Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Pain had accompanied Lucavion for long enough that he had learned to distinguish its dialects.

A torn muscle spoke differently from a cracked rib. Mana exhaustion carried a hollow heaviness that spread outward from the core, while damaged meridians burned along narrow paths beneath the flesh, sharp enough that following the pain almost allowed him to trace their route with a finger. What he felt now belonged somewhere between the latter two.

His core was under tension.

The Flame of Equinox sat deep within him, stable but burdened, feeding three manifestations while the chamber repeatedly twisted the mana surrounding them. Each time one sphere drifted, Lucavion corrected it. Each time its surface bent, he tightened it. When the formation compressed the surrounding mana, he pushed outward; when the pressure thinned, he supplied what the manifestation had lost.

Every answer began inside him.

That was the problem.

The chamber shifted again.

A current swept diagonally across the platform, catching the sphere above his shoulder before striking the other two a heartbeat later. Lucavion felt the distortion through the connection he maintained with each manifestation and responded almost immediately, but his correction travelled outward through his meridians with enough force that a hot line tightened beneath his ribs.

"Gh..."

His teeth came together.

The upper sphere recovered.

The pain remained.

’Annoying.’

That word had stopped being adequate several minutes ago.

Another instruction came from beyond the formation.

"Raise the forward manifestation. Compress the left. Maintain the third."

Elir.

Lucavion heard him clearly, although the professor’s voice seemed farther away than before.

He lifted the first sphere.

Compressed the second.

Held the third.

Then the chamber changed its mind.

Mana thickened around his left side while a weaker opposing current rose from below, and the two pressures reached his manifestations at slightly different moments. Lucavion’s core tightened again as he corrected both.

His breath scraped through his throat.

This body had endured worse.

Much worse.

It had been rebuilt twice, dragged through battlefields, filled with energies that should have torn an ordinary Four-Star apart and forced to continue moving while blood ran out of places blood was generally expected to remain inside. Even among cultivators of the same rank, Lucavion’s physical foundation had become absurd.

Yet durability solved only part of the problem.

A stronger bridge could carry greater weight.

It could still collapse if someone kept twisting it from both ends.

The pressure settled upon his core again, pulled outward through the meridians carrying his mana, and for a brief moment Lucavion tasted iron.

His eyes narrowed.

’I’ve felt this before.’

The realization came without warning.

A spear.

Black armor.

Wind screaming around a rooftop.

Aldric.

The memory surfaced with enough clarity that Lucavion almost felt the old wound open along his side.

Back then, the gap had been ridiculous.

Aldric’s Six-Star body had moved beneath an Aura Body that turned mana itself into an extension of flesh. Every swing carried a weight Lucavion could scarcely receive, and every collision forced his weaker cultivation to answer something it had never been built to endure.

Lucavion had answered anyway.

He remembered lying broken beneath him, his body refusing commands while Aldric’s storm gathered overhead. He remembered watching the Aura Body surrounding the knight and understanding, in that strange clarity that sometimes came when death stood close enough to touch, that brute force was only the surface of what Aldric had done.

So Lucavion had imitated it.

Poorly.

Violently.

He had wrapped Starlight around himself, then forced Flame of Equinox into the incomplete construction when the first core alone could not sustain it. He had created something his rank had no business creating and paid for every second of it through his veins, bones, core and flesh.

At the time, survival had been enough.

There had been no room to examine why it had worked.

Lucavion’s right sphere buckled.

He dragged his attention back.

The structure recovered before Elir could call another warning.

Sweat slipped beneath his collar.

’What did I do back then?’

The obvious answer was useless.

He had used more power.

Two cores.

A stronger body.

Desperation.

Those were circumstances, not principles.

And one of those cores currently sat sealed within him, silent behind Vitaliara’s work. There would be neither Starlight nor Void arriving to rescue him today. The Flame of Equinox was the only reservoir answering his call, and continuing to squeeze more from it would simply deepen the strain already collecting through his meridians.

