Chapter 188: The battle continues (1/2)

”Thanks for the delivery,” Layn muttered, suddenly all calm. Without even a shred of hesitation, he threw his mana-covered hands away, straight towards the attacking monsters.

Slit.

By the time the claws and teeth of the invading horde could reach the archmage's skin, he had already sucked most of the energy out of the monsters' bodies. With nowhere else to go, the energy amassed in his flesh, reinforcing it.

As such, he was left without even the slightest scratch.

”Now, that feels good,” Layn raised his head, looking at the monsters around him. The time seemed to slow down, but it wasn't the case at all. It was Layn's battle instinct kicking in, a product of one of the many reinforcing spells he was craving to use.

Layn rushed ahead. With his hands acting as his swords, he managed to streamline the process of obtaining more stones to suck the energy from. He would make a cut, recall the mana from his hand to grab the stone, and then coat it all back with the same mana from before.

By leaving a small channel in his palm free from the influx of energy, he would then suck all the mana from the stone, unleashing a flood of fresh power all around his body.

'Now that I think about it,' Layn raised his eyes as he jumped from one monster to another, turning the hunter and the pray situation around all on his own. 'Wasn't it a bit too long since I last allowed myself to let some steam off?' he thought arrogantly, fealing how the heat of the battle shrouded his mind a little.

'No, that's not the case,' Layn thought a few moments later, already several tens of meters deep within the belly of the horde. 'That's not what I was thinking about,' he realized, though unable to picture just what he was thinking about. So then, to abate his hunger for power, he continued his culling, decreasing the number of the enemies simultaneously as he continued to grow in strenght.

'That's right,' Layn managed to crack the lock over his recent memory soon after, using a flood of energy from seven more monsters to create the necessary momentum. 'Isn't it nice to combine cultivation with real magic, after all,' Layn asked himself, smiling gently.

The method of dual-circulating mana within one's own body was possible for him only thanks to cultivation. While sucking so many stones in a quick succession strained his ability to absorb energy pretty quickly, this rampant energy in his core instantly rushed to heal the injuries.

For the next several minutes, Layn was locked in the struggle of two powers. One was the energy from the stones, constantly fueling his cultivation core and injuring the pathways all over his flesh. The other was the energy already in his core, one that he properly purified in the process of cultivation. Pushed out by the incoming energy from the stones, it had no other choice but to mend Layn's inner injuries, keeping the stable balance between the two seemingly opposing forces.

Layn had to spend the entire seven minutes, constantly on the verge of burning his cultivation out, to finally overcome this struggle.

It felt as if the mana found a new path towards his core, a path that was completely unexplored and deprived of energy. With the influx of energy now split between more outflows, the burden on Layn's inner part of the body greatly lessened.

But it was this new part of himself that he finally noticed that made all the difference.

For every bit of mana that Layn consumed, the world around him appeared to slow down. This time, not only as an effect of Layn's reinforcing ability. It was as if his mind unlocked its latent power, capable of processing the information at a much greater pace than before.

And the process of growth of this side of his was insane.

With the energy flocking into this newly opened area of cultivation, it almost instantly all sank in the path itself, reinforcing it. But while this process was strangely similar to how Layn treated Irea in the recent past, the archmage didn't feel even a tingle of pain.

It was as if instead of ripping apart his cells and rebuilding them anew, this mana provided those cells with so much energy that they simply morphed into the state, allowing them to accommodate more of it.

And with each instance of this happening, Layn's movements turned faster and faster while the world continued to revolve slower and slower.

'So that's what all those stars mean!' Layn suddenly had a moment of enlightenment.

He didn't really bother with what he still considered an inferior way of using the mana one had access to. But now that the power of his brain seemed to multiply by at least tenfold, he could no longer claim the cultivation to be so ridiculously weak as he believed it to be.

With no other choice, he had to acknowledge that, after all, there was some potential in this manner of using mana.

And he did all of that while running around the thinning formation of the enemies, killing anything that dared to stand in its path.