His brilliant, elegant theory had been perfectly sound for the soul, but it had disastrously, fatally ignored the absolute limits of human flesh and blood. Mars's soul wasn't rejecting the fire anymore—because the fire wasn't forcibly stitched into his soul anymore—but his physical, biological flesh absolutely was.
The human body in this world was designed to channel a single, specific type of ambient mana. Over fifteen years of growth, training, and horrific experimentation, Mars's physical meridians, his blood vessels, and his very cellular structures had completely adapted to the dense, cold, rigid frequency of Crystal Magic. His flesh was built to handle pressure, structure, and frigid temperatures.
When Morris had grafted the Fire Gem into Mars's soul, the horrific Chimera Rune hadn't just bound the two spiritual entities together; it had acted as a brutal, agonizing, but entirely necessary physiological brace. The rune had forced the physical body to simultaneously accommodate two radically different, opposing elemental states. It was a state of constant, low-level torture for the boy, but it worked. It kept him alive.
But Lencar had played surgeon. Lencar had removed the brace. He had provided the massive, overwhelming power of the Fire Magic without providing the necessary physiological scaffolding to support it.
Without the physical presence of the Fire Soul Gem residing within his chest to naturally mediate the thermal energy, to act as a transformer stepping down the voltage, Mars's body had absolutely zero immunity to the element. None. He was drawing raw, unmitigated, high-level fire magic straight from Lencar's massive Stage 3 Peak soul, pulling it directly through physical pathways and veins that were only designed to handle cold, structured crystal.
It was exactly like trying to force a raging, boiling river of magma through a fragile, intricate glass pipe. The sheer, overwhelming resistance of his crystal-attuned biology was melting the conduit. The friction was insurmountable. The fire magic was running completely rampant through his system, finding no natural, heat-resistant pathways to channel it, and so it was violently, aggressively burning its way out through his skin.
He was spontaneously combusting. His body was literally tearing itself apart on a cellular level to vent the alien, catastrophic energy.
"Hold still! Mars, hold still!" Lencar shouted over the roaring flames and the boy's deafening shrieks, grabbing Mars by the shoulders to pin his thrashing body down against the rock.
The boy's skin was searing, impossibly hot. The thermal output was so intense it immediately began burning right through the thick, reinforced leather of Lencar's gloves. The sickening, pungent smell of singed hide and burning hair filled the damp air, making Lencar gag.
Lencar didn't hesitate. Tactics, risks, and the preservation of his own secrets vanished from his mind entirely, replaced by pure, desperate, blinding adrenaline and the terrifying realization that he was about to accidentally murder the boy he had just tried to save. If Mars died here, everything fell apart. The timeline, the future, the war against the Elves—it would all shatter.
He tapped the silver ring on his finger, ignoring the pain in his hands. He established a direct, hyper-pressurized, wide-open spatial link to the Void Vault. He didn't search for a potion or a tool. He visualized the pristine marble pedestal in the exact center of the white room, and the massive, glowing green crystal resting upon it.
"Come on. Come on!" Lencar gritted his teeth, his jaw locking tight as he focused every ounce of his willpower.
His own Stage 3 Peak mana flared with blinding intensity, a blue-white aura erupting around him, turning his very body into a living, high-capacity conduit between dimensions.
He pulled the raw, unadulterated Quintessence—the impossibly dense, miraculous, god-like natural life force emitted by the Breath of Yggdrasil—directly out of the spatial dimension. He didn't just let it wash over his skin as a soothing mist like he had done for his own bruises earlier. He channeled it aggressively, violently. He forced the roaring torrent of green energy down his arms, pushing it through his burning leather gloves, and pumped it directly, mercilessly into Mars's violently convulsing, burning chest.
The collision of opposing energies within the boy's fragile body was explosive.
The moment the vibrant, pulsing, emerald-green Quintessence flooded into Mars's failing circulatory system, it slammed headlong into the rampant, raging red fire magic. The hyper-refined life force possessed an almost sentient drive to preserve biology. It immediately recognized the catastrophic, systemic cellular damage occurring across Mars's entire structure and went into absolute, unfettered overdrive.
Lencar watched, horrified, nauseated, and utterly mesmerized by the sheer, terrifying power of the interaction.
The glowing, molten-orange cracks on Mars's face and arms rapidly, aggressively sealed themselves. The charred, blackened, ruined flesh visibly turned a healthy pink, then settled into its natural pale tone, completely restored to pristine, unblemished condition in a matter of impossible seconds. The roaring flames died out instantly, completely smothered by the overwhelming, suffocating influx of pure life.
Lencar let out a massive, shuddering breath of relief, the tension leaving his shoulders.
