Demon's Virtue

For now, Eiro chose that it might be a better idea to take the wooden hand off. After all, as it was connected to his stump directly, it might end up doing quite a bit of damage depending on how much the young Demon would continue to grow. Jura agreed that this might be the best choice as well. He seemed to do the same thing for some young animals that he 'treated', to just go back to the places where he met them last time to track them ever once in a while, just to replace their wooden limbs with new ones.

In the end, Eiro wasn't really using his wooden hand all that much anyway except for very specific situations, so considering that everything should be pretty monotonous and boring for now, he might not even really need it. And this way he did have access to the end of the 'mana path' inside of his right hand to maybe increase the speed at which he could push mana into the ground below him, or it might open up a new method of speeding his body up for all he knew.

Either way, this was only the second time that he was moving around without anything at the end of his right arm, so he was trying to be as careful as he could be.

This Evolution business was really quite annoying, wasn't it? He couldn't wear clothes, and he couldn't use his prosthetic... How bothersome.

But for now, it didn't matter. The Imp knew the path he was walking right here like the back of his hand. Well, the back of his still existing hand. Eiro doubted that there was anything that could surprise him, except maybe a wild animal or monster, but the latter didn't appear around here much anyway, and the former became less during this season as wel.

So as he expected, Eiro made his way to the place where he planted his seed without issues, and then looked at the ground in front of him. He could still feel the mana there, and while it did dissipate a fair bit, the seed was still there with the 'shell' Eiro formed around it yesterday, so he just quickly sat down there and started doing the same thing as he did yesterday, just trying to push his mana, and with that his will, into the ground to the seed.

It was really just supposed to grow, that's all there was to it. But when Eiro was doing that, he noticed something... odd. It felt like he was pushing out far less mana than before... At the very least it didn't feel like he was getting as tired as before.

And that was just really weird, but for now, Eiro tried to ignore it and continued on like this, but roughly two hours later, he took a break. It was just really, really weird. He felt comfortable and nice here underneath the cold moon, and feeling like that usually made the Imp feel even more tired, but he was just as energetic as he was when he first got here.

In the end, it didn't feel like there was too little mana in the ground either. Maybe... Maybe it was something else? Instead of having a sudden decrease of mana he could control... His total mana maybe just went up?

It did increase a little during the last evolution as well, but this time around it just felt slightly off. The reason for that was probably that Eiro couldn't actually properly control his mana in his Lesser-Imp days anyway, so this was a completely new feeling to him. And considering that he had to use as much of his mana every day for now anyway, it probably made sense that he noticed something like this only now.

But... How much mana did he have exactly? This would probably make something like that far, far harder to grasp, wouldn't it? At the very least, he noticed it pretty early on and could concentrate on that 'expansion' from now on a bit more.

At least Eiro could tell at which point he used too much mana, just because he could gage his tiredness pretty well, so he could probably continue on doing all of this for a fair while longer than last time. He was being less hesitant now as well, so he was even putting his mana into the ground a little faster, although at some point, the more he concentrated on that amount of mana, there was something else that he was noticing.

Before, he thought the mana simply dissipated, but right now, Eiro could tell, because it was happening right in front of his face. Or rather, right underneath his bottom. The seed was pulling the mana into it. It was absorbing the mana and concentrating it inside of itself! That was perfect! Eiro didn't know why this happened, but this seemed like a really good sign!

If the mana was being absorbed, it probably meant that the seed was doing this deliberately! And that meant that things were working! This made the Imp really excited, and it finally confirmed the words that Jura already told him of everything being fine.

It wasn't like Eiro was doubting Jura or something like that, but it was still sometimes easier to believe things when you can see it happening instead of just hearing about it.

And so, Eiro quite happily continued his work and then returned home to take another hot bath. Just like yesterday, he was feeling quite slow and lethargic after spending all day in the freezing cold, so he once more simply chose to take a bath.

He had to make sure not to fall asleep in the water this time around, however, or Jura would pour the water out again. Although, now that he thought about it... Weirdly enough, the water froze really quickly then, didn't it? As the mountain of snow he put into the tub was melting, he wanted to confirm something and just took some cups of water at different stages, pouring them onto the ground outside to see what would happen.

The cold water stayed sitting there for a few moments but soon also turned into ice. The Warm water was steaming a little bit and melted some of the snow around it, but overall, it did turn into ice a bit quicker. The actually boiling hot water, however, froze before it even hit the ground. Sure, it was cold out, but wasn't that a bit quick? And the difference between the hot and cold water was incredible as well... Was there any specific reason behind that?

As Eiro was contemplating on what the reason might be, he put out the fire underneath the metal tub and sat inside without thinking much about anything. "Do hot things freeze easily? That doesn't make sense... then flames would freeze too... Then is it just so with water?" Eiro asked himself, but he really wasn't entirely sure what he should think of this. Although in the end, that shouldn't be his biggest worry.

Instead, it should be the fact that he heated the water up enough to make use of boiling water in his experiment, and then didn't wait at all to get into the tub after putting the fire out. And that meant that Eiro simply sat down inside of the boiling water. It didn't feel uncomfortable, and he didn't really think about it, so he just did it but in the end... This was not something normal, was it?

He was always good with heat, and fire never hurt him as much as normal, but even he got hurt when accidentally spilling boiling water onto his skin before.

So how could he just sit inside of it like this? Was it because of his evolution? "Last time..." Eiro muttered quietly, noticing that he didn't put the fire out when he was bathing yesterday, meaning that it probably also heated up enough to be actually boiling...

He did concentrate on the heat quite a lot then, and after that a notification appeared. He wasn't sure which, but maybe it had something to do with how he was able to stay in the boiling water? Because Eiro didn't even glimpse at the notification either and just made it disappear immediately, he couldn't use his ability to remember things like that perfectly.

That meant he just had to wait for his evolution to be over and see if anything on his status explained that change.

Either way... Somehow, boiling hot water didn't really seem all that troublesome to him. Actually, it felt pretty nice to him. Well, whatever. If it didn't hurt him and he couldn't even figure out what it was that caused this, he would have to seriously wait and see.

For now, Eiro just wanted to relax with a nice bath. And after that bath, the Imp quickly dried himself and got dressed, although he noticed again that he grew a fair bit more.

But that was something that Eiro had figured would happen anyway. The thing that surprised him more was that one of the things he expected to happen hadn't happened. His blue horns stopped growing, and instead, he had two smaller, red horns instead that grew next to them, as if slightly growing onto the blue horns.

They were thin and short so far, and it seemed like they were just slightly wrapping themselves around the blue horns, but maybe over the next few days something might change about them again.

Now there was another thing that bothered the Imp a little more, though, something that he only actually noticed when he sat down on his chair inside of the actual house while waiting for the others to wake up.

His butt really hurt. Or rather, the area where his lower back became his butt. He did sit on the cold ground all day, so maybe he wasn't completely immune to the cold and this was just something he had to deal with...

Soon after the Demon sat down, the others woke up as well and first looked at Eiro's new horns curiously, although Jura was seemingly thinking about something else. Well, he probably didn't care too much about the horns, the only use that the Imp found for them was that they looked nice, and visuals weren't necessarily the aspect of life that Jura could appreciate the most.

Maybe he was just curious about his increase in his mana-capabilities, just like the Imp himself. Either way, the Imp was pretty sure that these changes would continue at a similar pace for the next few days. And in the end, he was actually correct.