Kaden examined his wounds. He cursed as he looked at the damage. Cuts from swords, the cauterized wound from the beam, pain from everywhere after he was slammed against the wall.

In the distance he could see some ghosts. Now that everyone they could detect was dead, they started to shimmer and disapear.

“I have time now”, Kaden thought and stood up. He was quite exhausted after the fight and all the lost blood did not help either. There wasn’t much left to pick from Arvan so Kaden went to check Calen instead.

Calen’s bag was a treasure to Kaden. There were several beast cores in it. They must have been collected them while traveling through the forest. Other than that, Calen only left behind his weapons and whatever tools he needed along the way. He carried nothing extra.

Kaden took one of the cores and ate it. This refreshed him some, but it would not directly heal him, just restored his mana and upgrade his core slightly. Rest of the cores he left for later. Stuffing his core full over and over again in short period of time didn’t seem too safe. He had to do something else.

He did have a thing that would help him, the Devour spell. He was aware how to cast it, but he had not trained it even a bit. It was not too complex, but still required some very specific ways to adjust mana flows to reach lowest levels of mastery.

Originally Kaden had thought that perhaps spells were formations too, but this was not the case. They had some similarities, but it was like comparing a machine that does something to actually bringing forth the concept of something to produce the same effect. Spells or techniques that used mana relied on the true idea of what mana was. Essence of concepts.

Kaden had learned that on Channel Opening manipulation of different types of mana was difficult. Those at formation stage could do it much easier since they could produce and gather whatever mana they desired as long as their internal formation had structures to refine it from their mana. Channel Opening stage still needed to specifically sift through and find the right kind of mana. Well made spell would help at this. Luckily Devour was that sort of spell.

The Devour needed mana related to, as expected by name, devouring things. Tear, consume, digestion and distribution. That is, if one wanted to cast it perfectly. It would work simply with tear and consuming. The effects afterwards would be slower and more inefficient, though. There was no way for Kaden to actually cast it perfectly at Channel Opening so he didn’t worry about it.

To achieve a succesfull spell cast, Kaden needed to move mana in a desired place with right kind of intent and using mana system at the same time. Idea was to attract the correct type of mana with intent and desire and then use it, mix it and manipulate it right way to get it do the desired effect. Failure to do so would cause either the spell to fizzle entirely or possibly go out of control in some way, depending on the actual spell. Trohin’s notes only said that Devour would cause pain in mana channels for failure, but there did not seem to be long term damage.

Kaden knew casting spell required control. His mana system was barely functioning. Yet, at his current situation, Devour would be most useful. If he could not get it to work, he would have to drag himself out of the remnant and hide to heal for a long period of time. With his injuries, a dire beast could probably kill him.

He attempted what was described. Even on his first try, he managed to gather mana that was very strange upon inspection. It felt like the mana wanted to separate and then be absorbed into Kaden’s mana channel. To be torn and then consumed? Gathering that little amount of mana was actually easy?

Then he realized something!

Kaden was happy that he had his core. Only part of the mana used came from his human type mana in his channels. For humans, some of it had to come from outside. They would collect it with help of mana systems. As for Kaden, he could release mana from his core, which was basically ordered chunk of chaotic mana from outside. It was slightly different for his fire type mana, which he felt to be more like intrinsic part of himself. That he had been able to do right away after his rebirth. The rest seemed to come from the external layers.

Kaden felt quite annoyed that he had not been aware of how spells are cast until now. He had even resorted to that self harming method to reach Channel Opening.

It had touched the right idea, but was wrong! Thinking of that, Kaden actually got some ideas he could try. Since he could pull out the few mana types he desired, why not pull out all the good types? This was like fixing his mana system with a spell to function with his special body?

Doing that, he could circumvent gods involvement in purifying mana for him! To do so would need both mana channels and a core!

All of this was a great dicovery for Kaden! He would not have problem with types of mana like humans would have. He would only have problem with control, which is why beasts did not basically use spells until higher stages other than what natural abilities their bodies allowed them.

Kaden had best sides of both, but also bad sides.

Due to the lack of control, he failed his spell cast attempts over and over. The mana he had gathered slipped free and did what was its thing in his channels. He felt tearing force absorb into him. In other words tore at him and then was consumed by him.

Truly unpleasant feeling. He would need quite a bit more of this mana mixture until he could form the actual spell.

Kaden gritted his teeth. Training would not be pleasant.

Still, what else should he be doing? Going outside was dangerous. Only ghosts were dangerous in the remnant, but they could not notice him for the time being.

It was painful, but Kaden did his best to ignore it. Life was pain. He would suffer far more in his quest for vengeance anyway. It was best to get used to it.

Since it was hard to follow passing of time in the remnant, Kaden couldn’t really say how long it took to gather enough mana reliably to actually cast the spell. That was the truly hard part

Failure after failure. Each one felt like his mana channels were bleeding.

With each failure he got slightly better! Kaden felt like casting a spell should be far easier than creating formations. Once you had the right mana and relatively good mixture, you just had to get the concepts within the mana to do the thing you desired, but this required control and maintaining intent. Requirement was that you are aware what you want and let the mana only do what you wanted it to do. The concepts could do many things related to its concept, but you only needed that specific part of it. This also helped to cast the spell again easier and in better way, once your mind had managed to get the desire and your intent right.

Creating formations was more like half physical control and half mana. Casting a spell was almost entirely mana control. Still, Kaden’s experience with formations seemed to aid him a bit. It was the part of keeping mana stable. Once mana was kept in control, it didn’t vary in power and seemingly try to bounce around on its own.

