After finishing his meal and offering a polite nod to Seraphine, Leo stood up and muttered, "Excuse me for a bit."
He made his way down the narrow corridor of the plane and slipped into the compact bathroom.
As soon as the door clicked shut behind him, his whole posture shifted — the casual expression draining from his face like melting wax.
He sighed and locked the door with a soft clack, resting his forehead against the cool mirror.
It was exhausting for an introvert to keep pretending to be the clueless 17-year-old, wide-eyed and amazed by every revelation like it was the first time he'd heard it.
The truth was, he could see most of what they were telling him before they spoke, thanks to Truth Layer.
But Truth Layer had limits.
And the biggest one as he had come to know was... himself.
He stared into the mirror.
His own reflection always seemed off when viewed through Truth Layer.
Like trying to light up the ocean with a flashlight — the deeper he tried to go, the more it scattered.
It wasn't because his body was immune.
It was because his control over Truth Layer wasn't... perfect.
Not yet.
It responded to intent and certainty.
And right now, he was uncertain about himself.
He splashed water on his face, let it drip down, and watched the droplets gather at his fingertips.
Then, without thought — more reflex than anything — he raised his hands.
The droplets trembled.
A sphere of water formed, spinning slowly at first, then faster, condensing and tightening into a rotating sphere that looked similar to a Rasengan.
It was pure ambient mana coiling around the water, drawing it into a structured form through will.
He didn't need to chant.
The book he'd read before boarding the plane had discussed the natural limits of control over mana.
It described two main types:
1. Will Exertion Threshold – the maximum precision and pressure a mage could mentally sustain to control ambient mana.[for precision]
2. Spiritual Compression Barrier – the point at which the soul itself could no longer maintain cohesion under high-density mana, leading to backlash or internal mana fractures.[Quantity that could be controlled]
Most practitioners respected these thresholds.
Leo didn't need to.
He read the principles.
He understood the mechanism.
And then he used Logos Erasure to destroy the limits inside himself.
Every law, every cap, every natural limitation on his personal mana control — gone. Erased.
And what remained… was freedom.
The water in his hands spun faster, breaking apart at the molecular level.
Bonds dissolved under the force of rotation, heat burst forth as intermolecular forces collapsed, and the liquid transitioned into gas, then plasma.
The sphere shrank as it intensified — energy condensing into a tiny mass no bigger than a mosquito egg.
A perfect, radiant point of plasma, bound by Leo's control alone.
The thermal radiation should have melted the sink.
But Leo's manipulation extended to the surrounding environment, isolating the effect by manipulating ambient mana.
The energy was trapped in a shell of controlled stasis by pure will.
He brought his hands close. Slowly.
His veins began to glow red, visible under his skin as something akin to mana circuits activated.
The energy differential between the plasma and his body created a magical vacuum — the plasma's energy transmuted into magical energy aided by natural process and Echoforge which Leo absorbed seamlessly.
Arcs of mana curled into his palms. Then into his wrists. Then chest.
Within seconds, the plasma sphere flickered and was gone all the matter and mana inside fully converted and absorbed into his body.
The glow in his veins pulsed once, then again… and began to dim, distributing evenly through his circulatory mana system.
His internal energy matrix stabilized, incorporating the new force like a battery taking in a charge.
Leo stood still, the air around him faintly ionized, the scent of ozone hanging in the quiet.
That was more than just a flashy trick.
He had just converted matter into usable magical energy and stored it in his own reserves.
A wet dream of any mage.
Finally, he closed his eyes and focused.
Leo activated Truth Layer, but this time — he pushed harder actively focusing to access more of its ability than being a magical google lens.
He forced his consciousness into the Information Plane, the deeper dimension where laws, constants, and logic weren't theories — they were architecture.
And instantly — everything physical collapsed.
The walls of the bathroom dissolved into translucent layers of data.
The air turned into stratified grids of molecular behavior, heat signatures, trace radiation, and atmospheric pressure.
Every surface was a mesh, every texture a formula.
The fabric of reality peeled back.
