Once he finished gathering his power, Dante gently raised the sphere until it floated beneath the rock Laurelai was ‘struggling’ to hold up. From there, he began to engulf the rock with his soul force. Sweat dripped from his brow and his eyes began to sting from holding them open for too long, but even with the effort, he only managed to shape his soul force into a bowl rather than a perfect, hollow sphere that surrounded the rock.

Laurelai dropped the rock when he stopped shaping his energy. It fell into his bowl of soul force and immediately lost all momentum, a crisp tinkling sound echoing through the cavern as it landed. To someone looking in from the outside, the strange phenomena would have looked like magnetism since all of the rocks kinetic energy was lost, making it look like it was frozen in time.

The scene was peaceful, but the load on Dante’s mind immediately doubled. Every point of contact the rock was making with his soul force was in upheaval, and as he desperately moulded his energy to press against the rock, his control over the bowl of soul force began to shift.

The hold he had over the energy was equal across the bowl’s surface, whether that be the inside or the outside, but now the inside of the bowl demanded twice as much attention. As his focus gathered there, his focus on the outside waned without him realising.

Steam began to waft off the bowl as soul force seeped through his grasp, pushing the technique to the edge of failure. Dante’s eyes locked onto the bowl as he focussed, but instead of stabilising, he overcompensated and put too much of his focus in the wrong places.

The bowl of soul force started to bulge in places as Dante tried to recover, quickly bursting into an explosion of wind that launched the rock across the cavern. The sudden failure ruffled his hair as the technique disintegrated into a wave of rainbow mist, but his energy wasn’t potent enough to throw him across the room like the rock.

“Close,” Laurelai said, flying back with the rock. “You just have to keep practising. Every time you fail, you get a little bit closer to covering the rock in one try.”

Dante nodded as he began to gather more soul force.

***

The next day, Dante managed to wrap his soul force around the bottom half of the rock before he lost control. Shaping his soul force so that it wrapped around the rock from the very beginning would help him skip the next two steps, but he simply didn’t have enough control – even with the snail potion – to bend his energy into a sphere without using tricks.

The nature of soul force was to move and change, flowing randomly from one shape to the next. Maintaining a restrictive hold over his power was hard enough without having to mould it like clay, and that wasn’t even mentioning the resistance soul force had to foreign objects. Wrapping it around the rock was like trying to put shoes on a child as they bicycle kicked you.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Dante began to slowly shape his energy so that it wrapped around the rock. Nothing visibly changed as the bowl engulfed the rock like a new layer of skin, but Dante could feel the upheaval going on inside.

His soul force inherently behaved like a repelling magnet or the wind, so having an object pressing against his energy did nothing but antagonise it to push harder. If he continued as he was, the rock would get launched across the cavern by the outbursts of his soul force, but Dante paid particular attention to countering any bursts of resistance.

It took him about thirty seconds to collect his mental energy into a ball and about a minute to shape and mould it into a form-fitting bowl, which was as far as he had gotten after three days of constant training. It got a little easier every time, meaning that his first attempt ended with him shaping a slightly curved plate rather than a deep bowl, but he always messed up this next part even though he had gotten a lot of practice in.

Now that half the rock was encased in soul force, Dante began to push the energy up the sides of the rock, making it look like the rock was being engulfed by liquid glass. He used every ounce of focus he could to make sure that the energy didn’t displace the rock or start fading away, but his mind simply wasn’t up to the task.

It was slow and strenuous work, only becoming harder with Dante making near-constant mistakes. The difficulty was simply too great for someone of his lacking energy control and experience. By the time he covered the majority of the rock, patches of his soul force were starting to slip through his grasp, dissipating like steam off a bowl of warm rice.

Without any more hesitation, Dante took a deep breath and pressed down on the ball of soul force above his head. The energy that was in the process of wafting away was pulled back into place, becoming one with the ball like it had never left. Once everything was in place and steady, the bowl’s surface pressed against the rock, Dante took the final step.

