'Dammit, we left too many impurities. Without the Immortal Body array and the potions we gave her, Phloria would have exploded during the first seconds of the process.' Lith inwardly cursed.

'No time for hindsight. Let's focus on softening the waves just enough to delay the process even if just for a few seconds.' Solus thought.

The problem was always the same. If the body, the impurities, and the core weren't balanced, the breakthrough would either happen so fast that the body wouldn't have the time to recover, or so violent that it would inflict damage beyond repair.

The former left behind a bloody puddle while the latter made the mage burst. The Immortal Body array combined with the magic circle allowed Lith and Solus to control both variables, but their lack of experience with Awakening different cores levels was showing.

They made mistakes and learned from them, but Phloria paid the price for it, suffering excruciating pain.

"Is it over?" Phloria asked among pants the moment the pain stopped again.

"Yes." Lith carefully examined her body with Invigoration and compared the results of her blue core breakthrough with his own.

Phloria smiled and then a small thud produced by her head hitting against the stone floor indicated that she had finally allowed herself to faint.

"This is very interesting. During the organs' refining process, I noticed a sudden increase of her mana flow, as if they developed properties similar to Adamant. For a few moments, instead of just channeling the mana coming from the core, they drew the world energy themselves." Lith cleaned Phloria's body from the traces of bones, blood, and impurities left.

Then, he covered her with a thick blanket and put her on a bed he had conjured from the tower.

"You are a horrible person, you know?" Quylla punched his arm, hurting only herself. "My sister almost died and yet you are here, ogling at her body and talking about her as if she's just another experiment."

"Magical research can never stop. We've collected some priceless data, here. If someday this happened to you…" Lith realized how Manohar-like he sounded only when he was too late.

"I was just messing with you." Quylla hugged him, sobbing. "Thanks for everything. Before you arrived, I was afraid we would have lost Phloria forever. I don't really care about Faluel, I just want you to always be my best friend."

Lith patted her head while returning the embrace.

"Don't worry, little one. I'm not going any- Fuck me sideways!" Lith pushed Quylla away, doubling over in pain.

"What's wr- Seriously? Again?" Solus blurted out. "Fuck!"

With a wave of her hand, Solus sent Phloria inside one of the rooms on the ground floor and Quylla back to the Mirror Hall with a small map that would lead her to Phloria.

"What's going on?" Like the others, Protector could hear what was happening but not see.

"Between the fight from earlier and helping Phloria, Lith's core has been stimulated so much that he's having a breakthrough." Solus said while preparing the Heart and herself for a second procedure.

"Why did you send me away? I can administer him a potion." Quylla said.

'I'm not letting you see him naked, sister.' Solus made Quylla return just for the time to inject a nutrients potion.

Only once they were alone did Lith remove his Skinwalker armor. He had learned from experience that the less resistance he offered, the smoother the process would be.

Thanks to being Awakened from the crib, Lith's body was always perfectly attuned with his mana core. From his last breakthrough, he had fought countless battles, manipulated enormous amounts of energy, and pushed his whole being to its utmost limits, expanding them every time.

Using so many Nova spells and then flooding his body with a controlled amount of mana for all the time needed to help Phloria had been the final straw that evolved the camel's back.

Lith's mana core produced waves of increasing power, seeking the last remnants of the impurities that it had to purge in order to achieve perfection. His body refining happened in a similar fashion to Phloria's, just quicker and less bloody.

At least until it reached the organs. Then, Lith felt as if Mogar was suddenly weighing on his shoulders. His skin dried up and his eyes shrunk, making him look like a desiccated mummy.

His organs started to fail one after the other and refused to return to their original state. Lith's mind was blank, beyond pain. The only time he had experienced a similar sensation had been during his two deaths when the soul had detached from his body and all physical sensations were lost.

"What the fuck is going on here?" Solus didn't panic, but it didn't make her any less scared.

Controlling the waves was pointless since they weren't doing any damage and the Immortal Body array didn't find any injury to fix. It was akin to treating a corpse. All kinds of healing spells simply failed to find their target.

'It's the first time that I see someone reaching a bright blue core, so this might as well be perfectly normal, but what if it's not? Any change sustained during a body refining process always reverts immediately. Why is it different this time?'

She was about to bring everyone in the Heart to ask their opinion when the tower trembled. A huge mass of world energy, so strong that it almost overloaded the tower's capacity, entered the room and flooded Lith's body.

His skin returned to normal and so did all his organs. World energy and life force flowed through them with a revitalizing effect, filling them to the brim. The normally static life force of humans had become more fluid, boosting both his physical prowess and recovery abilities.

Every single cell of his body was akin to a power battery for life force that now were no longer isolated from each other. They formed a circuit that connected them all from head to toe, allowing them to share both their energy and vitality.

Solus could see that all of Lith's organs not only offered no resistance to the mana anymore, but they also developed what she could only describe as their own pseudo core.

'If Phloria is like Adamant, Lith is like Davross. All of his body is now capable of drawing the world energy and storing it to assist the mana core. If before flesh and blood hindered the most powerful spells in our arsenal, they might now enhance them instead.

'The long pause was due to the time necessary for the world energy to build up enough to replace part of Lith's body weight with pure energy. I can't wait for…'

Yet as it had happened during Lith's and Phloria's last breakthrough, the world energy flowing through his organs didn't last long. The pseudo cores disappeared, returning his body to normal right before it was forced to shapeshift into his hybrid form.

Lith started to emit a silver light that spread both upward and downward, drawing even more world energy to itself. A silver pillar descended from the sky and a black one rose from the ground, meeting where Lith lay on the floor.

Instead of disappearing, all the impurities expelled from his human body now crawled back over Lith, covering his skin like a swarm of pitch-black insects.