The irony of getting ambushed by a group of beasts that hid their mana cores while he himself was working on a similar ability wasn’t lost on Micky.

  As soon as the battle was over, the survivors looted a few shards from the crabs’ shells to fix into their clothes, to hopefully mask their mana signatures in the coming days. In a way, this rendered Micky’s previous efforts moot, though he hadn’t been practicing Internal Runecrafting just for Marnok’s sake.

  The group was rightfully distraught after losing nearly half of their members again, yet nobody complained much. Today’s casualties were barely a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of people who had died the day before.

  Each survivor contributed in whatever way he could, to clean up the mess and get some much-needed rest as soon as possible. Marnok and another air user worked together to funnel the stench of death and decay toward the ocean, to avoid drawing unwanted attention from the land-dwelling creatures.

  The only remaining water user – or well… the only one that the other sailors knew about – washed away the bloodstains on the sand, while two earth users were in charge of burying the bodies and building a makeshift camp for the group. It might have been more prudent to move away from the battlefield before more monsters arrived in search of food, but the sailors were too tired to travel or carry the heavy carcasses.

  Two fire mages took it upon themselves to roast the Orange crabs. The larger specimens were too tough to eat, but the sailors didn’t rush to get rid of them. They hoped to offer them as tribute to any invading beasts, to hopefully avoid further bloodshed tonight.

  There weren’t any pure or lightning mages left. There had been some, but none had made it through the battle. All the sick men had died too – Micky didn’t think it was a coincidence that the sailors with the lower grades, weaker affinities, or impaired physical conditions had been among the first to perish.

  ‘Just the indifference of nature doing its cruel job…’ He sighed.

  Much to his host’s relief, Flammy was the eighth survivor. The life mage hadn’t been able to do much against the crabs directly, but his crewmates had gone out of their way to protect their only healer, and he’d returned the favour by keeping everyone in decent condition throughout the battle. He was currently walking toward Marnok to do more of that, his hand ablaze with the green glow of life mana.

  “I’m good mate,” Micky hurriedly said after seizing control of his host’s mouth. “The others need yar help more,” he added, making sure to emulate Marnok’s speech pattern to the best of his ability. He pointed to another sailor that sported a couple of nasty gashes on his left leg, just below his knee.

  Flammy nodded, quietly moving to heal the injured man as a mental frown bubbled up through Marnok’s soul. ‘Who says no to free healin’? I know we’re doin’ better than most, but I wouldn’t mind gettin’ some of me fatigue washed away, ya know?’

  Micky felt the urge to roll his eyes. ‘I’ve still got plenty of healing potions left,’ he said, emptying a few doses into his host’s stomach. The Orange liquid had grown even less effective on Marnok after he awakened his second core, but relieving some tension from his muscles wasn’t an issue.

  ‘Aye, if ya’d rather waste yar potions than to get patched up for free, who am I to judge?’ Marnok replied with a shrug.

  As soon as everyone was done with their respective tasks, the sailors feasted in relative silence around the campfire, only speaking briefly to discuss their plans for tomorrow.

  The thought of venturing into the jungle with nearly half the men they’d started out with filled everyone with unconcealed dread, yet reaching the Saint’s tomb might be their only shot at surviving the island. Not that the demigod’s treasure was guaranteed to save them, but the alternatives were far less promising.

  Nobody knew how long it would be before their Commodore sent more ships after them, and they didn’t think that they’d be able to survive on the coast for weeks or months – maybe even years.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “At least we no longer need food. We’ll save a lot o’ time if we ‘ead straight there,” one of them concluded, getting a round of nods back.

  Half the sailors went to sleep, Marnok and Flammy included. Or at least, the former pretended to do so, to avoid having to explain his willingness to keep watch for a second night in a row. Closing their eyes, Micky and his host rested on the soft sand, listening to the soothing sound of the waves and the hushed whispers of the sailors on guard duty.

  ‘A couple of them are coughing again,’ Micky noticed, suppressing a frown.

