CHAPTER 204: VOIDHEART CORE

CH204 Voidheart Core

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"There has to be another explanation, right? Zilbris is a Dragonkind who refined his entire body and existence with Spatial Energy—using the Voidheart Core—until he rose from the weakest of the Wind Amphipteres to becoming a unique Silver Dragon.

"I don’t believe he somehow stumbled upon a steady, reliable store of one of those supreme energies... or even something slightly weaker that he could use to convert into Spatial Energy in quantities sufficient to refine his ever-growing, ever-improving draconic body."

Alex’s eyes glimmered with a contemplative light.

"Come to think of it, Zilbris has always been well-known for locating and raiding mana stone mines. In fact, he was eventually exposed as the one responsible for secretly draining and consuming a number of important Mana Stone deposits across the Arun Continent.

"The scandal came to light when the lair he had built inside an untapped mana stone mine belonging to the Confederate was discovered—right when he evolved into his Silver Dragon form.

"By that time, he had already become a powerhouse among Legends. The Confederate could do little to him without paying a tremendous price in blood and resources. The only realistic way to punish or kill him would have been for someone above the Legendary realm to personally intervene.

"But had that happened, the elder dragons would never have stayed idle. And that delicate balance of deterrence was precisely why Zilbris managed to get away with such outrageous actions."

Alex gave a small shake of his head.

"My thoughts are all over the place again," he muttered to himself, pulling his focus back to the matter at hand. "The point is—Zilbris deliberately targeted mana stone mines.

"But why? If the ordinary mana that makes up the ambient environment—and is condensed into mana stones—is far too inefficient for generating Spatial Energy... then how in the world did Zilbris use those mines to create enough Spatial Energy to refine his body to that level?"

Alex ran through various possible explanations in his mind.

One theory was that Zilbris had possessed another mysterious artefact capable of transforming ordinary mana into a higher type of energy—one with a far better conversion rate to Spatial Energy when used with the Voidheart Core.

Yet, after a moment of consideration, Alex dismissed this line of thought. Even with such an item, the same principle of conceptual exchange would still likely apply, which meant the gains would not be anywhere near as dramatic as what Zilbris had achieved.

Ironically, this was among the most sensible of his ideas—many of the other possibilities that crossed his mind were far more outlandish, bordering on the absurd.

Eventually, he narrowed it down to one particular assumption. Not only did he believe it was the most plausible, but it also had the appealing advantage of being something he could test both easily and at relatively low cost.

Gently setting the nest from his lap onto the ground, Alex rose to his feet and made his way to the nearby storage area. He rummaged through shelves and containers for a short while before retrieving three distinct yet related items.

A low-grade mana stone.

A mid-grade mana stone.

And a high-grade mana stone.

Carrying them back, Alex placed the stones in a neat line before the Voidheart Core.

-

The Voidheart Core was a strange thing—both profoundly complex and deceptively simple at the same time.

Complex, because Alex still had no precise understanding of how the heart actually functioned.

Simple, because its physical design was so reminiscent of a mammalian heart—specifically a human’s—that he could easily draw analogous comparisons.

By combining his limited understanding of biology with the hard-earned instincts he had honed as a cultivator in this world, Alex had been able to intuit a few things about the Voidheart Core.

From its structure, he could even make a few cautious deductions about the nature of the species to which the Class 8 being it once belonged had come from—though his understanding remained extremely limited.

"Much like the heart of a mammal," Alex reasoned, "blood likely entered the Voidheart Core from the top—through its atria—and exited at the bottom via its ventricles."

"The right atrium area," he speculated, "probably received de-energised blood returning from the creature’s body, while the left atrium would have taken in blood already energised by passing through the creature’s main respiratory organ.

"In parallel, the right ventricle would pump this de-energised blood towards that respiratory organ, while the left ventricle would send fully energised blood coursing throughout the rest of the body."

When Alex pieced this together, an image began to form in his mind: a creature dwelling within the Void—what in his previous life was called outer space—a place with little to no atmosphere, bordering on a perfect vacuum.

This strange, possibly mammalian Void-dweller would not breathe air as terrestrial lifeforms did. Instead, it would ’inhale’ raw energy itself as its sustenance.

Such energy, once taken in, would be gathered and stored in a special reservoir inside its primary respiratory organ—something analogous to a lung.

From there, de-energised blood would be pumped from the bottom right chamber of the heart—the right ventricle—into that organ. There, the stored energy in the reservoir would infuse the blood, charging it much as oxygen does in an ordinary lung.

Once energised, this blood would return through the top left chamber—the left atrium—where a remarkable transformation occurred. Within this specialised chamber, the energy/mana bound to the blood would be converted into Spatial Energy, not unlike how a mage’s mana heart draws in ambient mana during cultivation and refines it into elemental mana aligned to the mage’s own affinity.

This Spatial-Energy-rich blood would then be driven out through the bottom left chamber—the left ventricle—dispersing its potent essence throughout the creature’s body.

After fuelling the creature’s activities in the hostile emptiness of the Void, the Spatial Energy would be gradually spent. The now de-energised blood would once again return to the top right chamber—the right atrium—so the entire process could repeat endlessly.

From this reasoning, Alex reached a sobering conclusion: the Voidheart Core before him likely suffered from hypoplasia—an underdevelopment—of the left atrium, the very place where the critical energy-to-Spatial-Energy conversion took place.

That flaw alone could have doomed the offspring of the Class 8 Void creature. Without the capacity to convert gathered energy into Spatial Energy at a fast enough rate -effiiciently, survival in the Void would have been impossible. The young creature would have weakened and died, leading to what was, in truth, a stillbirth.

A faint spark of possibility lit in Alex’s thoughts. If he could somehow repair or compensate for the hypoplasia, then perhaps he could resolve the Voidheart Core’s efficiency problem entirely.

Yet even as the idea took shape, the harsh reality followed close behind.

This was not just any heart—it belonged to the direct offspring of a Class 8 being. Its structure was only marginally less intricate than the parent creature’s own heart. Even Grandmaster-level bio-alchemists might struggle to begin such work, let alone succeed.

And Alex? He was already juggling far too many burdens as it was. The notion of stretching himself thin by dabbling in an unfamiliar and exceedingly complex discipline, without even a foundational foothold, was a recipe for disaster.

Alas, handing the Voidheart Core over to someone else -a professional- was also out of the question.

There was only one person in existence Alex trusted completely with it—himself.

...Well, himself, and maybe the Bonsai.

***