Morning in the forest always smelled the same: rotting pine needles and damp earth.
I woke up from my own coughing. My chest was tearing apart. On my lips—the sticky taste of old copper. Yesterday's experiments with mana flows had taken their toll. The tiny capillaries in my nasopharynx couldn't withstand the pressure I had created.
I sat up on the stiff straw. Every muscle responded with a protesting creak. Even in my past life, I complained about fatigue after twenty hours in the lab. Here... it felt as if I had been stuffed into an industrial cement mixer, covered in gravel, and left on the "maximum" setting.
"Biological wear: critical. Calibration required," I noted automatically.
Emotions interfere with calculations. Right now, I just needed to figure out how to make this pathetic collection of bones and meat keep moving.
Zeno stood by the window, examining his skeletal fingers against the gray dawn.
"Still breathing?" he rasped without turning around. "You were wheezing in your sleep. I almost dragged you outside. I'll say it again—you can't abuse mana like that, kid. It's a river. You're supposed to swim in it, not try to shove the entire flow through the eye of a needle."
"The problem isn't the mana. The problem is my body. The vessels are too narrow. The heart is too weak for this kind of current," I said.
"Eat." Zeno tossed a strip of dried Bone Wolf meat onto my lap.
It was tough and smelled like wet fur. In another life, I would have decided it was easier to die than eat this garbage. Now—I bit into it. The brain needs glucose. Cells need protein.
Natural digestion at this fiber density: six hours. Unacceptable.
I closed my eyes.
"Will to Live," I commanded.
The hum grew deeper. I directed a microscopic, calibrated pulse of mana into the stomach walls. High-frequency vibration.
I began breaking down the meat into amino acids right there, bypassing the slow enzymatic process.
A rush of heat surged through my body. Sweat broke out on my forehead instantly. My stomach rumbled loudly.
"Again..." Zeno muttered, watching steam rise from my skin. "Will you ever learn to just wait?"
I instantly froze.
For a moment, it felt as though I sensed that strange presence again, the one that had occasionally seemed to haunt me over the past few weeks.
"Why do I feel like... she's here?"
"Iron."
"If that's true, how is it even possible?"
"Iron."
"No, it's probably just my paranoia."
"Iron!"
I jerked slightly and turned toward the sound.
"Iron... are you feeling okay? You're just staring at one spot."
"Ah... Yeah... Fine. Just got lost in thought, don't worry," I said.
A month later.
I was sitting on a stump near the cabin, finishing the main project of the season.
The Bone Wolf hide had become my first real armor.
But I hadn't just sewn pieces of leather together. I approached it like creating a composite structure. Between two layers of heavy hide, I embedded the wolf's bone plates. I overlapped them like scales. Then, I suspended them within a thin layer of stabilized mana woven into the material. In my world, this would be called "adaptive armor."
During normal movement, it remained flexible. But I knew: upon a sudden impact, the viscosity of the mana field between the plates would spike for a fraction of a second, distributing the impulse across the entire surface.
Zeno walked over and poked a finger into the cuirass.
"Too complicated, kid. A regular mana shield is more reliable."
"A mana shield requires active concentration and drains energy every second," I said, tightening the last strap on my forearm. "This system is passive. It runs on inertia. I'm saving my strength for what really matters."
"And what is that?" he narrowed his eyes.
"Target neutralization."
I picked up the knife carved from the fang of that same wolf. I infused it with a thin stream of mana. The blade began to vibrate imperceptibly.
"I need data on regeneration. Small game dies too quickly. I can't measure the rate of tissue recovery."
Zeno stared at my face for a few long seconds. Then he spat into the mud and pointed his staff toward the lowlands.
"A troll lives past the Black Pines. Go."
"Thank you," I said, heading out toward the Troll.
My steps were almost silent now. I had mastered a basic form of acoustic interference—each step generated a faint counter-wave, canceling out the noise of the previous one. It required concentration, but it was becoming instinct.
The Black Pine lowlands greeted me with the stench of rot and stagnant water.
I found the troll quickly—by the constant cracking of snapping trees. He was massive. A three-meter hunk of knotted gray flesh, chewing on a young pine tree, bark and all.
Estimated mass: two tons. Skin density: comparable to reinforced rubber. Regeneration rate: approximately five millimeters per second. A direct strike is useless. I'll exhaust myself before he even notices the pain.
I crouched in the ferns. "Will to Live" accelerated my pulse. The world became sharp. I could see the muscle fibers shifting under his greasy hide.
All I need to do is crash his system.
I burst from cover just as he reached for another branch.
The troll roared. The sound wave rattled my teeth. A sharp vector to the right. A slide under his limb.
The vibrating fang sank into his ankle without resistance. Instead of cutting flesh, I induced cavitation inside the major vessels. The internal pressure spiked sharply, tearing valves and veins apart from the inside out.
The troll howled and dropped to one knee, shaking the ground. The wound began to bubble and close up.
"Slow," I hissed, already climbing up his back.
I dug into the folds of his neck. Pressed my palm against the base of his skull.
Target: protein denaturation in nervous tissue.
Method: local induction heating using mana.
The troll's eyes clouded over. He thrashed in convulsions, trying to throw me off. Regeneration kicked into overdrive—new neural pathways were forming, but I destroyed them faster than they could stabilize.
And then, a massive hand slammed into my side.
I slammed into a pine tree. The armor locked up instantly, distributing the force through the bone plates. But the momentum passed right through. It broke ribs, knocking the wind out of my lungs.
Internal bleeding. At least two fractures. Darkness at the edges of my vision.
The troll staggered. His movements were erratic; his coordination was gone—my thermal attack had fried part of his cerebellum. He tried to roar, but only a broken wheeze escaped his throat.
I forced myself to stand. Stumbling. Blood dripped from my mouth. The knife buzzed in my hand.
"Regeneration is just accelerated synthesis," I muttered, taking a step toward him. "And synthesis doesn't survive destructive resonance."
I drove the fang under his jaw, right up to the hilt, and cranked the mana flow to the maximum.
Bzzzt.
Something popped inside his skull. The massive body went limp. Neural impulses ceased.
I fell to my knees beside the corpse. My brain was on fire. Blood flowed in a steady stream from my nose.
"If regeneration can be broken, then so-called 'immortality' is either limited, or it's just an unsolved problem," I said.
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