At last, the silence broke.
With the apex predator dead, the forest slowly stirred back to life. Birds called from distant branches. Trees creaked as wind returned, leaves rustled overhead.
He lay sprawled on the mossy floor—battered, exhausted, eyes fixed on the drifting canopy above. Complete stillness held him, broken only by the occasional slow blink.
Then came the groaning.
"Ghhhuuu…"
"… I think I may have broken something."
He exhaled, voice dry but laced with dark amusement.
"At this point, I deserve a rest fit for a king."
Pausing, he turned his head toward the fallen foe.
"But first…" A weak smirk tugged at his lips.
For a long moment he simply sat there and listened. The forest settled with him, slipping back into its rhythm of chittering insects and far-off birdsong.
Still alive…
After dying once already… it kinda takes the meaning out of it.
His body felt heavier, as though some of the dead creature's weight had settled into his bones. Every muscle throbbed, still unaccustomed to the limits of this new frame.
"Well… at least now I'm not just eating fish. I've got chicken to cook."
After a brief rest, he pushed himself upright and retrieved his knife. He returned to the corpse, hesitation flickering across his face.
"Well, it's not gonna skin itself. Let's… let's do this."
With wavering confidence he set to work.
The hide was tougher than expected—scaled, leathery, and stubborn as a soaked boot. He leaned his weight on the blade until it slipped through with a soft, wet snap. Steam rose in lazy curls, carrying the thick scent of wet feathers and raw iron.
"Ahh, smells like otherworldly monster chicken. What could possibly go wrong?"
He followed the natural seams where the scales thinned. The deeper he cut, the more ordinary it became—pale muscle, faint marbling, nothing glowing or grotesque.
"Well, I'll be damned. It actually looks like chicken."
He carved off a generous chunk and laid it on a flat rock lined with a broad leaf. It hissed faintly against the warm stone.
"Chicken, fish, eldritch poultry—whatever. Protein's protein."
He sat back, knife balanced across his knee, watching steam curl upward. Against all odds, it smelled halfway decent.
—— ❖ —— —— ❖ —— —— ❖ ——
…
Days blurred together.
The forest settled into its own strange rhythm, and after enough days, he found himself moving with it too.
Mornings began with dew cold enough to sting bare feet, the river's surface steaming faintly as sunlight clawed through the mist. Somewhere in the canopy, birds waged chaotic choir practice—every species apparently born tone-deaf.
Each morning Arion flung himself out of bed and clung to the routine he had built, following the brutal wisdom of his great-uncle: a strong mind demanded a strong body.
When the workout was done he rewarded sore muscles with his new "chicken" protein, then quenched his thirst. Down at the river he honed his fishing routine; by now he had become alarmingly decent at it.
Once satisfied with his haul, he returned to the cabin and laid the fish neatly on a large foraged leaf—his makeshift platter—ready for the fire.
The air hung heavy with warmth and drifting insects. The faint shimmer of Essence still clung to the edge of his senses like static on skin.
Later, as the sun climbed higher, he returned to the river.
He sat on the bank with a stick, tracing diagrams into wet sand—heat vectors, pressure arrows, half-remembered equations that no longer belonged in this world.
Sometimes he caught himself lecturing aloud to the local wildlife.
A two-headed mutant blue bird perched on a rock, tweeting critically. An amphibian reptile with scales and a horn watched from the shallows. Completing the trio was a weird-looking fish flopping desperately back toward the water.
"Today's lesson: how not to die. Step one—don't be me."
The students looked unimpressed.
Each day ended the same way—with another attempt to coax the strange energies into obedience. He pulled heat from the water, pushed it back in, sketched new symbols into the sand, then ground them away with his heel when they failed him. The more he did it, the less it felt like guesswork and the more it felt like working a muscle he had only just discovered.
At least this version of me gets to fail in peace, he thought, watching ripples reform after yet another collapsed pulse.
—— ❖ —— —— ❖ —— —— ❖ ——
Another day, another spell session with disaster waiting somewhere inside it.
Arion stood at the riverbank, one hand extended, repeating the motion he had drilled a hundred times. Frost Snap now triggered cleanly, each cast precise—a thin line, a cone of frost, a broad area chill. He could adapt on instinct, deploying the spell exactly as the moment demanded.
