Rivers of the Night

[Shadow Step], [Shadow Flush], and [Shadow Extend].

These three techniques were so simple that it had only taken Theron a few attempts to raise them to Adept while in the middle of battle. By the time he got back to his Immortal Cave, he had already risen them to Adept mastery.

However, he seemed to be much further away from Consummate than he expected.

Usually by now, if he was controlling a Water Mana technique, he would have had some sort of epiphany that would make the next step obvious to him.

Reaching Adept was enough to say that he had fully mastered the technique. But the problem with Consummate was that it expected him to take the technique further than the original user intended, to comprehend something that made the Spell or technique his own rather than just a shell of what the creator expected of it.

That was where the problem lay.

Theron was more than smart enough to read context clues and understand what was in front of him. But taking a step beyond and into innovation… that was a problem if he wasn't as comfortable with Dark Mana as he seemed to be.

So, Theron decisively pivoted, bringing out a stack of Dark Mana Wood and his carving knife.

Lyra had warned him that he probably shouldn't start with a Silver Resonance carving knife, but he didn't listen. He wanted to really feel if things would be as hard as she said.

And if it exploded in his face—something that was apparently very possible—he felt that he could likely tank it. After all, his body was that of an Arcane Beast. There was a reason that even though he was weaker in raw strength than a Quasi Cloud Realm expert like Blackmaul, he could still hold his own just enough to win in the end.

Theron picked up a piece and placed the carving knife against its body. He was preparing to pause and wait out a subtle feeling, but almost instantly he felt his arm weighed down by something and the knife almost fell out of his hand.

With a wrench back, Theron separated the two to find that there was a bit of a dull spot on the Mana Wood that was quickly filled in with its usual black hue.

His gaze shifted to the carving knife to find that it was slowly dissipating the Dark Mana it had just touched.

'So it's actually that sensitive…'

All Theron had done was touch the blade to the wood; he didn't even start carving just yet, but the reaction was still so fierce. That wasn't something he had expected.

He waited for the Dark Mana to dispel itself from the blade entirely before he tried again. This time, he was even more cautious, but he went in with a single, calm stroke.

The plan in his mind was simple: slowly increase the pressure as he glided along it to compensate for the dulling and increasing heft of the blade.

But he quickly realized this was also easier said than done.

The Mana Wood looked uniform, but it wasn't. There were knots of Mana just like there would be knots of wood in normal situations. Regions where there had once been branches or leaves had irregular patterns compared to the rest of the wood, while the deeper inside he went, the greater those variables became.

Trees grew in rings, from the inside out. The variables of what they had been through in their long lives only compounded as a result.

This meant that more powerful Mana Wood wasn't only more difficult to handle because the Mana inside was greater, but also because more powerful Mana Wood also tended to mean older trees that had lived longer lives and had more time to accumulate these variables.

On Theron's third attempt, he nodded to himself, having a greater understanding of what made this so difficult.

The first attempt taught him it wasn't actually the carving process that changed the carving blade, but instead the interaction with a certain type of Mana to begin with.

The second attempt taught him what variables he should be looking out for and why carving taught him more about the Mana he was carving into in the first place.

And this third and final attempt taught him something quite curious, something that maybe should have taken him many more carving attempts to notice, but also something that he was well-suited to feeling out so early on…

Life Mana.

Trees were living beings; they just took on a different form. This Dark Mana was their Life Mana much the same way Theron's Water Mana had become his Life Mana.

The reason this was all so difficult, maybe more than any of the other reasons he had stumbled across, was because he was, in effect, manipulating the Life Mana of another living being.

This realization hit Theron the hardest.

He knew that manipulating Life Mana should be impossible. The fact he could manipulate his own made him an anomaly. But he also recalled that those that descended from his bloodline on the continent… he could control their Life Mana as well—or, rather, he could control their blood, which wasn't exactly the same.

These trees had been cut down, so they were technically dead now. As such, it was probably easier to carve into them now than ever before.

But… what if he tried to carve into a living tree? Would the backlash of such a thing be orders of magnitude worse?

Theron let himself sit and ruminate over this for a long while, his thoughts becoming wilder and harder to suppress as he realized the sort of potential carving might bring.

'There is a great deal of unearthed potential here. Maybe the Nightingale Sect isn't aware of it, but I'm sure that there are other far more powerful existences who've already noticed…'

Once Theron felt that he had finished priming himself properly, his gaze sharpened as he took out a booklet.