The grain that appeared in the core of my Anima Depth was smaller than a grain of sand. It was the first speck of crystalline Anima, and despite the pain, I understood what this meant with the first hint of the Arcanist tier.
If I were not in serious pain, I would be shocked, even after I had experienced this insane growth three times already... but Demon Slayer was allowing me to grow faster the stronger I became, instead of the opposite.
Usually, growth should stall when you get stronger, but in my case, it was different. However, I knew that I had paid for this growth in pain and lives, and so I was not too against it.
With the presence of the crystal of Anima inside my Anima Depth, the unreasonable pressure finally had an outlet as it drew the massive amount of Anima into it, and yet the size of the grain did not change; I could feel that it was growing denser.
[Anima Depth: 89 (Adept) — Crystallization initiated: 1% → 3% → 7% → 11% → 14%]
I did not breathe any sigh of relief because I knew that this was just the beginning, since the flood had not ended and something even greater was coming from behind, but I could not brace for it.
[ Endurance: 97 → 119 ]
The number climbed, and I felt my marrow expanding as new vitality filled it to the brim. I had expected agony, and at first I did not feel any pain, only an intense pleasure as my bones drank the Celestial Marrow that was being pumped into my body.
However, this did not last for long. My Endurance had reached the Arcanist Tier before I opened the Fourth Earth Gate, and so I had a lot of space inside my body for growth, and I was able to enjoy my Endurance flying through the Arcanist Tier until it reached the peak and was brutally halted.
It stopped at a hundred and nineteen, the peak of the Arcanist tier. Twenty-two points were spent reaching the ceiling from the sixty I had gained, and there were still thirty-eight more behind.
Endurance could not cross the Arcanist Tier because I was sure that my body was missing so many things that would allow me to have attributes at the Sovereign Tier, but at least it gave me time to brace for the pressure that was about to come.
In my Anima Depth, the overflow had compressed into a grain, which was a natural evolution of a mage; the crustalization of the soul was what many Adepts spent centuries trying to achieve.
I don’t know how an average Adept became an Arcanist. I was sure it was not easy, or there would not be so few Arcanists in the world. Still, what was important here was that there was a path forward when an Adept mage reached the limit of their tier, but there was nothing as far as I know that would happen when someone reached the limit of Endurance and did not stop there.
∞
I had gained Celestial Marrow at the Second Earth Gate, and so when a denser marrow entered my body, there was a fusion at first, and the older marrow was absorbed into the new, becoming as dense, and the pressure began to build when every marrow inside me had reached the standard of the new marrow, and more were still being introduced.
Here is the thing about being compressed. The grain at the centre of my Anima Depth was my liquid Anima pressed down into one mote of crystal, as the pressure made it denser. The Celestial Marrow was doing the same to my bones, as I was becoming heavier from the inside, my skeleton weighing more than its size had any right to.
I was dimly aware that my body was beginning to press into the earth as my weight increased. My whole body was being squeezed, denser blood, denser marrow, even denser bones.
The body of a mage is an amazing thing. I have heard this repeated to me many times by some of my teachers, as our souls were able to shape our bodies in ways that nothing else in this world could... This was one of the reasons why we were the strongest in the world.
My body had long exceeded the standard of a normal mage, and its ability to transform and adapt had been taken to the limits due to the impossible nature of the loop, and as it turns out, I was still underestimating how much my body could change if it were pushed past its limit.
And a thing that is being pressed inward learns, if it survives, that it can also press out.
That was the new road that my body found. The thirty-eight points that Endurance could not hold and my bones could not contain were poured into a place in me that had not existed a moment before.
I had never felt a skill being born in this manner before, and despite the pain, I tried to hold on to this feeling because it felt very important, but it was ephemeral and vanished before I could hold it.
A new place being born inside you was a skill, and I felt it as a new fact about what I was. Like I now had a tail or an extra limb, and somehow it felt as if I had always possessed this new part of me.
[ New Celestial-tier skill acquired ]
[ Titan’s Marrow 1 — Unique — Broken-Celestial ]
I felt this skill swallow all the Endurance I could no longer hold, creating strange new architecture in my flesh and bones, like a billion ants chewing through every cell in my body.
There was no pain, but the itch almost made me wish for it as I lay in the wreck of the camp with the word Titan sitting in my mind, and felt out the shape of what I had been given.
It was density, but it was density I could command. The pressure from so much Celestial Marrow being forced into me had taught my body to be compressed, and the skill that grew out of the lesson was the other half of it.
If my body could be pressed smaller and denser and made more, then my body could also be told to expand, to take the dense, Celestial-Marrowed, crystalline-cored mass of me and unfold it without making it weaker.
A smile touched my lips, and I decided to test this new skill before I fully understood it, and I did it the way I tested everything since this loop began, by doing it and seeing what broke.