Infinite Mana - Chapter 205: Borrowed Properties (Thank you for your support, J!) (Patreon)

Sieghart stared at the corrupted core floating several meters away, its red light continuing to pulse despite the complete destruction of the Guardian that had contained it. Every reasonable part of him agreed that experimenting with it immediately was an exceptionally bad idea.

He was physically exhausted, mentally strained, overheated from filling the chamber with Magma Magic, and still dealing with the headache caused by hours of excessive Telekinesis. Under normal circumstances, Sieghart would have rested before touching anything remotely suspicious.

These were not normal circumstances. He had already watched corruption apparently disappear from one Guardian only to discover something stronger waiting deeper inside the dungeon, and he had no intention of allowing the same thing to happen again. If the corrupted energy could abandon a damaged core, travel through the dungeon, and enter another Guardian, then leaving the core floating around while Sieghart recovered might be the equivalent of deliberately giving it time to escape.

There was another possibility he disliked even more. Sieghart wanted whatever power existed inside the core, and he could not completely determine whether that desire came from himself or from whatever influence still pulsed inside the object. That realization should have made him stop. Instead, it only made Sieghart narrow his eyes while Telekinesis pulled the core slowly closer, because uncertainty was not enough to convince him to risk watching the corruption escape again.

Maybe curiosity was dragging him toward it. Maybe greed was involved. Maybe the core itself was affecting his thoughts, encouraging him to absorb it before he could properly reconsider what he was doing.

None of those possibilities changed his decision.

Sieghart released Telekinesis when the core reached his hands and immediately began the absorption process. There was no gradual resistance, no need to carefully guide mana through the structure, and no warning before the entire core reacted. The corrupted sphere turned into dust almost instantly. Fine particles collapsed between Sieghart’s fingers while something much denser than ordinary dungeon mana rushed through his hands and entered his body with enough intensity to force him backward one step.

Sieghart clenched his jaw as the foreign power spread through his mana pathways. It felt different from the rage of Fury, different from the bottomless hunger caused by Gluttony, and far more invasive than ordinary core absorption.

His stomach did not growl. His mouth did not water. Nothing about the sensation resembled physical hunger, yet a desire to consume suddenly appeared so strongly that Sieghart’s thoughts briefly struggled to organize themselves around anything else.

He wanted more.

Not food.

Not mana.

Not even power in the simple sense.

He wanted properties.

Strength.

Durability.

Speed.

Claws.

Armor.

Wings.

Anything that could improve his body suddenly seemed valuable, and anything valuable felt as though it should become part of him before someone else could use it instead.

The sensation reminded Sieghart unpleasantly of the Chimerian core he had absorbed months earlier. That experience had filled his thoughts with cold ideas about replacing pieces of his own body with superior components regardless of how grotesque the process became. This was different, but disturbingly close. The Chimerian influence had treated bodies like collections of replaceable materials, while this new desire regarded every useful characteristic around Sieghart as something waiting to be consumed.

The distinction was small enough that Sieghart immediately disliked both.

He looked toward the remains of the Guardian scattered across the chamber and imagined touching the surviving metal, taking its hardness, covering his skin with something stronger than flesh, and keeping whatever worked best afterward.

That thought arrived far too naturally. Sieghart forced himself to focus on his breathing instead. The craving did not disappear immediately, but recognizing that it was foreign made separating the impulse from his own intentions considerably easier.

The System appeared before him moments later, filling his vision with several notifications that finally gave a name to whatever principle had entered his body through the Guardian core.

[New Magic Acquired: Assimilation Magic — Level 1.] 

[New Branch Acquired: Combat Adaptation] 

[New Spell Acquired: Property Consumption — Level 1.] Property Consumption temporarily borrows compatible physical or material properties from a touched target. Dexterity + 2 per level.

Sieghart read the notification twice.

Then a third time.

Assimilation Magic.

That explained far too much.

The Guardian had not simply possessed multiple unrelated powers. Its changing arms, shifting defenses, altered movement patterns, and constant adjustments had apparently been different expressions of the same underlying principle.

It consumed useful properties. Adapted them. Used them. Then changed again whenever the circumstances demanded something else.

Sieghart slowly looked toward one of the surviving metallic fragments nearby. The piece had partially melted during the battle, but several sections remained solid enough to test without requiring him to touch the core of another living creature.

The System had already placed enough information inside his mind for the basic principle to make sense. Property Consumption required physical contact, a compatible target, and a clear idea of what property Sieghart intended to borrow.

The word steal appeared several times in the instinctive knowledge surrounding the spell, although Sieghart quickly realized that description was not completely accurate. Whatever he took would return once the temporary effect ended.

Borrowing sounded better. Less criminal too.

Sieghart crouched beside the metallic fragment and placed two fingers against its surface. The moment he activated Property Consumption, something inside the spell connected his body to the material beneath his hand.

The sensation was horrifyingly intimate.

Sieghart suddenly understood the hardness of the metal not as a number or magical measurement, but almost as though his body had personally remembered what being metallic felt like.

He focused on that single property. Hardness. The spell responded. A cold sensation spread from his fingertips toward the knuckles, followed by a pressure beneath the skin that made Sieghart immediately reconsider whether testing the spell while exhausted had been remotely intelligent.

His index and middle fingers darkened. Skin lost its normal texture. The flesh became metallic. Not covered in metal. Metallic. Sieghart froze.

The change continued across the first joints before he immediately stopped feeding the spell further. His fingers remained mobile, but every movement felt wrong because structures designed around living tissue had suddenly gained properties they were never built to possess.

The fingers were substantially harder. They were also heavier. Flexibility decreased.

