The first day of the 180-day countdown began at exactly 04:00.
Lencar didn't wake up to a sudden burst of inspiration or a heroic theme song. He woke up to the cold, rhythmic ticking of his own internal clock and the sharp, high-frequency vibration of the mana siphoned from the four-leaf clover. It was no longer Yuno's energy; the moment it had crossed the threshold of the blank grimoire, it had been re-encrypted into Lencar's own resource pool. But the "hardware"—his fifteen-year-old body—was still struggling to recognize the new, massive power supply.
He sat up on his thin straw mattress, his head pounding with a dull, throbbing ache. In the dark, he could see a faint, golden-green luminescence leaking from his skin. The capacity he now held was so dense that it was physically manifesting as a low-level glow, like radioactive waste seeping through lead containment.
"Baseline check," he whispered, his voice croaking in the dry air of the room.
He closed his eyes, performing a mental sweep of his body. It was a habit from his old life, checking the morning stats before the market opened. But instead of stock prices, he was checking his own biology.
Mana Capacity: 100% (High-Pressure Status). It felt like his veins were filled with liquid mercury—heavy, potent, and dangerous.
Physical Integrity: 98%. His muscles were twitching slightly, residual tremors from the adrenaline spike of yesterday's fight with Revchi.
Spells Loaded: 3.
Wind Magic (Yuno and his mother).
Chain Magic (Revchi).
Fire Magic (His father).
The Void: [ANTI-MAGIC: TOGGLE] – Status: Inactive.
He stood up, his bones creaking like old floorboards. The weight of the mana inside him felt like he was submerged in deep water. It wasn't just energy; it was mass. Every movement required a conscious effort to push against the density of his own power.
He dressed in his most durable training clothes—rough linen trousers stained with grass and dirt, and a tight-fitting tunic that allowed for maximum range of motion. He splashed cold water from the basin onto his face, staring at his reflection in the dark water. The eyes looking back were tired, but sharp.
"Just another Tuesday," he muttered to himself, trying to inject some levity into the situation. It didn't work.
He stepped out into the pre-dawn chill of Hage. The village was silent, wrapped in mist. The world felt paused, waiting for him to make a move.
04:30 – The Morning Protocol: Mana-Forging 2.0
Lencar reached his usual spot on the cliff edge. The giant demon skull loomed in the distance, a silent, skeletal monument to the power he intended to surpass. The wind whipped at his hair, biting and cold.
In previous years, his "Mana-Forging" had been a delicate process. He would take his small, native puddle of mana and wrap it around his muscles like a thin bandage, creating just enough resistance to make a squat feel heavier. It was subtle work.
Today, he was going to drop a mountain on himself.
He dropped into a horse-stance, his feet planted wide on the rocky ground.
"Let's start," he thought, closing his eyes.
He opened the floodgates. Instead of a trickle, he forced a massive, concentrated stream of the siphoned mana into his quads, glutes, and lower back. He didn't use it to strengthen the muscles; he used it to try and crush them. He commanded the mana to act as a gravity well, pulling his center of mass toward the earth with the force of ten men.
The effect was instantaneous and terrifying.
His knees buckled violently, the rock beneath his boots cracking audibly under the sudden, localized pressure.
"Argh!"
Lencar's breath escaped him in a ragged, animalistic gasp. This wasn't training; it was torture. His muscles screamed as they fought to hold the weight of the "Sea" he now carried inside. The internal pressure was so high that he felt capillaries in his eyes begin to burst, tinting the edges of his vision red.
It felt like he was trying to hold up a collapsing building.
Too heavy, his mind screamed.
But he didn't back off. He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached.
"Hold it," he hissed. "Hold this stance."
He pushed the output to 30%. The wind around him began to howl, reacting to the sheer density of the mana he was compressing within his flesh. The air shimmered with heat distortion. This was the core of his new method. Nobles used mana as a shield or a weapon; Lencar was using it as a hammer to forge the iron of his own body. He was forcing his cells to adapt to a high-mana environment, turning his physical frame into a high-capacity capacitor.
He held the stance for sixty minutes.
It was an hour of agony. Sweat poured off him, soaking his tunic, dripping onto the dry earth. His legs shook so violently they blurred. Every second was a battle against the instinct to collapse, to let the magic win.
When he finally released the pressure, he didn't collapse. He couldn't. His muscles had locked up. He stood perfectly still, swaying slightly in the wind, his body twitching with a frantic, metabolic heat. He could feel the siphoned mana beginning to flood the micro-tears in his muscle fibers, repairing them at a rate that defied nature.
He gulped in air, his lungs burning. He looked at his hands. They were shaking uncontrollably.
"That sucked," Lencar wheezed, wiping his face with a trembling hand. "Let's do it again tomorrow."
