Chapter 49 - Second heartbeat

  Senior hunter Mai had been fighting the Niorbos for two decades before she decided to retire and focus on the next generation. She had lost many friends during her time as an earth mage on the fortresses, and wanted to do more for her fellow hunters than simply reinforcing the front lines and throwing rocks at herculean monsters that could shrug off her attacks with ease.

  Not having a power particularly suited for attacking, she would often stay behind and forge stone spikes around the front lines and reinforce the constantly assaulted walls protecting the human cities. So she never managed to reach the rank of master hunter.

  But her calling seemed to have been in teaching others rather than holding the line. Her theoretical knowledge far surpassed her peers and her mage weaving powers were only topped by the Grand master. As such, when she began her lesson with the newest batch of young hunters, she performed the same as always.

  She demonstrated her power, explained the basic type of attack they would be learning, then went on to explain how the hunter heart works for all mage powers. But on this day, something changed the safe and repetitive routine she had forged for herself away from the front.

  A few minutes after beginning her first lesson, she felt a sudden burst of power. It was like a ripple in space but it didn’t disappear after reaching her, rather it continued to erupt as power warped around her.

  She homed in on the source of the disturbance and found it coming from a small teenager. He was of average height for his age but had a rather skinny build and short cut hair. Nothing seemed to stand out about him other than the power erupting from his being.

  Mai had worked with all sorts of hunter powers and had seen countless combinations, including a warrior who possessed three of the four warrior powers. Yet this energy felt like nothing she had ever experienced before. Even the other young hunters could feel it despite not yet being able to access their hunter hearts.

  But just as the power had arrived out of nowhere, it disappeared from existence as if it was never there. It left behind no trace of its presence and in fact, she wasn’t sure what sort of existence it was to begin with. It felt like a ripple in the very fabric of reality, as if the power they used every day as hunters was nothing but a drop of piss in comparison to the undeniable power that aura had revealed. She was stunned as she stared at the young boy with closed eyes.

  Adam felt like everyone was staring at him for a little too long since not even the instructor broke eye contact.

  “What did you just do?” She finally blurted out.

  “I don’t know, what happened?” He replied, feigning ignorance.

  He felt a junction appearing before him. Clearly, the power that had flooded into Adam was noticed by everyone here, and it was nothing like the power of the hunters’ heart. He felt as though the middle-aged instructor's next decision would shape his future here.

  The power that enveloped him helped fix his soul's deteriorating condition as it acted in a manner similar to soul mana, nurturing and revitalizing his soul. Although this unexpected boon had fixed his immediate problems, it had created another in the form of the instructor. If she pursued Adam and demanded an explanation for this new power, an explanation he currently didn’t have, then his hopes of learning fire magic would be dashed once more.

  However, Mai simply shook her head and coughed into her fist to gather the group's attention.

  “As I was saying, to begin using freeform attacks, you must first unleash your mana hearts. It is difficult to do at first, like holding your breath, but the more you do it, the better you will become at it.

  Let’s start by relaxing our bodies. Tension will only make this harder, which is why mages must control their hunter hearts perfectly; if not, they will be defenseless in a battle. You must sense your second heart and grab it with your mind. Exert all your mental strength to force the heart to release its power and allow it to permeate your body.”

  Adam released the breath he was unknowingly holding in relief when the instructor continued on with her lesson. He expected this wasn’t the end of it, but he was glad that she had ignored the strange occurrence for now.

  He had mixed feelings about the return of the system. For one, he knew that nobody else had access to it, or they didn’t broadcast it if they did. Secondly, he had no idea what that power was that saved his failing soul from prematurely returning.

  It didn’t feel like mana, it felt more powerful and primordial than that. He couldn’t explain why, but he felt like it had fundamentally shifted the essence of his soul.

  He pushed those questions and feelings aside for now as he listened to the senior huntress. He was legitimately intrigued about what she could teach him, so it wasn’t too hard to forget about the system's return for now.

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  The next hour passed rather quickly as the young would-be mages tried to reach for their hunter hearts. Adam was stumped at how to release the energy stored in the hunter's heart. He was used to prodding his old mana core and letting it travel along his pathways. However, this power was different from his old mana core, it didn’t travel along any paths, and it wouldn’t release its energy from a simple prod.

  It took him longer than he wanted to admit to access his new power. Unlike a mana core, his hunter heart was more viscous and didn’t travel where he wanted it to since he had no pathways. He needed to fully grasp the heart and squeeze it with all his mental strength to extract the power hidden within.

  “As those of you who have succeeded in grasping your hunter hearts have found out, the power doesn’t move freely inside you but tends to stagnate around your chests.

  This means you're ready for part two, making your heart beat. Unlike before, you will not simply grasp the heart and squeeze it, but you will repeatedly squeeze and release it. This will activate the hunter's heart and will allow you to continually extract your hunter power like pushing blood around your body.”

  Adam was sweating from simply trying to fully grasp the heart a single time, so he felt like it was impossible to repeat that process multiple times every minute. He looked over at Ellio and found that she too was sweating and her brows were scrunched in deep concentration. He didn’t know why, but his sister was very talented when it came to this stuff.

  He wondered if this was genetic and Dorian was also supposed to have great talent. It made him briefly wondered about whether there was a reason Dorian’s young dying soul appeared to him back then. He still knew virtually nothing of the mindbending soul realm, so it was definitely something to consider.

