The three of them made their way to the empty, reinforced room that Beth was pretty sure was meant as a training room. They would all be able to do their fifth rebirths there without anyone else watching in or interfering. Beth took out the materials when they got into the room, passing the stuff Sera and Blood were missing to them. The materials had cost quite a pretty penny, almost four mithril coins to buy the bits they were missing, which definitely made Beth feel the pain, even if she still had around two orichalcum in savings.

The three of them sat on the floor, though they left a decent bit of space between them, as this rebirth could be a little more…exciting than previous rebirths. It wouldn't matter that they were in the same room, but being too close might cause what happened with one of them to disturb one of the others. The main thing they were worried about was a loss of concentration or interruption, though that would turn out not to matter nearly as much as they thought.

Once they had sat and had all their materials arranged, they let the process start, getting ready to plunge from level two hundred and eighty back to level one. It wouldn't be as big of a shock this time as previous times as their base stats were now into the four figures, so they would be going from the three, four, or five thousand mark in a stat to the one or two thousand mark. That would make adjusting to their newfound power, or loss of power, quite easy, and they would earn quite a bit of stats as they burned through the easy early levels, able to level to one hundred rather quickly.

All three started the process and started focusing on the sensations, but it was a bit different for this one. As soon as Beth had selected to undergo the rebirth, she was presented with a new screen, one she had been expecting, and one she took advantage of. She wasn't sure if the other two were going to select this, or make a serious attempt at it, but she was fully planning on utilizing the opportunity to its fullest. When she agreed, she was given a moment to enter a state of deep mediation before being partially isolated from what was going on around her.

She was then given a view of herself as if she was looking at a medical readout or advanced diagnostic scan. This was the little bit of help that the Path gave people at the fifth rebirth to give them one chance to excel. Beth had to split her focus more than a little, something her high-tier meditation skill aided her with quite well. She was focused on her body, on observing the diagnostic model, and on diving into the bundles of memories left in her head. She had an advantage here, but not a massive one, and she was determined to exploit that advantage for all it was worth.

She started with a very brief skim through Liveria's memories, compiling a bit of data, some of which she had seen before, and making sure she knew what Liveria had done and thought. After that, she focused heavily inward, looking at her own body, using both her meditation skill and healing skill to examine herself. She made sure she was in absolutely tip-top shape before doing anything, finding no problems with even a single cell in her body. She gave the diagnostic scanner one last quick glance before diving in, starting a work that might take a few minutes, or might take days.

Beth was collating a whole ton of information from so many sources it was almost dizzying, but she had a very good idea of what she wanted to do. The assistance from the Path showed the status of her body and it helped calm and slightly boost the surrounding mana, though the inside of Beth's gate was already quite dense, so the slight boost was negligible. She took a final breath before starting with a small test, concentrating on the cells in her left hand, she created a grid of runes around each cell, seventeen runes per cell. The runes locked her mana into the cell as well as allowed the mana to flow through the cell, and at a rate much higher than the cells naturally allowed.

She was glad she had started with just a small part of her hand as she created the runes, as it felt as if her hand had been shoved into molten metal while a powerful electric current was blasting through it. That was given the fact her Pain Tolerance was already at Gold[9]. If it wasn't at such a monstrous level, she couldn't imagine being able to bear what carving the runes into her flesh was doing to her. Still, she gritted her teeth and persisted, carving the runes she had developed around every cell. Luckily, now having the patterns in her mind and having tested them, she could imprint not just one, but hundreds of thousands of cells at once, the runework shaping up at the speed of thought. Of course, the faster she went with the runes, the greater the pain, but pain was an old, familiar ally at this point. She ignored what the act was doing to her, in terms of pain and agony, and continued, filling her left hand with runes, though they were so small each of her cells seemed gigantic by comparison.

Even at that size, she was being rather sloppy, but she just didn't feel she had the skills or precision to try something more daring. She could, if she had pushed herself, carved runes around or even into the molecules of her body, which would have made her current runes look like planets compared to a microchip. That was a bit extreme for what she wanted, and even with her 'sloppy' runes, she estimated the absolute worst she was going to make was a strong Silver Mana Physique. If she did what she intended, and it worked how she wanted, she was going to make a Gold Mana Physique.

She continued carving the runes into the space within her body for one minute, five minutes, ten minutes. Eventually, she was finished…with her left hand. Now, just another ninety-six percent of her total body mass to go and she would be done. She couldn't stop or even slow down, as losing the momentum during creating a Mana Physique was more than just annoying, it would break the entire process. That was one of the two most common ways to fail, to slow too much or stop to rest and have the partially built Physique collapse. It was always injurious, and could even be fatal, so it wasn't something she wanted to happen. The other common way to fail, that she would have to wait to the end to see if she dodged, was to come up with a shoddy or incongruous design for the runes and rune placement. That would lead to the Mana Physique not even reaching Copper in terms of level, and that was the minimum for a Physique to exist. Such a thing was painful, as the Path dissolved all the carved runes away on the failure, but it didn't break them like happened during an incomplete attempt, so it was not nearly as dangerous.

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Knowing that she couldn't stop, or even slow down, she kept going up her left arm, grabbing hundreds or thousands of cells at a time and working the runes around them. Part of the set she had come up with linked each set to the sets around them, meaning she didn't need to specifically build paths through her body; the entire network was a path, every cell in her body acting as a highway for mana. She grunted and hissed in pain as the bones of her forearm were cracked apart by the mana seeping in and the runes reprogramming her body at a fundamental level. The bones knitted back together just as fast as they cracked, causing an insane level of pain that made her quietly curse. She wouldn't know until the end, but everything she was doing, including her grunting and cursing, was isolated by the Path while she built her Mana Physique.

