I just wanted to watch TV! But now, I'm in a Fantasy World!-Chapter 71: The Harmonic Core

Thane stood before the great beast and began to slowly adjust his breathing. He was centering himself, regulating his pulse.

"Focus... This is like the Thesis Defense, my first job interview, or the first time I preached... Let’s do this!" Thane imagined that he was about to walk into a high-stakes boardroom instead of a monster-slick dungeon.

The Celestial TV activated without fanfare and appeared before them.

Yet when Thane gazed at it, there was a fierce expression on his face, not irritation, not excitement, but the kind of sharpened focus he usually reserved for crunch time, when everything else had already gone wrong, and only execution mattered.

His breathing continued to stabilize as the TV channel resolved into view.

[Discovery Wild Fantasy: Monster Core Harvesting —Episode: Giant Beast Pt. 4]

Thane didn’t say a thing as the Celestial TV immediately pivoted channels, bypassing the usual fluff and surfacing a targeted deliverable.

Libra was startled at the strange control.

"Hm? Thane didn’t even use the remote!"

Garron Duskbane appeared and gave his usual spiel introduction as he walked over a massive, gigantic serpent.

"You don’t really get much of these in the Three Kingdom region, but this one’s a beaut. Frankly speaking, as with the other Gigantic Beasts, I don’t usually mess around with them. At my current strength, I’d have to get creative, and that tends to get messy. But as I said in the previous episode, this Serpent fought a Cyclops to the death. Territorial dispute between two emerging Dungeon Cores. And the winner... was me!" Garron laughed.

"In any case, let’s begin harvesting the core of this creature!"

"Oh, so we can also harvest a Cyclops corpse. Too bad the last one didn’t have a core since it was my summon," Libra laughed, tone casual, like he was reviewing an interesting but irrelevant footnote.

But Thane didn’t reply. His eyes were locked onto the TV, his face blank, expression fully stripped of commentary.

"It’s the first time I’ve actually seen you this serious!" Libra added.

Still nothing.

Libra stepped closer, his senses flaring as a bizarre light began to gather around Thane. The air itself tightened, like a system under full resource allocation. Thane’s eyes didn’t blink.

"This...!" Libra inhaled sharply. "He’s forcing enlightenment through sheer focus alone."

Garron Duskbane drew a large blade and held it out, and Thane mirrored him.

The screen shifted to Garron’s perspective as he approached the giant serpent, and Thane moved in tandem, as if this were a synchronized workflow.

"First off, select the easiest access point to the Core without damaging the connective infrastructure. You want the serpent’s entire life source and mana flow to collapse inward. This preserves the quality of the core after all. But you already knew that if you’ve watched a few of my shows..." Garron said as he began cutting into the scale.

Thane followed every movement.

Despite the difference in size between the beasts, the Blast Serpent being noticeably smaller than Garron’s specimen, the logic translated cleanly. Thane adapted instantly, mapping scale density, vein positioning, and mana pressure like he was converting documentation from one system to another.

His actions aligned almost perfectly with Garron’s.

The first cut was shallow, deliberate. Excaliblade met resistance immediately. Even with Spirit Amplification active, Thane had to brace himself, muscles locking as he applied pressure with intent.

CRACK.

A scale split.

Mana surged outward in violent protest.

Garron’s hand moved quickly, and Thane adjusted without hesitation, altering his angle to avoid the primary vessels.

"Could it be...?" Libra murmured.

"The excitement of acquiring a Harmonic Core eclipsed everything else and forced this level of operational focus?"

Thane’s eyes were sharp, sharper than Libra had ever seen. There was no wandering thought, no internal banter.

Excaliblade hummed in his grip, responding to the density of power. Thane was pushing Supreme Perception to full utilization, no throttling, no safety buffers.

To Thane, the world changed.

The serpent’s body resolved into a living schematic. Mana vessels glowed like infrastructure lines, converging toward a singular node deep within the skull. Blood channels pulsed a dull red. Spirit traces coiled faintly, resisting consolidation.

Stroke by stroke, Thane carved pathways, redirecting mana inward instead of letting it bleed out. Spirit flowed from his hands, into the blade, and from the blade into the beast.

