"The yank said these wee beasties are dangerous," Illy said, holding the glowing crystal. "You sure ya want to take a gamble with this one Leon? If you wake up with this in the belly, you're not gonna be dealing with just morning breath. Might find yerself having a laugh with Saint Peter instead. Then I'll be all alone with that bampot. You know I can't wrangle his mania like you do."

Leon laughed, then held a hand out and tousled the girl's hair. As usual, she allowed it for exactly one point three seconds and then basically hissed like a cat and patted him off.

"Am so touched you missing me if I die." Leon smiled, hand reaching out for the mana crystal. "But we needing to test how the boon working first, then we know."

They'd learned from Selena that yesterday, when she'd woken up in Illy's home estate, she'd had a fully charged mana crystal with her. And when she'd made it into this round, that crystal had also been recharged back to full. So the System recharged her original gear each pass.

Unfortunately, that crystal was running on fumes by the time they'd made it out of the city.

Fortunately, the two demons here had replacements they offered. For a price.

Despite having Eri's leftover backpack with every item the group had to their name, the two demons didn't seem to even think about stealing it. They simply handed it over to Illy when she'd landed on the deck. And then asked for stuff out of it in exchange for mana crystals.

Apparently, with enough focus, a mana user could assist their attacks or movements converting mana into strength. Which meant now equipped with a mana crystal again, Selena was perfectly capable of lifting him up wholesale then jumping off the cliff as she glided downwards.

That's how he found himself safely down the cliff despite his fear of heights.

Oddly interesting to be the one in a princess carry for once. Normally with his size, that would never be a thing anymore. But the tiny twig of an elf lifted him up, and then jumped off the cliffside, burning mana to keep reforming her wings as they flew through occasional motes of mithril.

More interesting was the System's hand in all this. That it could create or recharge mana crystals wholesale just as well as anything else. Armor, weapons, people, it didn't matter. It had equally fixed her armor up, polished it all, and reapplied all her warpaint and makeup each time she'd jumped from world to world.

There was one issue with everything being restored on each trip with Selena: Wade.

He would immediately start looking for ways to exploit that. If they tried to turn her into a pack mule, the System might transfer her next with nothing but a pajama.

But there might be more System-approved ways of getting stuff across the worlds.

Conjure Sustenance (Common): Duplicates the user's last eaten meal. Useable once per round.

And when he identified what the meal in this case meant:

Meal - Prepared food that gives sustenance.

It could only be used once per round. Which meant not using it would be wasting it this round. Which also meant there was no second chances for testing this, nor time to ease into it. Leon had to commit all-in.

Leon looked over the little pill-sized crystal in his hand. It's probable that just dipping this into chocolate wouldn't work. And neither would throwing it into soup.

The sustenance part of the description he could work around, plenty parts of a meal didn't do anything for the body, such as sucralose. But certain dishes couldn't be prepared without those ingredients.

That's the direction Leon suspected he would have the best chance: Find a way to make the mana crystal a core part of the dish somehow.

"Warrior-Leon, if you do not have magical training or especially the fundamentals of mana manipulation, you are in high danger being exposed to this." Selena said, "Shop-keeper Wade was equally convinced he could handle it, and I strongly argue he could not."

He held the crystal up a bit more, studying it.

Medium Mana Crystal

Bigger than what Selena had been using up to now, and glowed brighter.

It was fairly safe to handle a crystal by hand but as soon as some acid splashed anywhere onto the rough surface, it would start to dissolve and mana would smoke away outwards. Stomach acid would be particularly effective. Maybe even sprinkling it with lemon juice would do the same.

The goat-demon behind came up, holding a small tray of tiny fish. "Aight I skinned all the mithril off these meself. Just cook 'em up and you should be fine. Don't worry nothin' about the bones in there. Small enough the spines get crunched up while you chew. Caught them only two days ago, fresh as could be."

Two days?

Leon touched one of the small fish, holding it up. It didn't feel cold or chilled in any way but had no smell of decomposition whatsoever either. "You keeping fish alive in cargo?" He asked, curious.

"What? Naw, won't be fresh fish anymore if we did that. It triggers their lifecycle if they're out of the sea for more than an hour. They start shifting essence." Jay said, chuckling.

There were a lot of different ways cultures over time had discovered in keeping food preserved, but Leon had never read any method that would leave fish still wet at room temperature - other than keeping them alive.

He suspected the locals here had their own means of preserving food items and it didn't involve freezing.

Level 29 Greater Infernal Essence - 100%

Jay the caprid demon looked almost like a stereotypical dungeon and dragons goat demon, a satyr. Except instead of a spear and huge horns, he had a straw hat with two smaller horns poking through, and a fishing pole. Although the pole was set on the wall in exchange for a platter of the fish.

