Chương 152: Mana Does Not Forget

Mira looked noticeably less exhausted than before, although reports already covered half her desk. The rescued child was nowhere nearby, which Sieghart took as evidence that someone had finally convinced her to let him recover properly.

"Sit." Sieghart remained beside the chair without using it, keeping his travel bag close while he studied Mira's expression and tried determining whether this was gratitude, interrogation, or another unpleasant combination of both.

"I just got back."

"That is irrelevant." Mira sighed without arguing, apparently deciding that forcing him into a chair would accomplish little after he had crossed hostile territory, fought Chimerians, and somehow returned with Ronan mostly intact. For several seconds, she only watched him, and Sieghart recognized the look immediately. Mira rarely stared that long unless she was comparing what she saw against information she had already gathered elsewhere.

"Thank you." The sincerity caught Sieghart slightly off guard, enough that he stopped preparing sarcastic answers while Mira folded her hands across the desk and continued before he could redirect the conversation.

"You helped bring him back. Ronan told me enough through telepathy to know the distraction worked because you were there." Sieghart shifted the bag against his side carefully, avoiding pressure against bruises that First Aid had repaired enough to hide but not enough to make every movement completely comfortable yet.

"You asked for me because you knew I wouldn't refuse a chance to fight some Chimerians." Mira's mouth twitched slightly, the expression falling somewhere between amusement and annoyance because the accusation was close enough to the truth that denying it would have been pointless to him.

"That was part of it."

"Actually, I was waiting for a magic book as a reward." Mira stared without answering, allowing Sieghart enough silence to understand that whatever sympathy he had gained by helping rescue her relative was already being tested unusually quickly in front of him.

"If I had the choice between never seeing those crazy people again and fighting them for free, I'd pick never seeing them again without hesitation." That answer surprised Mira more than he expected. She leaned back slightly, studying his face as though checking whether disgust had genuinely replaced the combat curiosity she usually associated with his behavior. The Chimerians had been interesting in the same way venomous parasites were interesting.

Sieghart wanted to understand how they functioned, but that did not mean he wanted hundreds occupying the same valley around him. Mira remained silent long enough that Sieghart realized her attention had shifted away from the mission. Her eyes followed something around him rather than focusing entirely upon his face or injuries.

"Are you feeling anything strange?" Sieghart frowned but kept his posture relaxed, because the question sounded too specific to be ordinary concern after a dangerous mission involving magic, poison, grafted monsters, and prolonged fighting that morning.

"What do you mean?" Mira rested one elbow against the desk and tapped her temple slowly, apparently deciding how much of her own magic she should reveal after years spent criticizing Sieghart for collecting dangerous secrets.

"I can use many kinds of magic. I can fight when necessary, but utility magic has always been where I'm strongest." Sieghart said nothing, though his attention sharpened immediately because Mira rarely explained personal abilities unless the information was necessary for something she already intended to discuss with him so openly.

"One of those abilities lets me see mana flow, density, structure, and color around living beings." That explanation immediately caught Sieghart's interest. Ordinary mages could sense mana vaguely, but Mira described something closer to magical diagnostics, allowing her to observe properties normally hidden beneath flesh, clothing, and controlled behavior. She explained that mana did not possess literal color in the ordinary sense.

Her spell translated affinities, emotional distortions, foreign influences, and contamination into visual patterns her mind could interpret consistently.

"Since the day you left for the mine, your mana has changed color three times." Sieghart stopped moving for several seconds, then deliberately relaxed again once he realized that reacting too strongly would only confirm how accurately Mira had already connected those changes in front of her.

"The first time happened after Bellhaven. It faded after several days." Sieghart remained silent, remembering the shattered Dungeon Guardian core, Necromancy, Zombification, and the overwhelming desire to drag his grandparents back from death regardless of what returned to him afterward anyway.

"The second happened after you returned from the northern siege." That one required even less interpretation. Wrath had entered him after the Orc King's core, turning every injury, resentment, humiliation, and grief into fuel demanding immediate violence against something at once.

"The third started the moment you returned from Chimerian territory." Sieghart mentally connected the three incidents without needing further explanation. Bellhaven meant Necromancy, the Orc King meant Wrath, and the Chimerian core meant the newly unlocked Alchemy Magic inside his System. Each absorption had therefore left a temporary signature inside his mana even after the foreign emotions weakened, which meant his System could organize corruption internally without hiding every external consequence.

Mira's gaze remained steady without becoming openly angry, and that calm concern made the situation more uncomfortable because anger would have been considerably easier for Sieghart to dismiss as another argument. Since she had already gone this far, pretending ignorance would accomplish nothing except insulting both of them. Sieghart shrugged and allowed some of the tension to leave his shoulders under her scrutiny. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"I feel better."

"Better than what?"

"Than when the changes happened." He deliberately avoided describing the specific emotions involved, because telling Mira that corrupted magic had made him consider zombifying his grandparents, murdering entire groups, and replacing his own body crossed several boundaries.

"If my mana returns to normal after a few days, then that explains a lot." Mira's expression hardened immediately, and the faint relief she had shown earlier disappeared beneath the serious look Sieghart usually saw whenever someone proposed something recklessly convenient without enough evidence first.

"No. It explains one thing."

"It explains that the visible contamination fades." Mira leaned forward and placed both forearms against the desk, looking more serious than she had during any previous conversation about his experiments with questionable magical principles like these ones.

"It does not prove the corruption is gone." Sieghart understood the distinction immediately, although he disliked how effectively it attacked the comforting theory he had started building around his System's apparent ability to translate corrupted powers safely without proof. Mira explained that foreign mana could stop producing obvious symptoms after a body adapted, even when the original influence remained integrated somewhere deeper inside magical pathways, instincts, memories, or physical structures.

