Yeah. I was wrong about thinking it was going to be a smooth ten years. In fact, it probably wouldn’t be rough, but absolute hell.
To my surprise, Master woke me up at 3 A.M. each morning before the crickets were chirping and forced me to sprint in the forest at top speed for a full hour. It was…out of my comfort zone on the first day and I was still bleary from being awake so early, so the run resulted in me crashing into trees four times plus the addition of being so exhausted I couldn’t move a limb.
After that, I could enjoy a decent breakfast of mushroom stew before being dragged to work on “fundamentals” for eight hours straight. Those fundamentals included continuous one-handed pushups, planks, pull-ups, sword swings, and traversing the entire five mile radius while carrying large jugs of water. I don’t even want to talk about how I threw up my entire breakfast within the first hour of training on the first day and passed out three times in the second hour.
Lunch was usually a nice chunk of meat and herbal vegetables along with fresh bread to prepare me for the seven hours of mana training ahead. I would meditate, circulate my mana in my mana veins, and then use mana to swing swords. It might sound easy, but I would almost faint of mana depletion every day.
“So, what do you think? Have you gotten stronger?” Master asked, grinning.
I nodded, “Yes, sir.”
We were standing on a lakeside, inhaling the fragrant smell of blossoms in the wind. It was spring again, so the weather was finally getting warmer after a frigid winter. I gazed at my reflection. A lot had changed in the last four years. For one, I was now ten years old, well, my mind was thirty-two years old, but my child body was now ten. My shoulders were broader and I had grown a couple inches now. My brown hair had grown out and now reached my shoulders even after cutting it when I was eight. Dark blue eyes now looked back at me instead of black ones, and new clothes fitted my body. Somehow, the aura I got when I looked at myself had changed also.
“What do you think? The deal was quite worth it, eh, Lupus?” Master smirked playfully.
“Yes, sir.” I replied monotonously.
Master crossed his arms and pouted, “You’re no fun.”
I stayed silent as Master finished his gig and got serious, saying, “Lupus, you have now reached about what I’d call ‘capable’, but you know what my expectations are, right?”
“Invincible, sir.” I answered without hesitation.
“Right, so the first step is to become strong, and to do that, you need a concept to follow.” Master said, summoning some green-glowing dirt in his hands and swirling it around like sand.
“What is a ‘concept’, sir?” I asked, glancing at the stirring dirt idly. I learned that Master could manipulate earth elements over the course of my training.
Master split the dirt into thousands of micro-sized pieces, “A concept is just a concept, disciple, but it’s also the strongest thing in the world.”
I tilted my head, not following Master’s words, so Master continued, “Let me clarify. A concept is the most powerful power in the world to the person who wields it. My concept is ‘nature’, so I use nature as a weapon. Think of it as merging with the concept.”
“So how do I acquire this concept, sir?” I asked as Master flattened his dirt with one clap of his hands.
“You believe, of course,” Master grinned, “You believe that that thing is the most powerful thing in the world, Lupus.”
Oh. So it was something like the Gift back in Koqnia. You had to put your faith into a power so you could be granted that power by the gods. It had evolved, but it was fundamentally the same thing as this idea of a concept.
“So how do get started, sir?” I questioned uncertainly. Back in Koqnia, a ceremony was held for each giving of a Gift monthly, so I wasn’t too sure about it.
Master raised his finger and tapped his head, “You use your mana to become faithful in it. Go on, start now. Let’s see how far you can get.”
I nodded and settled into a lotus pose. My mana core had dispersed under Master’s unique guidance of having smaller but more cores throughout the body for faster circulation and more efficient usage. I took a deep breath and sunk deep into thought. What was the most powerful power in the world? Flames? Death? Freedom? No…. But wait, I knew it now.
The most powerful power was the one dragging you down, no matter where you were. It could work for or against you, like any power. I knew it from my last life, as well as my current one. It was restraints. They could bind you to anything, life, death, pain, you name it. Now I needed to make it mine. That was the only way I could cope with restraints. I needed to dominate them, or else it wouldn’t truly be mine.
I visualized it in every particle of mana that flowed in my body. Soon, every limb felt like it was on fire and my brain was aching with every command it issued to my body. However, I could feel it. The shackles were almost mine. Almost. I was an inch away from that great power.
The leaves shook and the ground trembled. The world knew it. A new existence had entered the show.
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