Three hundred and thirty three degrees celsius.
If we want to be technical, this was the exact amount of heat Greem's forcefield could prevent from reaching his delicate parts.
Depending on the nature of the attack, anything above this would either pop his shield or go through it like it wasn't there.
That's exactly what happened when he unequipped the fire resistance talisman. Heat waves of about seven hundred degrees blasted him all over, vaporising any hair and moisture on his form in less than a second.
His contact with the red hot ground also devolved into loud sizzling, pungent gray smoke rising as the smell of burnt flesh spread from his position.
This was the least of his worries however.
Like he'd been doused in gasoline and set alight, his whole body caught fire immediately.
His skin blackened, charred, and fell off in seconds. His eyelids didn't fare any better, melting away and leaving his eyes to bear the fiery assault's brunt. They first dried out, boiled somehow, and exploded.
Sitting there with his empty eye sockets and exposed muscles rapidly blackening, Greem stymied his shock at the rapid and horrifying changes—both internal and external—and focused on repairing the damage.
He had never been so happy for the Hercules Method essence and the infinite life force it provided.
His focus sharpened to the utmost, he fought back against the fiery onslaught trying to reduce his brain, muscles, bones and organs to the current state of his skin; ash.
He had never leveraged his body control to such an extent.
None of the deep tissue damage he experienced lasted for more than a second under his watchful attention. The rapid swelling of his brain, his blackening muscles, boiling organs, weakening bones… he healed them all right as the damage accrued.
It made for a strange sight, his stationary form alternating between fleshy red and pitch black like some weird sea creature.
With every ounce of focus trained on every inch of his body, Greem ensured that nothing except for his skin and eyes burned away entirely. He kept up the regenerative effort on everything else and formed a sort of death and rebirth balance.
This level of extensive awareness and supervision is what allowed him to detect the multitude of tiny, invisible hands guiding the evolution of his cells and body as a whole.
He instantly recognized the influence. It was like a baby recognizing that its mother was the one to pick it up despite its eyes being closed.
It was the Will of the Plane!
This reality or multiverse (it didn't have a name) contained planes, floating land masses surrounded by impenetrable bubbles.
Each plane was a full sustainable world on its own, and most had the normal four seasons, a sun, moon, and the 24 hour cycle.
Due to the presence of magic within and outside these bubbles however, a peculiar phenomenon in those with a large number of inhabitants had been observed: the formation of a planar will.
The solid, physical plane gained its own consciousness, a selfish, infantile awareness of itself, formed from every grain of sand, strand of grass, elementium particle, and of course, collective minds of its inhabitants.
It wasn't intelligent and cunning like a human, but like a baby, it had things it liked and disliked.
When it encountered something it liked—something that would ensure its continued existence or make it stronger—it would throw its full support behind said thing.
If the case was the opposite, it would withdraw from the perpetrator and incite the plane natives to attack and destroy it, or use its control of the laws that governed the world to expel it.
Greem of course knew about the existence of this pervasive consciousness, and he'd often wondered if it could read his thoughts about the future. Its future.
His benefactor had neglected to mention anything about this.
Whatever the case, the planar consciousness seemed happy to help him advance. That meant he was in its good graces. A fact that came with its own complications, but that was a problem for another time.
With his meta knowledge, Greem knew something like this might happen, but he'd underestimated what coming into contact with such a vast and powerful existence entailed.
While the hands molding his cells into forms able to generate more intense lifeforce and withstand the ordeal his body was experiencing were incomparably tiny, following them back to their source nearly short-circuited his mind.
The experience felt eerily similar to the description physicists provided for a human hovering close to a black hole.
Only in this case, he wasn't being sucked in or experiencing time in a weird way, he was just… still, gazing upon and basking in the infinite size, majesty, and wickedness of the planar will.
He didn't know how long he was gone, but when he returned to his body, he immediately panicked. He was supposed to be focused on regenerating the damage his body accrued.
However he soon calmed down upon realizing he could think. That meant his brain was intact. And if it was, that meant—
A quick once over of his innards, bones, and muscles later, he found them no longer suffering under the assault of the heat. His goal had been accomplished.
Everything had grown tougher.
His organs no longer boiled, his skeleton and muscles had grown larger and no longer had to resist the pervasive heat, his strengthened forcefield now more than up to the task.
He could also feel his skin and eyes slowly regrowing, the latter in particular confirming that his Physique had indeed crossed the near-insurmountable barrier and entered the realm of First Grade.
He wanted to take active control of the regeneration and speed it up, making this joyous moment complete. But he could still feel the planar will and its subtle but insistent nudges.
It was directing him to unfurl his Spirit and dunk it into the lava ocean.
Seeing as he was still near it, doing that was as easy as pie… or it should have been.
Unlike his body where he didn't feel an ounce of pain from the horrors he just subjected it to, Greem couldn't "turn off" the pain receptors for his soul.
