Chapter 147: Resolve

Ten minutes in and a lot of mana later, Julius still hadn’t gotten anything. Once he got used to the weird sensation of not breathing, he was quite comfortable.

The heat was barely noticeable at this point. It was kind of like how the first dip into a hot tub was really hot, but after you got used to the temperature it started to feel really nice. That was exactly what Julius was going through at the moment.

It was like he was going through a spa experience. Sort of like a bonfire sauna type of deal. It probably wouldn’t look like that to any onlookers, but Julius was enjoying himself.

It was a shame that he was running out of fire mana. He did his best to reuse whatever leftover remnants he could from it, but unlike his constructs where the fire mana was in its “inert” state, igniting fire mana made it much more difficult to get it back. A lot of it dissipated before he could recycle it.

He would like to experiment on the reason why that happened in the future. It would be nice to figure out a way to recycle expended flames like he did with some of his other mana techniques.

For now, he would have to make do. It wasn’t that bad either, the efficiency wasn’t atrocious or anything, it was just that Julius didn’t like running low on mana. He had so much of it that it felt weird not to have any in the tank.

He sat down while he waited for his natural regeneration to work, he worked on his aura. He took out the set of balls that he carried around and floated them around with his aura in the most complicated patterns that he could currently handle.

Which at this point, only resulted in several looping orbits that revolved all around a single ball. He threw in some balls that went through the center of these orbits, but the current Julius was only able to do this much.

It was still nowhere on the level of Lily who was able to move them around and make them dance like Julius would be able to do with mana manipulation, but it was a start. Lily had told him that she had gotten an aura skill when she was just twelve years old and that she had been practicing with it for many years under the supervision of her mother and grandmother.

She assured him that given his work ethic he would very quickly get to her level in time. She knew better than almost anyone about how much work Julius put in. He didn’t know if Aubrey told her about his sleeping habits yet, but she knew that he didn’t get a lot of sleep.

Still, her opinion mattered a lot to him.

Once, his mana was almost filled entirely back up, he packed away the balls into his storage ring. Then he began the repeat the same process as before, but, he did something else on top of it.

This time around he used [Armaments of the Arcane] to create a pseudo barrier construct around himself. He thought of it as an armor construct that wasn’t pressed against his skin. It was much easier to create than his normal armor.

He didn’t need to have any complex curves or joints, it was basically a dome that covered his entire body. He didn’t need to move around in it, he just needed to contain the fire within.

As soon as the flames were ignited and he felt the fire scorching against his skin, he immediately sensed the difference. This time around, he wasn’t having to continuously pump as much fire mana to keep the fire running.

Although the amount of oxygen within the shell was quickly burned up as fuel, the fire didn’t go out. While he might have thought the fire would have gone out as a result, it didn’t. The fire mana present within and the mana in his core was enough to keep it fueled. Not only that but since the heat wasn’t escaping, Julius was able to keep ahold of the fire better.

He didn’t have to actively control and recycle the ignited fire mana, but the shell did most of that for him luckily.

Still, the fire wasn’t enough to feel more than a warm bath. There was another reason why he used [Armaments of the Arcane]. The skill was the only way that Julius was able to confidently use his blue fire.

While setting himself on fire hadn’t bothered him as much as it probably should have, cooking himself with his enhanced fire was something else entirely.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He knew that this was really pushing the boundaries of what is considered appropriate even with a healing skill like his. He didn’t think that his skill could bring him back when his entire body was burned to ash.

However, that just meant that he just had to control it so that it didn’t do that.

Before he could start to doubt his idea, he began the process. Something that he learned when he had been playing around with his blue fire was that he didn’t necessarily need kinetic energy to create it.

Kinetic energy made it much easier, but it was something he could handle just using pure mana manipulation. It wasn’t as strong or potent as when he used kinetic energy, but that was kind of the point.

He didn’t need the most powerful and intense flame at the present moment. He needed something that would push his fire resistance to the edge so that he could feel the heat enough to learn a Concept. There was no need to vaporize himself to oblivion just yet.