Rebirth: The Shadow Of Greed

Hirgram leaned back on the chair as it made creaky noises trying to support his body weight. When I was younger, I was still in the military as a soldier as a vanguard, some of my superior officers treated me like I was a punching bag, day in and day out.

The other manifester believe that overusing the self-healing manifest will affect the life force of the user, so they try to stay cautious and try to avoid getting injured too much.

For me, it was the same thing, every day I will try to avoid fighting with other manifesters, avoiding people who wanted to try their manifest on a living target.

Life was really painful in the military back then, we were treated as pawns, no one gave a shit about our lives, we were vanguards, meat shields. One day, after hiding from some of the soldiers, I ran to the back into the forest, I can't even remember what forest it was, but it was surrounded by a thick fog and mist. I missed a step and fell straight into a hole sliding down into a cave.

I could say I was lucky to survive, but I got even luckier when I found an ancient text, written in it was ways to build muscles and things called 'muscular regeneration'.

Apparently, the way you build muscular strength is when your muscles tear and the muscles heal themselves up building layer after layer, the same goes for the bones.

Once you fragment your bones, it will go through a process of "calcification" and make it even stronger. According to the texts, the more you repeat the process the stronger you will get.

Then it struck me, this text was made for me wasn't it? I have a <self-healing> manifest, doesn't that mean that I can expedite the process for me to build muscles?

I hid in the cave and started to train myself crazily. It was tough at the beginning, my body was in pain every day, although the healing manifest does kick in, it still takes some time to repair my body.

After 2 weeks, I realised that the time needed for me to heal up gradually shortened. After 3 months, I had a body that could easily match up with a strength and speed augmented manifester. I didn't have any problems with my stamina, those breathless moments seem like a thing of the past.

My healing manifest, from the ridiculous amount of usage, managed to be improved I went from a low-level tank power to a high-level tank power.

There is a side effect though, I began to eat more and more and that's when it dawned on me that instead of draining life force, you just have to feed your ability for it to function properly. After all that it still is a self-healing manifest but I believe that the more you use it the stronger it becomes."

Z listened with his full attention, looking straight into Hirgram's eye, he asked.

"If you don't mind me asking, how did you lose your eye? What happened next?"

"Hahaha, Let me continue the story... Yer need to be patient young'un. After half a year I finally managed to find my way back to the military base. Needless to say, the higher-ups weren't that happy with a punching bag that ditched his post.

The commander put me back into the training grounds and made used of me as a punching bag again. I stood there and took blow after blow, every hit to my body felt like an insect landing on my body.

After 5 minutes, he was upset and humiliated that he couldn't damage a punching bag. He tried to find out about my family, but I have no family, grew up in an orphanage.

I had a close friend though, he was someone I knew from the orphanage, someone who was like me who made it to the military. Of course, I didn't tell him about my friend but somehow that bastard just knew.

They sent out an order to find him and those bastards killed him in front of me on the grounds of some bullshit charge. They used his life as a means to get back at me, they showed me how worthlessness a militia was to them."

Hirgram stopped to wipe his tears that were welling up in his eyes before continuing with the story.

"It was on that day, I truly hated the nobility that bastard made me see red for the first time. He took everything I had away from me. So I ripped im' in half and threw his body aside. There were groups of people that tried to stop me and it took close to 20 commanders to pin me down.

They locked me up in the dungeon for many years, beating me up, day in and day out. My eye was taken by one of the nobles after I spat on him yer should have seen his face. If I could do it again, I would.

One day, a colonel from the Holy capital came by and took me under his wing, he didn't care that I caused problems there or how I had abused the nobility that had come. He wanted to bring me into offence to make full use of my strength. Yer know what, I took his hand and went back into the military as a free man. I trained hard and eventually became a captain. The nobility was not too happy about being disgraced you see and unfortunately, my mentor was brutally snatched away from me. I knew then, I couldn't serve in the military anymore, as long as these bastards were around no one I interacted would be safe."

"So that's when you met up with X huh?" Z asked curiously, wanting to know what happened next.

"Well that's a story for another time young'un, since you're awake, yer had better get to training. Yer got my manifest now, you had best make full use of it. After going through some intense training, the changes made to yer body will be permanent. Whether or not you have a healing manifest."

Hirgram took a swig of alcohol and laughed as he left the room.

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