Chapter 581: Conspiring Universe
Mika, unaware of the audience watching from the shadows, looked down at the bucket.
It was full now, overflowing with the meat he had carved from his own body.
The sight was gruesome, even to him. After all these weeks, after all these repetitions, he still wasn’t entirely used to it.
He doubted he ever would be.
He waited for his legs to finish regenerating. When they were whole again, he tried to stand and immediately stumbled, his body betraying him.
"Dammit!"
The anti-mana field that saturated this place had always weakened him, but now it was worse than ever.
Every regeneration sapped his strength. Every amputation drained his reserves.
He was running on fumes, pushing himself forward through sheer stubbornness and the desperate need to protect the girl waiting for him on the other side of the fissure.
Anya.
The thought of her steadied him. He gritted his teeth and forced himself upright, ignoring the way his legs trembled beneath him.
He was like a newborn fawn, shaky and uncertain, but he refused to fall. He had come too far. He had sacrificed too much.
He would not fail now.
He carried the bucket to a natural stone formation, a hollowed-out rock that served as a mortar, with a matching stone that fit perfectly as a pestle.
He dumped the meat inside, watching as it landed with a wet, slapping sound that would have made him gag if he still had the capacity for disgust.
Then he began to grind.
Thuk! Thuk! Thuk!
The pestle rose and fell, rose and fell, crushing the flesh into a pulp.
Squelch! Squelch! Squelch!
Blood splattered with each impact, spraying across his face, his chest, the stone around him.
But he just kept working, mashing the flesh into a thick, pulpy consistency.
When some of the blood got on his lips, he licked it off absently, it was his own blood, after all. There was nothing wrong with taking it back in.
After five minutes of relentless grinding, the meat had been transformed. It no longer looked like anything that had ever been part of a human body.
Instead, it was a thick, sludgy paste—red and wet and utterly unidentifiable.
But Mika wasn’t done yet.
He sat down cross-legged in front of the bucket—the first time he’d had legs to cross in nearly an hour and stared at the mound of minced flesh with intense concentration.
His jaw was tight. His fists were clenched.
Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his breathing became ragged and labored.
And then, before Anya’s astonished eyes, the meat began to change color!
The deep red of blood and muscle faded, shifting like a sunset in reverse.
Pink, then pale, then finally blue!
A bright, vibrant blue that looked nothing like flesh and everything like some exotic fruit from a distant realm!
When every last piece had transformed, Mika collapsed backward onto the stone floor, gasping for breath as if he had just run a marathon.
He looked utterly spent—more exhausted than he had been even when cutting off his own limbs.
Whatever he had just done, it had taken more out of him than the physical torture had.
This was his power he had discovered in the depths of his mother’s library.
The power he had been developing in secret, building step by step, formula by formula.
Molecular Mana Manipulation.
The theory was simple. Everything in existence was made of mana, or at least affected by it.
Even here, in this Anti-mana saturated hell, there was his own body. A generator of immense power, constantly producing mana that the Anti-mana field constantly suppressed.
But if he could control that mana—not wield it like a Blessed, but manipulate it at the most fundamental level...
...he could change the very nature of matter itself.
He had been trying for months. Most of his attempts had failed.
But then, in a moment of desperate clarity in the dungeon, he had succeeded.
He had changed the hemoglobin in his blood—the compound that made it red into something else.
Something that produced a different color.
Blue.
It was such a small thing. Such a pathetically simple spell compared to what he knew was possible.
But to young Mika, it was everything. It was proof that he wasn’t useless.
Proof that even without a blessing, even trapped in this Anti-mana hell, even reduced to a shadow of his true self he could still do something.
He could still make a difference.
This was a smile of genuine satisfaction. Of pride.
—
Anya stared at the bucket of blue sludge.
The ’Titan Berry’ fruit.
The substance that had healed the adults wounds and restored their youth and made them stronger than they’d ever been.
It wasn’t fruit.
It had never been fruit.
It was Mika. It had always been Mika.
Every single bite, every single meal, every single scrap of "food" that had passed their lips—it was all pieces of the boy she loved, stripped from his body and ground into paste and magically transformed to hide what it really was.
Mika, meanwhile, was gathering the bones.
He collected all sixteen pairs of skeletal legs, cradling them in his arms like firewood, and carried them to the side of the cave.
Anya, moving on autopilot, followed him.
She wished she hadn’t.
The pit was massive. A natural sinkhole in the corner of the cavern, deep enough that she couldn’t see the bottom.