His energy began to close in around the top of the rock, trembling fiercely as it connected into one smooth, uniform sphere that surrounded the uneven surface of the rock. The strain on his mind had been building up to this point, becoming more and more unbearable. He thought he was going to fail again, but as the rock was separated from the outside world, Dante felt a weight lift from his mind as everything snapped into place.

The load on his mind was instantly reduced to a third, the undulating surface of the sphere became utterly still, and the turbulent soul force inside the globe turned into a calm flow that circulated around the rock.

It was almost like the energy suddenly didn’t care that there was a foreign rock inside it. Dante knew that it would become easier to hold once the technique was formed, but he didn’t realise that evenly covering the rock would create some kind of… internal balance? He wasn’t exactly sure what was happening.

Dante was so focused that he only now realised some things. Most importantly, there were welts all over his body, the pain of which he was starting to feel. But as the pain was brought to the forefront of his mind, he felt the reed whip his back with incredible strength for someone so tiny.

“Ah!” Dante complained through gritted teeth, using his control over the floating rock to make it chase after Laurelai. “Why did you have to whip me again? I did the thing. I made the technique. Stop whipping me already, please!”

Laurelai flew around a white crystal as he sent the floating rock after her, to which she circled back and whipped him across the arm as she flew past. “Why would I stop? It’s good for your focus and helps your pain tolerance, not to mention that it took you way too long to finally do it. All that mental energy is wasted on an idiot like you. And besides, it’s really, really fun.”

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“Fine then, I’ll just drop the technique, and then you won’t have an excuse to-.”

But Dante was cut off by the screech of a hawk. He rushed to his left without a moment’s hesitation and dived under a crystal pillar that was slanted enough to provide him with cover. The next moment, the cavern was filled with a cacophony of sound as hundreds of hawks streamed in, their sheer numbers blotting out the sky above him.

Dante sat down underneath the pillar and took a deep, quivering breath, his fingers trembling even with his fists clenched. Laurelai landed on his shoulder a moment later and began to stroke the back of his head as he shook, but he barely registered her touch as each screech dug into the depths of his soul.

The hawks swarmed into the cavern every eight hours, lingered in the skies for an hour as they waited their turn in the mysterious ritual, then left once they finished. There were thousands of them at the very least, each one larger than the hawk before it.

Dante’s eyes widened as he spotted a hawk circling overhead. The first thought that popped into his mind was that it was nothing more than a coincidence. He didn’t want to believe what he was seeing, but as its head tilted in his direction, he realised that it was looking for something.

Looking for him.

It flapped its wings as it began to turn in the air, its flight trajectory slowly lining up with him. Dante’s mind could barely process what was happening as the hawk dived down low and began to flatten out its descent. The razor-sharp claws gleamed and twinkled with each passing crystal, and its wings cast an enormous shadow over him as it came closer.

The hawk would crash into him within seconds, but he froze on the spot. His limbs became chunks of heavy metal as he couldn’t muster up the power to move. Warning bells screamed in his mind, begging him to do something, so he tried to extract a strand of soul force.

It refused to budge.

A blur swept through him as the hawk appeared in front of his face, making him flinch and close his eyes at the last moment. Then there was nothing. Dante just sat there holding his breath, his eyelids creased as he squeezed them shut. Everything was frozen in place, whether it be his mind, body, or energy.

They simply refused to work, shutting down on him like they were broken. Or working too well.

“It’s okay,” Laurelai cooed, stroking his head. “Deep and slow breaths. In and out. In and out, okay?”

Dante opened his eyes to find himself in the same place under the slanted crystal, but there was no hawk when he scanned the area. No intruder ready to tear him to shreds and crush his bones. To kill him and cut-

“Dante!” Laurelai shouted into his ear, startling him from his flashback.

“Huh?” Dante muttered, blinking as he oriented himself. “What?”

“Deep and slow breaths. Five seconds in, hold for three, then five seconds out.”

