Lucius stared at the glowing stone in the physician's hand.
The man shook his head.
"…Still nothing."
The room was silent.
"No mana," the physician said again, slower this time. "Your core is completely inactive."
Lucius's fingers tightened around the edge of his chair.
This wasn't how it went in the novel. The original Lucius had a functional mana core. Weak, sure. But it worked. Enough to cast a minor spell or swing a sword with some weight behind it.
He didn't remember this.
"Could it be damaged?" he asked.
The physician gave him a sympathetic look. "No. It's there, but… dormant. Like it was never fed. Or… sealed."
Lucius's jaw clenched.
Sealed.
He knew that word far too well.
He left the examination chamber alone, thoughts swirling.
No mana meant no real defense in a world built on it. Nobles trained from the age of seven. Swordsmen enhanced their strength with mana. Mages shaped the battlefield. Even hunters in the wilds used basic mana sense to survive.
Lucius had none of it.
And worse—he felt it. A blockage. Like something was inside him, waiting to wake up.
But it refused to stir.
That night, he returned to his room and went through the Valehart library. He skipped war records, bypassed noble treatises, and went straight for the forbidden texts — tucked away behind a hidden panel in the west study.
He found it by memory.
The story had mentioned it once: The Elric Bloom. A rare fruit that forcefully jump-started a dormant mana core — at a cost.
Side effects. Risk of death. Madness.
The usual.
But Lucius didn't care about any of that.
What made his breath catch was this line, half-buried in an old expedition report:
"The Bloom is said to grow once every ten years… near the edge of the Varnen Wilds."
The same region where Rowan's orphanage had burned down.
Where the first arc of the story began.
Lucius exhaled slowly, closing the book.
'So this is how it starts.'
He couldn't train like everyone else.
Couldn't cast.
Couldn't even defend himself with magic.
But he could scheme. He could plan. And now, he had a goal.