Chapter 36

  By the next morning, he’d cleared a space near the outer perimeter. The scouts had their own training fields and the mages had wards for ranged spellwork — but Ren wanted solitude, and this part of the forest-adjacent camp was quiet. Only a few guards patrolled, and they didn’t question him.

  He stood in a rough circle of churned dirt, wearing a fitted training shirt and loose camp trousers. The arm was uncovered, catching the morning light like wet obsidian. He braced his feet, reached inward — and pulled.

  Threads coiled around him.

  He ran them through the arm and lassoed them out. It surged.

  For a second, he staggered. Not from pain — from clarity. The mana running through the arm didn’t just respond. It amplified. Echoed. The sensory nodes embedded in the plating flared to life, giving him a pulse-by-pulse read of pressure, temperature, resistance, even feedback from the dirt beneath his fingers.

  He closed his eyes. Tried again.

  More Threads.

  The forest around him dimmed. Sounds dulled. Aether kissed his skin like frost on glass, and his vision swam as the world snapped into sharper relief.

  Then the pressure hit.

  Like a weight dropped from a height, slamming into his core. His legs buckled and he dropped to one knee, breathing ragged. Not from injury — from overflow.

  He was wrong.

  There was a limit.

  And he’d just scraped it.

  ______

  The next few days blurred into routine. Painful, exhausting, exhilarating routine.

  Ren trained each morning — strength drills, balance work, mana channeling. He practiced cooking in the evening, first clumsily, then with a kind of mechanical grace. The arm could detect temperature shifts to a fraction of a degree. It could crush spices perfectly, slice with repeatable pressure, and even handle delicate herbs without bruising them.

  He built a firepit outside his tent, set up a small fold-out table, and began testing recipes.

  Mana-rich bone broth with heat-resistant fungi. Reinforced trail bread soaked in aether-infused butter. Glazed manafruit skewers that offered temporary resistance to chill-based spells. He tracked the buffs, measured the durations, tweaked ingredients.

  The arm helped.

  Not just physically — the arm made his mana flow smoother. Stronger. More controlled. Cooking felt… clearer. But it wasn’t just the arm. All those days spent cooking and training with only one hand, relying entirely on mana, had paid off. His mana and Thread control were on a completely different level now.

  Even the Order noticed.

  By the fifth day, runners were stopping by. Support staff, Shadow-Initiates, even one Writ-bound with a half-burned cloak. They asked for samples. Paid in minor favors or enchanted salt pouches. Word was spreading.

  Ren didn’t care about the fame.

  He cared about being useful.

  He cared about not being left behind.

  ________

  That night, he sat by the fire, the arm resting across his lap, cooling from the forge-like heat of meal prep. The stars above were thin and sharp, the kind of sky you only saw far from city glow.

  Leo sat beside him, uninvited, but not unwelcome.

  “You’re pushing it,” the mage said. “I saw you collapse earlier.”

  Ren didn’t respond.

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  “You’ll burn out.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You’re not Atreus, Ren.”

  Ren flinched. “You don’t even know who that is.”

  “No. But I know what you think he was. And that kind of fire… it burns. Bright, sure. But it burns.”

  The arm clicked softly as Ren flexed it. “I’m not trying to become anyone else. I just want to be ready.”

  Leo didn’t argue.

  The fire crackled between them.

  8 more days until the raid.

  8 days to become someone the Order could depend on.

  And he was going to use every hour.

  ______________

  Ren didn’t sleep much over the next eight days. He tried. He even lay down and closed his eyes at the right hours. But rest never came easy when his body was still adjusting to the weight of something new grafted to his bones—something not alive, but not dead either.

  Most of the original discomfort was gone now but what came next was even stranger: phantom feedback. Not pain, but sensation. He’d reach for a knife and feel the texture of its grip half a second before he actually touched it. It was like his arm remembered what they were before even coming into contact with it.

  By day three, Ren was confident enough to work with fine tools. He modified a set of cooking implements—grips resized, weights adjusted. The arm responded so precisely now that he could make all the dishes he could with his old arm albeit with a little more effort.

