Chapter 37: Advanced to C-rank
The training chamber had finally gone quiet.
Caelus stood at its center, staring at the status window floating before him. The room still carried the remains of the last few days: dried blood in the grooves of the stone, discarded training weapons, and the faint residue of spent mana clinging to the air.
He ignored all of it.
The numbers mattered more.
---
Name: Caelus Vespera
Rank: D
Potential: D
Affinity: Water
Attributes:
· Strength: D-
· Speed: D
· Stamina: D+
· Agility: D+
· Intelligence: D+
· Mana: D+
Skills:
· Intermediate Swordsmanship [D - 89%]
· Twilight Circuit [D - 53%]
---
Caelus read through the display twice.
That was it.
After the labyrinth, the Eclipse chamber, Eve, Elysia, and enough fights to qualify as a personal vendetta against his own body, his foundation had barely changed.
Strength was the only attribute that had moved noticeably, and even that had only crawled from E+ to D-. Everything else remained stubbornly close to where it had been.
Compared with the students preparing for the Primordial Academy, he wasn’t merely behind.
He was embarrassingly behind.
Potential was still D.
Caelus stared at the letter.
The system had apparently decided that everything he’d done so far still amounted to "average at best."
Potential described the rate of growth.
It said nothing about what could be built through force, knowledge, or sheer refusal to remain where he was.
His combat knowledge had already outgrown his body. His understanding of magic had outgrown his mana capacity, and even the Eclipse Ring could show him more than his current foundation could safely process.
He wasn’t lacking answers, but he was lacking the machinery to use them.
He reached into his spatial ring and withdrew the Water-aligned core.
Blue light pulsed beneath its surface, dense enough that he could feel the mana before activating the Eclipse Ring.
It had cost nearly everything he’d earned from selling information.
Money that could have bought comfort.Contacts.Better equipment.
He had spent it on something that might kill him.
Caelus examined the core.
At least it had the decency to be expensive before trying to murder him.
He placed the core on the floor and took his position in the center of the formation. Several smaller blue orbs had been arranged around him, each one containing enough mana to support the process once the core’s reserves began to fall.
He sat in a lotus position and closed his eyes.
He knew the theory.
Forming a core meant forcing mana through the body’s circuits, widening and stabilizing the pathways until they could sustain the flow required to form a permanent magical center. The circuit had to adapt to the affinity being used, then redirect that flow toward the location where the core would eventually form.
Normally, the process was gradual.His problem was that he didn’t have time for that.
Twilight Circuit: 53%
His circuit was barely past the halfway mark.
A sane person would have waited.
Caelus had never been particularly attached to sane decisions.
The academy examination had been moved forward, and his current foundation was nowhere near enough.
Waiting was safer.
It was also useless.
Caelus opened his eyes and looked at the core.
He was going to force the process.
He activated the Eclipse Ring.
His perception expanded.
The Water-aligned core stopped feeling like an object and became a structure.
Mana density. Flow. Pressure. Temperature. Cohesion.
The tiny movements within the core became distinct enough for him to follow.
Then he turned that perception inward.
His own circuits emerged within his awareness, uneven and incomplete, with narrow sections struggling to contain even ordinary mana circulation.
There you are.
Now, he could perceive the internal movement of mana clearly enough to guide it deliberately.
Caelus drew the first current from the core.
Mana flooded his circuits, cool and dense, spreading through the familiar pathways beneath his skin.
He guided it forward rather than forcing the flow.
The pressure increased.
He adjusted, continuing to feed the current forward and altering its path whenever the Ring showed him resistance ahead.
Twilight Circuit: 61%
He continued. The mana pushed deeper, reaching sections of the circuit that had never been fully developed. A dull heat spread through his chest and shoulders, an internal pressure that pressed against his spine.
Twilight Circuit: 67%
The next section resisted.
The pathway was too narrow.
Caelus slowed the flow, but the mana didn’t care.
Pressure built behind the obstruction until a deeper pain spread through his chest and shoulders, seeming to come from inside the bones themselves.
Twilight Circuit: 74%
He forced the mana through anyway. The obstruction yielded, but the passage felt raw and overstretched. He could feel the circuit straining to contain the flow.
Then the mana reached an incomplete section. The pathway simply stopped, the circuit unfinished, designed for a body that had never progressed far enough to need it. The mana could not pass through. It accumulated against the dead end until the pressure became unbearable.
The flow reversed.
Backflow.
The current tore backward through the pathways he’d already opened, ripping through them with enough force to make his entire body jerk.
His teeth locked together.
Heat flooded his chest, and blood slipped from his nose.
Another thin line of blood escaped from the corner of his eye, followed by warmth beneath his ears.
His hands shook against his knees.
Twilight Circuit: 81%
The number climbed despite the failure.
He could stop.
The thought arrived with perfect clarity. Stop now, preserve the circuit, recover, and try again after weeks of preparation.
His fingers tightened.
He continued, pushing the Ring harder.
The world sharpened, and his heartbeat became distinct.
