Heir of Synthesis: The World Mage

One hour later, Priam got up by himself and walked back to his faction’s channel. The troops were confused by his sudden movement, but knowing there was no immediate danger in the area, no one questioned him.

He made his way toward the piles of Corrupted Beast corpses scattered everywhere.

[Absorb?] [Yes / No]

The system’s confirmation window appeared as soon as he approached the first corpse.

Priam could have simply accepted the prompt from a distance, but that would have created a strange spectacle for anyone watching from afar.

Instead, he crouched down and placed his hand near the creatures’ cores.

The moment he accepted, the pure corruption contained within the core was extracted instantly. Since the other disciples remained far away inside the recovery zone, no one noticed anything unusual.

In this way, Priam began purifying and collecting the core corruption from every corpse.

Each one contained only a tiny amount of pure corruption in its core, just like the Corrupted Beasts from the exile planet. But there were so many of them.

When the two-hour break came to an end, a deep hum echoed through the air, and the whitish glow of the recovery zone faded almost completely.

It was the unmistakable signal.

The battle was about to begin again.

Everyone who had been asleep woke up feeling completely refreshed. Only two hours had passed, yet it felt as though they had enjoyed an entire night’s restful sleep. On top of that, every internal and external wound had healed, and the Ether flowing through their meridians had been fully restored.

However, as they marched back toward the channel, the psychological exhaustion from the first round still weighed heavily on them.

As soon as the battle resumed...

Everyone discovered something terrifying.

Both the number of beasts and their average level of strength had increased slightly.

A cold sweat ran down everyone’s backs. By the second round alone, the jump in difficulty was already obvious. They couldn’t let their guard down for even a moment—with every new wave, they danced even closer to death.

---

Seven days passed.

With four battle rounds every day and the difficulty increasing with each cycle, the disciples’ psychological strain had reached alarming levels.

It was a mental wound that the recovery zone couldn’t heal. Their lives had become an unforgiving cycle of fighting, sleeping, and fighting again.

The only exception to this widespread despair was Priam’s faction.

The reason?

They had a little mascot to lift everyone’s spirits during every break.

Mirra came out of the Inner Space whenever the truce began. Curious and mischievous because of her young age, the little feline girl wandered among the soldiers, looking at them with sparkling eyes that seemed to question everything around her.

She still couldn’t speak, but she was smart enough to understand what everyone was saying and would interact with them by pointing at whatever had caught her curiosity.

The soldiers happily chatted with her, patiently explaining every subject in detail. For a brief moment, it made them forget where they were, allowing them to relax and think about something else.

Even when Mirra wasn’t nearby, those moments were enough to get them talking among themselves afterward, chatting about whatever random topic came to mind.

For Priam’s faction, those two hours of rest passed in a completely different way from the nightmare experienced by the other groups.

---

The first thirty days flew by.

By this stage, the battles demanded tremendous effort and flawless teamwork from every faction.

In Priam’s channel, Shione’s ice barriers combined with Lumiere’s blazing explosions provided devastating and uninterrupted battlefield control.

Meanwhile, Flaris focused on intercepting and eliminating the strongest beasts that managed to break through the primary blockade.

Thanks to this layered defense, the number of monsters reaching the main front line remained completely manageable. Fighting in the Rotating Nine-Point Star Formation, the soldiers advanced and retreated like sharpened blades, grinding the horde apart.

Viewed from above, they resembled a giant meat grinder. Wherever they passed, pieces of Corrupted Beasts were scattered across the ground. Black blood and shredded flesh filled the air. It was a grotesque and cruel spectacle, yet the Corrupted Beasts seemed utterly devoid of any instinct for self-preservation or intelligence.

They continued advancing like mad, marching over the piles of their own comrades’ corpses.

Not a single one of Priam’s nine hundred soldiers suffered any serious injuries. Occasionally, a squad would make a mistake and end up with a few scratches, but nothing that threatened the stability of the army.