  They weren’t the same people as yesterday – those men had already died. Worse still, the newly afflicted sailors were all Yellow-borns, which was a terrible omen if Micky had seen one.

  Granted, he already had some guesses as to what was causing this, but he lacked enough evidence to be certain. Deciding to sit on the information a little longer, he ignored everyone else, turning his attention inwards again.

  The fact that Marnok no longer needed the concealment runes lifted some pressure off Micky’s non-existent shoulders, but that didn’t deter him from resuming work on his project. He still had a long way to go before his new skill was at a satisfactory level for his goals.

  ‘A single rune isn’t challenging enough anymore. I need to push myself further,’ he realized.

  Maintaining the enchantment still took a lot of effort, but his improvements had slowed down noticeably after having kept the rune active for the past few hours. Clearly, he’d have to keep raising the bar if he didn’t want to stagnate.

  Adding more runes was a no-brainer, but Micky had no idea how he was meant to draw multiple enchantments side-by-side inside the spherical core. Instead, he opted for enchantments that involved multiple runes stacked over one another.

  The most obvious next step was a controlled concealment rune. He started by forming one in his host’s water core, to ease the transition, only switching to the air core about an hour later. The process hadn’t changed much, but the shape in his mind was a little more complex, forcing him to expend more effort to hold it together.

  Over the next couple of hours, Micky moved on to other types of controlled enchantments, drawing each one inside Marnok’s water core first, before scrapping it and switching to the more challenging air core, getting faster and better with every attempt.

  About halfway through the night, he realized that trying different runes wasn’t helping as much anymore. Deciding to increase the difficulty again, he drew one of his favourite enchantments – and one that involved two intricate runes rather than one and a half:

  A self-repair.

  Micky had considered the possibility of using internal self-repairs to somehow accelerate his advancements in the past, though he’d long concluded that it wouldn’t work.

  Mana cores couldn’t be repaired with just mana. Even if he could somehow get the memory runes to store the organ’s blueprint before a cleansing session and the growth runes to restore it afterwards, the enchantment would most likely bring back all the purged impurities, essentially reversing the effect of the elixir.

  If he did that, Micky would only be wasting time and beast mana. He just couldn’t imagine a way to mend the cracks in the core the right way – other than feeding them crystallized pure mana, which his Aurora Dew already did.

  ‘Come to think of it, none of my current enchantments are particularly useful when paired with the new spell,’ he realized.

  Other than the concealment runes that could be used in niche situations, the only others that might come close were heat runes, pressure runes or structural integrity enchantments.

  Heat runes could potentially be used to warm up his body if he ended up stuck in a cold environment with a low grade and an affinity incapable of generating heat by itself.

  The pressure runes might allow him to expel mana more forcefully from his body, to perhaps strengthen his spells slightly. Of course, he could achieve something similar with regular pre-casting, and he wasn’t even sure that the organ would be able to endure the strain.

  As for the structural integrity enchantments, they could potentially shield his cores from harm, though he struggled to think of many situations where that would be handy.

  ‘I guess that they can be combined with pressure runes to offset the damage.’

  It would arguably be too much effort for too little gain. That said, both the structural integrity enchantments and the pressure runes would be part of his eventual artificial promotion, so testing this out sounded like a nice milestone to aim towards.

  ‘I’ll worry about that later. Right now, even the self-repair is difficult to draw,’ he decided, shaking the pointless thoughts off.

  It took Micky two hours just to get the enchantment to work inside Marnok’s second core, and another to resist the violent air mana in his first. Micky was debating internally whether to try a controlled self-repair next, or to go back to the simpler concealment runes but keep them active in both cores at the same time, when he got interrupted.

  The first rays of the morning sun licked his host’s face gently, the other sailors calling out to him – slightly less gently.

  “Oy, Marnok! We’re about to head out!”

  Micky took a short break from his runecrafting, he and his host stretching their limbs, taking a few deep breaths of the salty breeze, and eating a couple slices of dried crab meat. It was finally time to trek to the Saint’s tomb!

  Book 1 on at no extra cost, grab a copy for your shelf, or listen to the audiobook on .