In much the same way that people knew that they had blood vessels but couldn't actually feel any of them, before today, Greg had been aware that his mana pathways were slowly developing but had never actually felt the actual process. That changed as he got to feel firsthand new mana pathways branch out from the mana pathways around his eyes. The newly developed pathways reached into and connected to other preexisting pathways that were already present within the eyes. What the result of this was going to be, Greg couldn't tell. He, however, paid close attention ready to report everything once he was finally ousted from this body. The merging of the eyes to the mana circuit of the rest of the body seemed like it was very important to the entity, seeing as almost ninety percent of the mana being drained from the purple crystal was being directed to this task. The being taking him over was not only creating but also modifying the already existing ones, all in a matter of moments. A task that had taken the healer months of constant, cumulative effort to achieve was being replicated in mere moments.
The being was halfway through the modifications when Greg felt his right eye be pulled open. Greg wanted to immediately look for his teacher and seek some kind of help from her. He was aware of the fact that his teacher would probably not be able to contend with whatever vestige of the being was still left. Still, a drowning man will clutch at straws, he was desperate for a way out of this predicament. Unfortunately for Greg, control of his own body had already been taken away from him. Still, there were only two individuals in the cave, so Greg wasn't too surprised when the being chose to turn its gaze to the healer.
Greg reeled, his mind feeling like it had been punched from the volume of information that flowed into his mind with one simple glance. After his mind had had a few seconds to parse out the information it was receiving, Greg was left feeling a bit sick and guilty. If one was stripped completely naked and put on display, it still wouldn't be as invasive as the single glance that the being had sent the healer. Like the layers of an onion being pulled back, the being had calmly gone over every aspect of the healer, and worse than that, he'd assigned a certain value to everything he saw. There weren't any words or numbers attached to any of what he was looking at, they all just glowed with different intensity and colors. Anything that didn't glow at all was deemed to be completely worthless.
On the healer's first layer, were her clothes, her face her figure, and any outwardly visible item or aspect of the healer. All of them were tagged with the grey color which was the lowest value designation from what Greg was picking up from the being. On the next layer, much to Greg's shock, he found himself looking at his teacher's internals. From her brain, heart, liver, to her very bones, it was all there, and much to Greg's discomfort, each of them was also assigned a value. Her brain bore the most value, followed, unexpectedly enough, by her liver! All, of them, however, were still in various shades of Grey. A fact that didn't really shock Greg all that much. To a being at the level of the one that had reincarnated him and the one currently trying to take him over, a mortal body, even a tier-seven one, was probably of very little value.
But while the being didn't seem to value much that he saw, Greg had one of his long-standing questions answered in this most unexpected of ways. He couldn't help but marvel at the ingenuity of the healer even as he counted them. Though he'd always respected her privacy and never asked, he'd always wondered where the healer hid her storage rings or whatever storage device it was that she used. There were nine in total, one around her radius, the other around her ulna on each of her two forearms, for a total of four. Two around each of her femurs, for another four, and the final around the base of her spine. The design of her storage rings seemed to be of far higher intricate make compared to his low-grade tier-one storage rings. The being's eyes, however, still recognized them as storage devices.
It suddenly clicked in Greg's mind that he'd been limited in his thinking over the form of the ring as opposed to its function. Because it was a ring, he'd locked himself into thinking that it could only be around his fingers. But even if he held it between his fingers, he'd still be able to access what was within the ring if he supplied it with mana. If one took away the name 'ring', then the storage rings were just bands of metal that could be placed anywhere, visible or hidden. Given that she probably got these rings long before she was betrayed by her supposed friends, she must have still been very powerful. And if she could open up the obsidian earthmover in her current state, it would have been trivially easy for her to open up her own body back then. This was probably the only reason that his teacher didn't lose everything when she was betrayed. Greg didn't know how big each ring was, but he doubted that a seventh-tier mage would have had low-tier storage rings. His teacher carried her wealth wherever she went.
