He stood up, his gaze fixed on the mercenaries. He didn't just need information anymore. He needed a weapon. And he needed to find out exactly which descendant was responsible for this mess.
"Are my friends still alive?" Kyro whispered to the shadows of the tavern. His violet eyes flared with a cold, predatory light. "Because if they are, I'm going to kill them myself for letting the world turn into this shithole."
He stepped out of the Broken Staff and into the freezing night air. The damp mist of the village clung to his silver hair, but he didn't feel the cold. All he felt was the chaotic, jagged friction of the mana inside him. Fucking reincarnation, he thought. To go from the pinnacle of magic to a body that felt like a leaky bucket was a humiliation he couldn't endure for another hour.
He navigated the dark, mud-slicked streets until he found a dead-end alleyway bounded by high stone walls and rotting crates. It was silent here, shielded from the wind. He needed a foundation. If he tried to fight a single demon with his current fractured core, he would probably explode before he even finished a chant.
Kyro sat cross-legged on the cold ground. He ignored the smell of trash and the distant howling of wasteland beasts.
"Step one," he muttered, closing his eyes. "Break the shard."
In his mind's eye, he looked at his mana center. It was a jagged, obsidian splinter that hummed with a corrupted, unstable frequency. It was a "Gifted" core the kind given to the so-called Blessed of this era.
He reached out with his willpower, grabbing the shard. Most mages spent years polishing their cores; Kyro intended to shatter his. He slammed a pulse of mental energy into the obsidian.
A silent scream tore through his mind. His physical body jerked, his spine arching as a cold sweat drenched his clothes. Blood began to leak from his nose. The pain was like having a hot iron twisted in his gut, but he didn't stop.
"Break, damn you," he hissed through gritted teeth.
With a final, violent shove of his will, the shard detonated.
The agony was absolute. For a second, his vision went white, and his heart skipped a beat. If he had been a normal mage, he would have died or become a vegetable. But Kyro Sol had spent decades studying the very fabric of existence. He didn't let the mana dissipate.
As the obsidian fragments tried to fly apart, he threw out chains of pure mental force. He caught every single grain of mana, refusing to let even a drop leak out into the atmosphere. This was the hard part. He had to compress the chaos.
He began to spin the fragments. Faster. Faster.
He was creating a miniature black hole at the center of his being. The friction generated a heat so intense that his skin began to glow a faint, ghostly purple. The air around him in the alleyway began to hum, pebbles lifting off the ground as the gravitational pull of his forming core distorted the local space.
His muscles cramped. His lungs burned. He could feel the capillaries in his eyes bursting from the pressure. This wasn't the easy, natural growth of a prodigy; this was a man forcing the universe to obey him through sheer, stubborn spite.
"I am the sun," he whispered, his voice a distorted growl. "I am the center. I am the end."
The fragments melted. Under the immense pressure of his will, the jagged black shards fused together, losing their dark color and turning into a liquid, swirling gold. He shaped it into a perfect sphere, small but infinitely dense.
Then, he etched the first layer of the Sol Geometry onto its surface.
Complex, interlocking runes began to glow on the golden sphere. Each line was a masterpiece of magical theory, designed to filter out the demonic miasma and convert it into pure, usable ether. This wasn't a "Blessed" core. This was an Archmage's Reactor.
When the last rune clicked into place, the pressure vanished.
Kyro slumped against the damp stone wall, gasping for air. His chest heaved, and he wiped the blood from his face with a trembling hand. He felt hollow, exhausted, and incredibly hungry, but beneath the fatigue, he felt it.
The gold sphere spun slowly and silently. It was small barely a Tier 1 core, but its quality was incomparable to anything else in this broken world. It was clean. It was his.
He looked down at his hands. The faint purple glow had vanished, replaced by a steady, healthy vitality.
"At least I won't die from walking uphill now," he muttered.
He looked toward the center of the village, where the local Church of Selena stood like a monument to his failure.
He needed a weapon, and if the church was as corrupt as the mercenaries said, they probably had something of his locked in a basement. It was time to see what his "friends" had left behind.