The group of Jen, Dani, Patris, and Avan had spent the rest of the day searching the surrounding area for crystals, and even Avan's [Black Wyrm Backpack] with its 3X size inside was now half filled with all sorts of different colored mana crystals. And this despite the fact that he had circulated every other mana crystal and rendered it useless.

They had just all eaten a hearty soup over a campfire, and everyone went about their own routine tasks for the evening. Dani looked after her equipment and made sure her ranger gear was in good condition, while Patris lay beside her, muttering to himself that he vowed to do some combat training as soon as he had finished digesting.

Jen sat near Avan, and had done a lot with Avan in the last few hours and days. The mage himself was sitting in a meditative posture, in a pose he had more or less neglected for weeks. First the journey as a slave, and then the escape and then the dungeon. This had left little room for meditative rest, except for the few times he had spent in the evening circulating his inner mana.

[Meditation] not only provided faster mana regeneration, which he himself didn't really need due to his gigantic increased ambient mana, but also a minimal growth in the flow of mana through his own body. The more you deepened and mastered the meditation, the more you could increase your mana veins throughout your body bit by bit, multiplying your speed.

Due to the constant additional pure mana in the mana crystals themselves, which he had absorbed and used internally in the last few hours, his puny mana veins had almost doubled in size and width. Although this was of no use to him when it came to controlling his forms, for example, since they were created outside of his body, everything that healed or augmented his body itself, in other words, used his inner mana channels, was now more than twice as strong and fast.

Less than an hour after Avan sat down to meditate and breathed in and out calmly like a Zen master, the mana around him suddenly condensed.

Jen was the first to look up in shock and search for the origin of this phenomenon, only to find the starting point of it right next to her in the form of Avan! A clearly visible veil and mist of white neutral mana became visible. The closer to his body, the more visible and almost tangible became the mana that was attracted to him.

The three spectators looked at each other shaking their heads helplessly, as everyone present had read about similar incidents and breakthroughs in mana skills. No one was surprised if Avan suddenly pulled a rabbit out of the hood of his robe or made a breakthrough in meditation like a great mage.

Avan himself smiled only slightly as he clearly perceived the reactions of the others even with closed eyes, but then concentrated again on the new addition to his meditation skills.

Passive Skill: Meditation

Through meditation, a true spirit can reach godhood through instant regeneration of health, mana, and stamina.

While not moving, you constantly regain health, mana, and stamina at a higher rate than usually possible.

[Bronze] Your very soul faced a flood of mana and not only survived the encounter but also came out of this ordeal more substantial than before.

Your body and mind are tremendously improved through mana infusion, and you now passively store mana in your cells. You are faster, stronger, and more resilient. If you wish, you can unleash small portions of stored mana through contact to corrupt your enemies.

[Silver] You have managed to create a healthy schizophrenia in your mind. Congratulations.

Allows you now to split your thoughts and concentration in meditation and to tackle different thoughts and tasks at the same time.

[Gold] You can now passively regenerate mana while moving slowly. ADDITION: As a dungeon, you can now slowly but steadily restore mana within your domain, even if you are in a mana empty zone!

Avan smiled inwardly when he first read the first sentence about reaching the gold rank of the skill and was about to scoff a bit when he then read the addition and his eyes almost fell out of his skull.

*Is that Mana creation?" His head went blank. He dared not think of the sheer impossibility. *If this is mana creation, no matter how slow or little it is... Does that mean I can conjure up fucking mana out of thin air?!* This idea sent a shiver down his spine, as he couldn't imagine in the slightest that such a thing could be possible. As far as he knew and had read, mana came from the dungeons and the world itself, but was never created out of thin air.

On Aorus, too, the same rule of ancient alchemy and the Stone of Wisdom applied; something can be transformed, but energy can never be created out of nothing.

One thing Avan knew in any case - no matter to whom or what, he was not allowed to reveal this tiny little thing to anyone! For the protection of the others, but also above all for the protection of himself. He was indeed a dungeon, so the creation of mana was also quite conceivable. But he had never thought about it, because it had never come to his attention before.

*But of course, even a dungeon has to get mana from somewhere to respawn its monsters and resources.... Or to expand. Otherwise, eventually all the mana on the planet would be sucked up and gone...* He exhaled slowly and long.

His whole inside felt like it was on fire, but without the pain, just with a certain discomfort like waking up in a slightly unknown body. A warmth flowed through his body that had been there before thanks to his mana veins, but had never been felt as clearly as it was now.

Muscles, bones and tendons tightened, only to loosen up again full of energy. Every pore breathed in mana and the soul core in his center greedily sucked up any mana that was brought in from the outside.

When he opened his eyes, a slightly embarrassed and startled Jen looked him straight in the eyes. "Congratulations!" She squealed, completely caught off guard by the fact that he opened his eyes at the exact moment she wanted to see the phenomenon up close, only to be caught in the act.

