On the sixth morning he had a different idea.
He had been watching his sisters cast spells for five days and thinking about the ceiling. Right now they were growing from repetition — cast until empty, refill, cast again. The reservoir grew through use, slowly, the way muscle grew through work. It was reliable and it was the only method he had known for most of his life.
But it wasn't the only method.
He thought about what had changed the night of the festival. Twelve absorbed lives and his pool had jumped in a single night by more than months of practice had ever moved it. Not just his pool — his perception, his processing, the physical durability that had left him standing in the field feeling like the ground itself couldn't touch him. The energy from defeated monsters had been doing this his entire hunting career, one Glimmer Rabbit at a time, and he had come to take it as simply part of how he worked.
It had never occurred to him to wonder if it could work for someone else.
He spent the early morning in the forest.
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The pit took about forty minutes.
He found a flat area thirty meters inside the tree line, close enough that his sisters could reach it easily but far enough that the sound didn't carry to the house. Earth magic shaped the ground downward — four meters deep, three meters across, the walls packed smooth and hard enough that nothing was climbing out. He reinforced the floor and sides with compressed earth layers, then added a second wall around the outside at ground level, curved inward at the top.
The opening in the surface was a narrow slit, about one meter wide and a hand-span tall, set into the inner wall at standing height. Wide enough to point a spell through. Not wide enough to see what was inside, or hear clearly, or smell anything coming up from below.
He checked the construction from all sides. Solid. Good.
Then he went to find rabbits.
The monster rabbits in the outer forest were not hard to locate — Shadow's network had their general territories well mapped. He teleported them one at a time, a quick spatial fold from wherever they were to the floor of the pit. Each one arrived confused and agitated and very much alive.
He collected eight of them. That felt like enough for a first session.
He sealed the pit opening temporarily, walked back to the house, and found his sisters in the kitchen.
'Training,' he said. 'Different kind today. Come with me.'
Clara looked up from her breakfast. 'Different how?'
'I want to try something. You'll be casting at a target rather than a fence post.'
'A moving target?'
'Yes.'
She was already standing up.
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He brought them to the pit and showed them the opening.
'Stand here,' he said. 'There's a target inside. Cast Fire Bullet or Air Bullet through the opening. That's all.'
Lyra looked at the structure. She looked at Arthur. 'What's inside?'
'A training target.'
'Arthur.'
'A monster. Small. It won't hurt you.' He met her eyes. 'Trust me?'
A beat.
'Can we eat it after or no?,' she said. Making Arthur's eyebrow twitch, realizing that in this world killing monsters was commonplace and not a question of is it a bad or good monster but is it edible. 'Yes, they are glimmer rabbits so we can have mom make a good stew!'. Arthur then realized he didn't need to put in so much effort to desensitize them from the act.
'Clara, you first. Three casts. Fire Bullet, through the opening, aim for the center of whatever is moving.'
Clara stepped up to the opening and looked at him once more. He nodded. She turned to the slit, pulled the spell up from the place it now lived in her mind, and fired.
Three times. Clean, direct, the aim improving from the first cast to the third in exactly the way he had been watching it improve all week.
Then silence from inside the pit.
He had already cast the scan spell across his vision before Clara's first shot. He was watching for the thread of energy — the warmth and density he recognized from his own absorption experience, the specific quality of a life's residual magic releasing at the moment of death and looking for somewhere to go.
He watched it carefully.
It rose from the pit floor, that familiar warmth. It moved — drifted outward, dispersing, the way it dispersed every time he wasn't there to receive it. It did not go toward Clara. It passed through her the way air passed through a window and disappeared into the general background of the world.
He stood very still.
So it really is just me.
He had suspected this. He had known, in the way you knew things that you had always accepted without testing, that the absorption was his — something particular about his shadow affinity or his cultivation mechanic or the specific circumstances of how he had arrived in this world and built himself from nothing. He just hadn't been certain.
Now he was certain.
He held the knowledge for about two seconds. Then he went to work.
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The spell he built in his mind was something new.
He had never built a spell like this before, but the components were all things he knew: capture, which he used in storage constructs; purification, which he used in his healing work; and transfer, which he had been running across the mana thread to his sisters all week. The question was whether you could apply those principles to the specific type of energy that left a monster at the moment of death — whether it could be caught before it dispersed, cleaned of any incompatible elements, and moved into a different body without causing damage.
He didn't know. He was about to find out.
He built the capture layer first — a thin net of shadow-mana surrounding the pit, tuned specifically to the frequency of that dispersing life energy. He set the net finely, so it only caught the right thing and let everything else through. Then the purification layer over it, running the captured energy through a filter keyed to Clara's specific magical signature.
Then he waited, with a very small initial dose prepared, and looked at Clara.
'I want to try something,' he said. 'Stand still and tell me immediately if anything feels wrong.'
'Something other than the extremely ominous pit I just shot a spell into?'
'Yes. Something internal. Tell me if anything feels wrong internally.'
She faced him and held still with the specific focused quality she used when she was taking something seriously.
He transferred the smallest viable dose — barely a fraction of what one rabbit had yielded, just enough to register, just enough to see what her body did with it.
He watched.
His diagnostic ran across her simultaneously, tracking her reservoir level, her physical state, the baseline markers he had catalogued over five days of training. Her mana thread, her physical density, her —
Her reservoir moved. A small but unmistakable bump upward. And her physical density — the baseline resistance of skin and muscle and bone to external force — ticked up slightly in the scan, the same kind of change he recognized from his own physical state after each hunt.
It worked.
He let out a slow breath through his nose and transferred the rest.
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