The pain was sharp, a biting, electrical burn that traveled up his spectral arms. The rune was fighting him with the cold, programmed logic of a magical computer virus. It tried to sever the connection between Lencar's soul and the cluster, throwing up geometric barriers of raw mana.
"I am the Sovereign of magic," Lencar roared into the void, his willpower hardening into an unbreakable tether. "You are just a magical rune. Come to me!"
He threw the full, overwhelming weight of his Stage 3 peak mana capacity against the rune's defenses. It was a battle of absolute brute force against complex engineering.
For three agonizing seconds, the void vibrated with the tension of the struggle. The grey mist around them whipped into a miniature hurricane, disturbed by the massive displacement of spiritual energy.
Then, the inevitable happened. Morris's rune was brilliant, but it was already weakened by the anti-magic beatdown, and it simply did not possess the raw, boundless capacity of Lencar's meticulously forged soul.
The rune's anchors slipped.
The entire cluster—the Pink Gem, the Red Gem, and the glowing silver cage binding them—was violently ripped free from the hollow center of Mars's spiritual chest.
In the physical world, laying on the freezing obsidian plateau, Mars's unconscious body arched its back completely off the ground. A silent, agonizing gasp escaped his pale lips as the core of his magical identity was forcibly amputated.
In the Soul Space, the effect was immediate and visually stunning. The moment the cluster crossed the threshold and entered Lencar's glowing, blue-white silhouette, the connection to Mars was permanently severed.
Lencar floated backward, panting heavily, his spectral form dimming and brightening erratically as he struggled to stabilize the massive influx of foreign energy. He held the glowing cluster within the center of his own spiritual chest, containing it.
Suddenly, a wave of dense, choking grey ash swept through his spectral vision, temporarily obscuring the void.
Lencar looked down through the veil between worlds.
In the physical realm, the jarring, patchwork chimera Grimoire that Lencar was holding in his physical hands began to disintegrate. It didn't burn, nor did it tear. It simply lost its conceptual right to exist.
This was the terrifying, absolute toll of his unique attribute magic: Absolute Replication.
Lencar wasn't just casting a scanning spell; he wasn't just taking a picture of the magic. Absolute Replication fundamentally stole the conceptual essence, the underlying truth of the target's magic, and copied it perfectly into his own Logoless Grimoire. By extracting the very soul gems and the rune that defined Mars's dual-nature, Lencar had taken the "blueprint" of that magic.
Without the chimera soul to anchor it, without the fundamental truth of its existence remaining in the host, the physical book—which was likely a highly unstable, artificial amalgamation of two separate grimoires stitched together by Morris in a lab—could no longer sustain itself in reality. The magic binding the paper and leather failed instantly. The thick tome crumbled into a pile of fine, grey dust, which was immediately caught by the howling mountain wind and blown away into the stormy night, leaving nothing but empty air in Lencar's physical hands.
"Grimoire destroyed," Lencar noted, watching the dust scatter. "A direct consequence of the Absolute Replication processing the foundational truth of his magic. The original anchor is rendered obsolete."
He didn't mourn the book. He had the prize.
Lencar turned his attention inward, looking at the floating cluster now residing within his own soul space.
The Pink Crystal Gem and the Red Fire Gem were stable, floating calmly in the vast ocean of his blue-white mana. But the Rune—the silver, geometric cage that had bound them—was reacting violently to its new environment.
The moment the rune had been fully submerged in Lencar's soul, it recognized that it was no longer in the host it was programmed for. It was immersed in a vast, foreign sea of incredibly dense, perfectly refined mana that it did not recognize. The programmed logic of the spell failed.
The rune began to reject the new host.
"No, no, no," Lencar panicked, his spectral form rushing forward to observe the cluster closely.
The degradation, which had been slow and steady while inside Mars, suddenly accelerated exponentially. The silver geometric lattice began to glow with a furious, self-destructive heat. Large sections of the complex fractal patterns snapped and dissolved into the blue-white light of Lencar's soul, evaporating like water dropped on a hot skillet. The clamp holding the two gems together was falling apart in real-time.
"Don't disappear yet!" Lencar yelled, desperation bleeding into his thoughts.
This rune was the key. It was the stolen "technology" of the Diamond Kingdom's most guarded secrets. It was the mechanical secret to combining opposing magical attributes without undergoing spiritual detonation. If Lencar could learn this... if he could reverse-engineer its geometry and refine it to be stable... he could theoretically bind any magic he stole into more individuals or even create a singular, devastating new attribute.
"I need to record this. Now," Lencar realized, a cold sweat breaking out on his physical body. "This is the most valuable loot in the entire dungeon."
He stopped trying to physically hold the rune together. He knew he couldn't stop a programmed self-destruct sequence with brute force. Instead, he stared at it.
He poured every ounce of his focus, his soul, and his hyper-perceptive magical senses into observing the dissipating rune. He burned the agonizingly complex image into the deepest recesses of his mind. He analyzed the specific acute angles of the intersecting lines. He memorized the precise locations of the mana flow valves. He studied how the primary anchor points dug into the crystal affinity, and how the stabilizing loops wrapped around the volatile fire.
He watched it die, and as he watched, he learned.
And as he stared at the raw, naked structure of high-level, kingdom-altering soul magic, processing the impossibly complex geometric data, he felt something fundamental shift within himself.
His own soul, which had just successfully executed the most strenuous, complex application of Absolute Replication he had ever attempted, suddenly surged.
The spell wasn't just a tool; it was a process of assimilation. By successfully stealing, holding, and processing the massive influx of high-tier magical data from the two powerful soul gems, and by comprehending the advanced geometric logic of the artificial rune, Lencar's spiritual container was forced to adapt to accommodate the new wealth of knowledge and power.
The Stage 3 mana capacity he had so painstakingly cultivated through months of grueling physical training and magical replication—the vast, deep ocean of power he had built—began to boil.
It wasn't a gentle expansion. It was violent. The immense volume of new, highly refined mana generated by the successful replication pushed outward against the very boundaries of his spiritual container.
CRACK.
It sounded like a glacier breaking in the silence of his soul. A metaphysical barrier, an invisible ceiling that had capped his growth for months, shattered into a million pieces.
Lencar threw his spectral head back as a roaring torrent of power flooded his being. He felt his soul expand exponentially in all directions. It grew infinitely denser, heavier, and more sharply defined. The pale blue-white light of his silhouette erupted into a blinding, star-like brilliance that illuminated the grey void for miles.
The physical sensation echoed back into his body on the mountain. He felt his blood race, his muscles twitching as his meridians widened, forcibly stretched to accommodate a drastically increased volume of perfectly refined mana.
"Stage 3... Peak," Lencar whispered into the void, his voice trembling with the sheer, intoxicating rush of newfound power.
The advancement wasn't just a physical leveling up. It was the direct, undeniable aftermath of Absolute Replication successfully processing a haul of this magnitude. His soul was stronger now, reinforced by the monumental weight of the crystal and fire essences he had just claimed as his own. He was standing on the absolute threshold of Stage 2. He was knocking on the door of Captain-level capacity.
He looked back at the cluster.
The rune was fading fast. The last stabilizing loops dissolved into nothingness. The geometric clamp failed completely, releasing the Pink and Red gems to float freely, separate and distinct, within the vast ocean of his new, terrifyingly massive mana pool. The secret of the Diamond Kingdom was gone, reduced to a memory.
But it was a memory he possessed. Only a few seconds had passed in the physical world. He had to act before the fragile, complex image faded from his short-term recall.
Lencar severed the connection to the Soul Space and violently snapped his consciousness back into his physical body.