The healing of a human frame is a quiet, frustratingly slow process that refuses to be hurried by sheer force of will. For Lencar, the first two weeks following the qualification tournament were an exercise in enforced patience. His right arm, though no longer throbbing with the sharp, white-hot agony of the initial break, remained encased in a heavy wooden splint—a physical reminder of the cost of over-optimization.
He spent his mornings in the tall grass behind the barn, practicing what he called "Soft-Flow Calibration." Since he couldn't perform the high-intensity Mana-Forging that had defined his last six months, he focused on the microscopic movement of the mana already residing within him. He sat cross-legged, the blank grimoire resting on his knees, and watched the way the siphoned wind energy circulated through his meridians.
It was a strange sensation. The power he had taken from Yuno didn't feel like his own; it felt like a restless, high-pressure liquid held behind a dam. It was cold, sharp, and immensely potent. But as he sat there, his analytical mind began to notice a pattern—or rather, a lack of one.
"The reservoir is static," he whispered, his eyes fixed on the emerald glow of his disguised three-leaf cover. "I've been healing for fourteen days. My metabolism has stabilized. But the total volume... it hasn't shifted by even a fraction of a percent."
He pushed the thought aside for the moment. He had a secondary objective for the day: Data Acquisition.
The Helpful Neighbor
Lencar spent the next month playing the part of the dutiful son and the humble village hero. To the people of Hage, he was the boy who had performed a miracle in the ring and then, with characteristic modesty, had yielded to the genius Yuno. He was seen as a hard worker whose only "fault" was a lack of high-tier magic.
He started with Old Man Goro's farm. The elder was struggling with a blight on his potato crop—a common occurrence in the poor soil of the Forsaken Realm.
"Lencar! My boy, look at these vines," Goro sighed, wiping his brow with a tattered sleeve. "They're turning black. My Earth Magic isn't strong enough to pull the nutrients up from the deep soil."
"Let me try, Goro-san," Lencar said, stepping forward. "I've been reading about soil aeration. Perhaps if we combine our efforts."
He knelt in the dirt, placing his left hand on the soil beside Goro's. As the old man opened his three-leaf grimoire to cast a weak [Soil Enrichment] spell, Lencar allowed his own blank book—hidden in a leather pouch at his hip—to brush against the edge of the elder's parchment.
A faint, cooling sensation ran up Lencar's arm.
Entry: Earth Magic - Nutrient Draw. Capacity: Goro (Low).
He felt the mana enter the book, a dull, brown energy that felt like heavy silt. He used a tiny portion of it to assist Goro, reinforcing the old man's spell with a calculated burst of efficiency. The black rot on the vines seemed to shiver and recede as the roots drank deep.
"Oh! You have a touch for the earth, lad!" Goro laughed, clapping him on the back.
Lencar gave a polite nod and moved on to his next "client."
Over the next three weeks, he became the village's most active volunteer. He helped the mason, Rek, repair a collapsed stone wall, siphoning a [Stone Hardening] attribute. He assisted the village midwife with a difficult birth, catching a glimpse of a rare [Vitality Pulse] from her aged grimoire. He even spent an afternoon helping the local blacksmith, siphoning a [Heat Resistance] aura.
By the end of the month, his grimoire was no longer empty. It was a library of commoner-tier utility.
* Page 7: [Earth Magic: Nutrient Draw]
* Page 8: [Stone Magic: Structural Bind]
* Page 9: [Fire Magic: Forge-Heat]
* Page 10: [Water Magic: Pure Stream]
He was building a versatile foundation. He was the most useful person in Hage. But as he sat in his room on the thirty-first night, he opened the "Status Log" in his mind, and the numbers made him freeze.
The Static Limit
"Total Mana Capacity: 25.4 Units," Lencar muttered, his voice echoing in the small room.
He stared at the number.
When he had first siphoned Yuno, his capacity had jumped from 1.0 (his native baseline) to 25.0. It was a staggering 2500% increase. Later that same day, he had siphoned the rogue knight Revchi, and the number had ticked up to 25.4.
But since then... nothing.
He had siphoned from Old Man Goro (Capacity: 0.8). He had siphoned from the midwife (Capacity: 1.2). He had siphoned from the blacksmith (Capacity: 2.1).
If his magic worked by addition—the way a cup fills with water—his total capacity should now be well over 30 units. But it wasn't. It sat stubbornly at 25.4.
"Why?" Lencar stood up, pacing the small space of his bedroom. The wooden floorboards creaked under his weight. "The data doesn't correlate. I am touching the grimoires. I am seeing the spells appear on the pages. I am feeling the energy enter the book. So why isn't the 'battery' getting any bigger?"
He looked at his right arm. The splint was gone now, replaced by a light bandage. He flexed his fingers. The bones were healed, but the internal system—the thing that made him a mage—felt like it had hit a ceiling.
"Is it a storage limit?" he hypothesized. "Is the blank grimoire only capable of holding the equivalent of one high-tier mage? No, that doesn't make sense. Revchi's mana added to the total, even if only by a fraction."
He spent the next three nights in a fever of experimentation. He went out into the woods and siphoned the mana from a low-level mana-beast—a horned rabbit. The spell appeared in his book: [Horn Thrust]. But the capacity meter didn't move.
He tried siphoning from a different source—a mana-infused spring in the northern forest. Nothing.
"I am missing a fundamental rule," Lencar realized, his frustration mounting. "I've been treating this like a simple accumulation of resources. But magic in this world isn't just data. It's... something else. It has a structure."
The Research Phase
Lencar spent the following week in the Grimoire Tower. Tower Master Drouot, though eccentric, was a man who had spent decades surrounded by the history of magic. He didn't understand Lencar's "Method," but he appreciated the boy's sudden interest in the more obscure texts of the Forsaken Realm.
"Most young mages want to know how to make a bigger fire, or a faster wind," Drouot said, gesturing to the dusty, cobwebbed shelves at the very top of the tower. "But you... you're asking about the 'Vessel Theory.' That's old-world philosophy, Lencar."
"I want to understand the limits of a grimoire's capacity, Master Drouot," Lencar replied, climbing a rickety ladder. "Why some mages seem to have a bottomless well, while others run dry after a single spell."
"Ah, the 'Soul-Volume' debate," Drouot chuckled. "The nobles say it's in the blood. The scholars say it's in the link between the book and the heart. But there is a rare theory—The Overflow Principle."
Lencar stopped his search, his hand resting on a thick, leather-bound volume titled The Geometry of the Arcane. "The Overflow Principle?"
"It suggests that a grimoire isn't a bucket you fill," Drouot explained, peering up through his spectacles. "It's a lens. If the lens is too small, the light simply passes around it. If the lens is flawed, the image is blurry. And if you try to stack two lenses that are identical... you don't get more light. You just get the same image, slightly distorted."
Lencar pulled the book from the shelf. He spent the next six hours hunched over a small wooden table, the dim light of the tower filtering through the high windows.
He read about Mana Frequency. He read about Sovereign Signatures. And then, he found a passage that made his heart stop.
> "The acquisition of external mana is not a process of summation, but of replacement. When two spirits of disparate strength occupy the same vessel, the Vessel will naturally align its geometry to the superior frequency. The lesser power is not added; it is overwritten or absorbed into the higher-order structure, serving only as fuel rather than expanding the boundaries of the vessel itself."
Lencar leaned back, the ancient parchment smelling of dust and centuries-old ink.
"Replacement," he whispered. "Not summation."