But the breath caught painfully in his throat.
The synthetic grimoire lying next to Mars on the wet stone was still active. The encrypted tether was still wide open, relentlessly, mindlessly pulling the raw fire attribute from Lencar's soul into Mars's body based on the boy's subconscious combat instincts, which were screaming at him to defend himself.
No sooner had the emerald Quintessence miraculously healed the ravaged flesh than the fire magic surged forward again. It hit the same biological bottleneck of Mars's crystal-attuned meridians. The friction returned instantly. The newly formed, perfect, pristine skin instantly ruptured.
The orange fissures ripped open once more, wider and significantly deeper this time, exposing the glowing, boiling muscle beneath. Fresh, roaring flames licked out of the boy's forearms and neck, instantly burning away the newly healed, fragile tissue.
Heal. Burn. Heal. Burn.
Mars's body became a gruesome, terrifying, microscopic battlefield.
The brilliant, soothing green light of the Quintessence and the furious, destructive red light of the Fire Magic warred fiercely and unapologetically over his biology. He was being constantly, simultaneously destroyed at a fundamental cellular level and resurrected just as fast. The healing factor was keeping him alive, but it was doing absolutely nothing to stop the source of the burning.
The sheer, incomprehensible agony of the cyclical process was simply too much for the human nervous system to endure. No amount of Diamond Kingdom conditioning could train a mind to withstand being burned to death and reborn multiple times a second. Mars's horrific screaming abruptly cut off, replaced by a wet, sickening gurgle in his throat as his eyes rolled completely back into his head, showing only the bloodshot whites.
He fainted. The merciful blackness of unconsciousness claimed him. His body went completely limp in Lencar's burning grip, an absolute dead weight.
Yet, even in unconsciousness, the tether remained active. His flesh continued to spontaneously rupture, bleed roaring fire, and knit back together in a horrifying, endless, glowing cycle.
"I can't cut the tether," Lencar muttered frantically, real panic setting in. Sweat poured down his face in rivulets beneath the wooden mask, stinging his eyes. His arms were trembling violently from the strain of acting as a dimensional pump, as he poured more and more Quintessence into the boy just to keep him from turning into a pile of grey ash on the mountaintop.
His brilliant, analytical mind spun through the available options, discarding them as fast as they formed. If I sever the connection to the Fire Magic right now, the synthetic grimoire will shatter. It relies on the flow to maintain its structure. Mars will lose the fire forever, and the timeline will irreparably fracture. But if I keep this up... the sheer physiological, systemic shock of dying and healing a hundred times a minute is going to stop the boy's heart! His brain will hemorrhage from the stress! I'm just torturing him!
Lencar had to find the root cause of the absolute rejection. He understood the biological bottleneck perfectly well—the body wasn't built for two opposing magics. But the violent speed of the rejection—the sheer, unrelenting ferocity with which the body was tearing itself apart rather than accepting the mana—suggested something else entirely was interfering.
It was as if his body wasn't just failing to slowly adapt; it was actively, violently fighting the flame on a systemic level.
Even without the soul gem acting as a buffer, a powerful mage's body should instinctively, over the course of several agonizing minutes, attempt to acclimatize to the mana it was casting, even if it caused severe, third-degree burns initially. The absolute, instantaneous, catastrophic rejection pointed directly to a mental blockade. Something in the software was broken. Something was preventing Mars's mind from sending the necessary signals, from telling his body to accept and regulate the fire.
"What did they do to your head, Mars?" Lencar demanded to the unconscious, burning boy, his voice tight, hoarse with stress and fear.
He closed his eyes, desperately shutting out the sickening, horrific sight of the burning, regenerating flesh beneath his hands. He shifted his magical technique, compartmentalizing his focus. While his physical hands remained clamped firmly on Mars's shoulders, acting as an automated pump to push the life-saving green mana into his chest, Lencar extended a highly concentrated, needle-thin probe of pure sensory magic from his mind.
He didn't scan the vast, grey, ethereal emptiness of the soul space this time. He didn't need metaphysical answers. He scanned the wet, electrical, biological reality of the boy's physical body.
He bypassed the burning epidermis, slipping his senses past the tearing muscle fibers and the boiling blood, and phased his awareness cleanly through the thick bone of the skull. He traced the erratic, panicked electrical signals from the failing, overwhelmed nervous system, following the frantic impulses straight upward into the complex architecture of Mars's brain.
He dove into the folded grey matter of the Diamond General's mind, navigating the neural pathways, desperately searching for the anomaly that was causing the total systemic rejection.
And what he found there, buried deep in the center of the boy's brain, made Lencar Abarame physically sick to his stomach.