Chapter 136: Channel

Jaxir sat cross-legged in the middle of the training room with the page floating in front of him, his attention fixed on the dense circuit drawn across its surface.

He spent the first hour doing nothing more than running his mana through the pattern exactly as instructed, memorizing every turn until he could reproduce the circulation without looking.

Once that became comfortable, curiosity got the better of him and he started wondering whether the shape of the circuit itself meant anything.

He slowed his mana and studied each branching line, looking for the kind of logic he had learned to recognize inside Vestigem Cards. There had to be a reason one section doubled back while another spiraled inward before reconnecting with the main circulation, but knowing that didn’t bring him any closer to understanding why.

After nearly half an hour of staring, Jaxir finally admitted that he had no fucking clue what he was looking at.

He had expected better out of himself, honestly, especially after becoming accustomed to pulling meaning out of mana structures through instinct and experimentation. This circuit was built on rules he hadn’t learned yet, and without that foundation he couldn’t even tell which sections mattered most.

Jaxir sighed, dismissed the question for later, then reached into his Enhanced Inventory and pulled out the first corpse.

The crocodilian beast landed heavily across the floor, its thick body still intact despite having died hours earlier. Normally a beast corpse would begin breaking into motes of mana after death, though the page had described several methods for interrupting what it called Mana Dissipation before the process completed.

Jaxir had used the simplest method immediately after each kill, which was the only reason he had returned with a hundred usable bodies instead of an inventory filled with empty slots.

According to the page, beasts possessed closer relationship with natural mana than native humans did, and death caused that connection to pull their bodies back into the surrounding world quite strongly. Interrupting that was key to stopping them from dissipating into motes of mana.

Jaxir had wondered if he could also use that to stop others from dissipating as well. What if he used it on a player? What would happen then?

He hadn’t had the chance to test the idea out, or if the same principles would even be possible, but he was suddenly very interested.

Jaxir placed his right palm against the beast’s scaled side and brought the circuit back into his mind. His mana began tracing the memorized path through his own body, completing one slow revolution before pouring through his palm and establishing a connection with the corpse. Something inside the dead beast immediately pushed back.

Jaxir’s brows rose as the foreign mana struck against his own and attempted to reverse the pressure running through the circuit. It almost felt as though the corpse had taken offense at being condensed and decided Jaxir would make a much better target, but the resistance shattered against his mana without accomplishing much.

The beast was a Tier above him, though whatever difference existed between their raw strength meant little when the quality of Jaxir’s mana sat far beyond what the creature had possessed while alive.

The second revolution felt different from the first, and by the fifth Jaxir could sense exactly what the circuit was doing inside the corpse. Mana scattered through muscle, organs and bone began drawing inward toward the blood, packing itself into something that had already served as one of the body’s main carriers while the beast lived. Once enough mana gathered there, the circuit began compressing the blood itself.

That was when the process stopped being easy. Every revolution made the remaining energy denser, and that same density gave it more strength to resist the next turn of the circuit. Jaxir’s relaxed expression slowly vanished as the pressure against his palm grew heavier with every loop.

By the time he believed he had reached the halfway point, the beast’s mana was pushing back hard enough to make his fingers tremble. The page had warned him not to stop once condensation passed a certain point, since a failed circuit would release everything he had compressed in a single backlash before Mana Dissipation reclaimed the corpse.

Jaxir gritted his teeth and forced another revolution through.

"This is a lot harder than you made it look." Jaxir glared toward the page as though the thing had personally lied to him. The page, unsurprisingly, offered no apology.

He pushed through another cycle, then another, but brute force only made the resistance sharpen faster.

Mina’s explanation from that morning suddenly drifted back into his thoughts, especially the part about interpreting Root Abilities through the way a Path actually wanted to use them. Jaxir’s focus shifted from the beast to the circuit moving through his own body.

The repetition reminded him of Channel almost immediately. Channel had always been about holding mana inside a process and letting that process continue, maintaining the same structure while more power accumulated within it. What he was doing now wasn’t identical, but it was close enough that his mana responded the moment he made the connection.

Then there was Hex. His first thought was that forcing a corpse to condense itself against its own resistance sounded exactly like what his Path did, though he rejected that interpretation almost as soon as it formed. Hex had never really been about forcing anything.

Wither worked best when Jaxir understood how a target’s mana already wanted to behave, then poisoned that behavior until it destroyed them. Bind became stronger when he found an existing restriction and made the body accept more of it, while Fracture had grown once he stopped creating weaknesses and started finding the cracks that were already there.

A Hex didn’t command the body to betray itself, it convinced the body that betrayal was what it had wanted all along.

Jaxir’s eyes narrowed as the resistance from the corpse bucked against him again. Trick the body, nudge the mana, take something already present and twist it just enough that the victim finished the work for him.

There was something almost funny about it, a practical joke played with life and death where the punchline arrived only after the target realized what it had done to itself.

For an instant, a stray thought crossed the edge of Jaxir’s concentration. That sounded suspiciously close to the sort of Path someone carrying a Jester’s Divinity should have.

He barely noticed the thought before his attention snapped back to the struggling circuit.

Why was he fighting the beast’s mana at all? Every living thing benefited from mana becoming more deeply integrated into its body, and what Jaxir was doing now was nothing more than taking that desire to an absurd conclusion.

He wasn’t destroying the mana or expelling it, he was condensing it deeper and deeper into what remained of the beast.

Jaxir’s breath caught as another memory clicked into place. He had already seen a circuit built around almost that exact principle, one that encouraged mana to sink deeper into flesh until the distinction between the two began to blur. It was the reason his own body had become that of a Natural.

"Oh." Jaxir stopped pushing against the corpse and changed the pressure of his mana instead. Rather than forcing the next revolution through, he let the circuit brush against the beast’s remaining instincts, gently reinforcing the direction its mana already wanted to travel.

The resistance weakened. Jaxir smiled as he repeated the loop, making tiny adjustments each time until the corpse stopped feeling like something he had to overpower and started feeling like something he was guiding.

The mana still condensed with every revolution, but now the growing pressure fed the process instead of fighting it.

The constant repetition, once flow after another in a serious of linked outcomes...

Wasn’t that exactly like Channel?

Not holding mana still through brute force, but coaxing it into repeating the same process until it accepted that repetition as natural, gently tweaking the mana and even his own body until they produced exactly the result he wanted...

That was Channel.

No. That was the Channel of a Hex Path Archmage.

―

Lv43 Channel > Lv50 Channel

―

Jaxir barely noticed the notification when the last revolution completed. The crocodilian corpse collapsed into motes of pale light beneath his palm, leaving nothing behind except a single dark-red bead floating above his hand.

He stared at the condensed blood for several seconds before a slow grin spread across his face.