[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-magus-infinite":3,"chapter-magus-infinite-magus-infinite-chapter-77":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"english","MAGUS INFINITE",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},1526309,1977,"Chapter 77: Lightning Cascade","magus-infinite-chapter-77",77,"\u003Cp>I came back heavier than I had ever come back.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The wake was the kind of wake that begins as awareness of weight rather than awareness of self.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>My body was where it was supposed to be, attached at the joints, attached at the soul, the attachments better than they had been at any previous wake.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But, I was carrying a weight inside of me, of all the information I had earned, and the death I had paid for it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I could almost hear the pulsing of Caelith Mourne, somewhere beyond the canvas of my tent.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In a short time, the pyramid would be breathing red across the sky.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Somewhere, a few dozen meters from where I lay, the cookfire was burning, and across the camp, Bari was alive, Dara was alive, and Aldis was cooking the bland abomination he calls porridge.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I let that be true for a moment without doing anything with it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up!\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Mel’s voice. This silly phrase was the first sound I heard when I woke up.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Maybe I should have chosen a different catchphrase, but this was the price I had to pay for the loop; everything else returned to the way it was... except me.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Even if I changed the alarm’s voice, dying would reverse my effort.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I am a lazy cur, and I will not stop being a lazy cur until I am strong enough not to die again... until I can no longer be killed.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I let the orb finish its phrase, and I let it ring a second time, and a third time.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Three phrases. Three repetitions of the wake-up I had heard now thirteen times.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I sighed and switched it off even without opening my eyes. I just reached across, and it went silent.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was then that I realized that my feeling of being heavy was not a mistake. Mortal Shell had grown again, and I was feeling the difference even before I read my status screen.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I opened my eyes, and as always, the notifications were already waiting. If I had perished like I was meant to, then all of this progress would have vanished, but I was cheating death and stealing from its coffers.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Hmm... What is the fate of thieves?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Shaking my head to push aside that grim thought, I read the first line that mattered the most to me.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>[Soul Condition: Stable]\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I let myself breathe. I had hurt my soul in the last casting, and Mortal Shell had healed it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Even the cost of enduring a spell that had been severing my flesh from my soul had been repaired across the reset. I did not yet know whether the repair was complete or partial, but the system had returned my Soul Condition to Stable, and the system was known for always being precise.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I read the next line.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>[Mortal Shell 30 → 47 (Acolyte) — Broken-Celestial]\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Seventeen ranks!\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>None of my skills had ever grown in this manner, and it was proof that what was happening to me was not normal.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I suspected that with this loop, I could be the one who was ranking up this skill more quickly than anyone else before.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>At this point, I was enduring spells from beings at the Adept level, and this skill had to endure stress beyond anything an Acolyte should have been able to put it through.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The skill that had crossed into the Acolyte tier at the previous wake had now climbed almost to the upper edge of that tier.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Mortal Shell at forty-seven was three ranks from the next tier threshold, and the threshold for the next tier at Adept was going to be the next major qualitative change.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I had told myself that this skill would be the core of my power system, and so far, it seemed that I was not wrong.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The skill had grown by making me survive what should have killed me, and in turn, it was making me harder to kill.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I felt it in my chest. The fabric of Mortal Shell had become something denser. Not just woven and re-woven, the way it had been at thirty, but bound with cords I could not see, anchored in places I had not previously known the body could be anchored from.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Mortal Shell at forty-seven was an architecture, the kind of structure a builder lays under a house when the house is going to have to stand against the weather that the previous houses did not stand against.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I read the next line, and I stopped.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>[Lightning Cascade 0 → 1 (Initiate) — Rare]\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>A new Discipline.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I had not been expecting a new lightning spell, but on reflection, I should not have been surprised. Lightning Resonance was an Adept Tier level Attunement skill that enhanced a mage beyond anything an Acolyte could dream of.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>With Lightning Resonance, my body was beginning to change, as the raw elemental forces of lightning were becoming part of my being.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The burst of power I had released in the last loop had been the primer needed to unlock a deeper understanding of Lightning, and I had been rewarded with a new spell.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It sat in the same category as Arc Lightning, and I felt for it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The shape of it was already inside me. Disciplines appeared with a sort of internal blueprint, not the full skill, but the seed of it, which contained the pattern of how the spell wanted to be cast.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Arc Lightning had emerged from Spark with a clean sense of how to discharge a single arc through the staff at a single target.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Lightning Cascade was different. Its blueprint was a sustained discharge that branched into multiple arcs across multiple targets simultaneously, the way a tree’s roots branch through soil, finding paths, splitting, finding more paths, the cast continuing to spread for as long as the channel remained open.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was a channeling Discipline.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>A burst of excitement filled my head, and I could not imagine the impact of this spell if fully unleashed.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The channel-shredding cast I had used to sever Rex’s arm had been my first crossing into the channeling tier for lightning, and the system had registered the crossing.\u003C\u002Fp>",1043,"2026-06-06T05:51:16.684Z",1,"novelbin.me","1739cba0840a5e79c8856996ebda1ac086faf834764e7b2e7b95b161a1c85640","magus-infinite-chapter-78","magus-infinite-chapter-76",117,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Fmagus-infinite-cover.jpg"]