CHAPTER 215: EX 215.GENIUS OF MAN

Leon leaned back slightly in his chair, the old leather groaning under his weight as his eyes traced the jagged script on the page.

"For someone to be so determined that they’d create an entirely new system of power..." he muttered under his breath, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his lips, "calling them a genius wouldn’t cut it. They should be called a monster."

The irony wasn’t lost on him. Julius Arman had clawed his way from nothing, inventing a path where none existed. But Leon? He could do what even the so-called first emperor couldn’t,.he could use the cores themselves to grow stronger. If Julius was a monster, then what would that make him?

He let that thought linger for a moment before turning the page.

According to the journal, Julius didn’t discover his system overnight. In fact, he hadn’t touched upon it until thirty years later, when he was already a man of forty. By then, he had studied countless beast cores, though only the low-level ones scavenged from carcasses. Julius couldn’t kill the beasts himself, not yet. But still, he examined every core he could find, turning them over, dissecting them with whatever crude tools he could fashion.

Leon’s eyes flicked across the inked lines, his mind piecing together the picture: a man with nothing but time, driven by an obsession only he understood.

Julius’s wolf mother had warned him long ago: cores were poison to any being that wasn’t a beast. Trying to absorb one would mean instant death. That warning had kept him alive, but it had also shackled him. Observation could only take him so far. To truly understand how the cores worked, Julius needed to know what it felt like inside his body. But that path was closed to him—or at least, it should have been.

Leon exhaled softly through his nose. "Should have been..."

Because the journal revealed the truth: Julius hadn’t stopped there. He couldn’t. His human mind, sharp and restless, was both his curse and his salvation. It gave him ideas, schemes, paths to tread where raw strength failed him.

And so, with years of failures gnawing at his pride, Julius finally dared a different approach.

He gathered what he needed in secret, tools fashioned from bone and stone, herbs to dull pain, bindings to hold a thrashing body. Then, with the solemn authority of his years, he called upon one of the younger wolves in the pack. Though powerless, Julius was still respected, still seen as an elder. And when he asked for help, it was given.

The journal described it in stark detail. In his hands was a core, crimson and molten with residual energy, pried from the corpse of a slain fire lizard. Dangerous even when inert, it pulsed faintly like the dying ember of a sun.

That night, Julius began his plan.

****

In the dim glow of his den, Julius worked with the focus of a man walking a knife’s edge. His hands moved with practiced precision, setting fire rocks in place, adjusting the crude spiral tube he’d carved and bent over the years. Behind him, towering nearly three meters tall, stood a young wolf with fur like moonlight, Luna. Despite her size, she was still his junior. His little sister in all but blood.

She tilted her massive head, amber eyes narrowing with concern. "Brother, what are you working on today... that you would need my help?"

Julius didn’t look up from his tools. His voice was calm, almost eerily so.

"You’re here to bring me back in case I head to the other side."

The words froze Luna in place. Her tail stiffened, her ears flicked back. "What? Brother, you can’t be—"

"Done," Julius interrupted, as though her fears were nothing but background noise. He straightened, stepping back from his work.

Luna’s eyes locked on the contraption spread across the rough-hewn table. Worry battled with curiosity, because as much as she feared for him, she also wanted to understand him. Small pieces of her brother’s strange ways had rubbed off on her over the years. What sister didn’t secretly want to be like her elder, even if he was weaker?

On the table sat a steaming bowl of boiling water, heated by glowing fire rocks. A thin nozzle extended from its side, feeding into a spiraling tube that coiled downward like the innards of some beast. The tube connected to a second bowl, compact and sealed tight, with more fire stones glowing around it to maintain the heat. From this second bowl, another nozzle opened into a flask of rare, glass-like material, its mouth sealed shut. The whole structure hissed faintly, vapor condensing and escaping in soft plumes.

Luna’s ears flicked forward. "Brother... what is this?"

Julius’s lips curved into something that was not quite a smile. His gaze remained on the flask, his voice low and certain.

"This... is my future."

Yet all the fire rocks and flasks, all the bubbling water, were nothing compared to the true centerpiece of his experiment: the fire lizard’s core. It rested at the edge of the table, dim but alive, its fractured surface glowing with faint, ember-like veins.

Leon’s eyes narrowed as he read the account, his fingers drumming against the book’s brittle spine. "A cracked core..." he murmured. "The old man got lucky."

According to the journal, Julius had discovered this shattered gem by sheer chance. And despite its broken state, it didn’t bleed out its essence uncontrollably. After forty years wandering the forest, probability had finally dealt him a rare favor.

Julius had studied enough to know why this mattered. Normally, beast cores obeyed a merciless law: all or nothing. Either you absorbed the entirety of the star dust within, or you absorbed nothing at all. And for humans, that meant instant death. Knowledge flooding into the mind until it split apart.

But this fractured core was different. With cracks running across its surface, Julius believed he could draw out only fragments of its essence. Small enough to be diluted.

That was where the contraption came in, water to catch and thin the dust, heat to evaporate the mixture, steam to carry it into the flask. His plan was simple. Suicidal, but simple. He wouldn’t consume the core directly. He would breathe it in.

Leon barked out a short laugh as he leaned back in his chair. "The emperor seems to be a junkie."

The thought lingered, absurd yet fitting. Because only someone half-mad, half-genius would ever think inhaling poison was the path to power.