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. In the dark, he could see the 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.
"Baseline check," he whispered.
He closed his eyes, performing a mental sweep of his systems.
Mana Capacity: 100% (High-Pressure Status).
Physical Integrity: 98% (Slight muscle tremors from yesterday's fight).
Spells Loaded: 3 (Wind (yuno and mother), Chain(Revchi) , Fire(father)).
The Void: [ANTI-MAGIC: TOGGLE] – Status: Inactive.
He stood up, his bones creaking. The weight of the mana inside him felt like he was submerged in deep water. It wasn't just energy; it was mass. He dressed in his most durable training clothes—rough linen trousers and a tight-fitting tunic—and stepped out into the pre-dawn chill of Hage.
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 monument to the power he intended to surpass. In previous years, his "Mana-Forging" had been a delicate process of using a small puddle of mana to create resistance. Today, he was going to use a flood.
He dropped into a horse-stance.
"Initialization," he commanded.
He opened the floodgates. Instead of a trickle, he forced a massive, concentrated stream of mana into his quads and glutes. 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. His knees buckled, the rock beneath his boots cracking under the sudden, localized pressure.
"Argh!"
Lencar's breath escaped him in a ragged gasp. This wasn't training; it was a torture session. His muscles screamed as they fought to hold the weight of the "Sea" he now carried inside. The internal pressure was so high that capillaries in his eyes began to burst, tinting his vision red.
Data Point: At 20% output of siphoned capacity, the skeletal structure begins to show signs of stress.
"More," he hissed through gritted teeth.
He pushed it to 30%. The wind around him began to howl, reacting to the sheer density of the mana he was compressing within his flesh. This was the core of his 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. Every second was a battle against the "Resource" he now possessed. When he finally released the pressure, he didn't collapse. He stood perfectly still, his muscles 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 wasn't just building muscle; he was building a biological battery.
09:00 – Output Calibration: The Inflexible Artillery
After a breakfast of cold potatoes and a brief interaction with his parents Lencar moved to the deeper woods.
He needed to test the "Software."
He stood before a massive, granite boulder. He opened the blank grimoire to the first page.
[Wind Creation Magic: Towering Tornado]
"Target acquired," he muttered.
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. In Lencar, because he lacked the "edit permissions" to shape the spell, it came out as a raw, concentrated burst of atmospheric pressure.
A vertical column of screaming air erupted from his palm. It didn't spin; it punched. It hit the granite boulder with the sound of a cannon shot, pulverizing the stone into fine dust in less than a second.
Lencar's arm recoiled, the force of the cast nearly dislocating his shoulder.
"Inefficient," he noted, pulling a small notebook from his belt to record the findings. "The spell is binary. It is either 'Off' or 'Maximum.' I cannot use this for subtle combat. It is a siege weapon, nothing more."
He turned the page to the [Magic-Sealing Chain].
He targeted a 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."
"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, it couldn't lash out, and it couldn't seek new targets. It was a static object.
"I am a turret," Lencar realized. "I have massive range and massive power, but zero mobility within the spell itself. To compensate, I must move the turret."
He spent the next three hours practicing "Mobile Artillery." He would sprint at full speed, jump, and cast the Tornado in mid-air to see how the recoil affected his trajectory. 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 but effective form of flight.
13:00 – The Gauntlet: System Reboot
The sun was at its zenith. This was the most critical—and most painful—variable of the day.
"Heretic Mode transition," Lencar whispered.
He stood 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.
"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 heart. The massive mana pool—the "Sea" he had been swimming in all morning—vanished in a microsecond. 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.
"Latency..." he wheezed, his fingers clawing at the dirt. "2.5... seconds... of blackout."
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.
He waited for his heart rate to stabilize. In "Heretic Mode," the world felt different. It was 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.
"Protocol 1-C," he grunted.
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 that he could function even when the system was offline. He had to be a threat even when he was "just a human."
After two hours of grueling physical labor, he toggled back.
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, making his skin feel like it was being peeled off. He screamed, the sound echoing through the woods, until the mana finally settled back into its "high-pressure" tank.
"Latency during return... 1.8 seconds," he noted, his voice trembling as he wrote in his notebook. "Shock factor remains at Level 9. The nervous system is rejecting the switch."
18:00 – Multitasking: The One-Man Corps
As the sun began to dip below the horizon, Lencar moved into the final phase of Day One: Coordination.
He set up three targets: a wooden post (Target A), a pile of rocks (Target B), and a hanging bucket (Target C).
"The objective is simultaneous deployment of distinct attributes," he said.
He opened the grimoire. He channeled a tiny portion of his father's [Fire Magic] into his left hand 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.
The moment he tried to split the mana into two different "scripts," the chain flickered and died, and the fireball exploded in his hand, singeing his tunic.
"Conflict," Lencar analyzed, rubbing his burnt palm. "The grimoire's processor can only handle one active attribute at a time. It's a single-core system."
He didn't get frustrated. He simply adjusted the hypothesis.
"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 by flashes of fire and streaks of wind. He was practicing "Attribute-Cycling." By the time the moon was high, he could cycle through three different elements in 0.8 seconds.
It looked like simultaneous casting to the naked eye. To Lencar, it was just a very fast playlist.
22:00 – Log Entry
Lencar returned to the farmhouse, his body a map of bruises, burns, and strained tendons. He climbed the stairs silently, sat at his desk, and opened his notebook.
Day 1 Summary:
Physical Adaptation: Satisfactory. Mana-Forging 2.0 is viable, though high-risk.
Spell Efficacy: Binary output remains a limitation. Must focus on trajectory control.
Toggle Latency: 2.5 seconds (In), 1.8 seconds (Out). Total vulnerability: 4.3 seconds.
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 looking a bit more polished, a bit more "alive."
"You are a hungry thing," he whispered.
He lay down on his bed, his muscles humming with the residual heat of the day's training. He didn't feel like a hero. He didn't feel like he was "surpassing his limits" through the power of friendship or will.
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. "Optimization... continues."
The darkness of sleep claimed him, but even in his dreams, Lencar Abarame was calculating the trajectory of a storm.