Time in the forest grove passed more swiftly than it did perhaps anywhere else in the Greater Universe.

Slowly, Xavier’s ability to be patient grew with each use of his spell. The longer the Time Alteration spell remained active, the more he saw that time truly did move outside of it. If he stared outward at the trees long enough, he could see the leaves rustled by the wind. It was another exercise in patience that Liana had given him on his second usage of the Time Alteration spell.

Without even trying, while he’d been staring at the leaves for hours within the bubble, he had gained several ranks in his Meditation skill, something which when he told Liana, the woman had simply waved it off, saying, “That can happen.”

Xavier’s doubt in the woman slowly disappeared the longer he spent with her. She had a remarkable command over time magic, to the point where he wondered how she’d ever been in danger in the first place.

Unfortunately, cooldowns could never be affected by time spells—it was, according to the woman, impossible to speed up or slow down a cooldown as spell cooldowns worked with the clock of whatever universe one was currently residing within.

Which meant he would have to wait the full length of his cooldown between every single usage of his Time Alteration spell.

Soon, Xavier learnt how to expand and contract the time bubble while it was active—something that, to his surprise, garnered him several ranks.

“Time magic spells often differ to other spells—they receive ranks when one has mastered different aspects of them, not simply because you have utilised them in combat, though combat can certainly push forward innovation,” Liana had said after he’d asked about it.

Things went on like this for a while.

With the ranks he gained, his cooldown became shorter. At first, each rank gained him half a minute. Then, when he got to Rank 20—and his cooldown had been reduced to twenty minutes from thirty—ranks began to reduce his cooldown in smaller increments.

When Xavier had asked Liana about this, she’d raised an eyebrow. “With how powerful this spell is, you didn’t expect to be using it once per minute right away, did you?”

Xavier hadn’t expected it, but he’d certainly been hoping for it.

The first few times Xavier used the spell, all Liana would do while inside the time dilation field was read her books. She read several dozen while in the bubble, until she finally closed one of the books with a snap and stared at him. “All right. Time for me to earn that favour of yours.” She raised her chin. “You said there’s more you wish for me to teach you?”

Xavier, who had been focusing his energies on speeding up time even faster within the bubble to see how that affected how long it lasted, looked over at the woman with excitement.

He explained to her the position that he was in—all the things that he had learnt, and all the things he undoubtedly missed. When he was done, Liana simply stared at him.

“How is it possible you’ve gotten this far, knowing so very little?” Liana finally asked after a long pause.

Xavier narrowed his eyes at her.

She raised her hands in a placating gesture. “I’m not meaning to be rude, but…” She trailed off, resting her hands on her knees, and gave a slight shake of the head. “You’ve been going all out, and you haven’t even scratched the surface of what you should be capable of.” A smile swept onto her face. “If you’ve gotten this far through blindly blundering around, imagine how far you’ll get after a few solid years of training.”

Xavier blinked. “Years?”

She frowned. “You didn’t expect to learn everything you needed in a few days or weeks, did you? There are gaps in your knowledge larger than some planets, Xavier Collins. I think it’s time you suffered some tutelage.” She bit her lip. “But I can only teach you so much—our skillsets only truly intersect when it comes to time magic, and there seems to be a lot more that you’re capable of doing than just that. I saw your list of spells when you shared your status. Soul reaping? Summoning spirits from the otherworld? Controlling minds? And now, altering time on top of that? Do you know how unique a spellset you’ve stumbled upon?”

Xavier smiled. He had to say, he was starting to like where this conversation was going.

He’d had more than a sneaking suspicion that something had been missed in his training—even if he hadn’t realised exactly how much.

Xavier opened his hands. “Well, I haven’t encountered anyone else who can do what I can do.”

“Well of course you haven’t! You’re rarer than a land without strife, you are.”

“Are you saying I need to find another teacher?”

Liana waved away his question. “Not yet. There’s plenty enough I can teach you for now. But I alone won’t be enough. When it comes to your time magic, at least I’ve gotten to you early—other instructors might have difficulty if you’ve built up bad habits around your reaping or mind control spells.”

