Ludger reshaped the last step without ceremony.

The stone under his boots flowed forward, widening into a small platform that jutted out over the lake like a dock carved from the cavern itself. He crouched at the edge and watched the surface for a breath, no ripples besides the slow, lazy swirl of mana beneath it.

Then he leaned down.

He scooped a little water into his palm, brought it to his nose, and inhaled.

Clean. Cold. A sharpness like mountain air and crushed mint, with a faint metallic edge that didn’t feel toxic so much as… charged.

He dipped a finger in and touched it to his tongue.

Viola’s eyes widened. “Ludger, is that a good idea?”

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t spit it out. Just rolled the taste around like a man testing wine.

“We’ll learn that in a while,” he said flatly.

Viola stared at him like he’d just admitted to eating dirt for fun. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only honest one.”

He took another small sip, slower this time.

Because despite how calm he looked, a very old memory had just crawled out of the back of his mind, one of those humiliating ones you don’t forget no matter how many years pass.

Diarrhea that had hit like a curse. The kind that made you regret every life choice, including being born. He hadn’t experienced it in decades, actual decades, back when he’d had a different body, different problems, and a much lower tolerance for stupid risks.

He had no interest in reliving that. Still… the water felt right.

Not just safe.

Useful.

The moment it slid down his throat, he felt it, mana flowing back into him like someone had opened a valve. Not a trickle. Not a slow regen.

A clean, immediate refill that made the runes under his skin hum softly, like they’d been thirsty and were now politely pretending they hadn’t been. Ludger stilled, eyes narrowing with real focus. He took a deeper drink.

His mana surged again, settling into his core with that familiar, satisfying weight, enough that the edge of fatigue he’d been carrying since the labyrinth run dulled noticeably.

He exhaled once, slow.

“…That’s good,” he muttered.

Viola blinked. “Good as in, tastes good? Or good as in you’re not dying?”

“Both.”

She made a noise of pure frustration. “Ludger.”

He straightened and flexed his fingers once, feeling how clean the mana moved now, smoother, faster, like the Meditation rune had just been given better fuel.

“It restores mana,” he said. “A lot.”

Lucius leaned forward, cautious. “How much?”

Ludger looked at the lake again, calculating. “Comparable to Aronia’s potions.”

That finally wiped the humor off Viola’s face. Aronia’s potions weren’t cheap. They weren’t common. They were the kind of resource that made battles possible and retreats optional.

Viola’s gaze snapped back to the glowing water. “You’re serious.”

Ludger nodded once. “Unfortunately.”

Luna, quiet as always, shifted her stance a fraction. Not interest. Not greed. Threat assessment. Because anything that restored mana like that wasn’t just pretty. It was a prize.

And prizes always had owners, if not people, then something worse.

Ludger didn’t trust anything that felt like a gift.

So he treated the lake like a trap until it proved otherwise.

He lifted a hand and shaped the stone again, broad, flat platforms rising out of the water in a staggered path. Not one big bridge. Multiple plates, each separated by a short gap. If something tried to come up from below, it would have to pick a target, and Ludger could collapse any single platform without dropping everyone.

He stepped out over the lake, boots landing on solid rock that hadn’t existed a second ago, and let Seismic Sense stretch wider. He scanned the cavern walls, the terraces, the ceiling vines, the ruin fragments half-swallowed by growth. 

Nothing moved. No hidden glow in the stone that suggested a mana crystal vein. No pulsing rune arrays buried in the lakebed. No weird beasts circling beneath the surface. Not even the usual signs of life that would explain why the water was saturated.

It was just… water. Impossibly clean. Impossibly dense with mana. That bothered him more than finding a monster.

Potions made sense. Potions were work, ingredients, ratios, heat, time, and the kind of careful craft that punished mistakes. Even Aronia’s best stuff had a logic to it, because it was built by hands that understood cost.

This lake didn’t look like work. It looked like a source.

Ludger stared at the shimmer under the surface, thinking.

Maybe mana potions weren’t truly “inventions.” Maybe they were imitations, people trying to bottle and replicate the effect of something natural like this, using herbs and cores and alchemy because they didn’t have access to the real thing.

A copy of a copy. A desperate attempt to steal what the world was giving away down here. He returned to the edge and waited. Not dramatically. Just… waited, letting time do what it did best, punish impatience.

His body stayed quiet.

No cramps. No heat in his gut. No sudden nausea. No warning signs. He kept his focus on the feeling inside him, ready to trigger Healing Touch the instant something went wrong. He could already picture it: purge toxins, stabilize, cleanse, repeat until he either won or learned exactly what kind of mistake he’d made.

But minutes passed. Then more. And nothing happened.

If anything, he felt better, mana steady, muscles less tight, mind sharper as if his stomach liked the water’s flavor.

Viola watched him with growing impatience. “So?”

“So nothing,” Ludger said.

Lucius exhaled like he’d been holding his breath for the last ten minutes. Luna remained still, eyes moving, always moving.

Viola stepped forward first, because of course she did. “If you start dying, I’m telling Aronia you did this to yourself.”

“Noted,” Ludger said.

She knelt and took a cautious sip. Small. Controlled. Her expression flickered, surprise, then immediate interest.