So what had changed against Aldric?

Lucavion closed his eyes for half a breath.

He remembered the sensation.

The Aura Body.

Aldric had worn his mana.

That was how Lucavion had understood it then.

A layer over flesh.

A second body built from power.

And when Lucavion copied it...

His eyes opened.

The chamber struck again.

This time he was late.

The sphere to his left flattened sharply, its far edge tearing open before Lucavion forced the mana together.

Pain stabbed through his core.

His knee almost bent.

"Lucavion."

Elir’s voice.

He ignored it.

Because something had begun bothering him far more than the pain.

’I didn’t hold it.’

The thought seemed stupid at first.

Of course he had controlled the technique.

It had been his mana, his body, his command.

Yet that was different from what he was doing now.

Three spheres floated around him.

Lucavion was controlling the left sphere.

He was controlling the right sphere.

He was controlling the one above him.

Every fluctuation reached him as a problem, and every solution returned from him as a correction. He had made three additional limbs and then insisted upon moving every invisible muscle himself.

Against Aldric, he had done something else.

He had first understood the shape.

A body.

A layer.

A boundary that belonged around him.

Then he had poured power into that understanding.

He hadn’t spent every heartbeat deciding where the mana covering his shoulder should sit compared to the mana around his knee. Once the structure existed, the power had followed it.

His brow slowly furrowed.

’...Structure.’

The word felt unpleasant.

More unpleasant than it had any right to.

Something old moved beneath it.

A training courtyard.

A spear too heavy for smaller hands.

Mana instructors speaking patiently at first, then less patiently after the fifth failure.

Again.

Follow the circulation.

Again.

Hold the structure.

Again.

Why are you losing it?

Again.

His brother succeeding.

His sister improving.

Lucavion trying until his meridians hurt and the adults around him began using softer voices, which somehow felt worse than anger.

Poor mana control.

Poor compatibility.

Poor talent.

A child who worked very hard and remained disappointing.

His mouth tightened.

’Ah.’

There it was.

Lucavion had never decided to avoid magic.

That would have been easier to notice.

He had simply built everything else.

Gerald showed him that his body had been taught the wrong direction, and for the first time mana answered him rather than recoiling from him. From there Lucavion learned cultivation, then combat, then Starlight, then the strange darkness hiding between the stars.

But when he created something new, where did it go?

Into his body.

Onto his blade.

Through a thrust.

Across a sword line.

Into an enemy.

Even Flame of Equinox followed the same habit. He coated steel with it, fired it from his palm when distance demanded it, drove it through wounds, or used it to reinforce the immediate logic of battle.

Always something he could feel directly.

Always something connected to his hand.

’You really are petty.’

He wasn’t sure whether the insult belonged to himself or the child whose failures still occupied corners of his mind Bruce had never consciously entered.

Probably both.

The chamber’s pressure rose.

Lucavion inhaled slowly.

The three spheres trembled around him.

His first instinct was already forming the corrections.

Push the left.

Tighten the right.

Raise the upper boundary.

He stopped.

Pain immediately pulled through his meridians as the manifestations began drifting.

"Lucavion?"

Elir sounded sharper this time.

Lucavion barely heard him.

’Don’t correct them.’

The thought felt absurd.

The entire examination was about control.

But perhaps that was exactly what he had misunderstood.

Control did not have to mean personally holding every grain of mana in place.

A swordsman controlled his weapon because the hand remained attached to it.

Magic...

Magic could leave the hand.

The realization was painfully obvious once it existed.

Lucavion looked at the left sphere.

Until now, he had thought of its edge as something he constantly shaped.

What if the edge could remember?

He reached toward the manifestation through the thread of mana connecting it to his core, but instead of pushing against the distortion, he concentrated upon the condition he wanted.

Round.

Here.

This size.

This density.

Simple things.