Xavier wanted to argue. Bad habits? Those spells had gotten him where he was—he was using them perfectly fine, thank you very much. He was using them well, even.

But how could he know that for sure?

“Your forehead has more lines than a wrinkled perin fruit. What’s the matter with your face?”

Xavier shut his eyes, chuckled. He didn’t know what a perin fruit was, but he supposed he was using what Siobhan would call his stink-face. “Just coming to terms with how much I may have to learn.”

Liana offered him a genuine smile, then. “Learning is the greatest thing to be done in life—why ever would you feel bad about it? Our lifespans are such that we could very well have the opportunity to learn every single thing we could ever wish, and with the ability to freeze time? We can learn some things faster than others…” She looked away, her eyes unfocused. “Though, sometimes, we may learn things we would rather not.”

The woman shook her head, seeming to come back into focus again. She clapped her hands together. “All right, why don’t we get started? First things first, how is your connection to your attributes?”

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Xavier frowned again. “Connection… to my attributes?”

“Your attributes are staggeringly high for someone of your level, I will concede, but the way you moved on your way here… You shouldn’t have had so much trouble catching up to me.”

Xavier repeated the question, phrasing it differently. “When you say ‘connection to my attributes,’ what exactly do you mean? What connection are you talking about?”

The woman threw her head back and laughed. “You’re joking, right?” Liana wiped a tear from her cheek, then stopped. “You’re serious? You don’t know what I’m talking about?”

Xavier looked at her blankly. “I haven’t a clue.”

“Oh, dear. You really are from an unintegrated world,” Liana muttered.

Xavier didn’t deign to respond.

Liana paused for a moment, seeming to gather her thoughts. “There are more reserves of power within yourself than your cores.” The woman put a hand to her chest. “We each have six cores, though it is some time until they are all revealed to us. But our cores are not the only thing we can draw strength from.” She tilted her head to one side. “You are from an unintegrated world, so perhaps this is something you can understand. Before humans are integrated, they are weak and frail. Their strength has a hard limit that is almost impossible for them to even reach. But, can you recall ever seeing a non-integrated human perform something they shouldn’t be capable of?”

Xavier thought about that for a moment. “The proverbial mother picking up a car their child is stuck underneath.”

When Liana looked at him blankly, Xavier explained what a car was, and how heavy it was.

The woman clicked her fingers. “Exactly. That is exactly what I’m talking about. Our bodies and minds are capable of more than is always evident. That power is restricted from us, because it can come with… issues, if one is not careful. That mother you spoke of, when her child was in trouble, she was able to tap into her absolute maximum level of Strength—even if she didn’t have a visible attribute for it. If she did that all the time, it could easily lead to her injuring herself.

“When we add or gain points in our different attributes, we are raising our absolute maximum potential in those attributes, but if we don’t hone our connection to the different attributes—to the trinity that is our body, mind, and spirit—we will never be able to fully reap the rewards of higher stats.”

Xavier contemplated that for a moment. In a way, he thought he could understand what she was saying. “You’re saying we all have untapped potential without honing these connections?”

Liana nodded. “The beasts of this world, for instance, are highly attuned with their attributes. That’s why some Denizens struggle to fight them—they’re stronger than they appear from their levels alone.”

Xavier leant back. “Huh,” he said. “I was wondering why they were more difficult to face than other D Grades I’ve come up against. I had no idea that was the case. That… that changes a lot.”

The woman nodded again. “For someone from an integrated world, these things are second nature. You may well have encountered people who simply didn’t know to teach it to you.”

Adranial certainly never brought anything like this up.

Xavier grew more excited about his training the longer this conversation stretched. He’d known he had a lot to learn, but he didn’t realise there were things this fundamental that he had totally missed. He rubbed his hands together. “How do I get started, then? How do I better attune myself to my attributes?”

Apparently, the answer to that was training.

Lots, and lots of training.

But this wasn’t the type of training that Xavier was familiar with. To unleash his hidden Strength and better attune with that attribute, Liana didn’t wish for him to simply blindly do lots of exercises with increasing difficultly.

