Lament of the Slave

Chapter 87: Core

The System was mocking me. There was no other reason for it to notify me of the tier-up of [Inner Perception] right now. Except there was!

I checked out my whole body, something I never did in the few days I had the skill. Too weak, I never found the courage to look at the tumor in my lower abdomen, at the damage the core did there. If I did, I'd see the awful truth, and I didn't want to. Instead, a lie found a place in my mind. The thought that I've come to terms with the loss of the option to have children on my own.

If that were true, the fact that even a healer like Lord Wigram couldn't help me wouldn't have hit me so hard. Deep down, it still hurt, whether I liked it or not. Hence the tears.

Looking again at the notifications, the condition for a tier-up skill now seemed obvious. I could do nothing but smirk inwardly at my self-inflicted blindness. [Eleaden Standard Language] was the same case. That is, until the condition, or as Deckard called it, the bottleneck for tier-up was met, I was unable to gain further levels. It wasn't my fear that held me back, though. It was my reluctance to learn how to write when I wanted to get rid of the skill as soon as I was able.

So no, the System wasn't making fun of me. It was doing the job it was designed to do, albeit rather insensitively. Bitterness was hard to swallow, yet despite my initial urge to ignore the tier-up, I looked.

Inner Perception: lvl 10

Passive II

As important as seeing what's going on around you, it is no less essential to see what's going on inside you, to know your own body and how it works. You can distinguish bones, muscles, fat, and organs, see their shape, arrangement, and damage.

II - You are no stranger to the inner workings of your body. It's time to look deeper, to reveal the inner workings of your organs, to see where all those veins actually lead.

When I refocused on my body, the sight that came to me would turn the stomachs of many upsides down. As per the skill description, I saw my guts in greater detail. Lungs were no longer just a blob, but tissue composed of blood-oxygenating cells. The same was true for the tumor housing the core. The deformed tissue was riddled with veins feeding the pea-sized crystal with mana. At least, that's what I assumed their purpose was. I didn't feel the mana flow.

What was it, anyway? The core?

I looked through teary eyes at Deckard, the man I trusted the most here, the man who called me a real beast earlier. "Can you tell me exactly what the core is?"

"Me?" he grunted in hard to blame surprise. So far, the Imperial Chief Healer had done most of the explaining. Wiping away tears that still flowed despite me not bursting into full-blown crying, I nodded.

"Okay, dragon girl, listen. Most people call it beast core or mana core," he said and shifted his weight. "It's for one simple reason. It's the source of mana found in beasts."

"That is incorrect," Lord Wigram objected. "It is not a source but a storage for mana."

Deckard frowned, then shrugged. "Depends on how you look at it. It's a source of free mana for humans, serves as excess mana storage for the beasts. The truth is, it doesn't produce any mana on its own."

So it was kind of like a battery. So...

"What about humans?" Could they have had one too? Looking at my belly, I winced at the thought of someone willingly doing this to themselves.

"Nah," Deckard dismissed my notion with a wave of his hand. "I've never seen a man with a core, nor does every beast have one. It's species by species. Usually, the older and stronger beasts form cores."