Yuan had zero MP and a B-rank Corrupted Stone Fist coming down at him and one option.
He took it.
Shadow Step didn't need MP, that was the detail he'd confirmed during the Mana Golem fight and had been holding in reserve as a fact he might need urgently. The skill drew from his mana pool at ten per activation, and his mana pool was at two, which meant the activation would put him at negative eight, which the system would floor at zero, which meant he'd come out of the skill with nothing left but his body and whatever passives didn't require a pool to function.
He activated Shadow Step and went sideways.
The Corrupted Stone Fist hit the floor where he'd been standing and the Blight component spread outward from the impact point in a dark radius, contaminating the stone, creeping across the chamber tiles in slow deliberate fingers. Yuan came out of the skill at the chamber's right edge, zero MP confirmed, and immediately put himself in motion because standing still with empty resources in a B-rank fight was how people stopped being alive.
Zhang Wei was already moving.
He'd read the situation, which was Zhang Wei's particular competency, the thing his reinforcement build had always complemented better than the guilds had recognized. He came in from the left while the Gargoyle King was still tracking Yuan's repositioning, got his forearms up in the reinforced guard position, and took the creature's backswing across both arms instead of letting it find Yuan's exposed flank.
The impact drove him back four meters.
He stayed on his feet.
"Still alive," he reported, which was the most Zhang Wei thing he could possibly have said in that moment.
"Keep it that way," Yuan said, and felt his mana pool begin its slow recovery tick.
Mana regeneration at Intelligence ten was twelve points per minute. Yuan had done this math before and found it depressing. He was doing it again now with more urgency — at twelve per minute he needed seventy-five seconds to afford one Flame Breath, which was a long time to be in a B-rank monster's Blight Aura without offensive options.
He made himself useful in the gap.
The Gargoyle King's cracked chest section, the six-inch fracture line from the second Flame Breath, was the structural priority. He went for it with his hands, the same targeted pressure technique from the Mana Golem fight, driving the heel of his palm into the crack and pushing rather than striking. No force multiplication. Just the Strength-thirteen applied to a compromised point, gradually, repeatedly, while Zhang Wei kept the creature's attention cycling.
It was unglamorous work.
The crack widened. Slowly, B-rank Enhanced Stony Skin had considerably more structural integrity than the original, but measurably, millimeter by millimeter, the fracture propagating into the secondary layer beneath the surface calcification.
The Blight Aura pushed against him continuously. He felt it as fatigue rather than pain, a draining quality that sat underneath everything else like an extra weight his body was carrying. His HP was ticking down at a rate his Vitality wasn't fully compensating for — not fast, but present, a sustained bleed that would matter if this ran long.
Thirty seconds.
His mana pool hit fourteen.
Not enough for Flame Breath. Enough for a purpose he hadn't originally planned.
He looked at the Blight contamination spreading across Zhang Wei's right shoulder — the dark stain from the earlier glancing hit, slow and deliberate in the way all Blight effects were slow and deliberate. Zhang Wei was functional now. In ten minutes he might not be.
Yuan activated Cauterizing Flame at minimum output, directing it not at the Gargoyle King but at Zhang Wei's shoulder.
Zhang Wei yelped. "What—"
"Blight contamination. Hold still."
"That's fire."
"Purifying fire. Different."
The Cauterizing Flame's effect on the contamination was visible — the dark stain retreating from the heat, the corrupted mana burning off in thin wisps the same way it had burned off the Gargoyle King's hide. Four seconds of contact and the stain was gone, the shoulder returning to normal colouration.
Four MP spent. Ten remaining.
Zhang Wei looked at his own shoulder with the expression of someone who had just been helped in a way they hadn't asked for and wasn't entirely sure how to feel about it.
"Thank you," he said. "I think."
"Sixty seconds," Yuan said. "Then I need you to make it angry."
The mana pool hit fifteen at the fifty-eight second mark.
Yuan moved the moment the number cleared, not toward the Gargoyle King, toward the chamber's left wall, the angle that put him perpendicular to the creature's current orientation. Zhang Wei threw a piece of rubble at the back of its skull and followed it with a reinforcement-charged strike to its left knee joint, the compromised one from the original fight that the evolution hadn't fully repaired.
The Gargoyle King turned left.
Yuan activated Flame Breath from the right.
The cone hit the chest fracture directly, narrow angle, maximum concentration at the target point, and the six-inch crack became twelve, then eighteen, the stone splitting audibly under the thermal stress. The Blight component burned off the exposed interior surface in a sustained dark column of dissipating mana, and through the fracture Yuan could see the creature's core.
The corruption had reached it, the Blight threading through the original warm colour in slow veins, the pulse irregular and damaged in the same way the dungeon's own core was irregular and damaged.
Feeding from the same source, he thought. Both of them running on corrupted mana.
