Xavier stopped running, skidding to a halt in the middle of the forest glade, right in front of the armchair the pale-skinned, darkhaired Liana lazed back on, reading one of her seemingly infinite number of books.

“I’ve done it!” Xavier announced.

If Xavier were honest, there had been a part of him that hadn’t believed what the woman had been telling him—that there was a way to better connect to his different attributes. Well, it wasn’t that he didn’t believe her, but rather that he thought he must have done it on some natural, instinctual level.

How could he have gotten so far without doing something that was apparently so fundamental?

The appearance of that notification showed just how wrong he had been.

Liana closed her book and looked over at him. “You’ve done it, have you?” She raised an eyebrow, giving him a sceptical look.

Xavier shared the notification with her, so she wouldn’t have to spend another split-second doubting him.

Liana’s eyes glazed over for a brief moment as she read the notification he had received.

“You attuned your Speed attribute by .1 percent?”

Xavier’s shoulders drooped. “I know it’s not much, but it’s a start, right?”

Liana shook her head, sighed, and stared over at him through narrowed eyes. “You misunderstand. When a Denizen first starts their attunement, they usually only gain, perhaps, .01 percent for their first notification. You have achieved something ten times that.”

Xavier smiled. “I have? Perhaps it’s because I’m starting so late?”

“Hmm,” Liana said. “Perhaps.” She opened her book again.

Xavier kept staring at her.

She peered at him over the pages of her book. “The first attunement is the easiest. Keep going. You have plenty more training to do.”

Xavier heaved a sigh, then kept running back and forth in the forest glade.

He noticed the change immediately. When he brought up his attributes and looked at his Speed, it remained exactly the same as it had before. The number hadn’t changed at all. What had changed was that there was no bracketed percentage next to it.

(Attunement: 0.1%.)

The difference was more significant than he had imagined such a small percentage would have been—it was only one point out of a thousand that he could possibly gain for his attunement, yet his body… It moved more efficiently than it had before.

It was a difficult thing for him to explain, but an easy one for him to feel.

Xavier gained another .2 percent to his Speed attunement before the time bubble finally came down two days later.

Well, it had been two days within the time dilation field—outside of it, mere minutes had passed. He’d gained another two ranks for Time Alteration as well, having held the bubble up for his longest time yet.

“This is incredible,” Xavier said as the breeze started rolling in at a normal speed, and the forest around the glade was no longer frozen in a crawl of slow-time. “Being able to use the time bubble to train like that…” He shook his head. “When I first received this spell, I knew it would be powerful, but I hadn’t yet thought of all the possibilities.”

Liana smiled. “Time mages are often considered an overpowered lot.” She tilted her head to the side. “At least, in some ways. It is rare for a time mage to be able to specialise in other areas—our damage dealing capabilities tend to be limited compared with other magic users. Time mages are often better in a party. Though that doesn’t appear to be the case with you. You lack those same restrictions. Not that I would consider you a full-fledged time mage with only that one spell at your disposal.”

Xavier opened his mouth to ask why she wasn’t in a party herself, but the look on her face told him she wasn’t in a mood to answer personal questions—it was a look he was becoming familiar with, the more time he spent with this woman.

He was surprised by how he felt after all that seemingly mindless running back and forth within the time dilation field. From all appearances, what he’d done would be considered extremely tedious and boring. But, as he’d fallen into a trancelike state and had been running so long because he was trying to achieve a goal, he actually felt more energised than he had before—though that could have something to do with the fact that he was successful at attuning his Speed attribute, even if it had only been for .3 percent.

“How long will it take me to bring the attunement to 100 percent?” Xavier asked. He didn’t know if he had the patience to do that all at once. It would be… a lot of days stuck inside that bubble, doing the exact same thing, over and over again.

He wondered if it would still invigorate him after a week, a month… maybe even a year.

The woman pursed her lips. “You expect your attunement to grow to 100 percent, as an E Grade?” Liana sighed. “An F Grade would be lucky to attune their attributes by 10 percent after years of training. An E Grade might reach 20 percent, after even more years of training. I’ve heard of Denizens drawing on more than that, in times of great need—but not in regular fights, even those that are life and death, as many of the fights we Champions get into turn out to be.”

Xavier frowned. That wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting or hoping for. Those percentages… considering how much some of his skills boosted his attributes, it didn’t seem like the greatest amount. Then again, there was something more pure about attuning his Speed—something different in the way he moved.

Something altogether better.

Xavier had thought he’d been one with his body before all this, but he was beginning to realise just how shut off he’d been. Just how blind he was to… well, himself.