  The Quartermaster let him requisition a bunch of heavy-duty alchemy tools to experiment with and he set up a large cooking station towards the back of the camp right beside the forest so he could forage at any time.

  He started with mana-enhanced basics. Recovery stews for wounded scouts, light-boosting root pastes for night patrols, anti-fatigue jerky infused with bitterflow extract and sharpened salt. The buffs were modest, but consistent. Order doctrine discouraged alchemical supplements unless approved by a Ink-Bound or the Quartermaster but no one stopped him. They needed every edge now. The upcoming double-raid had stretched resources thin, and the announcement Ethan had made earlier today only made that more clear.

  Ethan's strike group would take the cave. Sinclair’s elite would go for the Dungeon they had originally suspected was the Church’s hideout and may well still be.

  Ren sharpened his focus.

  Every meal he prepped was a field test. Every test became a formula. He started logging infusion times, mana saturation rates, and flavor-mana compatibility. Some ingredients amplified buffs, others disrupted them. Sweetroots made heat-based effects linger. Chalkleaf overpowered defensive enchantments. He learned to layer dishes, staggering the effect of each bite across minutes.

  And still, he trained.

  The new arm let him pour mana through it in controlled bursts. On the fourth night, he discovered it could reinforce his grip mid-motion. That meant he could block with it. Parry. Even strike. He sparred with two Shadow-Initiates behind the quarry line, neither of whom went easy on him, and found that while he couldn’t match their finesse, not even close he could certainly catch them off guard. A reinforced slap to the ribs sent one sprawling and a [Mana Pulse] to the face put the other one down.

  Leo stopped by each evening with fresh paper and unsolicited commentary.On day five, the sensory feedback sharpened.

  He noticed it first while slicing mana-crystal fruit—tiny shivers of feedback, subtle fluctuations in internal resonance. The arm wasn’t just reading pressure or mana saturation anymore. It was picking up something subtler. It was like it was almost sensing the ingredients’ intent. What it wanted to become.

  He tried it with some Lightning basil, he could sense what it wanted to be, part of a meat jerky for boosting agility, a stew for refreshing the mind, It was amazing, as if he was discovering a whole new realm of food he had never known before.

  On the seventh day, he tried something reckless.

  He tried infusing Threads into his food.

  Leo warned him not to. “You’re borrowing from your soul when you do that,” the mage said. “Use it for combat, not comfort.”

  But Ren wanted to see.

  He waited until he was alone. Pre-dawn. Cold mist on the stone. A single cookpot set over controlled flame, ingredients laid out in exact portions. He drew his Threads inward. Focused.

  Then surged.

  His vision narrowed. His mind slowed—but not in the way it had in battle. This wasn’t survival. This was understanding. Every ounce of mana in the ingredients shimmered with clarity. The heat danced like a language he could read. The cooking process was no longer steps — it was one unified thread.

  The resulting dish was a minor miracle: smoked wildgrain porridge with layered stimroot, mana-burst figs, and char-baked focus leaves. The buff lasted nearly two hours. Mana control, clarity of thought, slow stamina recovery. No downsides. The flavor wasn’t just good—it was addictive.

  Ren passed it to a scout sergeant and timed the effects. The man blinked at nothing for ten seconds, then asked if Ren had ever cooked for a god.

  He didn’t answer.

  ____________

  The camp woke early. Today, they moved.

  Ren stood at the edge of the southern clearing, watching the strike teams form up. Hundreds of cloaks moved in silent order, from Shadow-Initiates to Inkbound. They were armored, spell-bound and ready for battle.

  Ren swallowed envy again. Not as bitter this time.

  He turned and made his way back to the Quartermaster’s hall.

  Inside, the Artificers were packing crates, testing last-minute enchantments. Ren’s supply kits were laid out in neat rows: stacked rations in special stasis crates which somehow prevented spoilage.

  “Well, we’ll have to hope this is enough.”