He impressed them into the mana as sensations rather than words, the same way he remembered the reference field from the first exercise.

Then he loosened his grip.

The sphere moved.

Lucavion’s heart skipped.

It drifted almost two inches with the chamber’s current.

For a moment he thought he had been wrong.

Then its surface tightened.

The distortion travelled around the edge rather than through the center, and the sphere settled into its shape again.

Lucavion stared.

’Again.’

He turned toward the second.

Location.

Size.

Pressure.

Boundary.

He gave it the shape.

Then stopped babysitting it.

The formation changed.

The second sphere shifted under the current, bent slightly, and returned.

The correction was rough.

Crude.

Slower than Lucavion would have managed himself.

But it happened with only a fraction of the pull against his meridians.

His eyes widened.

Something almost childish passed through his expression.

’Oh.’

Now he understood why mages bothered with all those ridiculous structures.

Perhaps circles, formations, spell arrangements and whatever other words Selenne enjoyed throwing around were more than elaborate methods of making simple things sound respectable.

They were memory.

Instructions left inside mana.

A way of deciding what something should do before it was forced to do it.

The third sphere nearly collapsed while he was distracted.

Lucavion laughed once beneath his breath.

"Right."

He caught it.

Then rebuilt the way he was thinking.

The chamber increased the output requirement.

He felt the command through Elir’s instruction and fed more mana outward.

The old strain started climbing immediately.

Lucavion refused the habit this time.

Instead of controlling three larger manifestations, he strengthened the framework holding each one.

The difference was clumsy at first.

His left sphere overcorrected.

The right one rotated when it should have remained fixed.

The upper manifestation thickened unevenly along one edge.

He adjusted the conditions.

Each correction taught him something.

Too rigid, and the chamber’s current fought the structure directly.

Too loose, and the sphere wandered.

So he allowed movement inside limits.

A boundary rather than a prison.

’You can move.’

The left sphere shifted.

’You simply return here.’

A current struck.

It moved.

Then returned.

The pressure against his core lessened.

Lucavion inhaled.

For the first time in several minutes, the breath reached the bottom of his lungs without catching.

The ache along his meridians remained as a warm warning, but fresh pain had stopped accumulating.

Another environmental shift came.

Then another.

The three spheres swayed inside the turbulence like lanterns suspended beneath invisible strings, their surfaces changing subtly with each disturbance before settling back into the conditions Lucavion had given them.

His core remained steady.

Lucavion’s expression slowly changed.

The grin disappeared.

Wonder replaced it.

Small.

Private.

Dangerous.

’I’ve been doing this wrong.’

Perhaps "wrong" was unfair.

His method worked beautifully in battle.

For a single blade.

A single line.

A single attack.

When everything passed through the sword and every decision existed for only a fraction of a second, direct control was faster. Sharper. More Lucavion.

But the moment he asked his mana to exist in several places, maintain several purposes and endure without his hand guiding every breath...

his method became expensive.

He had never noticed because his fights rarely demanded otherwise.

The sword had hidden the weakness.

His instincts had hidden it.

His body had endured enough punishment to hide the rest.

Until someone built a room specifically designed to keep increasing the burden.

Lucavion looked toward the chamber walls.

Then toward Marcus.

His smile returned.

This time there was genuine gratitude buried somewhere beneath the mockery.

’How unfortunate for you.’

Whatever had been done to this examination, whoever had arranged it and however they intended to use the result, they had accidentally shown Lucavion something he had spent years avoiding.

He could feel the difference clearly now.

His solution was temporary.

Primitive.

These three spheres were simple enough that a few remembered conditions could sustain them. A true spell, a complicated magical construct, or several interacting manifestations would require knowledge he did not possess.

But the weakness had finally acquired a shape.

Lucavion rolled one shoulder as the last of the sharp tension faded from his meridians.

’So that’s where you’ve been hiding.’

His mana continued moving around him.

For once, his hand was no longer holding all of it.

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