Chương 59: Diagnosing the Count

The spark brightened moments later. Now, the Count had his whole life ahead of him. The last time Adolin had checked, the spark had suggested a week of life at most to an entire lifetime. Now it had gone to less than a day. The potion had apparently slowed the ailment, though not nearly as much as he had expected. He still had no idea how much time the Count truly had left. The whole thing was an odd case. It was getting interesting. Unfortunately, he didn't have the tools to investigate it properly.

There were simply too many interesting things in this world, unlike his previous one. Well, maybe that wasn't true. There were a lot of interesting things there as well, but the problem was that he never had the time to focus on them. His life had always been filled with things he had to do rather than the things he wanted to do.

"Let's see what I can do," Adolin muttered and stopped in front of the Count. He had enough mana for a higher tier diagnostic spell. The issue was the curse. Well, he still wasn't entirely sure it was a curse, but whatever it was, it was inside the Count's core. Spells capable of analyzing a core required an absurd amount of mana. That didn't mean he couldn't deal with the issue. It just meant it would take a little more effort. And some creative problem-solving. At least, he liked to think it was creative.

Body Diagnosis. Life Insight. The first spell would allow him to perceive the mana flowing through a body, while the second would let him see through mana itself. Both spells had been designed to diagnose problems within the body and assist with healing. By combining them in an unusual way, he should be able to peer inside the Count's core. Well, the approach came with some significant side effects that he would rather avoid, but it was the only way he could do anything for the Count at the moment.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, focusing on the mana of the two spells and casting them, flooding the count's body with his mana. Using two spells at once was difficult for most mages. Using two diagnostic spells while trying to force them into another person's core was something else entirely. Pain exploded inside his head. It felt like a pounding headache, stabbing pain behind his eyes, and crushing pressure all at once. The longer he maintained the spells, the worse it would become.

He needed to do this quickly, before the side effects brought him down. He had two minutes, maybe three minutes to get the job done. He focused on Life Insight, and an image appeared before his eyes. The effect of the spells was interesting. That was the best way he could describe it. It felt as though he was floating in a void. In front of him hung a sphere of light—the Count's core. Its glow was almost blinding. That was only the outer appearance of the core, however.

There were no signs of the culprit, save for the greyish waves of corruption that leaked from it at irregular intervals. The good news was that he could finally confirm it. The corruption leaking from the Count wasn't the source of the problem. It was merely a byproduct. Whether that was actually good news remained to be seen. He pushed his mana closer, surrounding the core. The core itself was a perfect sphere, glowing with every color visible to the human eye.

It was little more than an organ—or an object, depending on who you asked—capable of holding enormous amounts of mana. Now that he thought about it, it wasn't all that different from a dungeon core. He made a mental note to study that later. He spent some time studying the core, but there was nothing out of place. It was the same as the cores from his old world. As far as he could tell, there were no differences between the two. So why did people here need chants to cast spells? He was getting sidetracked again.

Now came the difficult part. Invading the core with his own mana. He focused on the mana from the first spell and compressed it into a single point. Then he added some of the mana from the second spell that permeated the area around the core. He needed at least a little of it if he wanted to use Life Insight inside the core. The pain in his head intensified, but he ignored it. He was very good at that.

The spells had been designed to work with the target's own mana, making them the only ones that had a chance of invading the core. Then he pushed the mana toward the core, and the battle began. The Count's mana immediately resisted. Every core possessed a unique mana signature that was allowed to enter. When foreign mana attempted to do the same, the core defended itself by trying to destroy the invading mana. It was similar to the corruption he and Edrin had been exposed to.

As long as a core contained mana, invading it was nearly impossible. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. At least, that was the norm. There were several ways around it. One was to overwhelm the core with a vastly greater amount of mana, though that usually only worked if the attacker's core was significantly stronger. Another involved high-tier spells specifically designed to invade cores.

