Chapter 84: Seven Days of Stillness

Chapter 84: Chapter 84: Seven Days of Stillness

"Alright. Let’s get to work."

Eric carefully opened the transport crate, unlatching the top ventilation mesh with a soft metallic click. Using a pair of padded handling forceps, he transferred all twenty plump specimens into a wide, climate-stabilized glass vivarium lined with fresh clover and ventilated by microscopic aeration runes.

Before touching a single reagent, he focused his gaze across the crawling herd.

*Appraisal.*

│ Race: Green Caterpillar

│ Rank: F | Stage: Mortal | Level: 1

He flicked his appraisal through the entire cluster, taking note of their individual vitality bars. As expected, every single one sat squarely at Rank F. Eighteen of them lingered at Level 1, while only two had managed to graze Level 2 through sheer, gluttonous leaf-chewing.

"You guys are actually kind of cute," Eric chuckled, tapping the glass lightly with a gloved finger. "Wassup, little buddies?"

*Caw! Caw!*

Coal hopped closer along the edge of the alloy examination bench, his sharp black eyes locking onto the squirming green bodies like a hawk sizing up an easy mid-afternoon snack.

Eric immediately leveled an accusatory finger at the crow. "Hey. Those are research subjects, not trail snacks. They’re friends, got it? Be nice."

Coal let out a disappointed, low-pitched rumble, clicking his bone-white beak in mild protest before settling back onto his haunches atop the shelf.

Eric reached into the vivarium and gently lifted one of the healthier Level 1 specimens, setting it inside a dedicated porcelain dish beneath the spectral examination lens.

"You’re the lucky pioneer," Eric smiled. "Let’s call you Moon."

Following the precise instructions etched into the *Myriad Beast Encyclopedia*, Eric uncorked the first slender vial of Moonlight Lily Extract. A faint, luminescent silver-blue vapor drifted from the neck of the glass, carrying a sweet, chilling floral aroma. Using a sterilized micro-pipette, Eric drew three precise drops of the refined solvent.

With surgical delicacy, he applied the cold liquid across Moon’s soft, segmented back, using a velvet-tipped brush to spread the balm evenly along the creature’s dormant spirit channels.

The caterpillar squirmed slightly under the icy touch before relaxing completely, its translucent green flesh drinking in the silvery fluid like parched soil welcoming rain. A subtle, rhythmic pulse of cool mana rippled beneath its skin, expanding its tiny vascular walls to establish the neutral base needed for multi-elemental conversion.

"Phase one, Day One: complete," Eric murmured, sealing the vial and returning Moon to its private, labeled nursery pod.

He leaned against the alloy counter, tapping his chin in deep, tactical thought.

"The physical catalyst sequence only takes seven days flat. But if an impoverished border-town freshman walks into Professor Sonia’s office next Monday claiming he pulled a quad-elemental Rank-C butterfly out of a common grassland pest in a single week, the institutional audit board won’t applaud me, they’ll lock me in an underground interrogation cell to dissect my brain."

A sudden breakthrough was a miracle; an instantaneous, flawless miracle was a lethal liability.

"I’ll have to stretch the official laboratory records out for at least a full month," Eric calculated. "Seven days for the actual transformation, followed by three weeks of ’observation, metabolic stabilization, and dietary calibration’ before I draft the formal paper."

He looked around the pristine, quiet laboratory bay.

"Which leaves me with a mountain of downtime, and wandering around campus looking completely idle will only invite unnecessary questions."

Eric’s dark eyes drifted toward the reinforced storage safe sitting in the rear vault of Room 508.

A devious smirk tugged at the corners of his lips.

"Screw it. Might as well let institutional wealth fund personal growth."

Opening the vault with his student credentials, Eric reached past the common elemental stones and discreetly palmed a shimmering Peak Soldier-rank mana stone. He set the dense crystal down beside Coal’s perch with a hushed, conspiratorial wink.

"Shhh... Just absorb it slowly, alright? This stays strictly between us and these four walls."

Coal tilted his sleek head, giving an appreciative, low-pitched trill before sinking his ivory talons directly into the mineral facets, steadily siphoning the dense marrow into his core.

With the room secured, Eric sat cross-legged on the woven meditation mat, closed his eyes, and engaged the *Seven Star Mana Circulation Manual*.

His core sat at 78% of Soldier Level 2. With the starlight cycle running at double efficiency alongside the passive, soothing recovery of the *Ring of Tranquility*, breaking through the Level 3 bottleneck was merely a matter of two or three days of uninterrupted cultivation.

The ensuing week settled into an unhurried, rigorous cadence.

On Day Two and Day Three, Eric administered the remaining micro-doses of Moonlight Lily extract to Moon. The little caterpillar grew noticeably lethargic, its plump green skin taking on an iridescent, pearl-white sheen as its internal channels completely neutralized their baseline dross.

Starting on Day Four, the true challenge began.

Eric ground a tiny sliver of a Fire Elemental Stone into fine powder, mixing it with crushed clover pulp for Moon to ingest. On Day Five, he followed with a shaving of Water Elemental Stone. Day Six was Wind, and Day Seven culminated with dense Earth mineral marrow.

Each day, Moon consumed the opposing elements without a trace of violent rejection, the prior bath of Moonlight Lily extract acting as an absolute alchemical buffer that harmonized the clashing forces into an equilibrium loop.

Between the daily nursery duties, Eric’s week was occupied by lectures and routine drills.

He survived Professor Holt’s grueling combat conditioning, demonstrated his stable, thirty-minute *Illuminate* runes to an appreciative Professor James, and debated regional drake morphology in Professor Jones’s anatomy hall.

Every spare hour outside the lecture halls was spent locked inside Room 508 or his private dorm suite, alternating between drilling the pressurized edge compression of *Crescent Slash* and refining his starlight liquid mana.

And just like that, seven days slipped by in seamless focus.

Returning to his lab on Sunday morning, Eric unlocked the heavy pressurized door and walked straight toward Moon’s glass nursery pod.

Resting in the center of the porcelain dish was no longer a crawling green caterpillar.

Spun from dense, shimmering threads that rippled with faint crimson, azure, emerald, and amber hues, a delicate, oblong chrysalis hung suspended from the clover twig, pulsing with the faint, steady heartbeat of an awakening beast.