Time. It had a funny way of passing quickly, especially when the Supreme God of Time, Luck, and Fate was involved. Many often found time being compressed and many events happening in a short time to be a strange phenomenon to be a warning for things to come, but for Ren-Shai, it was a bit necessary to pass the days of childhood more quickly. As Ren-Shai cultivated his body and increased the power his vessel could hold, the flow time seemed to shift to favor his expectations and desires - to try and live as a human. It wasn’t that he was spending less time as a human, it was simply that he and everyone around him was, seemingly, spending it faster even though it was the same pace it ever was. Ten years and fifteen years old in 10th grade came more quickly than everyone thought possible.

  For home life, it grew more simple as Tyler’s parents adjusted to the fact that their son simply thought he was someone called Ren-Shai. As for Sasha, his little sister, she was more and more convinced that Tyler had become a superhero. Sasha had been watching his training as an elementary school student developed virtually unbreakable bones and the ability to leave the imprints of his fists in trees. Ren-Shai had developed other powers, such as the ability to fly, but he was reluctant to even let Sasha know of such developments out of fear she wouldn’t keep her mouth shut. At his parents’ behest, he had promised to keep up with sports as the coach requested of him and Ren-Shai had joined the football team of his high school. Despite the fact that the Tyler they knew being gone, Ren-Shai didn’t try to fight with them or argue with them, except when he was right on a subject. Ren-Shai had earned the trust of Tyler’s parents completely and would never betray it.

  With Anna, she had only grown closer to Ren-Shai. True to her word, she did her best to try and understand him. Because of her drive to do so, she ended up the second smartest in her class, of course, behind Tyler (as the school called him) and was reading leagues above her level. Whenever she asked, Ren-Shai had been willing to teach her, read books with her, and tutor her wherever she had trouble. The end result was the pair of them seeming like prodigies before they had ever reached high school. Though, that wasn’t what was most important to Anna. Despite her adoption and her mother being a doctor, her adopted father had succumbed to the curse the Crows had placed upon her to become a curse upon her life. Anna’s father fell into an alcohol addiction and began to get violent - verbally at first. Then, it progressed to Anna’s father beating her mother until her mother left. After that, the only thing he took his drunken rage out on was Anna.

  At first, Anna did her best to hide the bruises, until they became too numerous to hide. Though Anna still loved her father, she made up lies to protect him - too ashamed to tell the truth that her mother had left and her father was beating her. Anna didn’t even tell Ren-Shai, thus, him no longer being omnipotent in the form of a human, he had no way of knowing. Despite the abuse, she persevered, but her limp only became worse as her father blamed her leg for so many problems in his drunken rages and began beating her on it because it was useless anyway. At the very least, Ren-Shai had noticed that and began carrying her on his back when they were at school. Though Anna would never tell him that she had fallen for him, she happily rested her chin on his shoulder each time he carried her. Though they had grown up together, she had no clue how he was so muscular for his age and how she always felt like she was climbing onto a silk rock of sorts - where his muscles were perfectly supple, but whenever he flexed them, they felt like strands of steel below her.

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  Doctor Sullivan had the strangest time of everyone, so it seemed. Being Ren-Shai’s physician, he was the only one besides Sasha who had noticed the changes in Ren-Shai’s body. X-Rays, modern science, nor scans of any kind could explain how rapidly the boy’s body had begun to change. Sullivan’s results showed that Ren-Shai’s muscles alone were comparable to steel strands, with his bones being even harder to support them, with his brain only growing larger and developing more wrinkles to the point it seemed to be compressing in on itself, then forming new layers on top to further develop itself beyond the scope of standard humanity. Ren-Shai had, virtually, instantaneous reactions, mental recall, and senses that went beyond what nerves should have ever been capable of. At the age of fifteen, the boy had become something more than human, but looked to be perfectly so. Sullivan had seen puberty before, but there was no reason that a fifteen year old should have been standing six feet tall with the proportions of a nearly grown man. That didn’t stop Sullivan from picking his brain and asking questions where he could, however. All of these changes, of course, were going to make his career as he updated his findings with every examination Ren-Shai went to.

  As for Tyler’s former friends, they had begun to adjust to Ren-Shai’s presence instead of Tyler’s. They had begun to hang out regularly, chat, and, funnily enough, Ren-Shai had begun giving them the time of the day since they were maturing and their brains were developing. If Ren-Shai and Anna were the top two students, Will, Aaron, and Christian could be considered the latter of the top five, due to their proximity to the pair and their unwillingness to be beaten by a girl in anything (even though they had eventually lost out to her). For the three, their futures looked bright as they joined the football team with Ren-Shai and became linebackers. After they had hit high school and were trusted enough to not come right home after school, the group had often stopped at a small ice cream and milkshake shop near their school. Will, Aaron, and Christian seemed to already pick up that Ren-Shai and Anna were meant to be together and did their best to try and get the pair together, but nothing they did had really succeeded. All they had managed to do was get Anna to blush and Ren-Shai to look at them curiously.

  Finally, Ren-Shai had begun to understand humanity, even if it was only a basic grasp of it. Owing debts had turned into affection and genuine care for those who he deemed under his wings, like they were possessions of sorts - at first. When Anna had chided him for treating her like an object more than a person at one point, he had to re-evaluate what he was experiencing and slowly came to know what it meant to care for someone. After he had begun to care for Anna, his family, friends, and Sullivan followed in that order. Ren-Shai had decided one part of humanity defying them was a desire to protect those who they cared for - and he had a sense of where that inner strength came from now that he would be willing to step in to help them without any expectation of return. Ren-Shai’s powers had grown greatly, though, he would not use them unless the supernatural came to interfere with him - and the Crows had long-since stopped bothering him. Apart from his teacher Ms. Fiddler in elementary school, who had quit after he went to middle school, the supernatural seemed to be staying far away from him. At least as far as he knew.

  Meanwhile, other beings had begun to notice the abnormal passage of time. Old spirits of luck, fortune, and misfortune that had been created and had arisen from human superstitions and the New Gods’ powers in forming them. These lesser beings had been stoked into taking notice as a single cursed girl seemed to be avoiding their mechanisms whenever she went to certain places. Needless to say… that sparked their curiosity… and they were determined to fix this error.

Timeskip End.