He would have to endure the pain of his deepest self being immolated for the entire duration of its advancement.
The planar will nudged him again, letting him know that the time window to do this was winding down quickly. He had to advance his Spirit to match his body or else he'd experience a backlash and have immense difficulty controlling his improved Physique.
Having already planned for this eventuality, he didn't need to be told this.
Regarding the advancement of his Physique, he was originally fearful of the heat overpowering his regeneration. But with his soul, it was the expected agony that gave him pause.
What did it feel like to have your soul burn?
He was about to find out.
Gritting his teeth, he focused on the cool storage ring around his thick finger, retrieved multiple vials containing various substances and potions, and knocked them all back in quick succession.
Immediately they entered his mouth and went down his throat, they dispersed into mists of various colors and rushed into his mental domain.
Wishing he'd bought more of the damned items, he extended his Spirit from his forehead, gathering and compressing the total amount into one tendril before plunging it into the molten ocean.
Under the guidance of an unseen force, the raw and potent fire elementium rushed along the Spirit tentacle into his soul, burning everything along the way and setting it aflame.
Greem screamed his lungs out and began to roll about in a violent manner, the intensity of his voice and erratic, power filled-movements shaking the air around him.
Ordinary people would have had their eardrums burst from being in his vicinity.
Just like his body, the burnt parts of his soul were being quickly repaired and replaced by the various Spirit mending and recovery items he ingested.
They kept his soul from being completely incinerated, using the same method of balanced death and rebirth to evolve it to a higher form.
Nothing he did could ease the pain that came with this.
And to make matters worse, his unstable movements led him directly to the very edge of the lava ocean, where he tripped on a rock and fell right into it.
His large stature barely made a splash when he impacted the surface and began to sink. He kept screaming through all this, seemingly oblivious of his predicament.
Silence and calm reigned once more when his head disappeared under the molten waves.
☀☀☀
Drifting atop the lava ocean, a small, rocky island serving as a makeshift boat carried seven Molten Giants along their patrol route.
These massive rockmen milled about the island, tossing the diamonds, crystals and ores emitting elementium ripples they scooped up from the lava sea onto the pile they'd already gathered.
They bore great similarity to the Guardians of Flames Greem encountered.
Their tall and humanoid, three to four meter tall bodies consisted of incomparably hard rock and tough metals. Cracks filled their intrepid forms, the light of molten lava and flames peeking through.
Unlike humans who had symmetrical facial structures, these molten giants had haphazard and uneven rock depressions and formations for faces.
For eyes, they had deep sockets where fiery magical gemstones had been slotted in. Their noses and ears had the appearances of black beehives, and their mouths were a simple ragged, molten line that went across their faces like a certain green haired lunatic.
To preserve the sanctity of their home from intruders and prevent said people from taking the resources gifted by the Flaming Ocean, the elders of the molten giants assigned these patrol tasks to the adults and juveniles.
On this "battleship" for instance, there were five juveniles (Pseudo Adepts) and two adults (First Grade), the main differences between them being the red flames from the former and the golden ones from the latter.
They had been assigned their own stretch of the endless ocean and were supposed to deal with anyone not supposed to be here.
To make their work easier, they had chased all the low level creatures from this core region, hoping that their numbers and extremely hostile nature would deter or outright stop anyone from reaching their holy land.
Too bad for them that a very determined someone managed to breach this blockade and arrive anyway.
As they steered the ship and did some occasional harvesting from the lava sea, a howl they all recognised as a human's cut through the dull silence and drew their attention.
The adults quickly took control of the landmass and directed it towards the source, the pain and agony in the screams becoming apparent the closer they got
Being intelligent creatures, the molten giants could tell that the intruder had been met with some kind of misfortune, probably one related to the high temperatures of their world.
Glad for his suffering and eager to remove him from their holy land, the giants ignored everything in their way and even smashed through a few smaller islands to reach the intruder.
By the time they arrived though, the howls had ceased, and there was no one in sight.
Stopping the ship near the bank where Greem sat to advance, the adults disembarked, sniffing their air as their heavy footsteps banged on the rocky ground. "It's definitely a human. Arghol, we need to track him. Now!"
Standing at the exact spot where Greem tripped and fell into the ocean, the giant named Arghol scanned the surroundings and the portion of the lava ocean in front of him with his innate fire elementium senses.
"I don't think that's necessary. His scent ends here, in the ocean. Those screams were real. He was definitely burning, which means he's probably dead by now."
"That may be true. But we should still inform the elders. What if someone more prepared arrives? I'll take two of the little ones and patrol the known entrances."
"Hm, okay. I'll go back and see the elders."
The group then split up and parted ways, certain that the intruder had died and become part of the great Flaming Ocean.
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---End of Volume One: Apprentice---