09:00 – Output Calibration: The Inflexible Artillery
After a breakfast of cold potatoes—eaten quickly while dodging his mother's worried questions about why he looked like he'd fought a bear—Lencar moved to the deeper woods.
He needed to test the "Software."
He stood before a massive, granite boulder, moss-covered and ancient. It was the size of a carriage.
He opened the blank grimoire to the first page.
[Wind Creation Magic: Towering Tornado]
"Target acquired," he muttered, leveling his hand at the rock.
He channeled the siphoned mana into the spell. The reaction was violent. In a standard mage, the spell would manifest as a swirling vortex of wind, shaped by intent and finesse. Yuno could probably make this tornado dance.
In Lencar, because he lacked the "edit permissions" to shape the spell, it came out as a raw, concentrated burst of atmospheric violence.
A vertical column of screaming air erupted from his palm. It didn't spin gracefully; it punched. It hit the granite boulder with the sound of a cannon shot—BOOM—pulverizing the stone into fine dust and gravel in less than a second.
The recoil was brutal. Lencar's arm snapped back, the force of the cast nearly dislocating his shoulder. He stumbled backward, tripping over a root and landing hard on his ass.
"Ow," Lencar groaned, rubbing his shoulder. He looked at the crater where the boulder used to be.
"Inefficient," he noted, pulling a small notebook from his belt to record the findings. His handwriting was shaky. "The spell is binary. It is either 'Off' or 'Maximum.' I can't use this for subtle combat. If I try to use this in a crowded room, I'll kill everyone. The spell is a siege weapon for now, nothing more."
He turned the page to the [Magic-Sealing Chain].
He targeted a thick oak tree twenty yards away. "Execute."
An iron-grey chain shot from the book. It moved in a perfectly straight line—no curves, no tracking. It struck the tree and wrapped around it with mechanical precision. Lencar felt the drain on his mana pool. It was a constant, steady "leak," like a faucet left running.
"Sustainability check," he said, timing the drain.
Because the capacity he had siphoned was so high, he could theoretically hold the chain active for hours. But he couldn't make the chain do anything else. It couldn't tighten further, it couldn't lash out, and it couldn't seek new targets if the first one moved. It was a static object.
"I am a turret," Lencar realized, frowning. "I have massive range and massive power, but zero mobility within the spell itself. If the enemy steps two feet to the left, I miss."
To compensate, he realized he had to move the turret.
He spent the next three hours practicing "Mobile Artillery." He would sprint at full speed, jump over a log, and cast the Tornado in mid-air to see how the recoil affected his trajectory.
It was a disaster at first. The first time he tried it, the recoil launched him backward into a thorn bush. The second time, he spun out of control and slammed into a tree.
But by the tenth time, he started to get the rhythm. He found that if he timed the cast correctly, he could use the kickback of the Wind Magic to launch himself across the clearing—a crude, violent, but effective form of flight.
13:00 – The Gauntlet: System Reboot
The sun was at its zenith, beating down through the canopy. This was the most critical—and most painful—variable of the day.
"Heretic Mode transition," Lencar whispered, standing in the center of the clearing.
He had siphoned enough mana for the day to be at a stable 80% capacity. He felt like a god. He felt like he could lift the world (Result of a rapid increase in power in a short time period). The mana was a warm, comforting blanket against the cold reality of the world.
"Switching to [ANTI-MAGIC]... now."
Click.
The world didn't just go silent; it turned into a freezing, lightless vacuum.
The transition hit Lencar like a physical blow to the solar plexus. The massive mana pool—the "Sea" he had been swimming in all morning—vanished in a microsecond.
It was like being ripped from a warm bed and thrown into an ice bath. The sudden drop in internal pressure caused his lungs to seize. His vision went black as his brain struggled to process the total absence of the energy it had just spent nine hours adapting to.
He fell to his knees, vomiting onto the grass. His body shook uncontrollably.
"Latency..." he wheezed, clutching his chest, trying to force his heart to beat properly. "Two... point... five... seconds."
It was a catastrophic failure point. In that 2.5 seconds, he was a corpse. He had no magic to protect him, and his brain was too shocked to move his muscles. If an enemy attacked him during the switch, he wouldn't even be able to scream.
He waited for his heart rate to stabilize. In "Heretic Mode," the world felt different. It was sharper. Colder. More real. The colors of the leaves weren't enhanced by mana; they were just green. The wind wasn't a resource; it was just air.
He stood up, feeling the immense weight of his own physical body. This was the "Zero-Mana" state. He felt slow, heavy, and mortal. He felt like Kenji Tanaka again—just a man in a shirt, weak and breakable.
"Let's begin the excercises," he grunted, forcing himself to move.
He began a set of heavy-weight calisthenics. Without the mana to assist his recovery or dull the pain, every movement felt like he was lifting lead. He did five hundred push-ups, his face inches from the dirt, his sweat soaking into the earth.