“Oh.”

Ludger raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Viola took another sip, bigger. “That’s… actually—” She stopped herself, scowling like enjoying something was a moral failure. “It’s fine.”

Lucius hesitated longer, eyes flicking between Ludger and the lake as if expecting one of them to betray him. Then he finally crouched and tasted it.

His shoulders loosened almost instantly.

He didn’t look relieved so much as… hungry. Not for the taste. For what the water represented.

Luna was last. She didn’t kneel at the edge like the others. She stepped onto one of Ludger’s platforms, crouched low, and drank with the same careful precision she used to test a weapon’s balance.

A few seconds later, her eyes narrowed slightly. Not fear. Confirmation. She stood and glanced at Ludger once. It was the closest thing she did to saying this is real. Ludger watched them all, then looked back at the lake. Four people drank from it. Four people remained standing. And the cavern stayed silent, beautiful, and utterly uninterested in explaining itself.

Which meant the explanation was either buried deeper… or waiting for them to get comfortable.

Ludger stared at the lake a little longer, then made the obvious decision.

He needed to take it home.

Not a cup. Not a polite sample. As much as he could carry without being stupid about it.

Mana like this wasn’t convenient. It was logistics. It was the difference between “we can do one more fight” and “we can do three more months before we even think about retreat.” It was the kind of resource that turned an expedition from careful to aggressive.

And they had a spider labyrinth coming up.

Spiders meant poison, swarms, attrition, exactly the kind of place where you bled mana in small, constant payments. Barriers, cleansing, bursts of movement, emergency healing. Even with Ludger’s naturally high regeneration, the problem was never whether he recovered.

It was time.

Time spent waiting was time spent being exposed. Time spent camping was time spent letting something crawl into your perimeter. Time spent resting was time the enemy used to adapt.

This water would erase that. Not completely. Not forever. But enough.

He flexed his hand, already picturing the route back, the weight limits, the containers they had, the sealing runes he could improvise. He couldn’t drain a lake, and he wasn’t arrogant enough to try. Even if he made barrels out of stone, they’d be heavy. If he used real containers, they’d be limited. If he tried to store it in a mana bag… he didn’t even know if it would stay stable in a space like that.

But “not much” wasn’t the same as “not worth it.”

Anything he brought would be a cheat code for the next run. Viola watched him, reading the shift in his expression. “You’re thinking about stealing it.”

“I’m thinking about securing a resource,” Ludger corrected.

Lucius glanced at the water, then at the stairway they’d come down. “How would you even transport it?”

Ludger’s eyes didn’t leave the lake. “Carefully.”

Luna’s gaze swept the cavern again, then settled on the platforms. “And quietly.”

Ludger nodded once, more to himself than to them.

He could already imagine the difference it would make, no waiting for mana to crawl back. No rationing every spell like it was the last coin in a purse. No sitting behind a wall while his core refilled, pretending that was strategy instead of necessity.

His regeneration was high. It always had been. But even a high regeneration rate was still a leash if you were forced to pause. This water didn’t just refill mana. It bought momentum. And momentum, in a labyrinth, was worth more than gold.

Viola’s eyes narrowed as she watched Ludger mentally stack barrels in his head.

“You know we’ll have to negotiate with Ironhand,” she said.

Ludger didn’t look away from the lake. “Why?”

“Because the labyrinth is technically theirs,” Viola replied, like the words tasted bad. “The contract. The camp. The claims. Lionsguard gets half of the resources, but they don’t own it, remember?”

Ludger finally glanced at her, expression flat. “This isn’t part of the labyrinth.”

Viola stared. “We literally crossed through the labyrinth to get here.”

“Yes,” Ludger said. “And now we’re not in it.”

“That’s not how people see it,” Viola snapped. “Don’t be greedy.”

Ludger’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. More like a warning that he was about to be annoying on purpose. “I’m not being greedy. I’m being smart.”

Viola opened her mouth, then closed it again, because he wasn’t done.

“In the first place,” Ludger continued, voice calm and utterly disrespectful toward politics, “Ironhand didn’t even reach the third section. They couldn’t. They would’ve drowned.”

Lucius, who had been quietly watching, shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t like the tone, but he couldn’t deny the logic.

Ludger gestured toward the glowing water with two fingers. “Second. This lake isn’t loot. It’s infrastructure. If we treat it like a ‘resource split,’ then we start paying rent to idiots who can’t even get here.”

Viola’s jaw tightened. “You’re going to start a war over water.”

“No,” Ludger said. “They will. I’ll just be prepared.”

Viola took a slow breath like she was trying not to throttle her little brother in front of a missing viscount. “Ludger…”

He cut her off with a slight shrug. “Also, I’m being democratic about it.”

Viola blinked. “Democratic.”

Ludger’s eyes gleamed faintly with humor. He smirked, small, sharp, and entirely punchable.

“I found it,” he said, like that settled all moral debates forever. “So it’s mine.”

Viola made a strangled noise. “That’s not democracy. That’s theft with a smile.”

“It’s merit,” Ludger corrected, still smirking. “Try it sometime.”

Luna’s gaze flicked to Viola for half a second, then away. Not sympathy. More like: You picked this family.

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