The serpent’s soul reacted violently. Its tremors were sharper than the ones Garron had worked on, panic rippling through its essence.

"The serpent’s soul... It’s trembling," Libra said slowly.

"Is it being sealed into the Core?"

Few in this world could execute this process cleanly. And surely, none within Velithra! Necromancers of this region understood the theory, but their sealing methodologies were different.

Thane didn’t.

He was leveraging Libra’s own power, binding the soul in place without feeding it, locking it into compliance.

He worked methodically, opening some channels, collapsing others, forcing mana toward the Core. Blood evaporated into light with each Spirit-infused cut, the serpent’s physical assets liquidated into usable energy.

Garron continued explaining the theory as they moved deeper.

"At this point, pathways differ by specimen. You’ll need to sense the magical pulse..."

"There," Thane whispered.

He acted before Garron finished, severing precisely where the mana density peaked.

He exposed the heart.

The final web of blood vessels fell away. Blood poured down uselessly, but mana diverted cleanly, obeying Thane’s intent.

The core chamber revealed itself.

It pulsed violently, a dense sphere of Power and Mana, far beyond anything Thane had handled before. Pressure bore down on him like a hostile audit.

"This is it..." Thane muttered.

The Celestial TV shut off at his will, dismissed without ceremony.

Focus held.

He raised Excaliblade.

Each vein he severed triggered panic from the sealed soul, which screamed silently as it pulled mana from the remaining organs.

The dungeon erupted in light.

The Channel room trembled, systems reacting to an unexpected escalation.

[The conditions of activating the Celestial TV’s Bonus Info have been met. Soul Preservation in progress...]

Thane did not even react to this notification as he focused on the task at hand.

The core tore free.

Light enveloped it as it fell, the TV intervening only long enough to stabilize the asset.

Thane caught it instinctively.

In his hands rested a radiant crystal, humming with overwhelming presence.

His focus collapsed.

"Hrm...? What happened?" Thane blinked.

"...What?"

Libra froze.

"That... is not possible."

"What? What’s not possible?" Thane asked, then looked down.

Memory backfilled.

The interface appeared.

This was not a Mid-Grade Core. Not High-Grade. Not even Flawless.

It was beyond documented classifications of this world that only the Celestial TV provided it as ’bonus info’.

[Divine Grade Blast Serpent Harmonic Core]

Containing the living soul of a Blast Serpent, this miracle core possesses the attributes to create a dual core of Power and Magic.

Abilities:

Scale Skin (Power Attribute) Level 1

By converting Stamina and Vitality into localized reinforcement, the user can harden selected areas of the body into serpent scales. Reduces incoming physical and hardened magical damage by 20 points. Thankfully, no Molting.

Resist Fire (Power Attribute) Level 1

By stabilizing internal heat distribution, the user mitigates fire damage by up to 10 points from flame-based attacks. Full immunity to self-generated fire effects. You may still panic when on fire, but now it is mostly emotional.

Blue Flame Wielding (Magical Attribute) Level 1

Allows the user to channel blue flames using Mana. The Core autonomously generates one Blue Fire Bolt every 20 minutes, up to a maximum of five charges, each dealing 100 fire damage to HP. HADOUKEN!

Fire Feeder (Magical Attribute)

The user can consume external heat sources using Blue Flames to replenish fire-aligned energy. Campfires, lava, and explosions are all now valid fuel inputs. Fire is no longer just dangerous; it is now part of a balanced diet.

Serpent Soul (Soul Attribute) Level 1

The sealed soul of the Blast Serpent can be summoned for three seconds, dealing 30 damage directly to the target’s HP and bypassing all defenses. The serpent appears, remembers its unresolved feelings, and expresses them violently. At least not on you.

Serpent Dominance (Soul Attribute) Level 1

Grants intimidation authority over serpents and snakes of lesser bloodlines. 30 percent chance to intimidate, 10 percent chance to control for five seconds, 1 percent chance to enslave. Basically, you’re Parseltongue. Not sure if you’d be in Slytherine, though. You’re a Hufflepuff if anything.

"..."

Thane stared at the screen.

"It... got the soul of the serpent?!"