Dante nodded, breathing in as he counted. His heart began to calm down, the thumping in his chest almost disappearing entirely, and the overwhelming feeling of discomfort faded along with it. But even with his mind and body soothed, there was still a certain unease lingering inside him. It told him that something was there even when it wasn’t, screaming warnings of danger when there were none.

“It’s okay,” Laurelai whispered into his ear over the din of screeches, patting his shoulder. “How about you practice keeping your soul force stable until we’re alone again?”

Dante absorbed the words but didn’t visibly react besides closing his eyes and crossing his legs. He needed to focus, and the longer it took to start, the harder it would be to gather himself. Even as he sat there trying to ignore the screeches, he couldn’t help but feel his heart rate slowly climb as his nerves were pulled taut.

He was exposed and vulnerable, but there was nothing he could do except stay calm and hope that nothing found him.

Dante pushed all that aside and began to visualise his soul force, which seemed to be unusually riled up. In its natural form, it was just a thick blanket of mist, hints of colour blending here and there so that it looked like a rainbow was shining through. Now, however, the mists condensed into hawks that flew circles around his mind, kicking up tides of wind with their very passing.

Sometimes his soul force combined with a randomly born ripple, becoming larger and more potent in the process. And sometimes, they cancelled each other out. Even though they often created more turbulence when they nullified each other, the worst offender was the circulation of his soul force. It was like a rising tide that had nowhere to go, or maybe a snow globe that was constantly being turned and thrown around.

Not daring to waste any more time, Dante began to exert his will over it all. It was a broad and straightforward measure, but as he began to take hold of his soul force and hold them still like rocks in the ocean, the chaos started to calm down. Instead of the ripples empowering each other, the rocks began to ablate the force until it returned to its normal state.

Dante continued like this for a long time, but after spending nearly an hour stabilising his soul force, Dante was awakened by a smiling Laurelai.

“Hey, how are you feeling?” Laurelai said, her tone and expression the complete antithesis of when they were training. “The ritual is over, so how about you come out from under there?

Dante nodded as he listened to the sounds in the cavern, only crawling out from under the crystal after failing to hear a screech. He stretched and yawned, the exertion and stress making him feel more exhausted than he would be after two hours of levitation practice. But that was an unfair comparison since drawing out small amounts of soul force over a long period usually didn’t do any harm to his mind, not to mention the short breaks he would take after failing.

Dante took a deep breath, the very air trembling along with him. “I’m fine. I just wish this technique was more effective. It takes a few minutes to calm my mental state, but my soul force barely changes after that.”

“It’s more effective at calming the mind rather than bringing stability to your energy. Special techniques are usually required for that since it means you’re improving your energy rather than just bringing it back to the state it’s usually in.”

“What do you mean? My energy is always chaotic like that?” Dante thought he was improving the stability of his mind by meditating, not just temporarily calming his mental state. Since he had an hour or so to kill each time the hawks came, it was the perfect time to improve his control over his soul force.

“All of your energies move erratically if your mental state isn’t balanced, but this is especially true for soul force. If it’s wild and chaotic because you’re stressed, they will become harder to control.”

Dante rolled his eyes, wondering how she figured that he was stressed. He hadn’t eaten in over two days and would die if he failed to learn how to levitate with magical mind powers.

“But what does that have to do with me?”

“Well, when a person becomes panicked to a certain point, they can inadvertently injure themselves by losing control of their energy. Your volume of soul force is especially worrying since it would take a lot less to tip you over the edge than it would a normal person. And since you’ve been a bit traumatised by the hawks, you’re basically at that point all the time.”

“Traumatised?” Dante was confused for a moment, but then he only felt angry. Why would she think he was so weak that he couldn’t handle a scary bird? He wasn’t some scared little child who needed to be protected.

“It’s okay,” Laurelai said, a look of pity in her eyes. “Most people on peaceful worlds get post-traumatic stress disorder during the tutorial. It’s completely normal for the system to traumatise its gifted students. Makes them more motivated, apparently.”