The Gargoyle King turned on Yuan with both red eyes and raised both arms simultaneously, not the Corrupted Stone Fist pattern, something else, both limbs drawing dark mana in a way that suggested a different ability entirely. Something it hadn't used yet.
Zhang Wei hit it in the back of the knee as hard as he could.
The charge disrupted. The knee buckled. The prepared attack scattered, dark mana dispersing into the Blight Aura instead of releasing, and the Gargoyle King went down on one knee for the second time Yuan had seen it do that.
He took the opening without deliberating.
Shadow Step inside the guard, both hands through the chest fracture, fingers closing around the corrupted core. The extraction was harder than any previous one — the Blight component resisting, the corruption threading the core trying to hold its shape against his talent's pull, the two forces running against each other for three full seconds that felt considerably longer.
Then it gave.
The Blight-Touched Gargoyle King came apart differently from the original — not the architectural deconstruction of the first extraction, but a collapse, the dark mana releasing all at once, the stone form losing cohesion from the core outward in a single rapid sequence. The Blight Aura dissipated with it, the oppressive draining quality lifting from the chamber air so abruptly that Yuan felt lighter by comparison.
The corrupted core sat in his palm for a moment, dark-veined amber, still pulsing.
Then his talent processed it and it was gone.
[Ding!]
[B-Rank Blight-Touched Gargoyle King defeated. Experience +300]
[Ding!]
[Level Up! You have reached Level 3.][Available Stat Points: 5]
[Ding!]
[Ability Extracted: Blight-Touched Gargoyle King — Enhanced Stony Skin (A-Rank)]
[New Skill Acquired: Enhanced Stony Skin]
[Rank: A | Type: Passive | Cost: None]
[Description: Hardens the user's skin, increasing physical defense by 35%. Reduces incoming physical and magical damage. Grants minor resistance to Blight effects.]
The original Stony Skin notification appeared alongside it:
[Ding!][Stony Skin (B-Rank) has been replaced by Enhanced Stony Skin (A-Rank).]
He felt the upgrade settle differently from the original — the B-rank version had been density, a new awareness of his own surface. The A-rank was something more structural, deeper, a reinforcement that ran through the first few layers rather than sitting at the outermost one. The Blight resistance component registered as a faint inoculation quality, his body having processed the corrupted mana of the extraction and retained something useful from it.
He checked the status window quickly.
Name: Yuan Shenzi Rank: F (Hidden: SSS)Level: 3 | EXP: 0/500
HP: 82/100 | MP: 20/50
Strength: 13 | Agility: 14 | Sense: 12 Vitality: 13 | Intelligence: 10
Available Points: 5
Skills: — Basic Punch (E-Rank) — Ability Extraction (SSS-Rank, Passive) — Shadow Step (C-Rank, Lv.2) — Battle Instinct (D-Rank, Passive) — Enhanced Stony Skin (A-Rank, Passive) — Tremor Sense (B-Rank, Passive) — Ember Shot (C-Rank) — Cauterizing Flame (C-Rank) — Flame Breath (C-Rank)
Inventory: Academy ID Card | Corrupted Mana Stone (Small)
He closed the window.
A small dark fragment had been left in the chamber floor where the Blight core had dissipated — not a full mana stone, the corruption having compromised most of it, but a residual piece roughly the size of his thumbnail that his talent hadn't consumed. He picked it up. The system had labeled it automatically: Corrupted Mana Stone (Small). He put it in his pocket and filed the questions about what it was for later.
Zhang Wei was looking at him.
He'd been looking at him since the extraction — since the moment Yuan's hands had gone through the creature's chest and pulled something out of it and the B-rank boss had come apart like it had simply decided to stop existing. The expression on his face was one Yuan didn't have a precise name for. Somewhere between awe and the particular discomfort of realizing the map you've been using doesn't match the territory.
"So," Zhang Wei said.
"We need to keep moving. Eight minutes."
"Yuan."
"The core is still—"
"Yuan."
He stopped. Looked at his oldest friend, who had just taken a B-rank backswing across both forearms because Yuan had asked him to, and who was now standing in a chamber that smelled of dissipated Blight mana with the steady expression of someone who had decided they were owed a real answer.
"F-rank latent ability," Zhang Wei said carefully. "Sudden awakening. Secret training." He paused. "You pulled something out of that monster with your bare hands and it dissolved."
Yuan said nothing.
"That's not a combat-oriented F-rank ability, Shenzi. That's not any F-rank ability I've ever heard of." Zhang Wei's voice wasn't accusatory. It was the particular tone of someone who cared enough to push through the comfortable version of events and find out what was actually true. "What do you actually have?"
The timer in Yuan's head said seven minutes and forty seconds.
He looked at the lower corridor, and at Zhang Wei, and made the calculation he'd been avoiding since the junction.
"Walk with me," he said. "I'll explain on the way down."