The Grand Magic Zone did not care about Lencar's introspection regarding spirits or destiny. It was a region governed by the cruel, absolute laws of thermodynamics and magical entropy.
The heat was rising as the midday sun tried to pierce the bruising, violet storm clouds, turning the humidity into a suffocating blanket of superheated steam. Magma geysers erupted in the distance with the rhythmic thud of a giant's heartbeat, sending tremors through the soles of Lencar's boots.
Lencar stood in the center of the obsidian plateau. He stripped off his heavy travel cloak, folding it neatly—a habit of discipline that refused to die even in hell—and placed it into the Void Vault. Next came his tunic, his reinforced boots, and his wooden mask.
He stood only in his trousers, the black volcanic rock burning against his bare feet.
His body was lean and scarred. The muscles were dense, corded like steel cables under his skin—the result of years of Mana Forging. He looked less like a mage and more like a martial artist carved from driftwood—weathered, tough, and deceptively heavy.
"The Training begins now," Lencar announced to the magma.
He began his routine. It was the same routine he had done in the woods of Sosei as a child, the same routine Asta was likely screaming through somewhere in the Black Bulls' base at this very moment.
Push-ups. Squats. Lunges.
But here, the gravity felt heavier. The chaotic natural mana of the Vermillion Belt pressed down on him like a physical weight, a dense atmospheric pressure that tried to crush his lungs with every breath. Every movement was a struggle against the air itself.
"One hundred," Lencar grunted, pushing himself up. Sweat dripped from his nose and sizzled instantly as it hit the black rock, evaporating in a micro-second. "Two hundred."
He moved with perfect, robotic form. He didn't use magic to aid his muscles. He didn't use Reinforcement Magic to lighten the load. He used the [Breath of Yggdrasil] only to replenish his stamina instantly, allowing him to bypass the need for rest.
It was a grueling cycle. He was tearing his muscle fibers with the exertion, and the crystal was flooding him with life energy to knit them back together in real-time. It was evolution on fast-forward.
After two hours of continuous physical conditioning, his body was gleaming with sweat, his heart pounding a steady, heavy rhythm that drowned out the thunder.
"Physical warm-up complete," Lencar panted, wiping his eyes.
He looked at his skin. It was glowing faintly with the blue hue of his Mana Skin. The protective layer was doing its job, acting as a suit of armor against the environment. Inside the blue aura, the temperature was manageable. Outside, it was an oven.
"Too comfortable," Lencar criticized himself.
He clenched his fist, staring at the blue light coating his knuckles.
He thought of the enemies to come. The timeline was marching forward, and the villains were scaling up.
Vetto the Despair. A man who could crush adamantine with his bare hands, whose skin was tougher than any spell.
Mereoleona Vermillion. A woman who bathed in lava for fun, who didn't just use mana—she dominated it.
Dante Zogratis. A monster who possessed the power of a Gravity Devil, capable of crushing the earth itself.
"If I rely on Mana Skin," Lencar reasoned, his eyes narrowing, "I am relying on a shield. A shield can be broken. If my shield breaks against Vetto, I die. If my shield breaks against Dante, I am flattened."
He looked at the storm raging around him. The lightning tearing the sky. The heat warping the air.
"I need to be the shield."
He took a deep breath. He centered his mind, finding the cold, analytical core of the Heretic.
"Mana Skin... Disengage."
He dropped the spell.
WHOOSH.
The reaction was immediate and violent.
It felt like opening a blast furnace door with his face inside. The heat of the Vermillion Belt slammed into his exposed skin without mercy. The air temperature was easily 80 degrees Celsius, pushing 90 near the vents.
But it wasn't just the heat. It was the Natural Mana.
Without the filter of his own magic, the chaotic, aggressive mana of the zone attacked him. It didn't flow around him; it tried to invade him. It felt like millions of tiny, invisible needles pricking his skin, trying to force their way into his pores and disrupt his internal mana flow. It was magical radiation poisoning combined with incineration.
"Guh!" Lencar gritted his teeth, a guttural sound escaping his throat.
His knees buckled. His skin began to turn red instantly, like a lobster dropped in a pot. Blisters started to form on his shoulders where the heat was most intense, bubbling up in seconds. The air burned his throat and lungs as he inhaled, tasting like ash and fire.
"Hold it," Lencar hissed through clenched teeth. "Don't cast. Endure."
He forced himself to stand straight. His body screamed at him to put the shield back up, to run, to hide.
Pain is information, his mind analyzed, detaching from the agony. The blistering is my body telling me that my cellular structure is too weak to withstand high-density mana environments.
