With the approval of the woman, Lucas was happy he was able to continue with her agreement.
"Thank you. I can assure you I have some confidence this time. Just hold on for a little longer."
'I hope you're telling the truth, I don't think I'll be able to find a whole lot more bodies, buddy.'
Entering a state of focus, Lucas started to make an incision into the woman's body. Opening up her belly, Lucas made sure to constantly heal the tissue he shouldn't have damaged. Making sure to avoid her guts, he tried to move them until he found the core. Seeing it still intact in the body, Lucas noticed that while it was in the lower abdomen, it was stuck to the spine through some kind of muscle.
The core was small, extremely so, yet it also contained an entire world of mana. Lucas tried to lessen the pain she received, but he didn't have any spells for that, herbs were the best he got. Still, her constant screaming didn't stop. Thanks to Lucas giving her health and stamina back through magic, she was invigorated to start the second round.
Picking up a very small piece of core he carved, he had to use his magic and willpower to guide it to the core. Using his hands was simply impossible. Since it was all too small, he needed to be perfect, even using a tiny portion of his aura to keep her body completely still.
Inserting it as slow as his willpower allowed him, he lightly pushed the shard into her core. It fit perfectly like a piece of a puzzle, a key in the correct keyhole. Seeing it fit so neatly, Lucas doused his emotions from acting up as he started with the next piece.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl as minutes were necessary just to put a single piece in the correct angle before shoving it in. As each piece was being placed into the core, the woman felt a strange sensation she had never felt before. She could feel every minute movement Lucas made, the pieces of the core colliding with her own. It felt like she could feel her heart being operated on.
Lucas was sweating as he started to heal the woman back to her original state. Wiping it off his forehead, his hands almost trembled.
Placing his hand on her now fully healed abdomen, he poured slight bits of mana into her to check on the core. A large smile appeared on his face as the core seemed to be a whole again.
"Good. The difficult part is over. Your core has all its pieces again. Now, we just need to figure out how to heal it so the pieces are connected to the core. Only then will we be able to see if it can absorb mana. The pieces I used are from other mages, so I don't think the core will accept it so easily. You can't exactly stitch two pieces of a heart together and expect it to pump."
Lucas grabbed a few books he had on his nearby desk and went through them. "You'll have to excuse me, I've never gotten this far yet. So I need to see what I'm missing."
As a mage who skipped most normal classes during his academy days, Lucas barely had the basics in order. Sure, he knew a lot of powerful spells, and was a monster on the battlefield, but there were plenty of things he never learned about that could make his day to day life easier.
For example, as someone who was forcefully awakened, he didn't know what it was like to have a core activated under normal circumstance. Thinking back on his own beginning, he started to feel what Venion felt, this urge of exploration and discovery.
'He might've been doing it for the same reason we're doing.'
'So? That's just how it works. He was just too stupid to give us such freedom.'
'Indeed, the price for that freedom was his own life. How unfortunate.'
After taking some time to go through the pages, there was nothing.
'No wonder Venion had to experiment on children to figure it out. All these descriptions are worthless.'
Having barely anything to go off of, Lucas was starting to frown, much to the woman's dismay.
"I'm not a smith, nor do I know anything about making items. But considering we're talking about a core, I assume that in order to melt the two pieces together, the core needs to recognize the pieces as its own and initiate a merging process. Now, from what I can tell, in order to merge, it will need mana, so I will provide you with exactly that. Blink once if you want me to inject it straight into your core, blink twice if you want to drink a potion."
Faced with a sudden choice, she almost panicked. Drinking a mana potion without a core is asking to get killed. Having your body overloaded with mana that doesn't have a place to go to would just make it spread and damage nerves and blood vessels.
Then again, having this monster of a man inject his mana straight into her would also be far from pleasant. She didn't want to choose, but it's not like she could stop blinking.
"Once? Fine, I'll have to test both either way," the woman regretted her choice instantly as pain coursed through her veins, but she wasn't able to fall unconscious. She was kept awake through her own willpower and adrenaline pushing her.
The mana bore it's way towards the core before surrounding it. Despite it looking like a core, there was no sign of it accepting his mana, which made sense. It wasn't her mana, and the core was inactive, so the mana suction feature wouldn't have been activated.
Letting his mana stay around the core, he left it there while retracting the other parts. Making an extremely basic array, he made sure the mana would stay in place and not spread in her body.
"I'll let your core become used to the mana. Hopefully that will do something."
Leaving her to her suffering, Lucas left her. Right as he left, the woman blacked out in an instant, as if the reason for her consciousness was his presence.
The following days didn't show too much change. Lucas disguised as Osaragi came down to the basement every now and then to check up on her and to deliver fresh subjects, each who began screaming the moment they awoke, which irritated Lucas.
A week or two had passed before Lucas came down again. He had succeeded a few more times in his experiment, creating a fixed core. But none activated as he wished.
Walking up to his first success, the woman had gotten acclimated to the environment. She didn't show any kind of emotion in her eyes, just a dead look.
"My idea was a failure. I'll take the mana out of you. Then we can try something else."
Placing his hand on her abdomen, he poured his willpower into it to grab the mana around her core and drag it away. Yet the moment he ordered it to move, he felt the slightest bit of resistance.
'Hmm?'
'Did it just? React?'
'It's alive!'
While hard to tell, the core hadn't change in appearance in the slightest, but Lucas felt something was off. Guiding a very small part of mana towards her core, letting it rest against the side, it was slowly being drained.
Lucas couldn't believe his eyes as he saw the mana slowly shrink in energy. Of course, as a Rank 3 mage, his mana was too much for the core to easily handle, but the very small amounts were able to be digested in small bits.
An hour of Lucas feeding the core minimal energy, it was slowly showing progress, eating larger and larger bits of mana until suddenly, he felt the mana around the core being sucked in.
Even in the room he was standing in, a small vortex of air appeared as the core tried to fill itself up to the brim. The woman felt a soothing warmth spread across her body as she felt her powers return.
Dropping the tools he had in his hands, he stared at her core through his willpower filled with fascination.
"Incredible."
The feeling of the mana rushing past him to empower the core, seeing it turn bright and shining like a diamond made his eyes glitter.
'You fucking did it!'
'I... I did.'
'Hahaha! Finally! My acting career can be thrown in the trash!'
Lucas laughed to himself out loud, his image as a mad mage was already established among his subject, hiding it wasn't necessary.
'After all, none of you will get out of this place alive.'
Despite his promises of freedom, he just needed a willing mind to help him out. Now that he figured out how to solve Akraptor's problem, he just had to create the necessary environment for him to start his experiments.
Removing all the evidence in his basement took some time. Luckily, Dark magic was a very good cleaning agent, as it removed everything, even the smell was gone after he was finished with his work. The only thing he couldn't hold back was the atmosphere.
The tiles and stones were clean and everything was neat, yet he could smell death from it. If he tried to look for souls, the placed was filled. 'Luckily, this place is owned by Lord Alastor and the person who is renting it is a certain Osaragi.'
Satisfied with his work, he moved out. He wanted to experiment a bit more to replicate his results more since that was the only way to truly prove his methods worked. But he had gotten tired from it all and had the full belief that he would be able to do it.