DEMON'S VIRTUE

Eiro took a seat in the room connected to the infusion chamber as Nelli healed the wound on his back.

"How am I supposed to do this..?" Eiro muttered, "My body is fundamentally different to others, so the amount of damage that I took should be a lot less than what Merlin did. How did he manage to avoid these injuries?"

"Well, maybe it's because he didn't fucking rush ahead, you absolute dumb-fuck." Sarius replied immediately, and Eiro rolled his eyes in response, "Right, of course. I mean, I guess I can try and do it in the more basic way. I'll infuse myself from the inside, then."

Eiro slowly closed his eyes and looked into himself again. He felt the mass of pure mana and moved it around inside of him. The Demon shifted it toward his left hand, and then replaced the regular mana in there with the pure mana, going through the same process as 'infusion'.

And when he did so, nothing in particular happened for a while. But then, bit by bit, the longer the pure mana stayed in his hand, something appeared, something that only Eiro was really able to spot with his extremely strong eyes.

There were extremely thin lines of golden light appearing on Eiro's hand, that were slowly and surely growing in size and brightness. And the more this happened, the more Eiro's hand started to tingle and feel lighter and lighter.

But even so, the movement of his hand wasn't affected in the slightest. And for now, while his hand seemed to be okay, Eiro started to move forward from this point. Within the center of his chest, he continued on extracting his essence from the mana within his body. He pressed as much of the sludge-like substance that was his essence into the bottle that he had, compressing it down heavily.

And then once Eiro had acquired mana that was sufficiently pure, he would attach it to the pure mana that had started in his hand. He was practically starting to replace all the mana within his body with this pure, arcane version. That was basically how Eiro wanted to replace the infusion chamber before he figured out how to safely make use of it.

The Demon soon had his whole arm's mana replaced with the pure mana. And he then concentrated all of his senses just on his arm, so that he could properly try and analyze it with as much as he could. He analyzed the tingling, the way that his arm changed over time, the patterns and lines of gold appearing on it, basically everything that changed about his arm right now.

And like that, he soon realized something. The glowing golden lines were patterns similar to the patterns that made up the marks of Eiro's blessings, just at a much smaller scale, and they were also just so slightly shifting around the whole time, somewhat changing.

Eiro took a deep breath as he stood up. He started moving both of his arms around to see what sort of differences there were between his control over his arms. There didn't really seem to be any major difference, it was just that his left arm felt a bit lighter. Maybe the movement was slightly smoother, but there probably wouldn't be any benefit for combat here.

After a while, once Eiro had been filled with dedication to not sleep tonight to make up for the time that he had ended up losing through that mishap inside of the infusion chamber, he tried something else. Eiro began to move around larger amounts of mana, instead of just the small, thin streams that he had been doing since earlier.

Eiro made sure to increase the control over this pure mana as much as he could. Although, he wasn't entirely sure what was going on. Why was his body reacting to the pure mana this way? How did it literally rip apart his flesh? It simply didn't make any sense. It shouldn't be able to do anything like that.

"Maybe..." Eiro grumbled, before crossing his legs and entering a meditative state as quickly as he could. he started to let the pure mana flow through his body like his regular mana did, simply by pushing a little bit at at time into his heart. The pure mana was mixing with the regular mana, and Eiro started slowly increasing the purity by gradually increasing the amount of his essence that he pulled out of his mana. Of course, Eiro was still producing his regular mana, so he had no need to worry about accidentally messing anything inside of him up in that sense. However, bit by bit, the mana in Eiro's body grew more pure, and the Demon felt his whole body grow more energized and feel far healthier than before.

He wasn't particularly sure if this was real, or his imagination, but it was a fact that it felt like it. And considering that this was the case, Eiro continued. It didn't seem to be doing any harm to him. If it were, then Eiro would be able to sense it immediately.