Quantum interactions danced in a latticework of glowing threads — up quarks, down quarks, gluons holding them tight like cosmic stitches.
Equations wrapped around them in living script, morphing as time ticked forward.
The Higgs field undulated in the background — an ocean of half-seen filaments, assigning mass in real-time, quantifying the existence of everything Leo could see, hear, feel.
It was beautiful...And it was too much.
Leo's mind — human in nature, at least he liked to believe so,— began to glitch.
His vision buckled.
Spirals of raw math curved into infinity.
Dimensions twisted in ways Euclidean geometry couldn't grasp.
The volume of sheer meaning trying to pour into his head was like standing beneath a waterfall made of knives.
His brain stuttered, like a processor pushed past its limits.
Then it spiked.
A sudden jolt of pain lanced through his skull.
Leo gasped.
His knees nearly gave out.
And then he felt it — warm.
Not metaphorically...Physically warm.
A slow trickle ran beneath both eyes.
He blinked and saw red — tears of blood, painting crimson lines down his cheeks.
His nose followed next, dripping a bright stream over his lip.
Sharp, metallic.
Warm.
Then his ears.
Tiny, silent rivers trailing from his earlobes.
Inside his skull, it felt like something was tearing.
He groaned, staggering backward, his shoulder slamming against the cramped bathroom wall.
This is not acceptable, Leo thought.
His breath hitched. His heart thundered against his ribs like a warning bell.
If I can't even use the abilities given to me… then what's the point in even having them?
He gritted his teeth, hand rising to cover his face.
The mirror — now a blurry mess of flickering particle decay and probability clouds distorted his reflection until it no longer looked human.
With one trembling breath, Leo closed his eyes.
He severed the sensory tether to the Information Plane.
The bleeding slowed.
He redirected.
Inward.
Not into the world outside — but into himself.
He turned Truth Layer upon the structure of his own body.
Down past nerves and bones, beneath tissue and bloodstream, to the arcane infrastructure running through his core.
Layers of unfamiliar information began surfacing.
There were patterns that didn't belong to any ordinary human biology — dormant bloodlines coded in his blood, like forgotten spells etched into the double helix of his DNA.
He recognized them instinctively as magical — ancestral legacies from lines not bound to any single species.
There were even patches that felt… unfinished.
As if parts of him are yet to be given back to him.
But he didn't have time to marvel at that.
Leo pushed past it.
He focused instead on the immediate issue — the damage to his brain.
And what he found… was fascinating.
Unlike the brains of other students he had briefly glimpsed — glimpses taken through stolen moments in the Information Plane during training or contact — his was different. Structurally different.
The neural architecture was more adaptive, more fluid, like someone had left scaffolding in place for something unfinished but scalable.
There were gaps — not defects, but placeholders.
As if his biology had been waiting for something like this just not the scale of it.
He didn't dwell on the implications. Not now.
Instead, he started scanning.
Layer by layer, Leo extracted what he needed: reinforcement pathways, biochemical regulators, synaptic delay maps, mana conductivity ratios through glial networks…
And from it all — a theory began to form.
His bleeding stopped — all of it — within a minute.
His hands lowered from his face.
His breathing steadied.
He now had a preliminary blueprint for improving his brain.
A roadmap to enhancing its capability to comprehend the overwhelming flood of information from Truth Layer and the Information Plane without collapse.
And as he stared inward, he realized something humbling.
Earlier, he had assumed that the capacity to handle such abilities would naturally come with the abilities themselves as they were "grafted" onto him.
Since he never had problems with logos erasure and Echoforge.
But he was wrong.
Dead wrong.
---
Leo stepped out of the bathroom, quietly clicking the door shut behind him.
The artificial lighting in the hallway felt dimmer than before, or maybe his senses were just recalibrating after what he had done.
His mother looked up from her seat as he walked by her, eyebrows arched with a teasing smile.
"You sure spent quite some time in there, young man... Everything okay?"
Leo blinked, then rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.
"Yeah. I just… got distracted. Had an idea for my novel and didn't want to lose the plot midway."
"Oh really?" she said, her eyes lighting up. "That's great!"
