The Ten-Minute Aura Awakening
There should be a reward once the quest is finished. The voice was dry and sank low, heavy with exhaustion. The air inside the commander’s office felt thick enough to choke on the moment Tae-oh opened the door and stepped inside. Carlo stared at him with bloodshot eyes, the kind that came from not sleeping a wink all night. To Tae-oh, he looked like a wounded beast carrying the vile poison called vengeance in its veins.
“You look like you’re in excellent health, Commander.”
“More of your insane drivel. Does this face look healthy to you?”
“It’s the face of a man who’s finally decided to keep living. So yes, it looks good.”
“Hah?” Incredulity dripped from Carlo’s voice. But Tae-oh wasn’t wrong. The only purpose left in his life was to rip Valik limb from limb, and—if possible—to make sure a tragedy like this never happened again.
“I’ve come for instruction, just as promised.”
Tae-oh casually pulled out the chair in front of the desk and sat down. Carlo let out a long sigh and rose from his seat.
“I’ll acknowledge that you somehow survived the Sector 7 forest and even killed a magic beast. But Aura is different. It’s not a domain you can fake with cheap tricks or alchemy.”
Tae-oh laughed inside. That’s your opinion.
“Follow me. This room is too small. We’ll use my personal training ground.”
***
Carlo’s so-called personal training ground was simply a wide clearing carved out of the forest. He drew the sword from his waist. A clean shing rang out, and his breathing shifted at once into a precise, measured rhythm. Soon a red, hazy energy like heat shimmer rose along the blade. Aura.
“You inhale the life force scattered in the air, store it in the core known as the dantian, then explosively release it through your Aura Points and Aura Roads to coat your weapon. That is Aura.”
Carlo’s explanation was textbook, yet strangely abstract.
“It takes years just to sense the energy. Several more years to gather mana in the dantian. Then another decade or two of soul-crushing training to coat a sword with it. And you—a bloody conscript—think you can wield this power in a single day? Don’t be absurd.”
Decades of time. That was why knights were called superhuman. But Tae-oh’s perspective was completely different. It would take an ordinary person years. But not me.
Sensing the energy was the Mana Opening quest. Gathering mana in the dantian was Mana Expansion. Coating the sword with it was simply skill activation. The reason it took so long for others was that they foolishly tried to absorb nature’s energy with nothing but their bare bodies. Tae-oh, however, had shortcuts.
“Commander. In the end, isn’t sensing the energy the most important part?”
“That is true, but…”
“I can already sense mana.”
Carlo looked genuinely startled. “What… what did you just say?”
The loot he had gained from killing the War Wolf in the Sector 7 forest was a Mana Stone. Mana Stones naturally contained mana, and items crafted with them would contain it as well. Tae-oh had already used that stone to brew Tier 2 Potions of Swiftness and vitality potions and drunk them. The sensation of mana he had felt then still lingered clearly inside his body.
“Let’s just say I’ve become able to sense it. All you need to do is teach me how to handle it, Commander.”
“You… are you the hidden son of some noble martial house?”
“I’m the son of a hunter from a remote mountain village.”
But Carlo raised another hurdle.
“Sensing mana alone isn’t enough. You must first perfectly understand the Aura Roads and Aura Points within your own body. That cannot be taught by another. It requires endless meditation, quiet contemplation of your inner self…”
As the lecture stretched on, Tae-oh pulled out an item.
“Ah, I think this can replace all that.”
Potion of Amplification.
It was an item that boosted attack power in the game he once played. As a veteran of that game, Tae-oh knew its exact effects.
Since it raises magic power and amplifies mana, it should obviously help with training too.
For someone with as little mana as Tae-oh, nothing could be more useful right now.
“What the hell is that?”
“A potion that amplifies magic power, you could say.”
“What?”
“If I amplify the faint mana inside me, wouldn’t it be easier to sense? Simple, right?”
“You mad bastard. I don’t know where you got something like that, but if you drink it you’ll lose consciousness from the pain. Do you have any idea what happens when a person who cannot handle mana suddenly has it amplified?”
“I do. I know exactly.”
And Tae-oh downed the potion in one gulp.
“You crazy—!”
The moment the blue liquid slid down his throat, Tae-oh’s pupils dilated violently.
Arrrgh!! Fuck, this hurts like hell!
In the game, drinking the Potion of Amplification slowly drained stamina for the duration of its effect. The price of forcibly activating magic power. In this reality without a visible stamina bar, that price simply manifested as pure agony.
“Ugh… hack!”