He flexed his fingers, feeling the faint sting beneath the skin—nerves still learning how internal energy threaded through muscle and bone. With another flick of the wrist, ice webbed across the water in a perfect ring, forming a circular platform. No excess spray. No wild temperature swings. Just clean, practical control.
He tested variations through air, through soil, even through the water in his waterskin. It worked across every medium, though air and earth resisted, sluggish and reluctant. Water remained the perfect conduit.
Each refinement shaved a little more instability away. He focused on density rather than scale, compression rather than reach. Small, consistent tweaks—one after another.
Each adjustment mattered.
The reaction obeyed him now, at least within the limits he had learned to respect.
The frost ring spread again, smooth and symmetrical, faintly steaming where sunlight kissed it. A breeze rippled over the frozen patch, scattering cold air like mist.
It was almost hypnotic.
It's almost like breathing. Like another sense waiting to be trained.
Satisfied, Arion lowered his hand and brushed frost from his wrist. The skin beneath glowed faintly where internal energy channels pulsed warm against the cold.
Energy response steady… efficiency maybe thirty percent. Better than yesterday. Probably as stable as it gets for now.
…For now.
He let out a quiet laugh.
"Still doesn't mean I won't turn myself into a popsicle."
—— ❖ —— —— ❖ —— —— ❖ ——
By evening the sun had mostly retreated and the forest cooled. Orange light flickered through gaps in the trees, scattering across his small camp.
Arion sat beside the firepit, poking half-heartedly at another dinner experiment—partly cooked "chicken," slightly burnt on one edge, raw on the other. He ate anyway. Taste no longer mattered; survival had no menu.
The fire hissed softly while he flipped through the scavenged journal. The pages still smelled of dust and river mould. Some entries were unreadable—water-stained ink or frantic shorthand—but others revealed patterns.
Plenty of it remained hard to digest—the handwriting and mannerisms were stubbornly foreign. Yet this time the words began to surface clearly.
'Vitalis.'
'Luminary.'
'Essence.'
The words repeated like coordinates on a map.
"Luminary essence… found thick—essence saturated along the northern track, heart of the north forest…"
He read aloud, eyes narrowing.
"Vitalis burn… Is that what I think it is?"
He flipped pages back and forth, chasing the phrases. Each mention linked to fragments of symptoms: drained vitality, body tremors, prolonged exhaustion.
Then another note:
"Rested for two days. Break for Vitalis to renew…"
Arion frowned, tracing a finger through the faded ink.
"Internal current… external field…" he murmured to himself.
He leaned back, staring into the firelight. Then the shape of it finally clicked into place. Vitalis—the current inside the body. The muscle. Luminary Essence—the external field it communicated with. The environment.
The two were not separate. They fed into each other. He wasn't conjuring energy from nothing—he was bridging inner Vitalis and outer Luminary.
He looked toward the open forest where faint silver haze drifted through the canopy—thin strands of light bending when they met warm air. For a moment he swore the mist pulsed.
Essence.
A new element? A new form of matter?
"Maybe… something else entirely."
He laughed under his breath, rubbing the back of his neck. "Guess I've been swimming in the stuff since day one."
The journal rested open in his lap, firelight dancing over the ink.
Vitalis and Luminary Essence. Two sides of the same phenomenon. He stared into the fire a while longer, the shape of it settling deeper each time he turned it over.
—— ❖ —— —— ❖ —— —— ❖ ——
Twin heads. Two shrill tweets.
Arion's personal alarm clock from hell. He groaned, flung a pebble at the branch, and the birds scattered in offended harmony.
Morning again, and curiosity was already chewing through his focus.
If Luminary Essence can strip heat from matter… can it push it back in?
He crouched beside the river, staring at his reflection. "Just gotta reverse the transfer," he muttered.
"Same form. Opposite vector."
He opened his palm and drew Vitalis up from his core until the veins in his arm began to hum faintly.
Keep it narrow. Don't let the transfer bleed sideways. If this works, the heat should leave in one clean line.
