Chapter 915: 915. Burning hear

Noah would usually avoid inscribing an item that had already gone through one round of forging.

The Elemental forging method required specific meanings for each product that he wanted to create, and fusing items that had already been inscribed usually led to a conflict of wills.

However, Noah didn't need to change the will when fusing the new center of power with his heart. He had used the same imbued higher energy to force their tissues to merge.

That was necessary to make his body consider the new organ as part of Noah's existence. He couldn't just place it there because he needed to rely on the resilience of the magical beasts to harmonize that addition.

Yet, the real harmonization would arrive after the next breakthrough of his body. Now he had to deal with the consequences of his new organ on his own.

Noah felt as if the insides of his chest had turned into scorching magma after the two organs had fused. His body had been able to endure the heat radiated by the new center of power when it wasn't part of his tissues, but it didn't seem able to do so after the second forging.

Noah fell on his knees as his consciousness gathered around his heart and tried to suppress the heatwaves. Blood fell from the wound on his chest when he crouched on the ground in a hurried attempt to contain that outcome.

The new center of power didn't have access to his circulatory system. It was part of Noah's heart, but it was separated from the four chambers of his organs.

Noah had only fused it with its tissues so that it could become part of his body. He wasn't so idiotic to put his blood in direct contact with the dark star.

However, the heat had arrived anyway, and it spread on the rest of his torso since his mental energy couldn't stop it.

Most cultivators would try to revert the process or label the experiment as a failure at that point, but Noah had faced worse repercussions in his life.

He knew that his body could take a while to adapt to such invasive modifications. After all, he had to die when he fused with a Cursed Dragon to reset the laws that held his body together.

Something similar had happened with the Forging of the Seven Hells too. Death would always loom around him whenever he performed one of his unorthodox experiments, and a simple scorching sensation wasn't the worse that had happened to him.

June had felt the urge to run toward him as soon as she saw him crouching on the ground. Still, she suppressed that instinct to give Noah enough room to operate.

She was an expert in the formation field, but Noah was messing with the anatomy of his body. That kind of organic inscriptions wasn't something that she could affect with her expertise.

Noah roared in anger, and the world around him lost its light for an instant as he released a wave of flames. His instincts had told him to disperse some heat, but the issue didn't originate from his lungs.

Trails of gray smoke came out of Noah's mouth as he gasped for air. He was starting to act as a magical beast since his mind focused on confining the heat spreading through his body.

Noah spent entire minutes in that condition. He would punch, roar, and spew flames in the hope that releasing some of his energy would help to solve the issue.

However, his body only needed time to accept that new energy.

Noah's condition slowly stabilized as time passed, and the heat became more bearable as his heart became used to its new chamber.

It soon became apparent that Noah had mistakenly taken that scorching sensation as a consequence of the fusion of the two organs. That sensation was only an instinctive reaction of his internal organs adapting to the new source of heat that had appeared inside his body.

June breathed a sigh of relief when she saw Noah calming down and sitting cross-legged to meditate. She could see through her mental energy that her lover's consciousness had let go of its tension and was merely analyzing his body now.

Noah watched his heart with his mind. His heartbeat was strong, and the addition to that organ didn't affect the normal functioning of his circulatory system.

Instead, he felt a strange power coming from the spherical chamber that had appeared on his heart.

It wasn't the gravitational pull or its temperature. Noah felt as if his entire existence was striving for something different from its current state. Something that he couldn't define yet.

'Let's see if this works,' Noah thought before moving his focus on the new center of power.

A small piece of his higher energy came out of his heart and appeared on his palm. Still, Noah's attention remained on his chest to analyze how withdrawing power from the dark star had affected its state.

Of course, Noah had tested that before fusing his heart and the new center of power. Yet, he wanted to see if something had changed after the forging.

The dark star remained stable even after it lost part of its energy. The fact that the center of power compressed it helped in maintaining a steady form.

However, Noah knew that he couldn't let it become too unstable or withdraw too much higher energy. His new organ wouldn't be able to contain the dark star if it returned to its weaker form when it was still a vast mass of rotating energy.

'I need to keep the star to optimal levels,' Noah concluded in his mind and started to withdraw small pieces of the dark star to see when it would show signs of instability.

He had yet to find a way to use it in battle but knowing its limits had the priority. Even if he developed a fighting method that made use of his higher energy, he wouldn't resort to it until he knew exactly how much density the star could lose before returning to its giant form.

It turned out that the compression of the center of power kept the dark star stable even when half of its energy had gathered on Noah's palm. That gave Noah some confidence and eased his worries.

His training and tests would take a long time if the star were to become unstable as soon as he withdrew some energy. Still, it seemed that he could act quite freely as long as he didn't go under half of it.

"It seems stable," Noah said as he reabsorbed the higher energy floating on his palm. A sudden weight landed on his chest when he did that, but that sensation disappeared in a few seconds.

June neared him after those words, and her hand went on his chest, where the wound had finally stopped bleeding.

"It's hot," She said when she placed her palm on him. "Your fourth center of power is a burning heart."