The radiation dissipated like morning fog.

What remained of the street was unrecognizable. Craters pockmarked the concrete. Buildings on either side had lost their front walls—exposing gutted interiors, collapsed ceilings, furniture reduced to splinters. The warehouse where Kael and Sage had fought for their lives now sported a massive hole in its roof, debris scattered across a hundred-meter radius.

The crater where he’d stood still glowed faintly orange at the edges—residual heat from a blast that had hit with the force of a Mana Heart Rank 4 cultivator’s full-powered attack.

Kael sat on a chunk of broken wall.

Miss Beauty stood in the center of the devastation, arms crossed, green eyes scanning the ruins with the casual disinterest of someone surveying a minor inconvenience.

"You wasted too much energy."

Kael blinked.

"What?"

"I mean your little attack that uses gravity." She didn’t look at him. "That attack you used on the Rank 9. You poured everything into it. One shot. All your remaining mana. For a result that should have cost you a third of what you spent."

Kael opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Miss Beauty finally turned. Her green mask was unreadable, but her voice carried something he hadn’t heard before. Not anger. Not mockery.

Annoyance. Genuine annoyance.

"With the mana you wasted on that single attack, you could have fired at least three similar. Maybe four if you had any idea what you were doing." She tilted her head. "Do you have any idea what you’re doing?"

Kael frowned. "I killed him."

Her voice sharpened. "Do you know how much mana I have right now?"

"How would I—"

"Seventy percent." She held up a hand. "Seventy percent of your total reserves. I’m a Mana Heart Rank 3 cultivator, and my usable mana sits at seventy percent of what you—a Foundation Establishment Rank 4—can access."

Kael stared at her with a grin.

"Well, that’s convenient for me."

She dropped her hand. "You have more raw mana than I do. Significantly more. Your core is something I’ve never seen before—dense in ways that shouldn’t exist at your cultivation level. But raw mana without control is just noise. You’re screaming when you should be whispering."

Kael pushed himself off the rubble. His legs wobbled. He locked his knees. "Miss Beauty?".

"Stop calling me that." Her voice cracked like a whip. "My name is Lyra."

Lyra.

Kael filed it away.

"Lyra, then. With all due respect, I’ve been cultivating for—"

"Four years. Maybe five. I can tell." She stepped closer. "Your mana control is sloppy. Not terrible—better than most of your peers, I’d guess. But most of your peers aren’t worth comparing yourself to."

She raised one finger.

"When you form a technique, how much mana leaks from the construct before it stabilizes?"

Kael hesitated. "I don’t... I don’t measure that."

"Thirty percent." She answered her own question. "Approximately thirty percent of the mana you channel into any technique dissipates before the technique fully forms. Heat loss. Ambient dispersion. Structural instability in the energy matrix. Call it what you want—it’s waste."

"That’s normal—"

"It’s common. Not the same thing." A second finger rose. "When you fire a technique, how much energy travels in directions other than your intended target?"

Kael said nothing.

"Fifteen percent. Maybe twenty on a bad day. Your lightning fangs are the worst offenders—they scatter energy in a cone pattern when they should be focused beams. Gravity manipulation is slightly better, but still leagues below efficient."

Third finger.

"And when you maintain a technique—like that realm you created—how much mana drains per second just to keep it stable?"

Kael’s jaw tightened as he thought "Am I been lectured? And was she watching my fight in the domain all along?"

"More than it should," Lyra said. "Much more. Your bounded field was impressive in scope but atrocious in execution. You were hemorrhaging mana the entire time it was active. If you’d been even moderately efficient, you could have maintained it for a longer duration instead of minutes."

She lowered her hand.

"Raw power without control is a hammer swinging at mosquitoes. You’ll hit some of them. You’ll destroy everything around them. But you’ll exhaust yourself long before the job is done." Her green eyes studied him. "Do you understand?"

Kael was quiet for a long moment.

His mind ran the calculations. Thirty percent leakage on formation. Fifteen to twenty percent scatter on discharge. Unknown but significant drain on maintenance.

That meant for every hundred units of mana he channeled, only forty to fifty actually did what he wanted.

Fifty percent efficiency.

Less than half. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

"I waste more than I use," he said slowly.

"Yes."

"Despite having more raw mana than a Mana Heart cultivator."

"Yes."

"And you don’t."

Lyra’s eyes glinted behind her mask.

"My loss is under one percent."

Kael’s breath caught.

One percent.

Not thirty. Not fifteen. Not even five.

One.

"That’s not possible," he whispered.

"It’s possible with the right bloodline." She tapped the area near her eyes—the green irises that had seemed slightly off since the first moment he’d seen them. "My eyes don’t just perceive mana. They optimize it. Every technique I form, every attack I channel, every construct I maintain—my bloodline eliminates waste at the fundamental level. Near-zero leakage. Near-zero scatter. Near-zero maintenance drain."

"That’s—"

"Unfair? Perhaps. But it’s also trained. The bloodline gives me the potential. Decades of practice made it real. You don’t have my eyes, but you could still reduce your waste significantly if you stopped relying on brute force and started paying attention to what your mana is actually doing."

She turned away.

"Think about it."

Kael stood in the ruins.

And all he could think was:

Fifty percent. I’m operating at fifty percent efficiency.

If I could double that—if I could even reach seventy—

He’d be unstoppable.

Not eventually. Now.

The System pulsed quietly in the back of his mind. It had been silent through the entire conversation—unusual for something that normally couldn’t shut up.

Efficiency optimization protocols available, it said. Requires dedicated training time. Estimated improvement timeline: six to twelve months for measurable results.

Noted.

Kael looked up.

Lyra was walking toward the warehouse. Her back was to him.

"Lyra."

She paused.

"Why did you let Seraphine go?"

Silence stretched between them. The wind picked up—cold, carrying the smell of smoke and burned meat across the ruined street.

Then Lyra’s head turned slightly. Just enough for Kael to see the edge of her mask. The glint of her green eye.

And something else.

A smirk.

He couldn’t see most of her face—the mask covered everything from the nose down—but the crinkle at the corner of her eye, the slight tilt of her head, the way her shoulder shifted—

She was smirking.

"I placed a tracker on her during our battle," Lyra said. The word battle dripped with something between amusement and contempt. "She’ll lead me directly to the person in charge of this operation."

She resumed walking.

"Clean up your mess, Kael."

Her figure disappeared into the warehouse.

Kael stood alone in the devastation.

A tracker. She’d placed a tracker on a Mana Heart cultivator while simultaneously beating her half to death.

He looked down at his hands.

Everything hurt.

But somewhere beneath the pain and the exhaustion and the sheer absurdity of the night, something else burned.

Determination.

He had more power than almost anyone at his cultivation level. More than Mana Heart cultivators, according to Lyra. And he was wasting half of it.

That ended.

Starting now.