Her teacher's internals disappeared and for a second, Greg wasn't sure what he was looking at. When it finally clicked, however, Greg couldn't help the horror he felt. His teacher had been open about the fact that her mana pathways had been damaged. Greg, however, had never even in his worst estimations of the damage come anywhere close to how bad it truly was. The being had turned his gaze to his teacher's spirit body and from the several black spots with zero glow that Greg could see, it was nothing short of a miracle that his teacher could even cast a simple spell, let alone match a third-tier mage.
Just below her navel, in her spirit body, there sat a clear orb that Greg immediately recognized as her mana core. Several cracks ran all across the surface of the mana core. Some ran deep enough that Greg feared that a small nudge would be all that was needed for the thing to shatter. Greg could also see what to the being's eyes appeared as some sort of liquid inside the orb. It didn't take that big a leap of logic to realize that this was the mana held inside the core. What left Greg figuratively pressing his lips together in consternation was the fact that the core only seemed capable of holding about ten percent of what it should be capable of. Any mana collected beyond that seemed to vanish through the cracks on the core.
When this layer was peeled away also, all that was left behind was a flame. A bout the size of a small bonfire, calm, stable, and... green. Everything else that Greg had seen through the gaze of the being's eyes had been various shades of grey, both bright and dull. The flame, as such, stood out starkly against the grey background. Greg wasn't sure why or how, but the flame somehow felt familiar, like he knew it personally. And given that he suspected that this was a representation of the healer's soul, he wasn't that surprised by the feeling of familiarity. Why her soul was green when everything else about her had been grey? Greg didn't know. He didn't even know whether this was a good or bad thing.
It now occurred to Greg, why the being that had reincarnated him had asked him to first increase his own mental fortitude before trying to make full use of the eyes. It had only been a second of looking and yet, he could feel a migraine developing from all the information that he'd been forced to take in in that moment. The best and worst part of it was the fact that it was as if the information had been burned into his mind. It had only been a second-long look and yet Greg could remember every last detail of what he'd just seen. From what the healer had on, to the ascending order value of each of her organs, to exactly which parts of her mana pathways were completely damaged and which parts were just in critical condition. If this was how his body felt after just a few seconds of the eyes being used at max, Greg suspected that five minutes of looking around would be all that was needed to turn his mind to mush.
When the eye turned to regard Olivia, even Greg who was divorced from his own body could feel the sharp stab of pain that coursed through him. It felt like someone had jammed a metal rod in his brain and begun to stir. When the deity-level being that reincarnated Greg into this world gave him the eyes, she had warned him not to look at beings at the level of deities lest he go blind. Greg didn't know if a primordial was a deity or not, but he was left feeling glad that Olivia's true self wasn't present, otherwise he would have almost certainly gone senile. Unlike his teacher, Olivia appeared to be a turquoise shade of blue when seen through the being's eyes. Also, unlike the healer, Olivia didn't seem to have any internal organs. Her body was like shaped clay. It was hard where it was supposed to be hard, and soft where it was supposed to, but in the end, it wasn't an actual body. As a familiar, she was pure mana taken shape, a mana construct!
She also didn't have any spirit body like normal human mages did. After all, she was an avatar of a being that was far more powerful than a ninth-tier mage, and her magic operated on different principles compared to what he'd be learning as a human mage. While a bit surprising, seeing this far into his familiar wasn't all that hard or detrimental to Greg. It's when his gaze peered into Olivia's soul that he felt like his head was about to split open. At Olivia's core, there was a small golden flame, about the size that would be produced by a candle. But while it seemed much smaller than his teacher's soul flame, Greg could feel a vast ocean of power residing in that small flame. But even more than the flame itself, Greg felt like he was peering into higher truths that his mind wasn't meant to comprehend! Just trying to understand what it was he was seeing caused the pain he was feeling to double, then triple the longer he kept at it.
