Extra's Path: The Eternal Frost Monarch

The dormitory was quiet.

It was late evening by the time Noah got back. The living room was empty. Lights on ceiling were on, throwing a warm low light across the room.

Noah took of his jacket and threw it on couch.

He took out the carry case from his storage ring, opened it, and looked at what was inside.

Two cores.

That was all he had managed to get. Two E+ cores. Not thirty. Not even close to thirty. The E+ cores were better quality than the standard ones, denser and cleaner, but they had cost him 2,00,000 nova points each. With his budget already stretched from other expenses, two was what he could afford without leaving himself completely empty.

He picked one up. It sat in his palm, small and smooth, slightly warm to the touch. The faint glow inside it pulsed slowly. Almost like breathing. It was siz3 of tennis ball.

He set the case aside, moved the coffee table out of the way, and sat down on the floor in the middle of the room.

"Time to absorb it" he muttered with smile.

He sat cross-legged. Back straight. Hands resting on his knees, palms facing up.

The core sat in his lap. He closed his eyes.

---

The first thing he did was slow his breathing down.

He let the noise of the building fade out. The distant sound of someone walking upstairs. A door closing somewhere the hall.

All of it drifted back until it was just background. Until there was nothing in front of him but the darkness behind his eyes and the faint warmth of the core in his lap.

Then he reached.

It was something quieter than that. He turned his focus inward, the way he had been taught at the Academy and at his family. When he was not exiled. He extended his awareness outward just slightly, toward the core.

He felt it immediately.

The mana inside the core was raw. That was the only word for it. It wasn’t clean or smooth the way the mana in the Academy’s training rooms felt.

This was wild mana, the kind that had lived inside a monster, shaped by its nature and its instincts. It had texture to it. A kind of pressure. Like putting your hand near a fire and feeling the heat before the flame.

Noah began to draw it in slowly.

Not all at once. That was the mistake beginners made, pulling too hard and flooding themselves with more than they could handle.

He drew it in like pulling a thread. Seady and controlled. A thin stream of mana lifting out of the core and flowing into him through his palms.

It entered his body and immediately the work began.

Raw mana was not something you could just push straight to your core. It didn’t work that way.

Monster mana carried impurities in it. Traces of the creature it came from. Fragments of foreign energy that didn’t belong in a human core system.

If one let those impurities travel through unchecked and pushed them into the core, that would damage it. Slowly at first. Then seriously.

So they had to clean it first.

As the mana flowed in through his hands, Noah directed it upward through his arms, into his chest, and began circulating it through his body.

A slow loop. Arms, chest, back, down through his legs, back up again. Round and round, like running water through a filter.

With each pass, he caught the impurities.

It required focus. The impurities didn’t announce themselves. They were subtle, little knots and rough edges in the flow of energy.

He had to feel for them as the mana moved through him, catch them, and push them out. Through his skin, through his breath, out of his body entirely.

It was slow work.

The mana that came out the other side of that process was thinner. There was less of it.

He gathered that purified mana carefully and began guiding it downward.

The lower dantian.

It sat deep in his abdomen, a few inches below his navel, in the place where it had always known as the centre of the body’s energy. That was where the core lived.

Noah’s core was black.

Dormant cores presented. Pure black, like a piece of polished obsidian sitting in the middle of him. It was small still. Compressed into itself the way a Dormant core was before it had enough energy to crack open and move into the next stage.

He brought the purified mana down to it.

The mana touched the surface of his core and began to settle against it, thin as a coat of paint at first, layering over the black surface slowly.

Some of it was absorbed directly into the core, drawn in through the surface and adding to its density from the inside. The rest pressed against the outside, compressing, adding weight and pressure to the shell.

Both mattered.

The mana absorbed inside added to the core’s overall energy. The mana compressing on the outside added to its density and solidity, slowly building the pressure that would eventually be needed to push the core past its current stage.

It was like filling a container while simultaneously making the container stronger.

Noah held his focus on it and kept the flow steady.

After a while, the core in his lap began to feel lighter.

Sweat dripped over his face.

The mana coming off it had thinned slightly, the way a candle dims a little as the wax lowers. The core had given up what it could for now. The rest was locked inside it still, and it would take more time to absorbed it.

That was the other thing about monster cores.

One could not drain one in a single sitting. The mana inside was compressed too tightly. It released in layers, slowly, over multiple sessions.

One core at this level would take him several days of consistent meditation to fully absorb. Rushing it did nothing. The mana simply wouldn’t come out any faster than it was willing to.

Noah didn’t rush it.

He held the circulation going for another hour, gathering every trace of clean mana he could pull through, layering it carefully over his core, and releasing the impurities with each slow breath out.

When the flow became too thin to work with efficiently, he stopped. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

After hours of circulating and absorbed mana.

He opened his eyes.

The room was the same as he had left it. The core in his lap had lost a little of its glow, slightly dimmer than before, but still pulsing faintly. Still plenty left in it.

Noah exhaled and rolled his neck slowly.

His body felt warm. It was uncomfortable. The kind of warmth that came from the inside, like he had been sitting in mild sunlight for an hour.

His core felt marginally heavier than before. It was slightly denser. Not much different compare to before. But he could tell that he had some progress.

But he noticed.

He picked up the core and held it in front of his face for a moment, looking at the dim pulse inside it.

A few more days of this. Then the second one.

Two cores total. That was what he had.

It wasn’t much. But right now, it was everything he could work with.

He placed it carefully back in the case, closed the lid, and stored it in his ring. Then he got up off the floor, moved the coffee table back into place, and went to get a glass of water from the kitchen.

Two E+ cores.

He would make every bit of them count.

"This much is enough for today."

He muttered while his body was sweat drenched. Then he opened his status.

===STATUS===

Name: Noah Eldritch

Race: Human

Age: 19 years

Strength: 90

Speed: 76

Stamina: 93

Endurance: 73

Charm: 510

Mana: 834

Core Rank: Dormant (High)

Potential: Refined Core (High)

Profession: [Combatant Lvl.1]

Technique: [Frozen Lotus Blade Art]>

Affinity: Ice

Spells: [Ice Shard], [Frost Bind]

Innate Ability: Ice Creation

===

"In a week...I can broke through." He said with small smile.