She needed him to focus in a way he wasn’t sure he ever had.

“Your Meditation skill will come in handy, here. To attune yourself with your different attributes, you need to be able to observe everything your body, mind, and spirit is doing. This is easier said than done, and there is a reason that such a thing isn’t plausibly possible to tap into until someone has been integrated into the System.

“There are some non-integrated people who have trained toward this end, but as they become integrated at the age of sixteen, there is never enough time for their skills to truly come into fruition until after they’re integrated—it’s not possible to see if one could achieve this without the System, but we definitely know it can be achieved with it.”

Xavier thought for a moment about people who may have tapped into these sorts of abilities. He thought about the strongest and fastest people back on Earth pre-integration—powerlifters, strongmen, Olympians. He thought about those who pioneered the mind—monks and true academics who could stare at a problem for hours on end. And then he thought about the myths, wondering if there really had been people capable of magic before the System came down.

Could people have walked on water, healed the sick, seen the future? And if so, had these people managed that by doing what she was speaking of?

Even if they had, everything they’d been capable of paled in comparison to someone who’d gained a few levels in the System. He didn’t bother bringing these examples up to Liana, he simply contemplated them on his own.

Full awareness.

Liana had Xavier expand the time bubble until it filled up more of the glade. She wished for him to practise his Speed attribute.

Though Xavier was better able to expand the time dilation field now that he had gained several ranks in it than he ever had before, it didn’t seem like a whole lot of room for running. When he told Liana this, the woman explained that Speed wasn’t only about running in a straight line—it was about changing direction, too. According to her, he could learn plenty from simply running back and forth over and over again.

And, again according to her, he had a lot to learn.

So Xavier ran. He slipped himself into a meditative state, trying as hard as he could not to focus merely on his breathing, but every movement of his body. It was strange, trying to be so aware of his every action.

When he ran, unless he was trying to improve his technique, he didn’t often think about how he was running. Running was a habit, and then a skill, that he had developed. It was second nature. To think about it in detail all the time would be detrimental.

Hours passed for him in this state. He wasn’t doing enough running to gain another rank in his Running skill, and he wasn’t training hard enough to gain any attributes in Speed from what he was doing.

Honestly, much of the time, it felt like a waste.

He wasn’t doing anything unique by running back and forth like this, turning just before he reached the edge of the bubble’s barrier.

Liana wasn’t observing him during this time. In fact, she’d returned to reading her books. Despite all he’d learnt from her so far, Xavier had to admit he was growing frustrated.

That was when he remembered one of the first things she had told him—he needed to cultivate patience.

Considering how antsy he felt, doing this one task, he supposed that was true. He had never had much patience for waiting. Perhaps part of that came from the world he’d lived in—a world of smart phones and instant gratification. A world where even when one was waiting for something they wouldn’t dream of doing that while not being entertained.

The System had only heightened that with all the dopamine hits he’d received when he’d first began—gaining ranks and levels and titles as fast as possible.

Xavier thought he’d learnt how to acquire laser-like focus and a steel will from everything he’d been through, and everything he’d accomplished, but there were gaps.

Many gaps.

He wasn’t yet the person he knew he could be.

Case in point, his mind having wondered so much during the exercise.

Full awareness, Xavier thought, now repeating the mantra any time his mind wondered.

He spent a full day within the time dilation field, running back and forth, back and forth, changing direction over and over and over. He was aware of how he breathed, how his muscles worked, how the dirt shifted as he spun on the ball of his foot then kicked off back in the other direction. Of how he sped and slowed his momentum.

At some point, he wasn’t sure when, he fell into a trancelike state, one different to that of his normal Meditation skill. He wasn’t just aware of his body—he felt as though he was more in control of it than he ever had been before.

Time passed, and with it the ground changed. A path formed where he had been running, the indentations of his boots and the impact of every footfall changing the very terrain where he trained. Until finally, something clicked.

Then something happened.

You have Attuned 0.1% with your Speed attribute.