Leon did notice that as soon as the demon had that fishing rod in hand, the level went up from 28 to 29. Which meant the System was adjusting in real time.

If these demons actually had real weapons, what would their levels be?

Jay grabbed another fish and started tapping with a claw, happily pointing out details. "See, the mithril they collect over a lifetime grow into scales, and that's the only protection they got, rest of them is soft as butter. They don't stay small-fish for long, just for a cycle or so before they migrate onto land and turn into gator-fish. Completely different taste if they evolve into those. Much less buttery."

"My thanks," Leon said, tapping the small table next to the grill. "Anything more we needing to know?"

Jay shrugged, then pointed at two small buckets next to the grill. "Right side is Peppermince, and left side is Mountainlion moss, just crushed up and dried. Feel free to use as much as ya want, we plan on making a stop by a few fields on our way back home anyhow, so plenty to go 'round."

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

As far as Leon had learned, that was the only two spices the demons down here could gather locally themselves. Everything else took a lot more effort to make, or needed to be traded for by the spirit realm trade outposts.

Jay put the tray down, "Pleasure doin' business wit' everyone. Just make sure to give the grill a clean after. Dee and I are gonna be in the back playing some cards if you folks want to join in. We'd love to have ye', so long as you got coins to gamble with. Ain't no fun without that."

He looked over to the elf and the two humans looking back at him. Then gave a nod, turned, and walked on back, the door swinging shut behind him. Whistling a small tune while at it.

For a pair that had stumbled on actual mortals running around that claimed to have been inside a Nathir shelter-city, they seemed to take it all in stride. Just an hour or two of discussion before the pair had their curiosity sated. Convincing them was easy too. When the two demons saw Eri vanish out of existence, with absolutely no pulse of waste mana at all, that's when they realized something was very off with this crew. It made explaining some things easier.

Illy had managed to negotiate for the demons to stick by exactly here for another day, and traded just about everything in the backpack to get that.

He'd thought it was slightly too steep a price, but she had a different way to see it:

"What happens when we bugger off back to Earth then?" She'd asked him in english. "Everything we got here gets left behind, doesn't it? Which means they could just grab and go. I'm banking on making deals first, and keeping them held down by the promise of future work. So we might as well use just about everything we can out of this backpack, we ain't keeping it after we're gone."

It made enough sense to him.

Leon grabbed one of the tiny fish of the platter and prepared his own gamble. He didn't think just tossing a mana crystal into a soup would do the trick. Even further, he didn't think cooking the soup from the start with a crystal in it would work.

No, he needed to make a prepared dish that could not be made without the mana crystal. That's how he'd strong arm the System into delivering on the goods.

And to do that, he was going to abuse the single weak point of mana crystals: Acid.

He didn't have lemons and the spices here the demons used didn't have any acidity to them. So he shoved the tiny pill sized crystal down the dead fish's mouth and worked it further down the gullet until he was certain the crystal was inside the stomach of the fish.

The slight amount of acid left there would cause some mana to seep out into the fish over the cooking process, and possibly change the overall flavor slightly. Or maybe it changed something that he couldn't quite taste at all. But so long as it changed something in the dish, then that same dish couldn't be made without the mana crystal.

That was his gamble.

"I stand by my prior advice." Selena fumed in the background as she saw the progress. "There are entire techniques a mage needs to learn on mana circulation and handling surges from a crystal. Mana potions don't have surges, they're highly stable. Crystals are completely unstable. It is not something one simply starts with."

He sprinkled over one of two spices the demons had to work with at random, nodded when it looked good enough, and put the skewer on the grill. "Is okey Selena. I have plan. We starting grill now, please?"

Selena grudgingly used a bit of her mana to cast fire into the grill base, which started burning some coal-looking lumps at the bottom.

Magic itself would be nullified by mithril, but the physical effects of it were not. So even if some mithril sand chunks made it into the grill, fire was already fire.

And speaking of, his next plan. He grabbed a bucket, tied rope to it, then walked off to the side of the mountain while the fish started cooking. When he lifted the bucket back up, there was a small cloud of mithril sand floating within, slowly condensing at the bottom of the bucket as he lifted it past the atmospheric region it floated at. "You saying mithril pill is best anti-mana solution, da?" He asked the elf.

She twitched her ears.

"Well, then how about eating mithril sand here? Is it poisonous?" He didn't think it would be, given the pair of demons fished out of the sea here routinely.

It turned out it wasn't. Basically just an alchemical solution to suspend mithril, mostly made of water too.

If it was wet and there was sunlight, life would find a way he supposed. And there were green flecks of stuff inside the bucket.