Sieghart could feel pressure building around the transformed joints, and whatever happened to circulation in the affected area was apparently not something the spell considered important enough to explain beforehand. He stared at his partially metallic fingers for several uncomfortable seconds before striking them lightly against the nearby floor. The sound resembled metal tapping against stone rather than flesh striking rock.

“That is completely insane. Useful, obviously, but still completely insane, and I am absolutely not turning my entire body into metal just to discover which organs stop functioning first.”

The words came easily because speaking forced him to organize the experiment logically instead of simply marveling at the increased durability. He deactivated Property Consumption and watched the transformation begin reversing. Metallic coloration retreated slowly across his fingers. Normal warmth returned afterward, followed by an unpleasant prickling sensation as circulation and ordinary tissue behavior resumed throughout the affected area.

Sieghart flexed his hand several times. Everything still worked.

Probably.

The experiment explained one enormous limitation immediately. Borrowing a material property did not automatically redesign his biology to accommodate that property safely. Making his skin as hard as steel sounded excellent until muscles needed to move beneath it. Making bones metallic sounded useful until increased density changed his weight and joints.

Turning internal organs into anything remotely non-organic sounded like a convenient method of committing suicide with extra steps. The Guardian had avoided those problems because it was already an artificial construct. Its entire body consisted of material designed to change shape, making Assimilation Magic far more compatible with it than with a human.

Sieghart, unfortunately, remained mostly meat.

That did not make the spell useless. Quite the opposite.

Small controlled transformations could become incredibly powerful if he understood what each one did to his body before trying anything ambitious. Harder knuckles during a punch. Metallic skin over one forearm before blocking a blade. Reinforced fingertips when climbing. Denser bone around one impact point.

Each application could potentially improve survivability without requiring Sieghart to transform enough tissue to interfere catastrophically with normal biological functions. That was only the material side. Property Consumption worked on living creatures too. The knowledge accompanying the spell made that part much stranger.

Sieghart could not simply touch an animal and permanently steal everything useful about it. The target needed to possess a physical characteristic his body could reproduce through temporary magical alteration.

Muscular strength.

Claws.

Enhanced smell.

Unusual eyes.

Thick hide.

Perhaps gills.

Potentially wings.

Sieghart frowned when that final possibility became clear. Wings were not an abstract ability. If he borrowed the flight property from a sufficiently compatible creature, the spell would have to create the physical structures required for Sieghart to use that property.

In other words, wings would grow from his back. Not illusions. Not summoned constructs. Actual temporary biological wings connected to his altered body. The concept alone made the Chimerian influence he had experienced previously feel uncomfortably relevant again.

Property Consumption did not care whether changing Sieghart into something less human felt disturbing. It cared whether the borrowed characteristic could function. The target would also lose whatever Sieghart borrowed for the duration.

If Sieghart touched a bird and consumed its ability to fly, the animal would temporarily lose the physical property supporting that ability while Sieghart gained an equivalent adaptation. He imagined borrowing wings from a bird and watching the creature fall out of the air.

That was an important limitation to remember. It also made stealing feel considerably more accurate than he wanted. The spell returned the property eventually, but temporary theft was still theft if the original owner lost access to something while Sieghart used it.

Living targets also introduced another complication. Borrowing a simple material property such as steel hardness was comparatively straightforward because steel did not possess a biological system that needed to remain alive during the exchange.

Taking something from a living creature meant the magic had to alter both bodies simultaneously. That sounded considerably more dangerous.

Sieghart had no intention of discovering what happened if he borrowed an essential property such as a creature’s ability to breathe and accidentally removed enough of it to kill the target before the spell ended.

He looked toward the dust that had once been the corrupted core. The strange urge to consume remained. Weaker now. That concerned him more than the spell itself. Fury encouraged anger. Gluttony had produced overwhelming hunger. Assimilation produced desire. A boundless dissatisfaction with whatever body Sieghart already possessed.

Why remain fragile when steel existed? Why remain slow when faster creatures existed? Why remain grounded when something else could fly? Why accept human limitations when the world contained countless examples of creatures that had already solved those limitations differently?

Sieghart understood immediately how dangerous that thought could become.

The spell did not need to force him into anything.

It only needed to make improvement feel permanently unfinished.

One stronger material.

One better creature.

One more property.

One more experiment.

Eventually, Sieghart could spend years replacing every weakness he discovered without ever reaching a point where his body felt sufficient.

That sounded very close to Gluttony. Just aimed at evolution instead of food. He remembered the Guardian adapting throughout their fight. It had copied the practical result of Impulse, altered its arms into lances when close combat became useful, produced shields when projectiles became dangerous, and formed cannons once approaching Sieghart became inefficient.

At the time, the transformations had looked almost intelligent. Now Sieghart understood that intelligence had only been part of the explanation.

The Guardian had been consuming solutions. Every useful property it encountered became another option.

Sieghart possessed only the most basic version of that principle, yet even Level One already allowed him to borrow characteristics that would normally require entirely different spells.

That made Property Consumption absurdly versatile. It also made it one of the easiest abilities imaginable to abuse.

Sieghart dismissed the System display and looked toward the deeper passage beyond the destroyed chamber. His body wanted rest, his mind wanted sleep, and the foreign craving wanted him to find something else worth touching.

He ignored the third demand.

For now.

He still needed to determine whether the corruption had actually been contained by absorbing the core, but at least the red waves that had filled the chamber were beginning to fade instead of flowing deeper into the dungeon.

That was promising. It also meant Sieghart had probably succeeded in preventing another transfer. Unfortunately, the corruption had not disappeared. It had simply changed hosts. Sieghart looked down at his own hands.

That realization was much less comforting.