NOVGO.NET Chapter 310: First time sensing mana
Chapter 310: First time sensing mana
“My Mana is guiding yours. Tuning it. Not invading. Not replacing. Just… striking the same chord.”
The feeling of his body lifting, the breath in his chest stretching into rhythm. That moment when the air wasn’t something he breathed—it was something he heard.
Damien focused.
Not on the mana.
On the tension.
That weight beneath his skin—the hum that had followed him here. It wasn’t an enemy. Not yet. It was a test tone. A signal. Like a note hanging in silence, waiting for resonance.
He reached for it—not physically, not with his core.
With attention.
With alignment.
He remembered how Dominic’s Authority hadn’t forced him open. It had revealed something already present. Something buried under noise and fear and habit.
Here, in this place stripped of sound and system, there was no noise left.
Only Damien.
Only the hum.
Slowly, breath by breath, he began syncing to it. Matching it. Not imposing, not channeling—tuning.
The sensation rose—first like static along his arms, then a faint ringing at the base of his skull. A pressure behind the eyes. Not pain. Not yet.
But depth.
His posture shifted slightly as if his spine remembered the alignment from before. As if something under the skin remembered how it was supposed to stand—how it was supposed to receive.
He opened his eyes halfway.
The world hadn’t changed.
But he had.
The wind was still still. The sky, still watching. But the hum… responded.
Not louder.
Clearer.
The first note had been struck.
His breath slowed further.
Not calm. Intentional.
Each inhale tightened the frequency. Each exhale cleared another layer of noise.
The hum was no longer just external. It was inside him now, not intruding, but inviting. Wrapping around his nerves like a thread slowly being pulled taut.
He followed it.
Not with logic. With instinct.
His mind narrowed until there was nothing but that thread.
The moment before contact.
The moment before understanding.
’Almost there…’
It hovered at the edge of comprehension—like a word he’d heard a thousand times but never truly listened to. A shape forming behind the curtain of thought.
’What are you?’
He wasn’t asking the mana.
He was asking the feeling.
That hidden rhythm within him. The one that didn’t come from cultivation manuals or simulated awakenings. The one born of tension, of pressure, of presence.
And it answered.
Almost.
A flicker of something—
Something real.
And then—
Whispers.
Soft. Subtle. Alien.
Not inside his ears.
Inside his mind.
Words—but not words. Language—but not human.
Shapes of thought that didn’t belong.
“…shua’rin thal ke… naith r’vael…”
His breath caught.
His body flinched.
The harmony snapped like a wire under too much tension.
The hum recoiled. The resonance collapsed.
The thread was gone.
Damien’s eyes snapped open, and the silence that followed was too still.
Not the calm of meditation.
The cold of absence.
’What the fuck…’
His jaw clenched, eyes scanning the empty landscape again.
Nothing had moved.
And yet everything felt different.
The moment—that moment—had been real. The feeling. The tune.
And then something else had stepped in.
’What was that voice?’
He pressed a palm to his temple.
Still no System.
No prompts. No translation.
Just that whisper.
That damn whisper.
’It wasn’t mine… but it knew I was listening.’
He exhaled, slower this time. Not in surrender.
RUMBLE!
The ground shook beneath his feet—subtle at first, like distant thunder rolling through layers of stone.
Damien stilled.
RUMBLE. RUMBLE.
The vibration deepened. Not chaotic. Rhythmic. Like footsteps. Like something moving.
He turned, slowly, instinct overriding confusion.
The ground at the edge of the ruins cracked—a jagged line spreading like a fracture in glass. Dust rose, curling in unnatural spirals, and the wind—
No.
The air bent.
Twisted inward toward a single point. A pressure building so vast, so old, it didn’t roar—it reminded.
BOOM.
And then he saw it.
Something emerged from behind the shattered ridges of the warped terrain.
No—not behind.
Through.
The stone folded back like breathless cloth, space peeling in layers as the shape tore reality open.
Damien’s breath hitched.
He had no reference for what stood before him.
A colossus.
Not a beast. Not a machine.
A thing.
Towering higher than any structure he’d ever seen, hunched beneath a sky that shrank around its presence. Its flesh pulsed like exposed muscle, covered in veins of obsidian and coiling strands of something too organic to be metal, too sharp to be alive.
Eyes—dozens of them—blossomed open across its form. Not symmetrical. Not sane.
Every blink it made sent fresh waves of nausea curling in Damien’s gut.
Its limbs dragged across the ruinous landscape with agonizing slowness, leaving behind trails of blackened earth. Hands—if they could be called that—scraped the ground with claws like folded bone. Mouths opened along its torso, each one breathing not air, but sound—warped echoes that made the ground sing in pain.
It didn’t walk.
It shifted.
Moved in fragments.
Like the world had to remember where it was with every step it took.
’What the fuck is that?’
Damien’s thoughts clashed against each other, fighting for footing in a mind that suddenly felt too small.
The thing moved—continued moving—each ponderous shift of its body warping the land beneath. Not in tremors, but in reality itself. The stone bent where it touched. The wind recoiled. The clouds above folded.
It didn’t acknowledge him.
Not directly.
But its presence did.
The hum in the air had stopped.
Replaced by something else.
Whispers.
Not like before.
These weren’t quiet.
These surged.
“…sha’narith… keel thaor… knulth’reth…”
The language pressed against the inside of Damien’s skull like fingers too large for his thoughts.
It squeezed.
“…un-nael… daroth…”
He stumbled back a step, clutching the side of his head, breath hitching.
’Get out of my head. Get out—’
It wasn’t just speaking.
It was scraping. Each syllable a hook in his mind, tugging at memory, at instinct, at identity.
And then—
The colossus passed.
Just walked by.
If “walking” even applied to something that redefined distance with every lurch.
It didn’t strike.
It didn’t roar.
It existed.
And that alone shattered the quiet around him.
The ruins screamed. Not audibly—but through vibration, through shuddering glyphs, through collapsing arcs of ancient stone that began to split and fall as if rejecting its passage.
Damien took another step back.
And that’s when he saw it.
Movement.
Fast.
’Something’s coming—’
SWOOSH.
A whisper of wind became a blade.
A shriek of metal against air.
And then—cut.
A sudden sting tore across his left shoulder.
Blood flicked into the air—hot, sharp.
Damien spun, breath sharp, eyes narrowing—
Too late to see what hit him.
But the pain was real.
Deep. Precise.
Not some random burst of shrapnel.
An attack.
The whispers in his head doubled—no longer words.
Now laughter.
Low.
Mocking.
As if the colossus didn’t just pass through.
As if it opened the way.
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