Ronin's apartment barely looked like a place someone lived anymore. If anything, it resembled a low-budget operating room built by a lunatic with a shopping addiction. The sheets on the bed—formerly a mess of crumpled food wrappers and burned shirts—were now bleach-white and stretched taut, like an autopsy table waiting for a fresh corpse. A small mirror rigged against stacked books gave him a warped rear-view of his own skull. Tools were laid out in perfect rows like surgical instruments from a garage horror show: a razor-edged kitchen knife, a mana-charged soldering iron hacked into a cauterizer, fishing line for sutures, even a mana-dampened shot glass filled with antiseptic that smelled like it could dissolve metal.
It had been a week since he stumbled out of that other world—wounded, scarred, changed. A week of bouncing between hardware stores and black-market mana vendors, of scribbling notes on the backs of receipts, of sleeping barely four hours a night and dreaming of fire, blood, and power. And this? This right here was the culmination of every frayed wire in his brain sparking at once.
The blue crystal sat on the table like an insult. It hadn't responded to him once—not to heat, not to mana, not even when he tried to smash it with raw intent. Useless. But then again, maybe it wasn't the crystal that was wrong.
Maybe it was him.
So screw it.
No more tests. No more thinking.
Time to go upstream.
He had a theory—half-baked, probably suicidal, but brilliant in the same way a madman's last words usually are. The core? Just a damn tank. A reservoir. The real source of mana, he was starting to believe, was higher. The brain. The spine. The damn command center of the whole body. That's where the flow started. The yellow crystal in his chest had been a shortcut. A band-aid. This new one? It needed to go where mana was born.
He picked up a marker and drew a shaky X at the base of his skull, just above the spine. Right where all the wires crossed. That was the spot. The plug socket for his soul.
He swallowed a painkiller—not the weak pharmacy stuff, this was high-end, mana-fortified, expensive as hell and designed for battlefield amputations. It was supposed to dull everything. Numb the nerves. Take the edge off.
Didn't matter. He wasn't planning on stopping once he started.
Ronin picked up the blade.
He didn't flinch. The pain wasn't bad—not at first. Mana pulsed beneath his skin like a panicked animal, reacting instinctively, trying to shield him. His body didn't want this. Too bad. He used his mana sense, that odd sixth instinct he'd developed, and searched. Not for blood vessels. Not for bone. He was feeling for that... hum. That soft resonance in the tissue. Like tuning a radio to the right station, just before it hits static.
And there. Right there.
He pressed the crystal into the incision.
And all hell broke loose.
It didn't glow. It didn't fuse. It... melted.
The blue crystal liquefied like it had been waiting for this exact moment—like it had been built to enter the brain through pain. It soaked into his nervous system like water through dry dirt.
Ronin's jaw clenched so hard his teeth might've cracked. The pill didn't do a goddamn thing. His brain screamed, twisted, pulsed like it was trying to crush itself into a fist. No words came out of his mouth. Just a low, strangled noise that didn't even sound human.
Colors flashed behind his eyes—blinding whites, flickers of ultraviolet. Sounds buzzed in his ears like someone was tuning a violin with a jackhammer. The world spun, and he couldn't tell if he was lying down, standing up, or floating. Every nerve in his body was a live wire.
And then...
Silence.
Ronin gasped, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling.
Something was inside his head.
Not mana. Not like the yellow crystal. This wasn't a power source—it was a presence. Cold. Still. Blue. It didn't move, didn't speak, but it was there. Like a second heartbeat whispering beneath the surface of his thoughts.
He crawled to the soldering iron and cauterized the bleeding wound with a twitchy hand. The sizzle of burning flesh didn't even register through the fading haze.
Everything hurt. His limbs felt wrong. His vision was fogged, and his stomach twisted like he'd just swallowed broken glass and regret.
But he was alive.
And changed.
He hadn't gotten stronger—yet. But something fundamental had shifted. Something irreversible. He'd taken a step no sane person would take.
He'd violated himself in a way that felt... sacred. Sacrilegious. Whatever.
He touched the back of his neck, already crusted with blood.
This better be worth it.
Because there was no going back now.