Seeing her baby waiting for her on the other side of the glass and the idea of never touching Jormun again gave Thrud new strength. She remembered everything she had learned about her body and about Awakening during the pregnancy.
How her Awakened baby had made her stronger, to the point of pushing her rainbow core past its limits. She had briefly experienced the power of the white core and remembered its touch well.
‘What the heck am I still missing? I have the auxiliary cores, I have a fucking bright violet core, and yet it’s not enough to contain the power of my previous rainbow core.’ She racked her brain until she noticed that the multi-colored mana wasn’t the only thing lingering around her.
Most of the vortex that had previously allowed her to suck in the world energy was still there. Only the parts necessary to form the auxiliary cores had been integrated within her Awakened body while everything else could only try to force its way in.
‘Were you just lucky or were you a true genius, father? How could you have understood the secret of the white core without even being an Awakened? Was this your plan all along or just a fortuitous side effect of the Madness?’ Her body bloated and exploded again, putting an end to her thinking.
When Thrud’s physical form regenerated, she didn’t try to further refine her core nor her auxiliary cores like countless Awakened before her had done in the attempt to reach the white.
What she did, instead, was to create new auxiliary cores for every single part of her body that Regal Flow revealed to her.
Based on their size, normal violet-cored Awakened had one or more auxiliary cores per organ. Their purpose was to evenly spread the power of the mana core throughout the whole body and amplify it thanks to the world energy they collected.
Thrud had reached the violet for just a few minutes, but the persistent vortex hovering behind her core gave her an inspiration that very few had reached despite living for thousands of years.
‘The violet core is the natural apex, otherwise there would be white cored individuals even among fake mages. That means that trying to feed it more world energy is pointless, just like trying to refine the auxiliary cores.
‘They are nothing but an extension of the mana core, forming a web that reduces the strain on the body and quickens the natural absorption of world energy. They cannot get stronger unless the mana core gets stronger yet the core is capped at violet.’ She thought.
‘It’s a seemingly impossible conundrum, but it has a solution and, thanks to the mad genius of my father, the answer lay in my body this entire time!’
Thrud took small bits of the still lingering vortex that the Madness had bestowed upon her and assimilated them inside her body. She placed them exactly halfway between pairs of her natural auxiliary cores, using them as milestones.
The vortexes became relay points, transmitting the power of her bright violet core from an auxiliary core to another. It took the vortexes just a few minutes to make their edges overlap and turn into auxiliary cores as well.
‘I knew it! The answer isn’t to further refine either the mana or the auxiliary cores but to make more of them to turn the entirety of an Awakened’s body into an amplifier.
‘By having many auxiliary cores, the natural mana flow becomes so powerful that it nurtures the mana core and allows it to break past its natural limits!’ Thrud made sure to stabilize the newborn auxiliary cores before assimilating more pieces of the big vortex.
Each time, she would place the new vortexes between a pair of already stabilized auxiliary cores, strengthening the network that spread the energy of the mana core throughout her body.
The more she progressed, the less often her body exploded and the artificial vortex of the Madness slowly shrunk. When even the last bit of it was assimilated, Thrud had also absorbed all of the lingering energy of her previous rainbow core.
Her body quickly stabilized, yet she had not reached the white, just another rainbow core where silver and black had replaced the cyan and the violet. The seven colors weren’t generated by the presence of impurities since they had all been removed by the Awakening process.
They were simply the manifestation of the wild elemental energies that Thrud’s life force failed to merge into her own mana. The vortexes now absorbed more world energy than even a Griffon’s body could handle.
‘You were truly a genius, father. You made a machine capable of granting the next best thing to a white core even to a fake mage. You unwittingly discovered the secret to turning a pitiful human back into a mighty Griffon.
‘Yet you lacked the vision, the motivation, and the talent to understand the importance of your masterpiece. Your obsession with immortality kept you from taking the most important step.’ Thrud thought.
‘I’m not going to repeat your mistakes. My eternal life is not my goal but the means I’ll use to give my child and to every child on Mogar the life I could only dream about.’
She took a deep breath, making her Regal Flow technique harness the wild elemental energies until they submitted to her will. Thrud wasn’t at risk of dying any longer, but she couldn’t settle for a mere Awakened rainbow core.
She forced the energy of the six elements to match her life force and beat to its rhythm. As soon as the multi-colored energy turned into mana, she used Regal Flow to push it out of her core.
Thanks to the countless auxiliary cores, the energy encountered no resistance and grew so intense that the boundary between energy and matter almost broke. Thrud’s body was now akin to a block of Davross, with each one of her cells capable of drawing and storing the world energy.
Unlike the magical metal, however, the world energy she assimilated would take her energy signature and convert it into her own mana. She had become a huge living mana core that turned white as the internal and external energy became one.
“It’s done.” Thrud said, yet she didn’t open the door.
A dull white aura seeped out of her body, yet her skin had turned gold-colored and so did the feathers that covered the wings that came out of her back.
“Who would have thought that I’d evolve into a Golden Griffon? Mogar sure has a twisted sense of irony.”
“Did you really reach the white core?” Jormun was flabbergasted.
“I didn’t reach it. I had it for most of my life but my non-Awakened body couldn’t tap into its true power.” She conjured bricks from the academy in her hands pulverizing them the moment she flexed her fingers.
“If everything is fine, then why are you still there? Why don’t you let me in?” He asked.
“Because I’m not fine. I knew how to handle the power of the violet, but I have no control over the white.” Thrud placed her hand near a wall and Jormun saw it blacken as if it had been struck by a fireball.