“We should begin attuning some of your other attributes, now that you’ve got the hang of attuning Speed,” Liana said. She stood from her armchair and paced around the glade. The time bubble was still down—it would be another fifteen or so minutes until he was able to cast it again, after the cooldown had ended. The cooldown wasn’t yet where he wanted it to be, but he couldn’t fault Liana for that.

Xavier tapped his foot on the ground until Liana gave him a sharp look, the noise clearly intruding on her thoughts.

“We should work next on attuning your mind—specifically your Intelligence. Those are the two attributes that have benefitted me greatly in my time magic. They should benefit you as well.

Xavier nodded his ascent. He didn’t particularly mind which order her training came in. He worried about trying to figure out these things alone. He felt like he would be clawing around in the dark. He could spend days trying to meditate his way to attuning Intelligence and not make any progress.

It was so much easier with guidance.

More days passed, not just within the time dilation fields Xavier summoned into being, but outside of them as well. Attuning the mind didn’t come naturally to him. Despite intelligence being one of Xavier’s strongest attributes, and despite his ability to meditate and even split his mind into different portions, there was something difficult about the process he had trouble grasping.

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When he’d explained this to Liana, she’d nodded understandingly.

“Your mind is fractured. Your life before the System, and your life since, has left your thoughts and desires unordered. This is more common than you might imagine. There are worlds of people who never learn how to attune the Intelligence attribute, simply because they don’t have the discipline to rein in their thoughts and their will.”

Xavier had absorbed her words without questioning them aloud, but they unsettled him. He remembered often feeling as though his mind was fractured back before the System had come. As though his mind were an internet browser with dozens, even hundreds of different tabs open—with several of them playing music that he could never seem to turn off—and the chaos of finding what he needed often stopped him from moving forward.

He’d thought he’d gotten past that since being integrated into the System. His mind had felt a lot more clear with each attribute point he’d fed into Intelligence and Willpower.

Yet here Liana was telling him his mind was still fractured.

When Xavier had asked this woman to teach him, he’d decided to listen to what she instructed him to do without fighting back too hard, and this was only further driven into him after she’d taught him to attune his Speed in a way that he had doubted would ever work.

Like Mr Miyagi and the karate kid, it might not always make sense, so I have to trust the process.

So when Liana told him that to order his thoughts, he couldn’t simply meditate how he might normally—letting thoughts drift into his mind and then out of it again as he focused on a single point, whether it be his breath or the beating of his own heart—but, rather, he had to focus on his thoughts, he did as she said.

Even if it didn’t quite sound right.

Order your thoughts, and your mind will follow.

It was the mantra she had him repeat whenever he drifted from the task at hand.

Ordering his thoughts was another thing that proved more difficult than he’d imagined. Once he stopped to observe what was running through his mind, it made him realise just how much was going on in there.

Slowly, he made a list—one that didn’t feel exhaustive in the least.

Xavier needed to protect Earth—to build up the fighters and resources of the entire planet so it had a chance of defending itself when the restrictions on the world were lifted.

He needed to become strong enough himself so the threat he’d given to the other sectors would be taken seriously when the time came to act on it, should any of the planets have ignored it.

And that was just the beginning—there was so, so much more on his plate.

The Silver River sector itself was facing annihilation—a cleansing of every planet that had occurred in the past and was foretold to soon occur again.

“Soon” was a relative term that had little to no practical meaning to Xavier—he didn’t know when the threat would come, only that it would.

Then there was the Greater Universe at large—and whether he would one day become the Weapon of the System, and saving time itself from coming to an end. That was a goal so big it was hard to see it clearly.

There were other goals, too. The ones he had along the way—finding a vessel for the Spirit of Vengeance, gaining Telekinetic Enhanced Strike, mastering his Time Alteration spell, ranking up his otherworld spells, and now attuning all his attributes.

Not to mention dealing with The Nightmare—figuring out how it was he could control a C Grade beast.

And reaching D Grade before leaving this floor.

Xavier opened his eyes and released a breath. There was indeed a lot on his mind that needed ordering. But how could he put it all in place? How could his mind stop wandering from one task to another?

Was that even something he wished to stop?

Xavier contemplated this in silence for hours, the track that his footsteps had worn into the glade in front of him, cutting a line between where he and Liana sat. He felt a block in his mind—something that was stopping his thoughts from reaching true clarity.

Order your thoughts, and your mind will follow.

Days past as he sat there. Xavier didn’t move in inch, and yet the activity in his mind never slowed. It was more active than ever. It seemed as though the more he tried to bring order to the chaos that was in his mind, the more that chaos wanted to run free.

The patience that he had been so diligently cultivating was slowly wearing thing as his frustration mounted, coming to the fore, until finally he opened his eyes and stared at the darkhaired woman reading her book in relative peace on the comfortable armchair a few feet away from him.