Kaden eventually did manage to reach bare minimum success. He was not sure how long it took, but there was a small vortex on his palm. He planned on trying it on Calen’s cold corpse, but then he realized something?

“Isn’t this like eating a human?” Kaden wondered for a moment. “It is a necromancy spell that devours everything from a living or something that used to be alive. I guess its indeed eating, but it doesn’t feel as bad. It converts everything into mana and nutrients directly. Its not like I’m stuffing human flesh into my mouth.”

He decided this way was ok! Still, he burned the corpse charred black before he touched it with his Devour.

Once the connection was made, Kaden felt energy flow into him. He inspected that it was pure human type mana! This sort of mana was easily and quickly absorbed by beasts. It didn’t even all go into Kaden’s core, quite a bit was being absorbed into his mana channel. It was overall progress!

As for what happened to the flesh Kaden was devouring. Imagine that there is some force that tears off strands of flesh one after another. Then these strands glowed and turned to almost dustlike material as it disapeared into the spell’s vortex.

In his hand, Kaden felt a stuffy feeling. Like presure was spreading from it. His muscles and flesh began twitching. Soon it felt like he was performing some kind of physical activity.

As soon as that feeling reached his wounds, Kaden could literally observe the wounds knitting together slowly. It was sometwhat digusting sight, but nothing that Kaden didn’t expect from a necromancy spell. Trohin had written in his notes that priests were not only ones who specialized in healing spells. Necromancy did the same too… just different ways.

“Damn, I wonder if this makes me a necromancer?” Kaden muttered as he watched his flesh grow tendrils and connect with others while his devour spell continued consuming Calen’s corpse.

The body on the ground looked like layer after layer of flesh had been removed all the way even into the bones. It sounded a bit grisly, but it was actually pretty clean process. At least thats the case on dead things. Trohin had noted some difficulties of using it on living targets. Apparently having their flesh and essence torn from them was painful and would spill lots of blood.

“Its guess it is useful school of magic, but I’m not sure I want to delve deeper”, Kaden thought. “I doubt it is possible to drag out people’s souls from gods domains. I’d love to consign some of them into damnation. As for raising corpses or something like that, it feels like not my thing.”

Kaden did have some misgivings about necromancy, but spell like Devour was indeed useful. The efficiency wasn’t that good. He had to consume most of Calen’s body before any significant wounds showed any true healing effects. He probably managed to only barely cast it so quality of the spell was not high.

Then again, the mana related effects were far greater. Kaden felt like his mana channel was reaching some kind of treshold. Mid stage Channel Opening? It was quite quick progress? Kaden wondered how fast people on average progressed outside of backwater place like Dashire. No one really could cultivate much further that Channel Opening in Dashire. He assumed the quick progress was result of many factors, but he would not complain about easy progress!

Additionally, Kaden still had several cores left to consume and he was quite interested seeing how far they would take him. Still, he kept reminding himself of not rushing it. Eating cores was a rather forceful method while the devouring the calm and pure human type mana was extremely delicate way. He could keep devouring mana like he was as long as he wanted to, but he felt like it was dangerous to eat too many cores.

Luckily there were several corpses for Kaden to devour. As for Arvan, he was splattered across the tunnel and Kaden could not really find anything intact so he ignored whatever stains remained of him.

After devouring Calen, he felt somewhat ‘filled’. Not completely, but it seemed there was limit how much he could devour in one go. Besides even after he was no longer devouring, his wounds were still slowly being knitted together. The effect was probably not going to stop until whatever he had devoured was used up. Some of the smaller wounds had become scars. Kaden also felt quite a bit better. There was much less pain.

“Devour is good for healing, but not for cultivating”, Kaden muttered. “I did get lots of mana quickly, but now I’m getting stuffed and can’t take more. Perhaps, if I can cast the spell better, this problem disapears, but not as I am now.”

He wondered for a moment, if he should stay in the tunnels until he could devour all the corpses or leave the creepy place.

“I’ll just take all the mana I can get and not devour too much flesh”, Kaden finally decided.

Having decided that, he went from corpse to corpse and cast the spell again. As expected, it only required several tries for the next try and then with difficulty it succeeded every time. Kaden only gathered mana quickly and not spend time devouring the flesh.

At a point he felt like, his mana channel suddenly spasmed. He panicked for a moment thinking he had done something wrong again. He quickly inspected himself and found this was what he should have expected. He had reached that limit he had felt earlier unknowingly! It was indeed a smaller stage breakthrough! He had reached the point of mid stage Channel Opening!

Some of the mana he had gathered in his mana channel had seemed like it could no longer fit in and had started to even leak. This was what had caused the spasms. Yet, instead of causing any actual damage, it was forcibly pushed into the mana channel’s walls. There it expanded the mana channel and made it stronger. Kaden would be able to fit in more mana and use greater volume of it!

Kaden imagined himself slaughtering his enemies in glee and then devouring them to quickly grow stronger with each kill! He was disapointed to find out it would not be that easy. As he continued to devour the remaining corpses, he noticed similar effect as he had noticed with cores.

“Damn!” Kaden cursed outloud. “It’s the same thing! There is some kind of quality difference! I can consume as many corpses as I want to, but if they are lower level than me, its nearly useless!”

Kaden kicked the corpse next to him and spit on it.

“They can rot here for all I care!” Kaden grumbled in slight anger and left for the tunnels leading outside.