Chapter 57: Dark Mana

Not the ordinary shiver of a blade reacting to nearby mana. This felt deliberate, almost insistent, a pulse that ran up through the hilt and into his palm like the sword itself were asking to be drawn.

Something in his chest agreed before his mind had finished catching up, some instinct he couldn’t name yet trusted anyway, even though he still had no real understanding of what this sword was actually capable of.

He drew it in one clean motion, blade lifted skyward, point angled toward the smoke-choked ceiling.

And then, without a single swing, without a shred of force behind it, the black smoke bent.

It curved through the air in a long unbroken current, funneling toward the blade as though something on the other side of the steel had opened its mouth and started drinking, every trailing wisp of Dark Mana pulled from the room and drawn down into Sonata in the space of a few heartbeats.

Lucian stared at his own sword, breath caught somewhere behind his ribs.

He hadn’t done anything. Not really. He’d only lifted the blade, and the room had emptied itself into it.

Is this the sword’s own power? Or is it something else?

The Chronos Domain sat somewhere behind that steel, he knew that much already, and if the Omen truly lived somewhere inside that space, then maybe this hadn’t been Sonata acting alone at all. Maybe something on the other side had simply reached through and taken what it wanted.

I need to ask them properly. Next time I see Alayna, next time I see the Omen, I need real answers about what just happened here.

They’d both lived through Dark Mana before, more of it than he probably ever would. If anyone had a name for what this sword had just done, it would be them.

But while Lucian stood frozen in front of his own blade, still turning the question over, Jeanne had already moved past him.

She crossed the room fast, faster than he’d ever seen her move outside a duel, and dropped to her knees beside the bed, eyes locked on whoever lay there. Over her shoulder, she barked an order at the guards still coughing in the doorway, sending one of them running for more staff.

Lucian turned toward the bed himself, following the last of the smoke as it thinned enough to reveal what Jeanne had been so desperate to reach.

What he saw there stopped him cold.

A woman lay across the sheets, her hair a dull, faded blonde, her whole body slack with a kind of exhaustion that went past sleep and into something closer to collapse.

"Sister Jeanne, is that Lady Sophia?"

He didn’t need Jeanne to confirm it. He already knew that face, even blurred at the edges through his half-restored sight. Sophia, Vice-Patriarch of House Sarnel. Jeanne’s mother.

But his attention didn’t stop there, because the thin dark line he’d traced earlier hadn’t vanished with the smoke.

It still ran from somewhere on her body, faint now, but unmistakably present, which meant whatever had been bleeding Dark Mana into this room hadn’t finished yet.

His gaze dropped to her arm, and there he found it, a wound along her forearm, old and half-healed on the surface but clearly rotten underneath, dark veins spreading out from it like cracks fracturing through glass.

That’s the source. Whatever’s been building up in there, festering, that’s what’s been feeding this whole room.

The wound itself looked far past ordinary care. Bandages wouldn’t touch it. He doubted even holy water alone could burn out something buried that deep.

"Sister, how did this happen?"

Jeanne didn’t answer right away. Her hand hovered over her mother’s arm, careful not to touch the wound directly, and when she finally spoke, her voice had dropped into something quieter, older, like she was pulling the story out of a memory she’d rather have left shut.

Twelve years ago, someone had broken into the estate, aiming to steal one of the family’s relics. Sophia had caught the intrusion first and moved to stop it herself.

What she hadn’t realized in time was that the intruder wasn’t working alone. A Necromancer had come with him, or her, Jeanne didn’t specify, calling something up from behind Sophia while her attention stayed locked on the more obvious threat in front of her.

And this Necromancer, according to Jeanne, hadn’t been some minor threat either. Sophia held a Golden Core even then, and still the fight had nearly broken her, which meant whoever they’d been dealing with that night stood well above her in raw strength.

That was how she’d taken the wound. Not from carelessness. From an enemy she simply hadn’t been built to match.

The one piece of luck in the whole encounter, Jeanne said, had come from someone else entirely, a white-haired woman who appeared partway through the fight.

Sophia had assumed at first that this stranger had come as reinforcement for the intruder. Instead, she’d turned on the Necromancer and fought alongside Sophia until the threat broke and fled.

Wait. Twelve years ago. A powerful Necromancer. A white-haired woman.

A white-haired woman.

The pieces clicked together in Lucian’s head with a force that made his breath catch, folding straight into everything he’d already seen inside the Chronos Domain, into the fractured memory of the Kirana crystal splitting apart, into the intruder who’d come chasing that very same crystal only to be stopped cold by Sophia standing in the way.

And if Sophia had been there, had seen that white-haired woman with her own eyes, then maybe she was the one person alive who could finally put a name to the figure the Omen had only ever gestured toward.

Maybe the answer to the crystal itself was lying right here in front of him, wrapped in Dark Mana and half a decade of silence.

"Lucian. Can you heal her? The way you did before?"

And there it was, the real reason Jeanne had pulled him through half the estate tonight. Not an interrogation.

Not a trap. Just this, a mother slowly poisoned from the inside, and a daughter hoping the boy everyone else had written off might be the one person who could still save her.

She was counting on his White Awakening, on whatever Sacred Mana he could draw from it, to burn out the Dark Mana still rotting beneath Sophia’s skin.

Lucian knelt beside the bed, closing the distance to where the wound still pulsed faintly with corrupted mana, and let himself hope, quietly, that whatever had settled into Sophia’s arm and eaten away at her for twelve long years could still be pulled free before it finished what it started.

But how? That was the question circling through Lucian’s mind now, the same problem he’d solved once before without ever understanding how he’d solved it.

Healing a wound while pulling Dark Mana out of it wasn’t the same trick twice. He needed to do both at once, and neither of those things had ever technically belonged to him.

Jeanne, meanwhile, hadn’t looked away from him once.

If Lucian admitted now that he couldn’t do this, she’d have a hard time explaining away what everyone already knew about his White Awakening, the kind that let its bearer channel Sacred Mana on command.

Worse, whatever Sonata had just done to that smoke would be exposed right along with it.

Without quite deciding to, Lucian’s hand had already drifted toward the wound.

The instant his fingers came close enough to touch it, Sonata trembled again, and this time the tremor didn’t stay in the blade. It reached straight into him, twisting the flow of his own mana into something unfamiliar.

Warmth spread through his chest, gentle, almost soothing, carried along by whatever current now moved beneath his skin.

But it wasn’t his current. He could tell that much immediately, some deeper part of him recognizing the difference between mana he’d always carried and mana that had just been lent to him.