And it was filled with bones.
Hundreds of bones. Thousands of bones. Femurs and tibias and fibulas, all identical, all exactly the same size, all clearly from the same person.
They formed a mountain of white in the darkness, a monument to suffering.
"Mika...
Anya covered her mouth with both hands, pressing so hard that her palms hurt, trying desperately to contain the scream that was building in her chest.
Her body shook with silent sobs. Her tears flowed freely, streaming down her face and dripping onto the stone floor.
Mika had been doing this for more than two weeks.
Not once a day. Multiple times. Two or three trips to this cave, every single day.
She did the math in her head—her mind, despite its fractured state, still working through the numbers.
One bucket required approximately sixteen legs.
Over forty trips in two weeks. That meant...
Over five hundred times!
Mika had cut off his own legs over five hundred times!
Five hundred times, the axe had fallen.
Five hundred times, he had felt his flesh part and his bones snap.
Five hundred times, he had skinned himself alive and carved out his own meat and ground it into paste.
Why? Why would he do this? There was no need—there was absolutely no need.
If she died down here, she didn’t mind. She would be happy to die. Even if the adults ate her, she wouldn’t care.
As long as Mika was by her side, she could face anything.
But now Mika was sacrificing himself for her. Literally tearing himself apart just to keep her alive.
And she hadn’t even known.
She had eaten his flesh without realizing it. She had smiled and laughed and said it tasted strange, like cabbage, like something exotic.
She had thanked him for bringing her food.
She had eaten Mika.
The thought was too much. Her mind, already cracking, shattered completely.
She fell to her knees beside the bone pit, her body wracked with silent sobs, her tears falling like rain onto the remains of the boy who had given everything for her.
"Mika...Mika...Ahhh...Mika..."
She didn’t notice that her rainbow-colored hair, the hair that marked her as a daughter of the Battle Angel was flickering with light.
Tiny sparks of color, dancing through the strands like lightning through clouds.
Something was awakening inside her. Something that had been dormant for too long.
But she was too consumed by grief to notice.
—
Mika stood at the edge of the bone pit, staring down at the mountain of his own remains.
A wry smile twisted his lips.
’Sigh...Things weren’t supposed to go like this.’
When he had first realized the danger, he had known he needed to find food for the adults.
Something, anything, that would keep the wolves at bay.
So he had searched. He had crawled through every crack and crevice, broken down walls, squeezed through passages so narrow he’d nearly gotten stuck.
But there was nothing. The caves were barren. Completely, utterly devoid of life.
No plants. No animals. No miraculous subterranean ecosystem waiting to save them.
For a moment, he had felt true despair. The kind of despair that made you want to lie down and never get up again.
But then he had thought of another plan. A plan that didn’t require finding food at all.
Escape!
Not from the cave system—that was impossible.
But from the main cavern. From the adults.
He had explored dozens of smaller caves, tiny chambers accessible only through cracks that no adult could squeeze through.
If he and Anya could hide in one of those, they would be safe.
The adults could scream and threaten and plead all they wanted, but they wouldn’t be able to reach them.
The stone walls would be their protection.
It was a good plan. A solid plan. A plan that would have worked perfectly if not for one small detail.
The air.
Mika had noticed it immediately upon entering the smaller caves. The quality of the air was different—thinner, staler, harder to breathe.
At first, he thought he was imagining it. But the longer he stayed, the more certain he became.
The oxygen levels in these smaller chambers were dangerously low.
The crystals. It was the crystals in the main cavern.
They didn’t just provide light—they somehow converted the underground atmosphere into breathable air.
Without them, the smaller caves were death traps.
Mika himself could survive, maybe, but Anya...
Anya would suffocate. Slowly. Painfully. While Mika watched, helpless to save her.
The realization had sent him into a rage.
He had smashed his fists against the cave walls until his knuckles were bloody and raw.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
He had screamed into the darkness until his voice gave out.
"ARGHHHHHHH!"
Everything was working against him!
Every possible solution was being blocked. It was as if the universe itself was conspiring to destroy them.
But then, in the depths of his despair, he had thought of another way.
His body was not normal. He had always known this.
His mothers had remarked on it countless times that the density of mana within him was unprecedented.
If you took even a fraction of it and transferred it to a normal Blessed, that person would be overwhelmed instantly.
Mana poisoning. Their body would reject the foreign power, and they would die screaming.
What if he could use that?
What if he could turn his own flesh into a weapon?