Well, actually…

Lesser Infernal Essence

Identify returned to him what the green was in more detail after he isolated it and focused down. Alge of some kind. Same stuff as the demons were made of, but the lesser version?

And despite it clearly being alive, it didn't have a health bar. The System seemed to treat it more like an object. More study could be done later, his fish was going to burn at this rate.

He grabbed the fish off the grill, gave Selena a pat on her blond hair/feathers when she wanted to object, yanked the fish off the skewer and ate it in one bite.

The fish itself didn't taste like much. The spices here were more like a mix of spinach and grass. Not particularly tasty. The bones of the little fish equally crushed well. He chewed around the mana crystal, not wanting to damage it, and then swallowed the entire thing in one gulp.

It was almost immediate. "Oh. I see what you were meaning." A surge of power that started to flow in every direction. He could move it around his stomach, but there was so much of it, just constantly gushing out of the center crystal, he wasn't even certain where it needed to go. Wade had said he'd worked with small chunks of mana and took his time to move it around his circuits, but Leon had no idea how the American could even handle this much going all over in every direction.

It didn't hurt or anything, for something that was supposed to be toxic. It just didn't stick in the same place and kept flowing out. It felt like someone was dumping a mountain of sand into his hands. He could curl his hand around any part of it and hold tight, but the rest would flow over his fists. Too much. And it didn't leave his skin when unattended, rather remaining trapped within his body.

His mana bar started ticking upwards. One. Two. Three. He estimated about two minutes before it hit maximum. Which could be bad. "I seeing now why you were so worried," He laughed, taking care to move without panic. If he died, he died.

The death wouldn't be instant. Mana poisoning was supposed to take from a few hours to a week depending on the overdose amount.

The mana moved with him, like it was locked inside his body without any inertia. Still flowing out of his stomach similar to vapor out of a smoke machine. Not consistent either, some times more came out, sometimes less.

Right now, he needed to run some tests before the bar went to 100%

First the boon. He held his hand out, and triggered the sustenance boon.

It did not appear in his stomach, which was a small win. Instead, in his hand was an exact duplicate of the fish he'd just eaten. Even just as hot. Leon quickly dug his hands into it, and from inside the slightly steaming flesh, he felt and uncovered something hard.

"Well played vodka breath," Illy said, slapping him on the back.

"Are you finished with your experiments?" Selena asked, coming up to his side while carrying the bucket of mithril sand and water. "Now would you please either expel your crystal from your core, or at least swallow a mouthful of seawater?"

He did try following her instructions on removing just the crystal from his insides, by himself. According to her, he had full control over moving mana within his system, and the crystal was just condensed mana, so he should be able to physically move it up and out of his stomach, and then spit it right out.

It was harder than it sounded like. He could feel the mana crystal in his stomach, but moving it out felt like he was fumbling in the dark, or like he was holding onto melting ice in his hand. All he'd be left with would be vapors while the rock slipped out of his focus.

When he hit about 80% of his maximum mana bar, he decided to just drink seawater and hope the system didn't classify that as food.

It was like putting out a fire with extreme prejudice. As soon as the mithril sand landed into his stomach, all traces of mana vapor got sucked right into the particles, ripped out of his control. And the mithril chunks all started slapping up against the crystal, sticking to it like a magnet.

Mana didn't stop flowing out of the crystal, but instead of spreading out into his system, it was sucked right into the mithril sand building up around the crystal. Like osmosis. Mana started floating backwards from his skin, down back to his stomach as the mana inside the stomach vanished. He could certainly disrupt the movement if he wanted, impose his will on the puffs of rogue mana, but it was interesting to watch in action.

Mana really did spread out to fill any container like a gas would, and if parts of that container were sucking up mana, the rest would flow in that direction.

It was all gone in seconds. Faster than throwing an icecube into the grill.

"What happens to the crystal itself?" He asked, looking up at the elf. He could feel the main bundle in his stomach, and feel it rapidly shrinking.

"It is completely consumed, and lost." She said. Now looking down at the fish he'd spawned. She still didn't quite believe he could snap his fingers and have a copy of the same crystal. It was absurd magic to her.

Then the System gave them a new notification. Something they hadn't ever seen before.

Thirty minutes until end of round.

So there was a way to escape without dying. Leon hummed, they could simply hang out here and wait out the timer. Plus, it would complete that starting quest they all had about surviving a full round in Azdrial. "Perhaps we playing some cards with the demons?"

As good as any to pass the time, and they'd be able to learn a bit more about this world from the locals. Being able to openly discuss everything in any language had its perks.

He had just enough to buy the food boon and the early access now, so if the next round's random boon was good enough, he'd take the food boon here and see if it works on earth with his last eaten meal.

Overall, a good round.

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