– Era of the Wastes, Cycle 217, Season of the Rising Moon, Day 32 –
Terry glanced back for one last look at the endless white.
“...your time is up.” The monotone voice echoed in his head.
Soon after, Terry found himself sitting on a platform in his little cavern again. His eyes first darted towards the dried-up mana-infused liquid that had surrounded the platform before.
“Not dried up,” muttered Terry. “Used up? Or pulled elsewhere…” He lifted himself from his seated position and stretched. He rubbed his eyes and exhaled sharply.
“As beneficial as this meditation might have been…” Terry rubbed his eyes a second time and inhaled deeply. “...this was exhausting on a whole other level. No wonder, these martialists are all batshit bonkers. Stuff like this, these ridiculous trials accompanied by platitudes and grandstanding, and naturally all while being imprisoned with other lunatics.”
Terry walked away from the platform. He felt like sleeping for at least two days. Technically, his body had gotten enough sleep. Terry had kept a tight schedule but he had always made sure to get enough food and rest.
However, none of this accounted for the time inside the meditation space. Even though Terry had not felt any physical tiredness there, a mind can only be awake for so long before screaming for mercy.
Mana, I really don’t know how Devon was able to stay even remotely sane without ever allowing himself to sleep. I barely held on in a mental simulation and even there, I had to take rest time. I can ask him if he has any tips if I ever get the chance to meet him again. It would be nice if I can visit the Chara Settlement and Syn City after returning to Arcana. Nice, but difficult, unless the bounties on my head disappeared, which seems unlikely.
I want to nap…
“Not yet.” Terry slapped his cheeks. “Spells and research first.”
Terry dashed towards the initial cavern that led to the nine passages. He had spells to keep active, and something important to investigate.
***
Terry stared at the different pieces of wood in front of him.
When Terry had placed them, they had all looked exactly alike. Now, however, there was a progressive change in them. It might not be that noticeable if he only compared individual pairs that were closest to each other, but it was obvious when looking at the two at the outer edges.
One looked still fresh, dry perhaps, but freshly cut.
The others looked grey and, well, aged.
“Fits the pattern.” Terry glanced at a similar line-up of tertium. The piece he had placed directly in the original cavern where that weird plant was growing had become extremely dull. Terry knew that this was what happened after tertium got exposed to the air for an extended period of time. Even though he had never cared about it, he knew that you had to polish tertium if you wanted it to stay shiny.
Terry had placed different test items at different distances towards the plant and cavern. Wooden logs, tertium slabs, some of his juggling balls, and even some crumbs of the food he had in his storage items.
All of his tests had yielded the same result: Time was accelerated in the cavern.
Terry warily pressed his mana into the chamber. The increasing resistance told him that the mana density in the cavern had increased since his last test. Terry had managed to keep his own passage mostly free of the strange mana by blocking it at all times with immovable tertium.
“Seems like the passage obstructions had another reason than simply to prevent challengers from returning…” Terry muttered to himself.
He was trying to make up his mind. He wanted to test something, but the more cautious part of him wanted to talk himself out of it. Eventually though, his cautious self was ganged up on by a curious Academy student and the part of him that desired to grow stronger.
“Let’s go over this calmly.” Terry told himself. “I know that real time dilation is posited to be an impossibility. The articles I’ve skimmed while being desperate in the Academy library made that clear.”
Terry clicked his tongue. “I know that what’s-her-face from the Icy Dew Mountain claimed this was a mental experience, but was that really the case? Even if it was mind magic, the effect should be limited by the senses of the target, right? Or rather, the processing signals in my brain. Unless that was accelerated for real, how could such a mental simulation be workable?”
Terry moved his gaze towards the tertium slab that was still blocking the opening in his transfixed tertium cube. “And this? My experiments have shown that the mana in there does something to accelerate time.” He repeated for himself. “Time cannot be created out of nothing. It cannot vanish into nothingness either.”
The more often he repeated it, the more Terry felt reminded of something else. He never studied it himself because of his aspect impairment, but he was aware that one of the best ways to achieve mana cloaking was to rely on aspect inversion.
Aspect inversion was a cloaking technique that made use of the paired aspects that off-set each other. Using fire to hide water. Using darkness to hide light. And vice versa. Similar effects could be achieved without aspect inversion but the fundamental idea remained the same.
Mana – like other forms of energy – can be positive or negative. If you want to hide positive mana, you can wrap it in matching negative mana structures. From the outside, the mana signatures add up to nothing.