This was one of the reasons why Eiro kept his 'essence'. It was rather easy to control, and not only could he easily push it out of him, but he was able to pull it back in and infuse the pure mana with his own essence. So if anything happened. Eiro would immediately proceed to turn the pure mana back into regular mana.

Eiro slowly but surely pressed a tiny bit of the pure mana into his right hand, just to test out whether or not this would work.

"Huh?" Eiro muttered confused, as he noticed something while moving the mana around the magic circuits within his wooden hand. A bit of the pure mana simply escaped. It slipped out of his wooden hand. But how was that possible?

And that was when Eiro realized something.

"My spiritual body was ripped apart in my hand because of the Holy Energy... And now that I have this staff acting as my hand instead, letting mana flow through it as normal... The pure mana can slip out of the cracks in the soul's form..." The Demon said as he looked at the spirits in front of him.

"Wait, does that mean that the mana before injured your soul itself, and not just your body?" Sarius asked, and Eiro looked at Nelli, who had done all the healing.

"Well, I didn't notice anything unusual myself. It just seemed like an actual physical mass came out of you, and I can't see anything weird in regard to your soul there. Your mana flows there regularly as well, after all." The Naiad explained, and Eiro closed his eyes in thought. Eiro's manipulation of the pure mana was close to non-existent compared to that of regular mana. And that was when he realized something.

"I think it doesn't damage my soul at all... regular mana practically tugs on the walls of the soul as well as it leaves your body. Now it was just so strong that once it passed through the soul, my flesh was ripped apart in that spot, but my soul stayed intact. A soul is something far more durable than flesh, after all. But now, the pure mana didn't have to worry about the interference of the soul at all... but if I still had a regular hand, it might tear my flesh apart in that area anyway while the pure mana flowed out through the cracks. I must have not noticed any sort of difference with regular mana because at this point, mana flows through my soul's walls as if they were nonexistent." Eiro pointed out as he started to think deeply about what he should do.

"Well, at least this is a shortcut to cast arcane magic..." Eiro muttered quietly, as he sensed the mass of magic in front of him. Of course, Eiro wasn't particularly able to see his mana outside of his body, but he was still able to sense it a bit.

Eiro recalled the example arcane spell inside of one of Merlin's spellbooks, and swiftly drew it with the help of this pure mana that had pulled the Ancient Language into itself, this Arcane Magic. And so, a few moments later, the spell was finished at the same time as he finished speaking the chant.

And when he activated the magic circle, the glowing lines gathered in a mass in the center. The glowing Orb that was floating there soon had its outermost layer shatter apart in some places. And that which then appeared there was a hand nearly identical in appearance to Eiro's own right hand. It even had some of the slits that the wooden hand required for the individual pieces to move properly.

The only difference was that this hand was made of Arcane Magic. It was floating there, a white, translucent hand with thin and shifting golden lines all over it. And this hand was completely linked to Eiro's mind, and was utterly under his control.

With a single thought, this hand moved to the other side of the room and picked up a small object, bringing it over to Eiro. This was honestly quite amazing. He had never seen a spell like this.

It seemed like due to the nature of Arcane Magic and the spell itself, this hand couldn't be used in combat. If it held a weapon and attacked others, it could potentially penetrate their skin, but barely any actual damage would be done to them. And the hand itself didn't even have the strength to strangle someone, so it really was quite useless in that sense.

But luckily, it could have other uses for Eiro. Although, that wasn't directly what he was thinking about the whole time as he was watching this hand float there in the air in front of him. Due to his lack of an accompanying skill, or even any sort of major control over Arcana in the form of an elemental affinity, the hand was weak and unstable, barely able to even lift the writing feather that was laying on the desk on the other side of the room. It drained much more mana to keep it up than most of Eiro's high-power attack spells.

However, this was something so new, and so different to Eiro, that it felt like he was once more nothing but a lesser Imp, staring into a campfire and being so enthralled by it that all his thoughts disappeared.