He pulled out his grimoire. It floated in the air, the pages flipping rapidly to the section on Replica Magic.
"Phase Two: The Deconstruction Update," Lencar whispered.
He pulled a quill and a pot of mana-infused ink—purchased from the black market months ago—from his Void Vault. He pushed his bed against the wall to clear the floor space.
He sat cross-legged on the floorboards and began to draw.
He pulled a quill and a pot of mana-infused ink from his Void Vault. He began to draw on the floorboards, sketching out a new magical circle.
He integrated the concepts he had realized in the kitchen.
Replication was a pulling force.
Deconstruction was a pushing force.
He needed to create a closed loop.
"Step 1: Anchor the Soul Gem." (The Replication phase).
"Step 2: Initiate Molecular Unbinding." (The Deconstruction phase).
"Step 3: Convert Matter to Natural Mana." (The Release phase).
He used the Breath of Yggdrasil—the crystal inside his ring—as a reference point. The crystal took chaotic mana and made it refined. Lencar needed to do the opposite: take refined matter (a body) and turn it into chaotic mana.
He worked for hours. He combined Earth Magic symbols (to understand the structure of matter) with Mist Magic symbols (to understand diffusion) and Spatial Magic symbols (to contain the reaction).
By 3:00 AM, the circle was complete. It glowed with a faint, eerie gray light.
"Testing," Lencar murmured.
He needed a subject. He didn't have a mage. He had... a leftover bone from the mutton stew he had grabbed from the trash. It wasn't perfect, but it was organic matter.
He placed the bone in the center of the circle.
He placed his grimoire over it.
"[Replica Magic]: [Entropic Deconstruction]."
He poured his mana into the spell.
The golden light of Replication flared, grabbing the "essence" of the bone. But instead of leaving a dry, white husk behind, the secondary circle activated.
A grey mist wrapped around the bone. It didn't burn. There was no fire. No smell of smoke.
The bone simply... unraveled.
It dissolved into motes of light—tiny, sparkling particles of raw mana. The particles drifted up into the air and dispersed, fading into the ambient atmosphere of the room.
Lencar checked the spot where the bone had been.
Clean.
No ash. No residue. A very slight "void" signature.
He used his [Far-Speaker's Mirror] to scan for mana traces.
The only thing the sensor picked up was a slight increase in the "Natural Earth Mana" in the room as well as the "Void". To an investigator, it would look like someone had just cast a small earth spell nearby, or that the area was simply naturally rich in mana. And that too would disperse into the environment after a few hours.
"It works," Lencar breathed.
He slumped back against his bedframe, exhaustion finally hitting him.
"I did it. I solved the Forensic problem."
With this modified spell, he could harvest a mage, take their power, and leave absolutely nothing behind. They would simply cease to exist. They would become part of the wind, the soil, the air.
"No body. No crime," Lencar whispered.
He closed his grimoire.
But after the problem of the body came the problem of the soul. The "Void" of the Soul and the magic left after he used [Absolute Replication] on someone...
How to make it vanish quickly was the question or even erase it in the first place. As Lencar knew from his experiments and hypothesis that this "Void" would only fill itself completely in a matter of days even if lencar used high magic spells to try to disperse it and if he left it alone it would take about a week for it to disperse natural (maybe more or slightly less). Of course if Lencar could perform Absolute Replication in the chaotic magical field of a grand magic zone then it would only take a few minutes to fill this void...
After hours of research and experiments, Lencar although not empty handed but still could not come up with a concrete solution.
He was tired. His mana was infinite thanks to the Breath of Yggdrasil, but his mental stamina was fraying. The human brain was not designed to run calculations on the metaphysics of the soul for 144 hours straight. He felt like a coder trying to fix a bug in the source code of the universe, and the universe was laughing at him.
He sat in the dark, the Demon-Dweller Sword resting on his lap. The sword hummed, content with its diet of refined mana from the Void Vault. It was a simple creature. It ate, it slept.
"You're lucky," Lencar told the sword, his voice raspy. "You just eat. You don't have to worry about the dishes."
He looked at his hands. They were scarred, strong, and glowing faintly with the power he had stolen. He had Stage 4 capacity. He had attributes ranging from Spatial to Mist to Steel. He was a powerhouse capable of leveling the town of Nairn with a thought. And yet, he was being cornered by a bunch of librarians in blue robes because he couldn't figure out how to take out the trash properly.
"There has to be a way," he growled, clenching his fists until the knuckles cracked. "Mana is energy. Matter is energy. If I take the soul... the matter shouldn't just become waste. It should revert to..."
He trailed off. He didn't have the answer. The equation was missing a variable.
The sun rose on the seventh day. It was a grey, listless dawn. Lencar didn't sleep. He washed his face with cold water, the shock doing little to clear the fog in his mind. He put on his apron, tying the strings with mechanical precision, and went downstairs to the kitchen.
He felt heavy. Not physically—his body was forged iron—but emotionally. The fear of being caught was no longer an abstract concept. It was a physical weight on his chest. If he messed up, if the Blue Robes found him, they wouldn't just try to take him. But they would look at who harbored him. They would look at Rebecca. They would look at the kids.
"Morning, Lencar!" Rebecca chirped as he entered. She was already wrist-deep in flour, working on the morning pastries. Her energy was a stark contrast to his internal gloom.
"Morning," Lencar replied, forcing a smile that felt like it was plastered on with glue. "Any burnt toast today?"
"Hey! I haven't burnt anything in... two days!" she protested, throwing a pinch of flour at him playfully.
Lencar dodged it effortlessly, his reflexes too sharp to be turned off. "A new record."
He started his prep work. The rhythmic chopping of carrots usually soothed him, a meditation in motion, but today it felt monotonous. Every slice of the knife was a reminder of the severance he performed on souls. His mind kept circling back to the spell formulas, running simulations that ended in failure.
Absorption. Disintegration. Ash. Residue.
The loop was endless.