“… I overdid it,” Miles muttered. When he’d gleefully let the amplifying array drink his mana, he hadn’t cared how much he fed it. He hadn’t accounted for his malice toward Ben saturating that mana and guiding what came next.Miles had barely corralled his mana back into himself, and thankfully he had, or else Lakeward would have been gone. He wondered if the key artifact had caused the severe error, and he hoped that was the case. He would find out soon enough.Miles took a step toward the door and froze when he saw the room. It was barren.Ben and company had left plenty of minor magical artifacts, but his onslaught when he destroyed the cage erased them all.This doesn’t bode well.He quickly went down the stairs and saw the unconscious bodies on the second floor gone, and the same on the first. He frowned as he looked around for any signs of any remains. It was the first instance of him taking lives since he had woken, even if unintentional. But he felt little pity. Everything was fair game the moment Ben used the key artifact.Ben and his partners must have been on the first floor before the amplification array shattered the cage, and that’s where he searched, and stopped at a tiny golden glint.He bent and picked up a small chunk from the key artifact that had successfully imprisoned him for a few minutes. It was a miracle any part of it survived, since it seemed his raw mana had targeted the entire pick-pocketing ring and everything even remotely magical with the intention to reduce them to molecules.Miles hadn’t lost such control in nearly a decade, when he first dabbled in manipulating raw mana in earnest when he was twenty years old.He placed the piece of the broken key in his storage pouch.I’ll study it later. It should have interesting applications elsewhere.Miles was about to exit the building when he recalled what Ben had said: he looked like an undead, (...)