Priam remained the calmest figure on the entire battlefield. As time passed, he even began walking among the corpses, collecting the corruption from their cores in the middle of the fighting.

With every new round, enormous amounts of Ether accumulated inside the Nexus Seed.

Around the fifteenth day, he made a fascinating discovery: whenever the accumulated Ether reached a saturation threshold, the Nexus Seed automatically compressed that energy, transforming it into liquid-state Ether.

Priam was thrilled. This new ability of his was truly incredible.

If anything unexpected happened on the front lines, he had an absolutely terrifying emergency reserve of Ether at his disposal.

As for the other factions... their situation was slowly becoming critical.

Starting on the twentieth day, with every new round, at least a dozen disciples died across the other four channels.

The expressions on Sallya’s, Daraen’s, Inigo’s, and Walhart’s faces grew darker and darker.

No matter how hard they tried to stabilize their troops, it seemed impossible to watch over every soldier while also keeping the battlefield under control.

The flow of Corrupted Beasts only continued to increase, along with increasingly powerful abominations. The math was merciless: if the battle continued at that pace, by the end of the 275 days, the number of casualties would be catastrophic.

For the first time, those prodigies understood the brutal essence of a true large-scale battle. Reality didn’t bend to individual talent, and by themselves, they were incapable of controlling everything.

That was when they began looking at Priam’s faction with different eyes.

Priam never fought or gave orders. Most of the time, he looked like a calm, almost invisible shadow walking among the fallen enemies.

Yet his army hadn’t suffered a single casualty.

Little by little, the painful truth dawned on the four of them: Priam’s secret wasn’t overwhelming personal strength, but the flawless engineering of his entire structure.

In terms of raw individual power, any one of the Super Geniuses surpassed Priam’s Generals. However, those three didn’t fight to show off or stand out. They spent their energy with careful precision, for the sole purpose of controlling the pace of the battlefield.

The synergy between Shione’s Ice and Lumiere’s Fire created devastating area control, slowing down and funneling the horde. Flaris’ offensive power acted as the final guillotine against the most dangerous threats. Meanwhile, in the rear, Dandara served solely as the tactical brain, monitoring every squad and correcting spacing down to the smallest detail without wasting her focus on direct combat.

None of them tried to do more than their assigned role. Each fulfilled their responsibilities with surgical precision, trusting their lives to their comrades.

In the other factions, on the other hand, everything revolved in a dysfunctional way around the Super Genius.

Even though the sect had encouraged them to appoint Generals and organize their factions with multiple people filling different roles...

...would Super Geniuses ever accept someone doing something they themselves could do better?

The Super Geniuses were still the center of their factions. They fought on the front lines, shouted orders, tried to protect the weaker disciples, and personally managed their soldiers’ panic. They were the sword, the shield, the spear, the brain, and the commander of their armies all at once.

It wasn’t because their factions lacked talented people.

It was because of the Super Geniuses’ pride and deeply ingrained habits.

Having spent their entire lives being the best at everything, they had never even considered entrusting vital responsibilities to people beneath them. In the arrogant logic of a prodigy: if I’m the strongest and the best at everything, then I should be the one doing it.

But reality had just crushed that way of thinking.

They realized that Priam’s true brilliance wasn’t in building an elite army, but in creating a self-sufficient ecosystem—a machine so perfectly engineered that the presence of the ”Boss” himself had become almost unnecessary.

Precisely because he did so little himself, everyone behind him had been forged and pushed to their limits, allowing them to improve at an astonishing pace under constant pressure. By now, even a random soldier from Priam’s faction was several times more capable and efficient than one from any of the other factions.

That newfound realization was still weighing on the young Mages’ minds when...

**ROAR!!**

A colossal, earth-shaking roar tore through the distant skies. A tyrannical, oppressive pressure descended upon the valley, making the ground tremble and causing every young Mage’s expression to change dramatically.