He felt blood moving beneath his skin, water shifting through his tissues, heat spreading through his muscles, and moisture clinging to every surface in the chamber.
Mana was everywhere.
Inside him.
Around him.
Inside the core.
The distinctions began to collapse beneath the sheer volume of information.
Precision became noise.
Something brushed the edge of his awareness.
A whisper.
...Xæ’rith....
He could not tell whether it was real or imagined. He could not tell where it came from. He did not have time to analyze it.
Twilight Circuit: 84%
Caelus forced himself to ignore the noise and returned his attention to the only thing that mattered: the circuit.
He found the obstructions, the damaged sections and the pressure building behind them.
He redirected the current around the weakest portion, then fed it back through the pathway in smaller pulses.
Twilight Circuit: 89%
His body began to shake despite every effort to control it.
Blood ran down his face and darkened the collar of his shirt. Sweat rolled from his skin in fine streams, carrying traces of blood with it.
His breathing had become shallow, his thoughts were beginning to lose their edges.
Twilight Circuit: 94%
He found the place where the core was supposed to form.
It was a pressure point within his consciousness, something he could sense but had never been able to reach.
Mana gathered there, compressing.
Caelus gritted his teeth.
Not yet.
The mana pressed against it, and the resistance was immense. His vision swam and his thoughts fragmented. He could feel himself losing coherence.
He forced the mana forward.
Twilight Circuit: 100%
The structure began to form.
It tugged at his awareness, drawing his concentration inward until everything outside that single point began to disappear.
Caelus held the structure together through sheer concentration, maintaining the pressure while the forming core trembled against the limits of his control. His circuit strained beneath the final surge of mana, threatening to collapse before the structure could stabilize.
He forced the flow into alignment.
Something inside him locked into place.
The pressure that had been tearing through his body vanished, replaced by a steady current of mana flowing through the completed circuit and into the newly formed core.
Caelus released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. His entire body felt hollow, as though whatever strength had carried him through the formation had been spent in the final seconds.
That almost killed me.
He barely finished the thought before his vision dimmed and his body gave out beneath him.
---
When Caelus opened his eyes, the training chamber looked exactly as he remembered it, but his perception of it had changed completely.
Mana no longer felt like some distant force waiting to be shaped; he could sense its presence throughout the room, distinguish its density, and follow the faint currents moving through the air and along the stone.
Moisture clung to the walls, collecting in the smallest cracks, while the mana circulating through his body followed a complete path through the Twilight Circuit and returned to the Mind Core at its center.
He could actually feel the structure now.
It was stable.
The Eclipse Ring’s enhanced awareness no longer felt like pure overload. The new Mind Core gave his mind a place to process what the Ring showed him.
This was the true feeling of C-rank. His relationship with magic had fundamentally changed.
He opened his status.
---
Name: Caelus Vespera
Rank: C
Potential: D
Affinity: Water
Path: Mage
Attributes:
· Strength: D-
· Speed: D
· Stamina: D+
· Agility: D+
· Intelligence: D+
· Mana: D+
Skills:
· Intermediate Swordsmanship [D - 89%]
· Twilight Circuit [D - 53%]
---
Path: Mage.
So it was official.
He had spent years training his body to wield a sword, yet now he was on the path of a mage. The thought would have irritated him once. Now, it simply felt like another step forward.
He sat up slowly, allowing his body to adjust. The worst of the pain was gone, but every muscle still carried the aftermath of what he had forced himself through.
He took a breath.
Something was different.
Moisture.
He could feel it immediately, scattered throughout the chamber in minute traces.
Vapor drifted through the air with every current, gathering more densely near the cooler stone. He could sense the moisture in his own breath as it left his lungs, the faint condensation it left behind before disappearing into the surrounding air.
Then he sensed it in his own blood.
He could feel it moving through his body with a clarity that had never existed before. Each pulse sent another wave through his veins, its rhythm synchronized with the beating of his heart. He could distinguish the warmer flow beneath his skin from the cooler moisture resting against it.
He could even feel the residual water within his muscles and tissues, subtle movements that had always been there but had remained completely invisible to him.
Caelus raised one hand.
"Cleanse."
Mana responded immediately.
The dried blood and sweat vanished from his skin and clothes in a smooth wave. The spell required almost no conscious effort. Light followed, then Spark, each forming with far less resistance than before.
He studied his hand.
The difference wasn’t simply that he had more mana now.
His entire perception of his own affinity had changed.
Before, Water had been something he manipulated.
Now, it was everywhere.
The Eclipse Ring had shown him traces of it before, but without a proper foundation, that information had been difficult to process. Now his Mind Core gave that perception somewhere to settle, allowing him to separate each sensation instead of drowning in all of them at once.
The breakthrough had changed his foundation, but he had no intention of mistaking a foundation for mastery.
He still had an academy to enter.
The corrupt king to kill.
And far too many things standing between him and the future he intended to survive.
He flexed his fingers once, feeling the faint movement of moisture across his skin.
The Mind Core had given him the foundation.
Now he would find out what he could build with it.