"Thank you." He smiled warmly at her and made nothing more of it, since he had also seen everything even with his closed eyes.

The day ticked away and the 4 of them slept in their three tents until the next dawn to start collecting more mana crystals.

In contrast to the previous day, the 4 decided at breakfast to advance a little more into the more dangerous interior of the battlefield surrounded by crystals, since far and wide everything in the surrounding area of mana crystals had been harvested by the more than 60 adventurers yesterday.

So they set off, and it took them more than half an hour of stumbling on foot to find the first mana crystals, which promptly disappeared into their backpacks. With the exception of Avan, of course, who again let half of his collected crystals crumble to dust.

In a huge circle of over half an hour and certainly several hours around the battlefield, the other adventurers had done a great job and left no fully grown mana crystal.

The idea of going further inside soon proved to be the right one as the backpacks of the 4 slowly but steadily filled up. Among other things, this had been the reason why they had wanted to take the risk of going further into the interior, because otherwise they would have spent hours walking around the edge of the battlefield until they had even reached untouched crystal formations.

Not to mention the fact that the other 60 adventurers went to collect again today too and the distance they had to cover to reach the camp increased even further.

So the small group of adventurers with Avan slowly meandered deeper into the interior. The orders of the commander of the quest had not completely forbidden to advance further, but admonishingly advised against it.

But except for the few encounters with smaller crystal lizards and a few crystal elementals that were quickly hunted down, there were no signs of increased danger. The monsters, even here in the interior, were rather fewer, and were all only in the range around level 130.

Soon the crystal formations thinned out more and more, and while it was already afternoon again when one looked at the position of the sun in the slightly cloudy sky, the backpacks and bags that had been brought along were now slowly really full to the top.

Dani himself had again taken over the scout post and circled around the collecting group members in some distance approximately. And it was precisely this young woman who now approached the other three comrades from the front with a frowning expression on her face.

Patris was the first to approach her and put both his hands on her shoulders to look at her questioningly. Jen and Avan also stopped, although the latter had already noticed something in his domain that was most likely responsible for the ranger's confused mood. Over a kilometer radius was simply no joke when it came to pure perception, and at the edge of his domain directly towards the center of the battlefield something strange was going on.

While Dani was reporting the same thing, Avan was pretending to listen, but concentrating more on watching what was happening on the small earthy hill in the middle of the huge battlefield.

A small group of beastmen had gathered in the center, and all of them were surrounding in a semicircle a single lion-man in the middle, who was holding a strange intertwining sphere stretched out in front of him and chanting something in a strange singsong.

*Where does this sound familiar...?* Avan looked more closely and examined the ball in the lion man's hands. It seemed as if two spheres were inside each other, exactly fused. While one surface was spinning and whirling in a clockwise direction, the other sphere was spinning in exactly the opposite direction to the first. A slightly hypnotic way and manner could not be denied the sight, there would not be exactly what Avan's heart briefly suspended to see.

*These purple veins! Miasma!" he cursed with wide eyes, and had been so engrossed in watching the hill that he didn't even notice Dani's shocked look until she snapped him out of his trance with a loud voice.

"...Listening? Don't tell me you saw it from over here?!" She looked at him stunned, because she had seen the same as Avan, but this place was more than a kilometer further inside! His group knew a little that Avan could sense things within a certain radius, but to this extent? That was just terrifying for each of the members of the group.

Avan himself didn't say anything else about it and didn't inform anyone about the true extent of his abilities, but nonchalantly confirmed Dani's own statements and even added to them in real time about what was happening.

The group had a brief crisis meeting and discussed what to do. Jen was of the opinion that it would be better to return to the camp quickly and bring in the commander, while Patris was ambivalent.

It was only when Avan interjected with more urgent information that the four of them unanimously decided to see for themselves. A reddish and strangely black mana had risen from the ground in two places on the hill and was slowly wafting towards the sphere still held in the air in a chant.

Whatever the beast people were up to, with the factor miasma it could not bode well. And since something serious was happening now, everyone wanted to be able to intervene directly before they ran back to the camp for an hour.

Another ten minutes of strenuous running later, because all the crystal formations all around and on the ground in the race to avoid was not easy, the group was at the edge of the hill and looked out stealthily behind a larger crystal formation. Avan had a brief dejavu when he thought back to the crystal plane in Akkalon's dungeon, where he had also peered at his enemy from behind such a huge crystal structure.

Purple mana, definitely the contaminated kind, had in the meantime risen from the sphere between the paws of the lion man and was clearly trying to fight the blood-red and midnight-black mana that was still streaming out of the earth in ever more gigantic dense clouds.

The ground vibrated slightly at first, and the quake grew stronger the longer the battle between these three forms of mana dragged on.