He focused on the spell he had crafted from the bandits.
[Plant Recovery Magic]: [Verdant Cellular Knit].
He didn't cast it as a shield. He cast it internally.
He visualized the spell weaving through his dermis, through his muscle tissue, through his lungs. As the heat destroyed his skin cells, boiling the water inside them, he forced his magic to rebuild them instantly.
Burn. Heal. Burn. Heal.
It was agony. It was the sensation of being cooked alive while simultaneously being dipped in healing water. The cycle repeated a thousand times a second. His nerves were firing conflicting signals of destruction and regeneration, creating a white noise of pain in his brain.
"Harder!" Lencar roared, stepping closer to the edge of the cliff, closer to the magma geysers where the heat was intensified.
The mana density here was crushing. It felt like being underwater at the bottom of the ocean.
He began to throw punches.
Jab. Cross. Hook.
His movements were sluggish. The atmospheric mana resisted him, acting like a viscous fluid. Every punch felt like he was moving through molasses.
"Faster!" he screamed at himself.
He punched through the pain. His knuckles split from the force and the dryness, bleeding for a split second before the green light of his recovery magic sealed them shut. His skin peeled away in flakes and reformed, coming back slightly tougher, slightly denser, slightly more resistant to the heat.
He was forging his body not just with physical stress, but with magical stress. He was forcing his cells to adapt to a high-mana environment, rewriting his biology to accept the chaos.
"I am not a noble!" Lencar shouted into the thunder, his voice raw and cracking. "I don't have a divine bloodline! I don't have a four-leaf clover! I don't have a spirit!."
He channeled the memory of every rejection.
The Spirit Scroll going cold in his hands.
The Nobels looking down on him and his parents when some of them visited his village when he was small.
The feeling of being small and weak in a world of devils and chosen ones.
"I have this!"
He punched the air until his arms felt like lead. He kicked until his legs shook uncontrollably. He turned his frustration into fuel, feeding it into the furnace of his training.
Hours passed. The sun began to set, turning the violet sky into a deep, bruised purple. The temperature dropped slightly, but the mana storm raged on.
Lencar stood in the center of the plateau. He was a mess.
His trousers were singed and burned to crisps. His hair was wild, stuck to his forehead with sweat and grime. His skin was a patchwork of red, raw healing, looking like he had been flayed and put back together.
But he was standing.
Then the sun rose back up.
The heat still burned, but it no longer felt like it was killing him. It felt like a heavy coat—uncomfortable, but manageable. The chaotic mana still pricked him, but his own aura had hardened, pushing back naturally without the need for a conscious spell. His pores had adapted; they no longer let the foreign mana invade.
He had acclimated.
"Stage 4 Body," Lencar whispered, clenching a fist.
He looked at his hand. The skin across his knuckles was thick, calloused, and radiated a faint heat of its own. He had turned his body into a vessel capable of housing the power he had stolen.
He reached into the Void Vault and pulled out a water skin. He drank the entire thing in one go, the water turning to steam as it hit his stomach, his body absorbing the hydration instantly.
He sat down on the rock, finally reactivating his Mana Skin.
The relief was instant, like stepping out of a desert into an air-conditioned room. The pain vanished, replaced by a dull, throbbing ache of accomplishment.
He checked his internal clock. He had been training for twenty hours straight.
"Efficient," Lencar nodded, though his voice was a croak.
He looked at his hands again. They weren't the hands of a dishwasher anymore. They weren't even the hands of a mage. They were the hands of a creature that could survive in hell.
And then he entered his Void Vault and slept there for 8 hours straight.
And then after waking up lencar comes out of the Void Vault.
"Kiten Dungeon is cleared," Lencar summarized, his mind running down the checklist. "The artifacts are secured. My mana is almost infinite. My body is hardening."
He stood up, his joints popping like gunshots. He retrieved his cloak from the vault. He wrapped himself in the black fabric, hiding the raw, red skin and the dense muscles.
He pulled the wooden mask over his face.
"Time to go back to Nairn," Lencar said, the weariness finally seeping into his tone. "I still have to maintain my image of being a restaurant worker there. Rebecca will worry if I look like a boiled lobster."
He cast a quick [Illusion Magic] spell over his skin to hide the redness.
He raised his ring-clad hand.
[Spatial Magic]: [Long-Range Coordinate Shift]
The air twisted.
The Heretic vanished from the fire, leaving the Vermillion Belt to rage against an empty rock, the only witness to the forging of a monster.