This was the "Void Training." He had to prove to himself that he could function even when his ability to use mana was offline. He had to be a threat even when he was "just a human."
"Don't stop," he growled at himself when his arms started to tremble at rep 300. "If you stop, you die. If you stop, you're just a glitch."
After two hours of grueling physical labor, he was exhausted. His muscles were jelly. He was covered in dirt.
"Toggle back," he ordered.
Click.
The return of the mana was even worse.
It felt like being struck by lightning. The high-pressure energy flooded back into his empty veins, expanding rapidly. It made his skin feel like it was being peeled off. His nerves fired all at once—pain, heat, cold, pleasure—overloading his synapses.
He screamed, the sound echoing through the woods, clutching his head as the world spun wildly. It took nearly two seconds for the pain to subside into the familiar hum of power.
"Latency during return... 1.8 seconds," he noted, his voice trembling as he wrote in his notebook. He stared at the page, a drop of sweat smudging the ink. "Shock factor remains at Level 9. My nervous system hates this. It absolutely hates this."
He lay on his back, staring up at the leaves. "I have to do this every day," he realized with a sinking feeling. "Every single day for six months."
18:00 – Multitasking: The One-Man Corps
As the sun began to dip below the horizon, painting the sky in shades of bruised purple and orange, Lencar moved into the final phase of Day One: Coordination.
He was tired. His body ached in places he didn't know existed. But the logic of the plan demanded completion.
He set up three targets: a wooden post (Target A), a pile of rocks (Target B), and a hanging bucket filled with water (Target C).
"The objective is simultaneous deployment of distinct attributes," he said, rolling his shoulders.
He opened the grimoire. He channeled a tiny portion of his father's [Fire Magic] into his left hand—a small, flickering ember—and the [Magic-Sealing Chain] into his right.
"Engage."
He fired the chain at Target A. While the chain was in transit, he tried to launch the fireball at Target B.
He failed miserably.
The moment he tried to split the mana into two different "scripts," his brain stuttered. The chain flickered and died halfway to the target, and the fireball exploded in his hand, singing his tunic and burning his palm.
"Damn it!" Lencar hissed, shaking his hand.
"It is causing a conflict of attributes," Lencar analyzed, rubbing his burnt palm with a grimace. "The grimoire's processor—my brain—can only handle one active attribute at a time. It's a single-core system. I can't multitask. I can only task-switch."
He didn't get frustrated. He simply adjusted the hypothesis. That was the data analyst in him taking over, pushing aside the exhausted teenager.
"If I cannot cast simultaneously, I must cast sequentially with zero downtime."
He tried again.
Step 1: Cast Chain.
Step 2: Release Chain.
Step 3: Cast Fireball.
Step 4: Release Fireball.
Step 5: Cast Wind Pulse.
He did it again. And again.
Faster. Faster.
He spent four hours in the dark, the woods illuminated only by flashes of fire and streaks of wind. He was practicing "Attribute-Cycling." He forced his mind to dump one spell and load the next instantly.
By the time the moon was high, casting a pale light over the clearing, he could cycle through three different elements in 0.8 seconds.
It looked like simultaneous casting to the naked eye. Fire, Wind, and Iron (chain) appeared almost at once. To Lencar, it was just a very fast playlist, a rhythm game played at maximum difficulty.
22:00 – Log Entry
Lencar returned to the farmhouse late. His body was a map of bruises, burns, and strained tendons. He climbed the stairs silently, trying not to wake his parents.
He sat at his desk, lighting the small candle. He opened his notebook to the first page.
Day 1 Summary:
Physical Adaptation: Satisfactory. Mana-Forging 2.0 is viable, though the pain threshold is high.
Spell Efficacy: Binary output remains a limitation. Must focus on trajectory control and recoil management.
Toggle Latency: 2.5 seconds (In), 1.8 seconds (Out). Total vulnerability: 4.3 seconds. Critical failure point.
Cycling Speed: 0.8 seconds per 3 attributes.
He looked at the blank grimoire sitting on the desk. It had siphoned his sweat and blood throughout the day. The leather looked a bit more polished, a bit more "alive" in the candlelight.
"You are a hungry thing," he whispered to the book. "You're going to eat me alive if I let you."
He lay down on his bed, his muscles humming with the residual heat of the day's training. He stared at the ceiling, feeling the phantom weight of the chain in his hand, the burn of the fireball on his palm.
He didn't feel like a hero. He didn't feel like Asta, shouting about dreams. He didn't feel like Yuno, blessed by destiny.
He felt like a technician who had just finished the first day of a long, dangerous overhaul of a machine that wasn't designed to exist.
"179 days remaining," he thought as his eyes drifted shut, the exhaustion finally claiming him. "Improvement... will continue."
The darkness of sleep took him, but even in his dreams, Lencar Abarame was calculating the trajectory of a storm, running the numbers again and again, terrified that he might miss a decimal point and lose everything.