Even through the pain, a chilling smile crept across Tae-oh’s lips.
Oh!? I can feel it. The paths are visible now.
The stinging pain that flared as the faint mana inside him amplified—Tae-oh used it like a navigation system. Through the routes the pain traveled, he perfectly mapped out every Aura Road and Aura Point in his body. An ordinary person could never have endured it. This was the moment his pain tolerance, forged through hundreds of deaths by beheading and poisoning, proved its worth.
A normal person would have fainted from shock, but Tae-oh kept his breathing ice-cold even as the pain threatened to tear him apart.
Is this how you move it?
He clumsily copied the steady breathing method Carlo had demonstrated and began forcing the sensed mana into the place called the dantian.
Oh… it’s actually moving.
How much time had passed? Focus slowly returned to Tae-oh’s bloodshot eyes. The convulsions caused by the pain had nearly stopped.
“Hoooo…”
A long, hot breath poured from his mouth. Mixed within that breath was a faint but unmistakable blue haze.
“…Impossible.”
A dazed murmur slipped from Carlo’s lips.
He had taught the boy nothing. He had simply recited common knowledge. He had expected the conscript to give up after hearing that sensing energy and opening the circuits took years. Instead, the man before him had shattered that process in a mere ten minutes using some unidentified elixir and monstrous willpower.
This cannot be happening! He gathered Aura in his dantian right in front of me in ten minutes?
It was genuinely impossible. The established theory stated that moving Aura required powerful mental strength built through years of intense meditation and self-control. But neither Tae-oh nor Carlo realized the truth: Tae-oh’s mind had already been tempered beyond anything Carlo could comprehend by the ordeal of death itself.
What had once terrified him as reality had, after dying and dying again, become something he approached like a game to be conquered. That mindset itself was a product of his unbreakable will.
Tae-oh staggered to his feet. His whole body was soaked in sweat and blood, yet the heavy, burning mass he felt near his dantian gave him a strange, fulfilling sensation he had never experienced before.
Okay. Mana core opened. Easier than I thought.
He drew the sword from his waist.
“Next was coating the sword with it, right? How do I do that?”
Carlo’s voice shook as he asked, “Did you… really gather mana in your dantian? How?”
“I sensed it, moved it, and willed it. Now hurry up and tell me how to clump it together properly.”
“!!!”
If this was true, the man before him was a genius who appeared once in a thousand years. No one had ever gathered mana in their dantian so quickly.
“You weren’t lying about not knowing how to use Aura before, were you?”
“You’re an Aura User. You would have sensed it in my body if I already had it, wouldn’t you?”
That was true. The boy’s body had been completely ordinary. Fascinated by Tae-oh’s monstrous talent, Carlo unconsciously stepped closer and began teaching him how to coat a sword with Aura without even realizing what he was doing.
“Every person’s Aura Roads are subtly different. Even their Aura Points. But the method of operation is mostly the same.”
Carlo placed a finger on Tae-oh’s body and began explaining. His finger started near the dantian and slowly traced upward.
“Raise the Aura from the dantian to the chest, then pass through these points in the arm—here, here, and here—before sending it through the upper arm, lower arm, wrist, and finally throughout the hand. Imagine it as wrapping your extended body, which is the sword.”
“Oh, I see. So the Aura Points are around there.”
Tae-oh visualized pulling the mana from his dantian, guiding it through the Aura Points in his right arm, and flowing it out to the tip of the sword.
His arm began to tremble violently. The repulsion came from forcing mana through his still-impure Aura Roads for the first time.
Urk! This hurts like hell too!
The veins in his right arm bulged as if they would burst, flooding him with pain. Still, Tae-oh clenched his teeth and kept pushing the mana through.
And at last—
Hummm—
A very faint but unmistakable blue membrane overlaid his ordinary steel sword. Compared to the fiercely burning Aura Blade that Carlo and Raymon had displayed, it was laughably thin. So weak that you had to look closely to even notice it. It couldn’t even be called Sword Qi.
Yet it was undeniably the manifestation of Aura—a power that transcended human limits.
“Graaaah! S-success, right!? It’s a success, yeah!?”
Tae-oh grinned through the cold sweat pouring down his face.
“…You… madman…?”
Carlo stood frozen, unable to speak. It felt as if his entire life’s worth of common sense and martial dedication had been completely overturned.
Not even a full hour had passed. Using potions and pain as fuel, this venomous bastard had forcibly awakened his mana and drawn out Aura.
Is it right to let someone like this live?
The sheer monstrous talent forced Carlo to seriously consider the question.