Chapter 151 - 151: Cultivation

When he heard the word Aether Ezekiel remembered the moment he evolved into this current species.

The Aether Beast appearing in the sky to drive away the attackers, the system describing them as kin species and the massive power bonus he got from the appearance.

If Hope got a quest related to the Aether Beasts then it was a quest he felt she should pursue as hard as she possibly could.

"I don't know much about Aether but if it's anything like what i've experienced so far you should go for that quest from now on. I saw an Aether Beast when I evolved and they are crazy powerful creatures."

He began to explain what he had experienced with the arrival of the Aether Beast, the titan class monster that tore reality to appear and protect him from the monstrosities of space that hoped to destroy him.

"Every since I became a Void Beast I got access to a specific kind of mana called void mana, it's way more potent than regular mana but it cut my mana pool to one tenth of what it used to be."

As he explained what void mana felt like he watched the others begin to sense for the mana around them.

"Your mana does feel different, what can it do?"

"My void mana enhances my abilities and adds an armor destruction affect, actually it also seems to bypass armor entirely depending on the skill I use."

"Damn that would be helpful, and it only let you use it after evolution?"

He nodded before he returned to his cultivation.

While he was practicing his cultivation method the others observed him, Hope specifically watching the way he used his mana to cycle through his body and enhance his body.

'I wonder if you can do that with other forms of mana? Or with elements like the life affinity.'

She sat down to try and copy what he was doing, her mana sense was honed well enough to feel that he was moving his mana through his mana veins and pushing it out through the rest of his body until he pushed the mana through his pores with strange matter collected in the process.

She started to cycle her mana through her body the same way but the mana itself was only giving her body a refreshed feeling, raw mana seemed to have an effect more like natural recovery than the tempering his mana was offering.

Since she saw no real progress with raw mana she began to cycle mana infused with the life affinity through her body, mana that immediately brought a very different reaction.

The life mana allowed her to feel strange details in her body that made her grow cold and disgusted by the sensation, abnormalities in her body that felt like growths or toxic buildup she was not aware had grown inside of her.

She started to attack those disgusting things with her life mana but it almost seemed like there wasn't a reaction, the affinity allowed her to identify those impurities but the mana seemed to ignore them.

She kept trying and noticed that some of the impurities reacted slowly but she wanted to remove them now.

'Maybe wind mana? If I can tear the stuff apart and push it out then maybe it will work?'

With this thought in mind she began to infuse wind mana into the cycle which gave her a great change.

She noticed her organs were full of impurities and her muscles had strange blockages due to similar things so she used her wind mana in small locations, tiny spaces in her body that ripped the impurities apart and caused her sharp pains until she healed them with her life affinity.

She continued this process until she saw that every impurity was destroyed and left suspended in the mana she manipulated.

She had seen how Ezekiel used his mana to push towards his skin so she copied this method.

Every cycle of her mana pushed further and further until she could feel an odd pressure under her skin.

Keith and Layla had noticed that Ezekiel had begun to cultivate again and lowered their chatter to a whisper until the pair saw Hope do the same as their friend.

Their mana sense was not as refined as the mages of the group but they were able to feel the mana around the pair start to grow chaotic.

When Layla saw the first signs of black specks under Hope's skin she moved back, she did not stop watching because she was curious but she did keep distance.

When Keith noticed Hope was starting to smell a bit he pinched his nose, the wind mana escaping her body made the scent of the disgusting impurities spread around which even broke the concentration of Ezekiel.

He opened his eyes with an annoyed expression until he saw Hope was copying his method of cultivation.

'Oh god I hope she didn't mess something up doing what I did, will she be ok?'

He used his mana sight to observe what was happening inside of her body before he smiled wide.

She was destroying impurities and forcing them away from her body while taking care to restore the damage caused by her destruction of those impurities, she was doing extremely well to copy him with her own method.

He could feel her mana about to burst through her skin and got ready to apply his own life affinity to her body when he remembered how his skin had been torn apart by this part.

Inside of her body she felt that the impurities were almost fighting removal so she pushed harder and harder, using the natural mana of the dungeon to force the impurities all the way to the edge of the skin before she realized she didn't have enough to get it out.

She started to cycle massive quantities of mana through her body instead as she figured she needed a massive push to remove it all.

She pulled so much mana into her body that her core felt swollen from all of it, like an overfilled balloon ready to burst.

She cycled the mana though her body faster and faster while infusing life affinity into the mana before taking a large amount of wind affinity to add even more force.

When she pushed that swirling mana out of her body she felt like her skin was being torn apart from the inside, her body was immediately screaming in pain and she had to heal it while pushing out.

She felt like something splattered through her body as she finally pushed the impurities out, a foul stench filling her nose and the subtle sound of dripping liquid reaching her ears.

She ignored this at first as she used her life affinity to make sure her body did not suffer any negative effects from the pain she just put it through, her life mana surging through her newly stretched mana veins and pushing out mana faster than she had ever felt them move before.

After a few minutes every wound no matter how small was healed, her body felt like she had just been forced through the most intense hot spring ever as she realized that she could move better than ever before.

When she opened her eyes she saw that the others were staring at her with Ezekiel smiling down at her.

She looked down at herself and immediately saw that her clothing was a horror show of black sludge and dark blood, she did not know if the blood was purely from wounding herself with her mana or from bad blood being forced out with the impurities but she knew it was disgusting.

"Well someone is a prodigy, you figured out cultivation just by watching me"

She smiled at him then began to get self conscious due to her current predicament with the disgusting residue.

"Don't worry the nasty stuff will be gone after you leave the dungeon."

He laughed to himself as he held a hand out to her.

"Now come on and show the others why we do this. You don't seem to be much stronger so I bet you got a lot faster, was that wind affinity?"

She nodded before checking her stats and to her shock she saw that every stat had increased significantly, the biggest change was her agility however as she felt like she just gained a huge boost in it.

Her first test was a simple standing jump to see how much her natural hare folk agility had been boosted.

Before this moment she had been able to easily reach a standing vertical of four feet but after her agility had increased she felt herself soar into the air, nearly reaching the highest branches of the thick trees.

"Very nice! I'd say you reached six feet with that jump, what else changed?"

She began to test her other abilities like her movement speed and her dodging speed, she could easily outpace Keith and Ezekiel while her dodging speed got so fast that a full speed slash combo from all four of Ezekiel's claws couldn't even touch her.

As the party celebrated her growth and the possibility of their martial allies learning the same thing she decided to test something herself while no one was watching.

She stood as tall as she could and pulled one leg into the air to test her flexibility, when she felt how easy it was to do things that a trained gymnast could do she silently celebrated for very different reasons.