  But for a more current matter, he was shocked at the use of his hunter heart. It looked just like a mana core except for its lack of a connection to the soul and its pathways. He would never have considered manipulating it like a second heart back on the alien world, yet it seemed to work great for these people.

  He felt giddy at the thought of all the things he could learn from these people. It isn’t every day that you can reincarnate into a different world and learn and experience magic through their eyes. He found out that recreating the heart beat actually wasn’t as hard as extracting the power from a single grasp.

  He was sitting on the compacted dirt of the training yard with the rest of his group and all of them had passed the first stage of extracting their power and were now working on creating their second heartbeat.

  Adam was actually one of the last people to succeed in the first stage since he was used to using small tendrils of mana with delicate mental prods. This magic, however, required a much heavier hand. It felt thick like honey and was simply pushed out of the core instead of being sent onto his previous mana highway.

  Yet it wasn’t too difficult to circular the thick mana throughout his body once he got his hunter heart going. It acted like an engine where only the first step required the person's full effort and every beat afterward would continue to affect the heart and allow it to beat continuously with little concentration needed to maintain it.

  As he figured this out, the power in his second heart was pumped out and began to be spread further out from his chest. He remembered the power that grew inside of the instructor before she formed that stone projectile. He now understood what that was, it was her hunter's heart revving up.

  For his part, Adam couldn’t extract the power in his heart nearly as fast as instructor Mai, and he felt his second heart grow weaker and hollower as the power was pushed around his body. But surprisingly, the thick reddish mana in his body didn’t visibly leave the confines of his flesh or dissipate into the air like what he would expect.

  “You seem to have mostly mastered the hunter's heartbeat. Now, you need to reverse the process and return the power flooding you back towards your hunter's heart.”

  Adams brows shot up so fast they could have flown off into the sky. ‘You can do that? Just directly reabsorb the mana?’

  Every time he extracted mana from his core on the alien world, he always had to wait for his core to reabsorb the mana from the air before he could continue his training. Had he been really stupid all that time and simply didn’t realize he could recycle his core mana?

  “Unlike releasing the power of the heart, you don’t want to constrain it anymore. Simply stop the heart beat and focus on expanding the heart. You want to make it grow as much as possible without grasping the heart. Think of it like inflating a ball, you don’t want to push on it from the outside since that would interfere with its inflation.

  Instead, focus your mind on a single point of the heart and channel your mind into it. You want to create a tiny hole that will be filled with the nearby extracted power. Similar to the heartbeat, once the process is started, it continues practically by itself until all the power in your body is returned into the heart.”

  The next hour was spent repeating this process of creating the heartbeat and excreting power, then reversing the process and returning the power. Instructor Mai gave some of the young hunters some small red pills when they complained that they lost most of their power. It seemed to be a much weaker version of the awakening pills and helped restore their hunter hearts. Yet it also raises a question.

  Back on the alien world, Adam simply had to breathe in the air for mana to enter his body, yet here, he didn’t feel any mana enter his body as he breathed. Also, the mana here was a lot heavier and therefore probably couldn’t travel in the air. That made him wonder how people would regenerate their mana without some pill. Adam himself felt like he currently had less mana in his second heart compared to before due to gradual loss from extracting and reabsorbing his mana.

  “Excuse me, Instructor Mai, but how do mages replenish their hunter hearts without using the pills?”

  “Most mages use the materials harvested from slain Niorbos to form mage candy. It isn’t common for us mage hunters to be too close to the battles with the Niorbos so the warriors are the ones that tend to benefit most from direct slaying of the enemy, while mages are more suited for using our brains to grow stronger with alchemy.

  Don’t worry though, no mage hunter goes anywhere without a supply of mage candy. That is the source of all our abilities after all. The warriors also have hunter hearts, but they use them very differently, causing their bodies to fuse with them while us mages perform feats impossible to them.

  But as you say, we both grow stronger by facing the Niorbos and slaying them. The pills we use don’t make us stronger and taking too high a dose would only lead to an overdose and even death. The only way to grow stronger and rise to senior or even master hunters is to slay Niorbos as they release their power after death, and pills can’t capture the effect it brings to the hunters' heart.

  The city lord himself has spent most of his life on one front or another, constantly fighting the endless Niorbos and for that reason, he has now become an elite. With danger comes great opportunity, but those who use magic are more vulnerable than most. Getting close to the front for mages is far deadlier than for warriors, but those who survive are far more powerful as a result.

  Remember young mages, the power of the mage hunters may seem weak or too limited at first, but its power truly shines the stronger you become. Any junior warrior is stronger than a junior mage, but a senior mage is stronger than dozens of junior warriors. That power only rises the stronger the mage. The Grand master himself is probably stronger than the city lord since his powers can incinerate entire hordes of Niorbos.”

  The entire group had stopped training their second heart and were now all staring at her long monologue with sparkling eyes. She was clearly very passionate about her profession and Adam could understand why. He too wanted to figure out how to use his fire magic and go ham on some monster hordes.

  “But, before you get any ideas of running headstrong into a horde of Niorbos, you first have to manifest your powers. Now that you can control your hunter hearts, it's time that you finally get to work on expelling your powers. Let me show you how to create freeform attacks.”

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