Even some of Terry’s earliest mana crafting lessons with Brynn had already touched on the idea that nothing and nothing were two different concepts.
“Adds up to nothing,” mumbled Terry. He held his hands behind his head. “Doesn’t mean that the individual parts are all nothing.”
He puffed his cheeks. “Theory: The dao chamber is not creating time out of nothing. It’s creating something negative that is paired and offset by something positive in the original cavern. Time dilation for the mental experience and time acceleration here.”
He rubbed his chin. “If this doesn’t come with any other drawbacks, this would be genius. Taking the benefit of time dilation while displacing the drawback.” He puckered his lips. “Is it even a drawback at that point? I don’t know what plant this is, but there are plenty of plants that become more valuable the older they are.”
Terry shrugged. “No idea if that would be workable. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that something is growing there. Or it’s a requirement for the whole process rather than a magic-accelerated greenhouse. It could be tricky to provide all the required nutrients and environment for something to grow like this. I wonder if Bjorln would have an idea…”
Cut the crap. His intrusive thoughts barked.
Terry tried to ignore them.
You know you are not thinking about gardening.
You know what this is really about in your head.
“I know.” Terry placed his hands in front of him and moved his thumb over the palm of his other hand.
What was the biggest frustration in the Thanatos Proving Grounds?
“Lack of equipment,” mumbled Terry.
Not true and you know it.
“Lack of long-range attack spells.”
You know that this is simply a limitation of who you are. This frustration is part of you and probably always will be.
No.
You know better.
Terry exhaled slowly and closed his eyes. “Betrayed by the limitations of my own body.”
Yes. No matter how great my mana foundation is, the transformation of a body is a time-consuming process.
So what’s there to think about?
Terry involuntarily thought back to his first mana cultivation lessons. To the physical exercise with Bjorln. To the first day that Terry had ever bottomed out his mana pool.
“Unhealthy,” mumbled Terry.
‘A bit of normal aging will do you good.’ Bjorlns’ words echoed in his mind.
“This won’t exactly be ‘normal’ aging, will it?” asked Terry.
No one replied.
Terry’s cautious side made one last-ditch effort: “Wouldn’t that mess up my future progress? If I take it slow, I can focus on increasing my mana foundation. If I go through with this, the aging will happen at my current level of mana foundation.”
His inner Academy student considered the problem and replied calmly in his thoughts. Only matters if I lose more time than I can gain by the increase in mana foundation anyway. Otherwise, the difference is a drop in the bucket long-term. I’ll still grow older afterwards too. Plus…
Terry nodded to himself. “Plus, I can make sure my mana is filled plenty.” He sunk his consciousness into his storage items, moving over all the edible stuff he had taken from the Hall of Wealth and the oasis.
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If anyone was aware of how Terry considered to use these items, they would want to club him to death. Using priceless treasures as light snacks would make even the martialists question Terry’s sanity.
“They’re not in a position to judge,” grumbled Terry.
For some reason, he recalled something the monotone voice had said: ‘A genius that dies young is no genius at all.’
“Okay.” Terry resolved himself. “Let’s do this. Slowly…” He moved the tertium slab to the side and used his own mana to gather some of the aging mana towards him. A moment later, Terry absorbed the mana into his body and began circulating it…
***
Terry stuffed more of the lizans’ rations into his mouth and checked himself in a mirror while chewing.
“No grey hair yet.” He quipped, not sure why.
He retrieved a strange mango from his storage and used his keen dagger to prepare slices he could bite into. The fruit was unaspected but with an emphasized light aspect.
Terry did not know its name but was reasonably certain that it was harmless to him. It contained a lot of mana and it served as regular food besides. Both were aspects he could appreciate in his current process.
Terry had never become so hungry so quickly. He had also never seen his mana drop so quickly without using it actively either. In fact, Terry could not remember ever having his mana regeneration outpaced by his own passive consumption to that degree, even when he was starving and sleep-deprived while fleeing the undead horde in the Wastes to Tiv’s north. He had to stuff himself perpetually to keep his mana pool and stomach as full as possible.
“Worth it.” Terry reminded himself and made a fist. He could feel the changes with each passing day. His bones were becoming denser. His muscles felt more receptive to his commands, and stronger at the same time. To top it off, even his senses were becoming sharper.
If he continued like this, then even with an injury like the one that he had received from his traitorous ally Nash in the Thanatos Proving Grounds, Terry would be able to survive the night on his own. Back then, his mana foundation had prevented the worst by stopping his organs from failing completely despite the significant blood loss. However, his physical body had not been resilient enough to recover quickly and his mana foundation wasn’t high enough to prevent it from failing indefinitely.
