Kai still clearly remembered the first time he had read Hendricks Klandel’s diary.

  He had found it inside the larvae nest, back when he was still new to being Arzan, when everything around him felt uncertain and dangerous. That diary had been the first place where he had encountered a written reference to the prophecy of the cycle of life and death. At the time, he had found the words unsettling.

  Hendricks had been trying to cultivate beasts capable of absorbing dead mana without losing their minds, experimenting with selective breeding, controlled exposure, and magical conditioning. Even the larvae queen, Sonia, had once been his tamed beast.

  That diary, however, had ended abruptly.

  There had been no conclusion, no final words of failure or success. He had assumed that Hendricks had simply failed. After all, surviving dead mana without fundamental corruption was impossible for any normal being. Amyra was the sole exception, and her survival had nothing to do with biology or adaptation. It was her soul inscription that allowed it.

  Later, while studying in the Archine Tower, he had come across Hendricks’ other works. And had found that the man was a renowned Mage, respected for his extensive research into magical beasts—their habitats, temperaments, and the feasibility of taming them. Those texts were thorough and academic, stripped of personal emotion. They read like research notes meant for posterity, not confessions meant only for oneself.

  But nowhere—not once—had Kai found another diary.

  Until now.

  The registry clearly listed it as being housed in Valkyrie’s grand library.

  Curiosity tugged at him immediately.

  Without hesitation, Kai rose from his seat and followed the directions listed in the registry, weaving through towering shelves and long aisles until he reached the far western section of the library.

  He scanned spines one by one, dismissing treatises and bestiaries until his gaze finally caught on something different.

  A thin, weathered book sat wedged between two thicker volumes.

  The leather of the cover had darkened in age, the edges torn and cracked, corners worn down as if it had been handled countless times. The spine was faded almost to nothing, its stitching barely holding. When Kai pulled it free, a faint cloud of dust rose into the air.

  There was no title on the cover.

  He opened it immediately.

  The very first line made him freeze.

  If you are reading this diary and I am not, then I am dead.

  Kai’s eyes narrowed as he read on.

  Either old age or one of my numerous enemies has finally hunted me down—though it is probably the former. No Mage in this realm is immortal, after all. But if this diary has reached your hands, then you now possess what I consider the most precious body of magical knowledge in existence. I only hope your talent is at least sufficient to understand it.

  Kai closed the diary at once.

  For a long moment, he simply stared at the worn leather cover.

  He hadn’t expected this. Not truly. But finding this diary shifted his priorities entirely. In that instant, every other book stacked on the table felt secondary. He wanted to read more about his experiments and see if he would find more mentions of the prophecy in the diary.

  So, without hesitation, he carried the diary back to his table and set it down carefully, as if it might crumble under careless handling. With how the pages were barely held together, it, in fact, might crumble.

  It didn’t take much effort for Kai to piece together the intent behind Hendricks’ work. After learning of the prophecy, the man must have tried to create something capable of enduring dead mana without being fundamentally corrupted. A living proof that the cycle could be resisted.

  The same path Kai himself was now walking, with Amyra.

  Taking a breath, he opened the diary again.

  The opening chapter was exactly what he had expected from a famous Mage: half introduction, half shameless boasting. Hendricks wrote about his reputation, his accomplishments, and how fortunate the reader was to have obtained his personal writings. Kai skimmed through it without much interest.

  Then the tone changed.

  The second chapter abandoned ego entirely.

  The very first page made his fingers tighten around the parchment.

  I created this diary not as another research compendium for apprentices, but as a private record. A place to gather every experiment I conduct in one location, untainted by academic restraint or political interference.

  And all of it is in service of a single purpose.

  To oppose the prophecy of the cycle of life and death.

  The prophecy that states our world is destined to rot, collapse, and end beneath the weight of dead mana. Sooner or later.

  I was never one to trust in prophecies.

  Kai turned a page.

  But after some time spent among the elves, I could no longer pretend the prophecy was coincidence.

  From that point onward, Hendricks described the prophecy in detail: the cycle of life and death, the slow saturation of the world with dead mana, and the eventual rise of the mythical dragon Malefic—an existence not meant to rule, but to erase. A being whose very presence would drown the world in death until nothing remained.

  Everything Kai already knew.

  He turned a few pages, his expression darkening as the writing shifted in tone to grow more serious.

  As a Mage, no matter how strong I became, Dead mana has always been my nemesis.

  One so absolute that I never truly believed I could alter my own Mana heart enough to accept it—though that would have been the cleanest solution. If a Mage could take it in without corruption, the prophecy would lose its teeth.

  I tried.

  I worked with other Mages. I borrowed their research. I stole from those who despised me. In the end, every path led to the same conclusion.

  Humans were unsuitable.

  That was when I turned to beasts.

  As a tamer, it was a betrayal of everything I believed in. My code exists to protect them, not reduce them to tools. But the world was at stake, and I told myself that intent mattered more than purity.