The sensation felt strangely familiar now—like flexing a muscle he had never possessed, yet somehow already knew how to use.
"So this internal energy is my Vitalis."
It's just heat flow. Push instead of pull, and the whole reaction turns the other way.
He exhaled. "Alright… let's break physics again."
He pushed.
A faint hum built under his skin—pressure, vibration, a fever blooming from the inside out. The air rippled around his palm, distortion lines bending light. Dust motes danced, flung away by invisible force.
The air between his hand and the river warped at once, bending light into a trembling blur.
Then it hissed.
"Shit—too much, too much!"
The heat hit the river like a detonation. Water convulsed; bubbles ruptured in a rolling ring, spreading outward. The air filled with the acrid smell of scorched stone and superheated metal.
Sssszzz.
He yanked his hand back, gasping. Skin bright red, veins glowing faintly like molten filaments.
"OW!—fuck—ow—you backfiring bitch!"
He plunged his hand into the river. The hiss that followed was instant and vicious, like quenching red-hot steel. Steam roared upward, beading on his face and hair.
For a few seconds he simply sat there, half in pain, half laughing through clenched teeth.
The skin was reddened, but still intact.
Vitalis had let him force the transfer far past what his body should have been able to handle.
"Damnit. It locked onto the wrong medium." He narrowed his eyes at the river. "Vitalis pushed, but the Luminary caught the first thing it found."
"Alright… slower. Feed the Luminary out gently until it settles into the right medium. Don't push until it locks."
…
Attempt number two.
He built the pulse gently this time, pressure guided rather than forced. He let the Luminary drift outward in a thin, careful stream, feeling for the moment it caught the river properly instead of the damp air above it. Only then did he begin to feed heat through. The water rippled, and a faint halo of warmth bloomed beneath the surface. Fish scattered. Not perfect—but stable.
He grinned. "Better. Steady, as long as I feed it in slowly."
The second attempt held.
No violent blowback. No flash of pain racing up his arm. Just a spreading pulse of warmth beneath the surface where the water shivered and rolled, the current disturbed by something it could not resist but had not yet fully submitted to.
Arion watched the patch closely, eyes narrowing.
The heat had not simply struck the river and vanished. It had travelled through it—threading into the current, carried along the medium instead of bleeding off all at once.
The idea hit him hard enough that his mouth curled.
"So that's what you're doing…"
Once he saw it, the pattern came together fast. Vitalis set the push or pull, but the Luminary carried that transfer through the water instead of letting it die at the surface.
Pull, and heat fled outward. Push, and it rammed back in.
He stepped closer to the bank and crouched, keeping his hand low over the water. A faint shimmer lingered beneath the surface, subtle as a trick of sunlight, only visible where the current bent around stones and forced the distortion to betray itself.
Not a surface trick.
Not just a point of contact.
The transfer was moving through the river itself.
He fed another measured pulse into it, keeping the Luminary slow and steady as he searched for that same settling point again. He felt for the same strange settling as before—that moment where the external field stopped slipping through the damp air and caught properly in the water below.
There.
The shimmer deepened.
A line of warmth stretched outward from the bank, slipping into the river's current and holding together far longer than it had any right to. It ran clean beneath the surface, a submerged seam of distortion that pushed further and further from him before finally thinning.
Arion's grin widened.
"Right… so it's not just transfer. It's carried transfer."
He raised his hand again and repeated the motion, this time aiming further out into the middle of the river. The first pulse landed weakly and bled away. The second held longer. By the third, he felt it properly—Luminary catching in the current, locking into the water rather than the humid air above it.
Heat travelled out into the middle of the river.
A patch of the surface twitched.
Then it trembled.
Tiny bubbles rose first, scattered and hesitant, breaking one after another before they could build. He pushed a little more Vitalis into the transfer, not enough to force it, just enough to deepen the effect.
The bubbling spread.
Steam began to rise in thin pale ribbons, curling over the water before being caught by the current of air above the river. The patch writhed now, a disturbed, shimmering circle where heat gathered faster than the river could steal it away.
Arion let out a low breath, caught somewhere between satisfaction and fascination.
"The transfer's mostly holding now…"
He tilted his head, studying the bubbling patch.