“This is impossible,” he said.

Liana lowered her book. A smirk twitched up one side of her lips. “So it’s true, then.”

“What’s true?” Xavier snapped.

He knew he shouldn’t be frustrated—that was the whole point of cultivating patience, wasn’t it? But he had been sitting there for a very long time. He had grown hungry. Thirsty. And this seemed like a complete waste of time—there must be another way for him to attune his Intelligence attribute, or something that the woman had left out.

Because this clearly wasn’t working.

“There is something that the Great Xavier Collins isn’t instantly capable of doing,” Liana replied, sounding a little smug.

“Instantly capable of? I wasn’t instantly able to attune Speed!”

“It may not seem that way, but I’ve never seen someone else manage it as swiftly as you did. That might have something to do with the fact that you are already E Grade, and a very, very powerful E Grade at that—your body was primed for it, no doubt.”

Xavier sighed. “Then why am I having so much trouble with this? Shouldn’t my mind be primed for it?” He took a deep breath. His voice still betrayed his frustration.

Liana closed her book and placed it on her lap, and the smirk fell away from her face, an indication that she was taking him seriously. “What are you struggling with?”

“Ordering my thoughts,” Xavier said, controlling his voice.

“There is a chaos within my mind—one that never slows, never wavers. There is so much on my shoulders, and so much to be done, that I don’t know how to slow down. I chafe at having to sit for such long hours without gaining anything in return.” He looked at the edge of the time bubble they were within, at the trees frozen outside of it. “There are beasts I could be killing, souls I could be reaping.”

“Hmm,” was all Liana said at first. She didn’t chide him about cultivating patience, as she had in the past. She simply stared at him for a moment that stretched beyond what was comfortable, until she finally spoke. “One can never truly order one’s thoughts—not completely. But your mind is not a chaotic thing, it is a powerful tool that has brought you to where you are right now. But like all tools, it is best to learn how to use them properly. Any fool can swing a sword and cause some damage, but to wield a sword is a different matter entirely.

“Wield your mind, Xavier Collins. Remember, you are at a unique advantage—you lose no time in here. There is no waste in the hours that pass you by, for we have frozen those hours in this moment. The world is not moving forward without you.”

Rather than respond, Xavier shut his eyes, remembering his rule not to push back against her guidance. This was exactly the reason why—his frustration grew from his lack of perceived progress.

He took two deep breaths, then replayed her words within his mind. Once he was a moment removed from them, he could see the wisdom in them.

He was chafing at the bit, trying to get to all the things he needed to get done—all the things he knew he needed to achieve.

Xavier opened his eyes and looked outside the time bubble again. There was an ant-like insect on the ground, one that he had watched before casting Time Alteration. The creature had barely made it an inch along the ground in the time that had passed while he’d been inside the time dilation field.

The world isn’t passing me by.

It was such a strange concept for him to absorb.

Xavier shut his eyes once more and returned to the task. Wield your mind. It sounded like something Morpheus would tell Neo.

Free your mind.

If only it were that easy.

A week passed for Xavier and Liana while he focused on this task. He took short breaks to eat, and to chat with the woman across from him, but then he always continued in his diligence, his mind toward this singular task.

Still, no progress came.

Another week passed. Xavier would recast his Time Alteration spell whenever he needed to, and so not much time passed outside of it—it would still be a while yet until either of them needed to hunt and kill a beast from the notice board in order to stay within the hundredth floor.

There was no sense of urgency. None whatsoever. That was perhaps the hardest thing for Xavier to come to terms with.

The waiting.

But finally, after the third week had passed and Xavier had been putting all his energies toward this one task, something clicked within his mind. A notification appeared and a smile spread out across his face.

You have Attuned 0.1% with your Intelligence attribute.

Xavier released a long, contented sigh, for it wasn’t just the attunement with his Intelligence attribute he’d gained—it was a new way of thinking.

He tilted his head to the side, glanced over at Liana, then looked up through the top of the time bubble and at the sky high above them, contemplating the System and its motives for sending him here.

The System had sent him here because he needed to face challenges that would help him adapt—Xavier had thought those challenges would be fights against beasts, and they certainly were—but perhaps there were other challenges the System had in mind for him.

If the Empress Larona has the ability to see the future, then the system must as well, especially as it has access to an infinite number of alternate universes.

Did it know I would seek Liana once it sent me to this floor? Did it know she would teach me these things?

The thought that drifted through his mind as he stared up at the sky brought other questions—like the nature of freewill, and if he even possessed it with the System meddling so heavily in his life.

He ordered those thoughts, placing them somewhere in his mind that he could come back to.

“I did it,” he told Liana. “Now, what’s next?”