Terry understood in theory how mana transformed a physical body over time, but he had never been able to tell while it was going on. This was only possible in retrospect when looking back at a longer timeframe. Now, however, Terry was able to sense some of the changes. He suspected that a part of it was the kinds of food he consumed – the weird body-strengthening rations from the lizans and then the high-mana edibles from the Hall of Wealth.
However, the most important component was the weird mana that Terry was absorbing and the accelerated aging it caused in his body. It certainly wasn’t accelerated a hundredfold like the experience in the meditation space, but Terry estimated a multiplier of at least ten.
It might be possible to accelerate my body’s aging even further by absorbing more…
“No,” insisted Terry sternly. “This is my limit.” He took a deep breath. “Anything more and I wouldn’t be able to nourish my body appropriately. Better to do it slowly but for longer.”
How long? You don’t know if there is an expiration to the teleportation field.
“A month and a half at most,” replied Terry calmly. “The way I’m stuffing myself, my food and mana supplements will have emptied out to a worrying degree by then. I should keep at least some buffer, so that I won’t starve before I can collect more.”
***
“Alright.” Terry clapped his hands before grabbing the transfixed tertium cube.
“Three… two… one… Go!” Terry simultaneously deactivated his Immovable Object spell and yeeted the tertium cube out of the way before the movable walls could crush it into unusable scrap metal. Not a second too late because the walls didn’t wait.
After nearly two months, the passage that Terry had chosen was blocked exactly like all the others. He had wondered if he should try to harvest the strange plant but decided against it. For all he knew, the time acceleration near the plant might turn him into a wrinkly grandpa in a second.
He had also wondered if he could simply leave without caring about his tertium items. However, the strange mana seemed dangerous if not isolated to whatever was going on here. Furthermore, as cheap as tertium might be, Terry did not know when he would be able to restock. The idea of losing a foldable cube made his inner dungeon hoarder revolt.
“Good as new.” Terry appraised the tertium cube he had rescued from the evil movable walls.
He returned the cube happily into his storage bracelet and then moved to also collect the remaining tertium items that prevented similar movable walls from closing further along the tunnel.
***
Terry stepped into the teleportation field and allowed himself to be grabbed by the unanchored spatial transfer. An instant later, he stood on a field in a wide open plain with plenty of hills and even a few mountains in the distance. He first glanced upwards at the familiar strange sky with multiple moons.
High chance there will be another spatial distortion that prevents me from leaving certain bounds.
Terry’s mana sense first registered several mana signatures of people nearby and then something very close to him. “A small fruit tree?” He walked closer and picked one of the strange yellow peaches.
Mostly lightning aspected but a layer of unaspected mana as well.
Probably far from tasty but beggars can’t be choosers.
Terry began picking all of the fruits into his storage item without giving it a second thought. He could sense that there were martialists coming over but he did not really care.
“Hold it right there!”
Terry was already grabbing the last fruit on the tree when a group of martialists shouted at him.
“Hold it, you idiot!”
“Stop him, the Lightning Heart Peach tree will die if all fruits are harvested!”
“We should just kill him.”
Terry plucked the last fruit with a sense of spitefulness. He could see the tree crumble into dust from the corner of his eyes while he turned around to look at the martialists whose acupoint style he knew all too well.
“Thunderous Palm Sect,” said Terry in a flat tone. “Do you have a problem?”
The martialists were dumbstruck for a moment by the sight of the tree dying right in front of their eyes.
“You!” One of the women was about to attack when another held her back. “If you know our sect, you should have heeded our orders. How are you going to apologize?”
“Apologize for what?” asked Terry blankly. He bit into the Lightning Heart Peach. “Eww…” He reflexively spat out half of the fruitflesh that was extremely sour and prickly on the tongue.
“Unbelievable…” One of the martialists nearly had a mental collapse when he saw how Terry treated the priceless treasure.
“‘For what?! This tree was ours!” The leader glowered at Terry. If looks could kill, her eyes would have stabbed Terry to death already. “We were going to take it back whole to our sect.”
“Uh-huh.” Terry looked around absentmindedly. “How come none of you were close to it then? Seems kind of stupid. If you want to rob someone, just be open about it.”
“Oi!”
“Listen you—”
“Nope.” Terry walked away.
Lightning cracked and two of the martialists from the Thunderous Palm Sect appeared to block his path.
