One Last System

'What the hell are those stats?' I thought, puzzled to no end by the numbers my system provided me with.

First off came the name of my stage.

'Novice Ascendent, huh?' I thought, unable to hold back a small sense of satisfaction. 'So I did it?' My lips quivered up into a small smile.

No matter what, advancing to the next level always gave me a nice sense of accomplishment. After all, it meant I was now one step closer to my ultimate goal of becoming strong enough to effectively force all the potential threats to fuck away!

Yet, as great as advancing to the next stage was, there were several elements that soured this experience.

'What about Mia...?' I thought, turning my eyes to the girl standing several feet away.

By this moment, she has long cleaned all the filth that my accidental shockwave send all over the place. And from the look on her face and the proud nodding of Levi by her side, she already became aware of my advancement.

'Will we still be able to get intimate?' I thought, gritting my teeth as the doubt settled in my mind.

Yet, it was still way too early for me to give up. I advanced so that I could gather all the antimana around this place. And even after breaking into the ascender's realm... I still could feel I wasn't anywhere strong enough to accomplish that task.

'From how I only have a single point in each of the other two types of growth for the ascender rank, I think it's safe to assume I need to top out the first one before starting to cultivate through the other ones,' I thought.

And so, I gritted my teeth... and started to absorb the pure mana right into my body again.

Then, the entire torturous process started all over again. My entire body would dissolve at a cellular level, only for those cells to regenerate in an even more powerful form.

'I wonder what's the physics behind it,' I thought, releasing a pained but also exhausted sight.

At this point in my life, I went through so much pain that the feeling of having my entire body fall apart was like that... well, it would be a lie to claim I couldn't be bothered.

But as I no longer considered this level of pain to be something out of the ordinary, I could somehow manage.

And so, the numbers displayed by my system continued to grow bit by bit.

From seventy-three thousand and seven hundred ninety-six billion to a perfect hundred thousand billion. Roughly half of all the antimatter that was left on the battlefield later, I finally maxed out the body ascendance part of my cultivation.

And just as I assumed before, this lead to the second level of my cultivation opening up.

Body Ascendance:  73 796B/200 000B > 200 000B/200 000B

??? : 1/200 000B > Mind ascendance  32B > 200 000B

??? :  1/100 000B

'Seeing how my growth points raise several billion per second of cultivation...' I thought after confirming the rate of growth for the second type of ascendance. 'That kinda makes me feel bad about all the joy I derived at the beginning when growing my cultivation by a mere hundred points felt like an achievement...'

The changes to my body have nearly stopped. Right now, though, instead of my bones and muscles, it was my brain and nerves that started to overgo the same type of changes.

At this point, I also abandoned all the idea of even trying to understand what was going on. Because for how little I knew about how the nervous system worked, even adding magic to it wouldn't make it any faster.

'Aren't the signals within the nervous system traveling at the speed of light? Like all the electricity?' I thought, trying to make some sense of the changes that resulted in an even more intense pain throughout my entire body than before. 'What else is there for the mana to improve?'

No matter how puzzling it was, it wasn't something that I had to focus on. Because whenever I allowed my thoughts to wander, I could see the speed of my growth slow down.

'That's yet another topic worth consideration,' I thought before closing my eyes and clearing my mind of all the unnecessary thoughts.

Sure, it might be an interesting topic... but one that I could consider once I would be done with my cultivation. Because while I could see the speed of my growth changing, I couldn't say the same about the amount of energy that I continued to absorb.

'Growing the mind ascendance is already slower than doing the same with body ascendance,' I thought, gritting my teeth as I pushed all my attention to the mind-wrecking pain that filled every last cell of my body, 'so I can allow myself to slow it down even further!'

In the end, I didn't get to advance for the second time. In fact, once I consumed nearly half of all the anti-mana on the battlefield and turned it into the fuel for my mana engine... I failed to even fully cultivate the second element of my current stage!

Novice Ascendent (73 796B/500 000B) >  (376 916B/500 000B)

[

Body Ascendance:  200 000B/200 000B

??? : 1/200 000B > Mind ascendance 176 916B/200 000B

??? :  1/100 000B

]

'So that's the limit of how far I can go, huh?' I thought, taking a deep breath once I grew strong enough to confidently absorb all the remaining anti-mana in the surroundings.

As such, I stood up and took a deep breath... and send several tentacles made out of the world's mana to spoon up and push all the liquified pieces of anti-mana into my set of arrays.

I was still way too weak to properly make use of it. I didn't have nearly enough world's mana to properly turn anti-mana into fuel for my engine.

But at the very least, I could properly absorb all the remaining antimana into my mage's tower, keeping hold of it until either I would grow stronger or Levi would develop a mana engine on his own!