"You should not assume that returning to your usual color means everything became harmless."

"It hasn't caused permanent physical changes."

"That you can see." Mira pointed toward his chest, not accusingly but with the deliberate precision of someone emphasizing that skin and appearance revealed almost nothing about what foreign magic might be changing internally.

"You keep absorbing powers produced by beings who destroyed themselves to obtain them." Sieghart almost corrected her by explaining that the System converted those powers into magic rather than reproducing the original corruption directly, but revealing that mechanism would surrender far more information than intended.

Mira noticed the hesitation, narrowing her eyes slightly, yet she allowed him to keep whatever explanation had nearly escaped instead of pressing telepathically or demanding an immediate confession from him.

"Who knows what happens if you keep doing this?"

"Your body might eventually become an amalgamation of mana and knowledge that should never exist together." The warning made Sieghart's stomach tighten because it resembled his own concern after Alchemy emerged from Chimerian corruption rather than producing any direct physical graft or mutation inside his body.

Mira described separate magical principles competing for the same internal pathways, influencing emotions differently, or forcing Sieghart's body and mind to adapt in contradictory directions after enough corrupted absorptions inside him.

"One power could reinforce what another tries to destroy. One instinct could demand preservation while another demands transformation." Sieghart immediately thought about Zombification and Alchemy. One rejected death by preserving what should remain dead, while the other originated from corruption that rejected the body's natural limitations entirely through magical change.

Wrath complicated everything further because rage could provide exactly the emotional pressure necessary to turn either dangerous impulse into something that temporarily felt rational, urgent, and completely justified to him. For the first time, Sieghart wondered whether the neat categories inside his Status might be organizing conflicting powers visually without actually preventing those powers from affecting one another underneath inside his body.

Black Magic sat beside White Magic, while Necromancy, Sin Magic, Psionics, Perception, and Alchemy occupied separate sections as though everything inside him belonged peacefully within one carefully arranged library inside one body. Reality did not necessarily respect the interface, and that thought bothered Sieghart more than any accusation Mira could have made about deliberately ignoring her previous warnings regarding corrupted cores once again.

He had assumed the System translated corrupted principles into compatible magic because he had not developed undead flesh, Chimerian organs, or the Orc King's permanently transformed crimson body afterward to match them. Perhaps translation only meant making the power understandable. Compatibility might be something entirely different, something the System expected Sieghart to manage himself rather than guaranteeing automatically in the future at all.

Mira watched his expression shift and apparently recognized that her warning had finally reached somewhere deeper than his usual instinct to resist anyone restricting his experiments quite so casually anymore.

"I'm not telling you this because I think knowledge is dangerous by itself. I'm telling you because you are treating yourself like an experiment." That sentence struck harder than Sieghart expected because it identified the weakness inside the argument he had repeatedly used to justify studying corrupted cores rather than destroying them immediately on sight.

He possessed no controlled samples, external observers, reliable measurements, or method to remove an absorbed principle if the result became dangerous after the experiment had already entered his body forever afterward. Every time he absorbed a core, the experiment was Sieghart himself, and the same mind evaluating whether another attempt remained acceptable was also the thing potentially being changed by corruption itself.

That created an obvious problem because corruption did not need to overwhelm him immediately. Gradually altering the person deciding where the limits belonged could be far more effective over time. Sieghart looked toward the floor before answering, choosing his words carefully because sarcasm suddenly felt childish compared with the concern Mira had actually raised about his long-term survival so directly.

"I know that. At least, I'm starting to." That answer seemed to satisfy Mira more than any promise would have. She leaned backward again, although concern remained visible beneath the calmer expression returning gradually to her face at last. Sieghart still had no intention of surrendering every corrupted spell or System mystery for someone else to decide what he was allowed to understand, regardless of their good intentions for him. However, curiosity alone was no longer enough justification.

If he continued studying corrupted powers, he needed rules stricter than simply waiting until the immediate emotional influence faded afterward inside himself. He needed ways to compare his behavior before and after absorption, outside observations from someone trustworthy, and limits determining which cores were too dangerous to investigate personally without outside guidance.

The thought made Sieghart uncomfortable because Mira's newly revealed ability could provide exactly the external measurement his experiments had been missing since Bellhaven all along without telling him anything about it. Unfortunately, asking her to monitor his mana would indirectly confess that he intended to continue studying corruption despite everything she had just explained about possible cumulative consequences directly to her.

Sieghart decided that particular conversation could wait until Mira was considerably less likely to confiscate every suspicious object he brought within ten meters of Lunar Arc without warning ever again.

"So, about that magic book." Mira stared at him for several seconds, perhaps wondering how someone could move from possible magical self-destruction back toward negotiating payment without experiencing any visible transition quite so casually again.

"You did say thank you." Mira covered her face with one hand and remained like that for several seconds, apparently reconsidering whether gratitude had been worth encouraging Sieghart to begin negotiating another dangerous magical reward.

"You are something else..."

"That is not a no." Despite everything, the tension inside the office weakened slightly. Sieghart suspected Mira understood that joking again meant her warning had actually reached him instead of simply bouncing away unnoticed this time. More importantly, Sieghart understood something uncomfortable about himself: he still wanted the knowledge, perhaps even more now that Mira had explained another danger he did not fully understand properly yet.

The difference was that Sieghart no longer trusted curiosity to regulate itself, and accepting that limitation might be the first genuinely useful precaution he had taken against corrupted magic so far.