stomach turn.

Yet, for some reason, I continued. I wanted to know what was in the next journal. Were there any successful experiments? Were there any outliers to be found?

In the second journal, the topic of their research changed. It looked like the researchers realized that trying to increase affinity was a gamble they could not take with the heir of their house, so they shifted to forcing people at the peak of Tier-3 to form cores.

I finally realized how the royal family had discovered these experiments. Finding people with low elemental affinity who were also at the peak of Tier-3 was not easy. From the birthplaces of the test subjects recorded in the journals, I could assume that House Cicero had abducted people from outside their territory. In fact, they had not stopped there. They had gone so far as to abduct people from different kingdoms, and their search had included not just humans, but even barbarians.

For the experiments in the second journal, they changed the surroundings and conditions at the time of core formation, forcing their test subjects, who had low elemental affinity, to form cores.

In the end, the results were the same. Even among these subjects, most died, while the unlucky few survived with their mana systems crippled.

Once I had satisfied my curiosity about the types of experiments, I approached the journals from an analytical perspective. I started arranging the data in tabular form, noting down details about the subjects, mainly their region of birth, elemental affinity, age, sex, class, type of experiment conducted, and the result of those experiments on their mana channels.

I also added my own reasoning on why those experiments had failed and what I would have done to make them successful.

Finally, after analyzing the journals for one week, I started to observe a pattern within them, though it was not completely clear to me yet. It felt as if the bodies of all these people had some unique way of interacting with non-elemental mana, and that interaction was directly dependent on elemental affinity.

This pattern was clearly visible in one test subject who came from a specific region where most people had an affinity with the earth element.

That subject had 40% affinity with the earth element, and he was the only test subject who came close to forming a core. During the experiment, the researchers used a mana crystal from the region where the subject was born, which was completely bizarre to me because the mana core and mana crystal of a region were completely different things. I did not know why they would even experiment with something like this.

Yet somehow, that subject came the closest to forming a core, completing 80% of the core formation process, only to be crippled at the end.

Just as one would expect from researchers like these, they thought they had discovered something, or were at least close to discovering something.

So, for the next ten experiments, they kidnapped people from these types of unique locations and gave them mana crystals from those regions, but none of those subjects performed even up to that standard.

If I had to guess, it had nothing to do with the region or the mana crystal, but rather with the unique interaction between non-elemental mana and the human body. My theory was that the first subject had nearly succeeded in forming a core because the composition of mana inside the mana crystal and the subject’s body were similar, allowing them to synchronize and make the process of core formation possible.

The only reason it failed was that his mana system did not fully synchronize with the mana crystal’s mana, leading to failure at the end.

After noting down my hypothesis, I finally stood up. I had delayed getting information about Velkar Town long enough. Now it was time to prepare to leave. My squad and I were leaving tomorrow. I could no longer postpone it.