The ground was littered with corpses.
The dragon warriors watched in silence, their faces carrying terror, respect, and uncertainty all at once. None of them knew what to say. None of them even knew how to feel as they looked at the battlefield before them.
The perfect elven bodies were now dried beyond recognition, their skin pulled tight against bone until there was almost nothing beautiful left about them. Only a small number of elves remained alive, standing among the dead with pale faces and hollow eyes as they stared at what had once been their friends, family, comrades, and acquaintances. Even their proud and powerful emperor had fallen, reduced to nothing before the man floating in the sky.
And that man, the one who had done all of this, was now glowing in a golden light.
Max hovered above the ruined battlefield, surrounded by that radiance like a cocoon. All the mana he had stolen from the elves was now gathering around him, thick and violent, no longer looking like power under his control. It trembled, twisted, and pressed against his body from every direction, as if the stolen mana had finally turned against him and was trying to destroy him instead.
His expression, however, remained calm.
It was not the first ti he had faced such a backlash. Back when he fought against Thor, his body had been almost completely wrecked from the inside by raging energy, and at that ti, he had sworn to himself that he would be more careful. Yet here he was again, doing the sa thing on an even greater scale.
The battle against the elven armies had been simple, almost like a joke to him. They had arrived here mighty and proud, carrying themselves as if the whole world should bow before their golden light, yet in the end, they had been reduced to nothing but dried skin and empty husks.
The real challenge now was not the enemy.
It was refining all the mana he had stolen, forcing it into his body without allowing it to tear him apart, and using it to improve his Magic Soul to a higher grade. This was where his true growth would begin, not by rely defeating armies, but by devouring everything they had once called power and turning it into his own foundation.
Thanks to the system’s creator, he had gained a list containing a large number of Magic Soul realms. But the more he understood, the stranger it felt.
He could not understand how soone as powerful as him was still standing at the very beginning.
He was still in the Spark Realm, or as humans called it, the first level. There were ten realms known to him at the mont, and each one carried its own level of understanding on how magic worked, how mana should be controlled, and how the Magic Soul slowly transford into sothing normal people could not even comprehend.
As he processed the mana he had stolen, Max searched through the mories the creator had placed inside his mind. There was a very specific path for Magic Soul transformation, and if he wanted to step beyond the Spark Realm, he had to slowly draw a magic rune inside his own soul.
If done successfully, that rune would beco the foundation of his next stage, transforming his Magic Soul from the Spark Realm into the Rune Realm.
What Max did not know was that most magic users in the world were stuck in this second realm for their entire lives. Drawing a rune inside the soul was not sothing that could be done by talent alone.
It required precision, control, and an almost impossible understanding of one’s own mana.
One wrong line, one unstable stroke, one tiny imperfection, and the rune would beco flawed, leaving the Magic Soul damaged or forever trapped inside that realm.
Luckily for him, fate seed to be smiling.
Max searched deeper through the mories inside his mind and found instructions on how to draw a god-level rune inside his Magic Soul, a rune that would not rely allow him to advance, but place him on a path of supremacy for all future growth.
It was another gift from the mysterious system creator, another advantage handed to him by the being that had torn him apart, rebuilt him, and quietly pushed him toward sothing far greater than this small continent could ever understand.
Max closed his eyes, ignoring the battlefield beneath him, ignoring the dried corpses, the trembling dragons, and the few surviving elves who were too terrified to even breathe loudly.
All of that no longer mattered.
The golden mana surrounding him pressed against his body like a violent ocean, beautiful and deadly at the sa ti. It wanted to tear him apart, to burn through his veins, to shatter his Magic Soul from the inside, but Max forced it to move. Slowly. Carefully. He pulled the wild power inward, not allowing it to flood him all at once, but guiding it thread by thread through his mana channels until it reached the place inside him where his Magic Soul floated like a tiny spark in the endless dark.
It looked so small.
So weak.
Max almost laughed at the sight of it. This little thing was the reason he could stand above armies and emperors, yet compared to the knowledge the creator had burned into his mind, it was nothing more than the first ember of a fire that had not even begun to grow.
He began to draw.
The first golden line appeared across his Magic Soul, thin and trembling, carved with the mana of the elves he had just devoured. It was not a simple mark. Every movent had to be perfect, every curve had to follow the mory the creator had left behind, and every mistake could beco a flaw that would remain inside him forever.
Max’s brows furrowed.
The second line ford, then the third, slowly connecting into a shape that looked too ancient to belong to any mortal realm. The golden mana resisted him with every stroke, struggling like a living thing that hated being forced into order, but Max pressed harder, his teeth clenched as cracks began to spread across the tiny spark of his Magic Soul.
Too much.
The thought flashed through his mind.
The rune was not stable.
The golden lines shook violently, twisting away from the shape they were supposed to follow, and Max’s eyes snapped open as blood spilled from the corner of his mouth.
For the first ti since returning, that calm look on his face finally cracked.
Inside his soul, the half-ford rune began to collapse.
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