The easiest method was simply to empty the core of mana first, or have the owner willingly allow the mana to enter. Unfortunately, the Count wasn't exactly in a state to do that. In this particular case, overwhelming the core was the right approach because the other methods weren't an option. His mana clashed with the Count's, and the battle began. At first, it was a stalemate. He couldn't actually see the fight. At least, not with the spells he currently had access to.

The only way he could judge what was happening was by feeling the mana and tracking how much of it he lost. His mana was winning by a decent margin. The longer the clash continued, the easier it became. That at least confirmed that the Count's core was weakened. The pain was becoming harder to ignore. Pain relief spells wouldn't help in this case. So he gritted his teeth and pushed through it. It was funny, in a way.

Pain was probably the thing he hated most, yet he somehow kept finding new ways to inflict it on himself. Was he some kind of masochist? He pushed more mana into the spells, replacing what had been consumed during the struggle. After some time, a portion of his mana finally broke through and entered the core. The battle wasn't over. He needed more mana inside. Some time later, he finally had enough.

It was difficult to keep track of time in his current state, but judging by the pain, at least a minute had already passed. Inside, the core was just as bright as its exterior. Or maybe it wasn't. The only thing he could see was white. He still wasn't entirely sure how cores functioned. For all he knew, nobody did. It was one of the mysteries his mentor had devoted his life to studying. Unfortunately, he had died before finding an answer. Adolin himself had never been particularly interested in studying cores.

Most of his previous life had been spent fighting, leaving little time for anything else. Now he needed to find the problem, and that was the hardest part. The interior of a core was far larger than its exterior suggested. And he had less than two minutes to search it before the pain overwhelmed him. This part mostly relied on luck. There was only a tiny amount of mana from the Life Insight inside the core, and that mana served as his eyes. He spread it as thinly as possible, sending it in every direction.

Adolin groaned as the pain doubled instantly. Each fragment fed him a different perspective, and his mind struggled to process them all at once. At the same time, he used Body Diagnosis to analyze the interior of the core. Nothing. No sign of what was killing the Count. Everything depended on finding it before he reached his limit. Time continued to pass as the intensity of the pain started reaching unbearable levels; he didn't even want to imagine how he looked in the real world. Terrible was an educated guess.

He did feel some wet licks around his neck, or at least where his neck was supposed to be. He ignored it and continued his search. He found it after some time of unbearable pain. His thoughts were already blurry, and he was barely enduring the pain. He had very little time to gather enough information to heal the Count. Leaving now and coming back later wouldn't work because he wouldn't be able to find the location again from memory. Space behaved differently inside a core than it did outside.

Both distance and direction were completely skewed. The mana from the spell surrounded the curse. It looked like a grey dot, almost unrecognizable against the sea of white around it, but he had gotten lucky enough to find it. Now he needed to figure out what it was and how to cure or destroy it. Depending on what it was, one of those options would be necessary. The thing was absorbing mana from the core and releasing corrupted mana into its surroundings.

That was merely a side effect of whatever it was actually doing to the Count. He made a mental note of that. Then he focused on the first spell and released his hold on the second, destroying the mana it had left inside the core. He didn't need vision anymore, and it was better to remove the mana before he collapsed from the pain. Leaving his own mana inside the Count's core was just asking for more problems.

"Are you okay?" He heard the words coming from somewhere beside him, but he ignored them. There were also the constant meows ringing in his ears. He blocked everything else out and focused solely on the feedback Body Diagnosis was giving him. Nothing. He was getting nothing from the spell, as if he were casting it on empty air. Fuck. That wasn't how it was supposed to go. He was certain his spell was far stronger than the curse. So it should have worked. But it didn't. Why?

He was also fairly certain he had let out a shriek or two in the real world, and he was going to collapse at any moment. What could he do? The pounding in his head kept interrupting his thoughts. If... If the spell didn't work... Then the... Adolin lost consciousness.