  I began with older, stronger specimens—Grade five beasts whose bodies were made in a way to live in the harshest regions in the world. I dissected their physiology, altered their cores, and introduced dead mana in controlled amounts.

  Nothing worked.

  Within a year, every single one of them died.

  I reduced the dosage. I experimented with alternative cores. One species—famous for storing any aspect of mana—survived longer than the rest.

  Twenty-one days. It was a record.

  He lived normally during that time—ate, slept and responded to commands.

  Then the corruption took him.

  I ended him myself. The weight of that decision has not left me. For a time, I wondered if my goal was simply impossible—if the world was doomed no matter how much blood I spilled trying to prevent it.

  But giving up has never been something I knew how to do.

  Still… It took me months to crawl out of that grief.

  Months before I could look at another beast without remembering that I had killed one of them.

  Kai turned a few more pages, watching the handwriting grow uneven as Hendricks wrote about the aftermath of his failures. Page after page was filled with mourning, not only for the beasts that had died, but for the hope he had placed in each of them. He documented long stretches of time spent doing nothing but rereading his notes, searching for flaws that were not there, and chasing alternatives that led nowhere.

  In the end, desperation drove him toward one final idea.

  Rather than using ancient, powerful beasts, Hendricks began experimenting on newborns.

  His reasoning was simple, if flawed: if a creature was exposed to dead mana from birth, perhaps its body would adapt naturally, the same way living beings adapted to hostile environments over generations. He raised them carefully, introduced infinitesimal traces of dead mana, and monitored their growth for years.

  Kai already knew the outcome.

  From his own memories of the dying world, he understood the truth Hendricks had hoped to disprove. Even human infants born in regions saturated with dead mana did not adapt. They became weavers. Left unchecked, they grew powerful, yes, but only as monsters.

  Hendricks eventually reached the same conclusion. Every creature he raised beyond a certain point became unstable and their minds became fractured. Aggression replaced instinct. What began as adaptation always ended in corruption.

  I tried until the very end, Hendricks wrote. And in the end, I killed them all with my own hands.

  The words were heavier here, pressed into the page as if the quill itself resisted the motion. He described the final days of those experiments with brutal honesty. The violence was not born of cruelty, but of mercy. Leaving them alive would have meant unleashing abominations upon the world.

  Unable to bear adding more blood to his hands, Hendricks finally abandoned the idea of breeding beasts adapted to dead mana.

  Instead, he released the remaining subjects into the wild.

  This was the first time the diary mentioned specific names.

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  Among all the beasts I left to grow on their own, Sonia, John, Rhelis, and Kaemar were the closest to me.

  Kai’s eyes narrowed at the mention of the larvae queen.

  Hendricks mentioned that he only released them because staying around his lab might get them corrupted accidentally. And If they were to die one day, he wanted it to be by the natural course of the world, not by his interference.

  I promised them I would return, It was a promise I barely managed to keep.

  The next entry shifted abruptly in tone.

  For the following three years, I abandoned experimentation entirely and devoted myself to studying the prophecy itself.

  Kai leaned back slightly, fingers resting against the page.

  This was the point where Hendricks had stopped trying to fight the prophecy with force, and began trying to understand it instead.

  And that, Kai knew, was where the most important knowledge would begin. This was the part that truly caught his attention.

  Hendricks wrote that after abandoning the idea of creating a beast capable of enduring dead mana, he shifted his focus entirely. Instead of pondering on the question of how to survive it, he pondered a far more dangerous question.

  What survives when the prophecy comes true?

  He poured years into studying the future described by the cycle of life and death, tracing every fragment of myth, every elven record, every forgotten account that hinted at the world’s end. He searched for even a single species that would endure the calamity.

  What he found was devastating.

  None of them survive, Not humans. Not dwarves. Not even the elves.

  The words were stark, without embellishment.

  According to everything he uncovered, only one kind of being remained when the world drowned in dead mana.

  Dragons.

  At first, Hendricks dismissed the conclusion. Dragons, aside from Malefic itself, were creatures of legend. He had never seen one with his own eyes. He doubted anyone truly had.

  That doubt ended after a conversation with the Elder Tree. The tree confirmed their existence.

  Dragons were real, but they were not bound to any single world.

  They were beings capable of moving freely between realms, even between entirely different worlds, using magic so vast and intrinsic that it defied conventional understanding. They rarely remained in one place for long, and only the oldest among them could endure a world fully consumed by dead mana.

  That revelation reshaped Hendricks’ path.

  If no beast or race in this world can be made to survive the end, then I must seek those who can.

  Finding a dragon and persuading one to listen to him—those goals felt far more achievable to him than rewriting a being’s biology. He abandoned breeding and experimentation entirely and turned his efforts toward locating dragons, hoping to secure their aid against the coming calamity.

  Like everything else, it failed.

  Kai read that section slowly, his focus sharpening as he had never heard of someone trying to look for dragons.

  Dragons never stay still. They all belong to a vast clan, scattered across the realms. The more I searched for them, the more I realised how large this world truly is.