The river was holding the path now. Carrying it. Spreading it.
Getting the heat into the river was no longer the problem. Holding it there was easy enough now. The real problem was what happened when he pushed too much through too quickly.
A thought sparked.
Not a steady feed.
Not a gradual ramp.
Snap transfer.
Dump the heat in all at once and force the medium to take it.
His expression brightened with the sort of bad idea that had improved his life exactly zero times so far.
"…That sounds horribly irresponsible. But completely necessary."
He lifted his hand anyway.
This time he did not feed the heat in gently. He found the same patch out in the middle of the river, felt the Luminary catch, and held it there—steady, taut, waiting.
The connection tightened.
His pulse picked up.
"Alright," he muttered, eyes fixed on the trembling water. "Let's see what happens when I turn off the safety."
He drove the transfer through.
Not a steady current.
A shove.
A sudden, violent heat injection rammed through the locked path and into the same patch of river in a single burst.
The reaction was immediate.
The entire section of water convulsed.
Steam exploded upward in a roaring white plume, the river detonating as if something beneath it had kicked the surface from below. Boiling water burst high into the air in a violent spray, a hissing cloud of heat and vapour blasting out in every direction.
Arion's eyes widened.
"Oh, you stupid genius—"
Scalding rain came straight back at him.
He threw his hand up on instinct.
"Frost Snap!"
Ice burst into existence in front of him in a curved wall just as the boiling water crashed down. It hammered against the fresh ice in a vicious hiss, steam rolling everywhere at once. The outer face of the shield began melting immediately, the surface turning slick and glassy as more hot water struck it and ran downward in streaming sheets.
The sound was absurd—like a forge had been dumped into a winter pond.
Arion ducked behind the shield, half-crouched and squinting through the steam.
"Well… at least now we know what happens." The grin still got through.
The barrage eased.
Water still drummed against the ice in diminishing spatters before finally dropping away into hissing runoff. Steam drifted thick across the bank, white and dense enough to hide the river entirely for a few seconds.
Arion held the shield a moment longer, just in case his own stupidity had one more lesson to teach him.
When nothing else exploded, he let the ice collapse.
The shield melted down in sloughing sheets and ran back toward the river.
What lay beyond it made him stop.
The patch of water he had struck was still roiling, veiled in steam. The surface frothed and spat, heat trapped there in the current even after the main burst had passed.
And floating belly-up within it—
fish.
Several of them.
Pale. Limp. Thoroughly cooked.
Arion stared.
Then barked out a disbelieving laugh.
"Well."
He planted his hands on his hips and looked from the steaming patch of river to his own palm.
"I think we can safely classify that as a success."
His grin spread, bright and a little unhinged.
Not subtle. Not elegant. But definitely useful.
He looked back at the bubbling water, where the last of the steam twisted upward into the evening air.
"Scald Burst," he said aloud, tasting the name.
Yeah. That feels about right.
—— ❖ —— —— ❖ —— —— ❖ ——
Scald Burst
Thermodynamics
Description:
Instead of pulling heat away, I drive it in—the same transfer principle, reversed.
Water flash-boils on contact because Luminary Essence carries the transfer into the medium fast enough that the usual conduction delay barely seems to matter.
On Earth, driving water from liquid to vapour costs enormous energy—about 2260 J/g just for the phase change. Here, Luminary Essence seems to let that transfer happen almost instantly.
Vitalis sets the direction; Luminary Essence carries the transfer through the medium.
Science:
Luminary Essence acts as an abnormally efficient carrier of energy transfer, allowing heat to be injected with barely any of the normal conduction loss I would expect.
The limit and efficiency of the transfer depend on my Vitalis reserves, and on the degree to which that Vitalis has matured—grown denser and more saturated within the body.
It feels like trying to lift far beyond your actual strength—the body pays for the difference.
A strong Vitalis push paired with a stable Luminary hold produces the burst.
In Layman Terms:
I turned boiling water into a mini explosion. Vitalis lets me shove heat straight into matter instead of waiting for physics to catch up.
It hurts like hell, but it works.
Maxim:
"Pain without flame still wins a second."