Leo nodded quickly, not wanting to let the moment linger. "Yeah. I'll write it down before I forget."
He offered a small wave and made his way toward the private cabin sectioned off as his room.
"Goodnight, Mom," he added over his shoulder.
She sropped him from entering made him turn around and, gently kissed him on the head and said.
"Goodnight, sweetheart. Don't worry about anything, okay? It'll just take a little time to adjust… that's all."
Maybe, she assumed his long silence in the bathroom was him thinking — processing the cascade of revelations and the truth about their bloodline. It made sense.
He let her believe that.
Inside, the room was more luxurious than he expected.
A desk with a high-end computer built into it.
A fridge tucked into the wall.
Even a very large bed.
He opened the fridge absentmindedly.
Among the rows of energy drinks, bottled water, and neatly stacked snacks there was a dark brown bottle of Beer.
Leo stared at it for a second.
He hadn't really drunk much in either life.
Not from lack of opportunity — just… indifference.
But she had...His only friend.
Her birthday was in April too.
She always was too opportunistic unless when it came to alcohol.
A small smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
"Maybe I'll drink to her that day," he whispered.
With that, Leo closed the fridge, slid off his shoes, and laid down on the bed.
Though it would've been easy to let sleep pull him under, Leo knew better.
No rest for the wicked, as the saying went.
And for someone with the Titled Path of Actually Satan, it was more than just an expression.
With a sigh that held no fatigue, Leo sat back up and turned to the computer tucked neatly into the corner of the room.
He didn't boot it up.
He opened it — as in, began to disassemble it piece by piece.
The internal components were nothing short of remarkable.
The CPU, motherboard, and data converters were custom-made, high-tier, bleeding-edge tech designed not only to interface with normal Internet but also the Magical Internet — more specifically, the Devil Net — and do so stealthily.
There was no direct traceable line between this system and the Devil Net's core servers.
Instead, it worked through an external relay node — a physical gateway device stationed elsewhere, functioning like an isolated sandbox server.
That gateway formed an invisible bridge between two completely independent networks.
Some Batman like Paranoia shit.
Leo admired the craftsmanship for a moment longer than necessary.
But that wasn't why he opened the machine.
He extended his hand, and without pain, thin trails of blood seeped from his sweat glands — an application of controlled diffusion, keeping the process clean, painless.
He let the blood fall across the motherboard, the processor, the cooled circuits — every stripped-down component now bare before him.
Then he activated Echoforge.
The fundamental principle of Echoforge was retention of conceptual properties.
When he had used it on water earlier, even though the substance had been transformed into energy and absorbed, the essence of water was retained.
He could actually apply that essence to something else too.
The same logic applied here.
The computer parts shimmered under the forging process.
Blood and silicon merged.
Organic and inorganic components aligned in harmony — re-forged into a new device.
Not just technological now..
Leo repeated the process — twenty-eight times.
Each set of components was reforged, rewritten, until the final construct resembled a dense cluster of organic matter and machine straight out of warrhammer, it looked like a brain laced with circuitry.
Now came the hard part.
He directed his mana into it, treating it like an embryonic organ.
Reshaping. Feeding it.
Teaching it the form it needed to grow into.
He wasn't building another computer.
He was designing the first prototype of a Mana Brain — an implanted brain node capable of processing data at inhuman speeds and interfacing directly with his mind and the Information Plane.
The idea was crude.
Possibly inefficient.
But he had space inside his brain.
He'd seen it during the Truth Layer inspection — unoccupied capacity where these synthetic organs could grow like second brains.
Auxiliary processors wired with energy and will.
He didn't even need it to be permanent yet.
Not until the blueprint was perfect.
And once that happened?
He could replicate it.
Mass-produce it.
Connect to millions, eventually trillions of such nodes.
Still… this was just one solution.
Another one might lie in the unfamiliar information he had glimpsed earlier — the dormant magical bloodlines buried deep within his DNA.
But that was a whole different rabbit hole.
For now, Leo continued feeding mana into the embryonic core — building his new mind, one pulse at a time.
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Power Stones and Reviews please