  Hendricks described worlds layered atop worlds, regions of mana so dense that even his own circles could not sustain him for more than a few heartbeats. Entire realms where existence itself bent beneath the weight of magic.

  I could not survive in those worlds, I could not even send a message.

  The final line of the passage was pressed deeply into the page.

  At that moment, I understood the truth. I—Hendricks Klandel, the legendary beast tamer—was no more than a speck in a far greater universe.

  Several pages after that were nothing but madness.

  The writing spiralled across the parchment in uneven lines, ink smeared and blotched as if the quill had slipped again and again. Some words overlapped each other. Others were scratched out so violently that the page itself had torn.

  Kai frowned as he read through them.

  It felt less like research and more like a man drowning in his own thoughts.

  Had he been drunk while writing this? Kai wondered.

  Still, he forced himself to read every page. If there was even a fragment of meaning hidden inside the chaos, he needed to find it.

  There was nothing.

  Just repetition. Fractured thoughts. Half-written equations that went nowhere. Angry denials followed by despair. In the end, Kai kept turning pages.

  Until the writing finally steadied.

  A year passed, a year of grief.

  The grief of losing the beasts was something I learned to endure. What nearly broke me was something else entirely.

  It was the realisation that no matter how much effort I poured into my work, I was insignificant in the wider scope of the universe. Even if I devoted every waking moment to refining my circles, I knew my limits. I would never be strong enough to seek out the mythical dragons. Not truly. Not without dying the moment I stepped into the regions they inhabited.

  That truth took a year to accept.

  A full year of anger, denial, and hollow ambition before it finally settled into something quieter and far more dangerous—resignation.

  I asked myself what remained.

  Should I abandon the work and live what time I had left in peace? I would likely be dead long before the world reached its end. Ignorance would be a mercy.

  But I could not sleep with that answer.

  So I continued.

  Not because I believed I would succeed, but because failure felt less shameful than surrender. I returned, again and again, to the same question that had haunted me from the beginning.

  How can a living being take in dead mana without losing its mind?

  Every conclusion I had reached told me the same thing. Human bodies could not withstand it. Elves fared no better. Beasts broke just as surely.

  Dead mana was not an element to be mastered.

  It was a disease.

  A rot with no cure.

  That led me to another line of thought—if dead mana could not be endured, could it be avoided? Could I hide life from it?

  I considered sealed civilizations. Entire populations hidden away from the world. I considered abandoning flesh altogether, placing souls into artificial bodies of metal and stone.

  None of it worked.

  Dead mana poisoned the atmosphere itself. There was nowhere to run. No barrier that would last. No metal that could endure the rot indefinitely.

  And so I failed.

  Again. And again. And again.

  Until the day I did not. I FINALLY found a solution to the problem.

  Kai’s fingers tightened around the page as he flipped it, rereading it just to make sure that he hadn’t read it wrong. He had found a solution?

  It was an accident, Hendricks wrote. But then again, most breakthroughs in magic are.

  I had begun rereading my old research.

  Not with hope… only habit. I promise. When one has exhausted every path forward, the past becomes the only place left to walk. I revisited my notes on beast cores, on failed adaptations, on realms I had once dismissed as theoretical distractions.

  That was when the thought struck me.

  A simple one. Almost insulting in its simplicity.

  If we can summon creatures from other realms… if we can even borrow mana from them… then why can we not send mana back?

  That single question did more for me than years of disciplined research.

  For the first time in a very long while, I felt alive.

  I threw myself into the problem with a fervor I had not known since my youth. Days blurred into nights as I traced summoning circles backward, inverted mana flows, and studied dimensional bleed-through. It took months, but I found the answer.

  It was possible.

  Mana could be expelled from this realm and returned to another. Even dead mana was not exempt from this law.

  The revelation should have been enough.

  It was not.

  Because knowing that it could be done did not answer the real question.

  How could this be applied to humans?

  A spell, no matter how refined, was temporary. It could divert dead mana, yes, but only after the damage had begun. Corruption would still seep into flesh and mind before the spell could act.

  Dead mana does not ask for permission.

  So I thought and thought and thought. For half a year, I thought of nothing else.

  If the solution was not a spell cast upon the body… then it had to be something deeper. Something fundamental. Something that acted before corruption could even take hold.

  It had to be etched into the soul itself.

  But a soul alone was not enough. No existing body—human, elven, or otherwise—could withstand such an inscription without tearing itself apart. The vessel would fail even if the soul endured.

  And so I reached a conclusion that frightened even me.

  If no existing species could survive what was coming, then one would have to be made.

  Not modified. Not adapted.

  Created.

  A species with a soul capable of bearing an imprint tied to other realms, and a body strong enough to endure it without collapse.

  I have decided to call them “High Humans.”

  Whether this makes me a savior or a monster is not for me to decide. But for the first time since learning of the prophecy, I no longer feel powerless.

  ***

  A/N - You can read 30 chapters (15 Magus Reborn and 15 Dao of money) on my patreon. Annual subscription is now on too.

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