Her arm felt like it took a hundred hours, though she really got up to her shoulder in less than thirty minutes. That was where the real fun, and danger, started, as she would have to incorporate her heart into the system she was building for her Mana Physique. She worked around it for a few minutes, finishing her shoulder and working on her spine, which was horrifically agonizing. Once again, she reached a level of pain she had never felt before, putting everything, from the first serious fight she had had with a Wayfarer, to the elixirs, to the rebuilding of her body the titan's device had done to shame. Of course, anything touching nerves was going to be a tricky business, and immensely painful, but that was the point where she went from swearing to screaming.

Even then, she didn't stop, finishing her spine and starting on the rest of her chest, other than her heart and lungs. Every single cell in her entire body had to be incorporated in this first go or else it would fail, so she had to do her skin, muscles, fat cells, nerves, various tissues for her organs, and even the roots of her hair. She saved her lungs for second to last as, considering she was still essentially a baseline human, she had two of those and one stopping would be scary and painful, but not exactly fatal. She had learned as she went, as well, as she was getting to the point where she was imprinting more than a million cells at a time and was doing it two hundred or more times a second, meaning she was imprinting two hundred million cells a second and still accelerating.

While that pace was quite fast, she had trillions of cells to work on and at this point had been going for hours just to get her left arm and most of her chest. She finished her right lung, her breathing only having been slightly interrupted twice while the lung had ceased functioning. She moved on to her left lung, finishing out everything in her chest except for her heart. It was just slightly amusing to her that she had to go through both of her breasts and rebuild them, though the pain really took most of the amusement out of it. She then took a deep breath, finding it much easier and cleaner with her newly improved lungs, before starting to rapidly lock the runes around the cells in her heart. She felt the organ stutter and judder, adding on even more pain on top of the pain of carving the runes into her body, but she persisted. When she was more than halfway done, her heart stopped, beating erratically and rapidly several times before ceasing to beat entirely.

Beth didn't panic, though she would have loved to, but instead continued to carve over the cells while sending a blast of mana into her heart to shock it back into function. She failed the first time and tried again, this time squeezing and relaxing the muscle with mana, forcibly restarting the beating, succeeding more through luck than skill. She was more than two-thirds of the way done with the organ now and that was enough to stop anymore unfortunate events, though it was still a little shuddery until the end.

She wasn't done at that, of course, but had to move on to the rest of her torso, meaning her abdomen. She had to go over everything, including all parts of her digestive system and reproductive system, leaving not a single cell out of the webwork she was building. She was still speeding up without sacrificing a bit of quality, and still increasing in the amount of pain she had to endure as she went. Her guts took even longer than her chest, but only because she had to jump from organ to organ and there were more organs as well as skin, muscle, and fat. When she was finally finishing all of that, she still had four places to go and decided that her right arm was next.

It was remarkable to move her focus from by her right hip to her right shoulder, there being no time delay at all, her mental 'eye' shooting through her body instantly. She had already done her right shoulder and couldn't afford to even slow down, so she didn't pause at all, leaving a gap of not even a hundredth of a second between moving from her hip to working on her arm. The arm was simpler and easier than her torso, by quite a bit, and her speed was far faster now. She completed her right arm with far more ease than she had her left, snapping her focus back down to her hips instantly as soon as she was done.

She worked on her legs next, starting with the right and then moving on to the left. Her legs were larger than her arms, of course, but they were still simpler than her torso, so they went by just as quick if not quicker. She was at the point where she was now doing multiple billions of cells per second, so each leg took about ten minutes to get done. She had been working on her Mana Physique for several hours at this point and had saved the best for last, which was a bit of a worry. She started with her neck, of course, doing everything there before moving up to her head, linking her sensory organs one-by-one before taking care of her skin, skull, hair follicles, and the rest of her flesh. That left just one last thing.

Her brain was the scary part, as the mana could interrupt it just like her heart. It was almost the opposite here, as she had to go slowly and carefully, to an extent. Different areas of her brain would cause different issues, though she was thankfully able to force herself through the pain and disorientation to finish the work. Her senses blurred multiple times, and her concentration slipped at the very end, but she managed to hang on by sheer grit of will, likely relying on the strength of her soul to keep focused for those critical two seconds where her mind went totally blank and complete her Mana Physique.

Mana Physique construction detected.

Analyzing Mana Physique construction.

Analysis in progress…

Analysis in progress…

Analysis in progress…

Analysis Complete.

Mana Physique identified.

True Flame Mana Physique[Platinum] acquired.

All the time, effort, and pain were more than worth it. Beth couldn't help cackling out loud, sounding like a mental case as she laughed and laughed. A Platinum Mana Physique was so good it was almost unheard of, and her use of the wisdom from Liveria in how to construct the runes and link them clearly had an influence, with her body being one of True Flame. She looked at the description of the Mana Physique to see what it was.

True Flame Mana Physique[Platinum]

{This Mana Physique has control over the true essence of all flames. Regardless of current skills, the wielder is nigh immune to fire damage and can exert their will to control flames. The power of flames reinforces the wielder's body to greatly increase their physical strength and toughness.}

The Mana Physique, like all physiques, didn't have exact numbers that it gave for what it increased, but they would always say what stats they were for. Talking about reinforcing physical strength and toughness meant that it would be adding a background multiplier to Beth's STR and END stats that wouldn't be represented on her page. The boosts would be noticeable, however, especially considering the level of her Mana Physique being at Platinum. The power over flames was entirely unexpected, but very welcome. Beth had already been rather resistant to fire, and now she would basically be immune to it. That would be handy, even more so with a dragon as a life partner.

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