Terry had expected as much. He had sensed the early warnings of the movement techniques. Back when he had observed all the martialists in this secret realm from the sky, he had paid special attention to any member of sects with whom he had a hostile relationship.
“Who permitted you to leave?!” The woman glowered at Terry.
“I don’t remember asking for permission,” retorted Terry indifferently. “If you had truly found the tree first, you would have already taken it into your storage items. So what’s this about? I’m kind of busy.”
“Impudent bastard,” snapped another martialist.
“If we say the tree was ours, then it was ours. Stop yapping!”
“He probably has more of the fruits. I don’t think a tree of that size would only carry a single fruit.”
Terry tried to take another bite of the lightning heart peach while barely listening to the martialists. “Ugh. This stuff is horrid.” He could barely force himself to swallow.
“You fucker…”
“He is completely ignoring us!”
“Hand over the fruits!”
Terry glanced at his half-eaten peach and then tossed it at the head of the martialist that had spoken last. “There you go.”
At first, the man could not believe what had just happened. Then he snapped and immediately attacked Terry while the mana resonance of a furious ape covered in lightning manifested behind him.
Terry felt eager to test the new limits of his physical body, but he reminded himself to not be an idiot. This was a real battle, not a sparring session. He could test his physical limits in another and safer way. He covertly transfixed one of the transparent poison needles he had collected in the last trial. He stepped back and pretended to try and block.
The man impaled himself with the small transfixed needle and before he could even reach Terry, he was already on the ground and grabbed his heart. He appeared to have trouble breathing. It looked painful.
“Nasty,” said Terry matter-of-factly.
If that’s the kind of stuff that a supposed senior uses for a mere trial, what do these people do if they really don’t like someone?
“Junior, no!”
“You dare!”
Two more martialists attacked Terry while a third tried to help their poisoned fellow disciple.
Terry meanwhile used his bidirectional attraction glove to recollect the transparent needle. He saw no reason to lose his calm. In his estimate, there was only one person in this group whom he needed to worry about and it was the woman that had led the conversation for the other side.
Oh, maybe…
Terry recalled that he had a lot of items whose purpose was unclear in his storage. These were the weapons and talismans that he had collected in the Hall of Power. Some of them were duplicates or parts of a bundle, so Terry could use one to test and see what they would do.
He dodged a sword and spear by jumping into the sky on layers of divine mana.
Let’s try this one.
He retrieved a talisman and channeled mana into it while focusing his attention on the leader from the Thunderous Palm Sect.
“You dare target me?! You overestimate yourself. Wait, what is—?”
A silver wyvern roared forth from the paper as the talisman vanished into nothingness.
The wyvern eviscerated the leader together with two of her sect members in an instant. The ground where the wyvern had darted was completely ripped apart as if countless tiny blades had rushed over it.
Gruesome.
More importantly, air-aspected.
“That was total overkill,” muttered Terry while looking at the scene below. Good to know what it does though.
“I’ll kill you!” A martialist appeared in the sky in front of him.
Terry retrieved a sword of unknown purpose and channeled mana into it. The sword started flying and, to his surprise, it started defending him of its own accord. Before Terry could do anything further himself, the attacker was already sliced in half.
Terry examined the flying sword in his mana sight. “Seems sharp but brittle. And by the change in mana, probably a limited number of activations. Pity.”
“What grudge do you have with us?!” demanded one of the two remaining survivors. She was missing a leg and bleeding profusely.
“A few but what kind of question is that?” Terry shook his head while looking down at the two people in yellow-black robes. “Your group attacked me.”
“Senior Laila never attacked you!”
“That one?” Terry pointed at the mangled corpse of the leader. “She helped encircle me, even prevented me from leaving. She stood by while those others attacked me. If that doesn’t make her complicit, I don’t know what does. Do you want to claim that if I was about to kill the others, she would not have interfered directly? I find that hard to believe.”
“You could have given us a way out!”
“If we had known you had this kind of background, we would have never attacked you!”
“That’s the lesson you took from this?!” Terry exclaimed in disbelief. “The problem is that I had the means to defend myself? Not that you attacked me in the first place?”
He was too furious to continue the conversation and before long, the remaining two people from the Thunderous Palm Sect were dead too. This time, Terry had not relied on any other items than his regular equipment.
Terry was scowling grimly while he collected the storage items of the corpses. He could already sense more groups of martialists coming over. Chances were that these groups were coming over to rob or kill him too.
Perhaps he would be able to avoid them…
But did he really want to?
***