Book 3. The Long Journey. Chapter 109. Breakthroughs.

“I did it!” Mikaela said with a bright smile, having finally succeeded in creating a perfect ball of ice with no water mixed in. Since he had been putting his whole mind and heart into trying to do so for the past ten minutes, he was overcome with a very fluffy and pleasant feeling now that he achieved his goal; and the fact that he did so while Laien watched only made this feeling better.

“As expected, you improve real fast when you put your mind to it,” Laien praised sincerely and couldn’t resist chuckling a little when he saw Mikaela’s face flush slightly from happiness. It would be hard for someone else to tell, but as a person who shared the same elemental affinity with Mikaela and as someone who understood quite a lot about the Principle of Energy, he understood that the task of ‘stopping the movement of bubbles as soon as they appear’ might sound simple, but in truth it required a great control over one’s spiritual energy and, as discouraging to some as it might be, a great degree of inborn talent. Thus, his words just now weren’t lip-service or anything of the kind.

Although he wouldn’t say it aloud as to avoid the words getting to Mikaela’s head too much, he came to regard Mikaela’s talent as truly first-class, at the level of people like Yin, Anatis, and himself. In his mind, those like Arslan or Raphael also could potentially be included in this tier, but in the former case, the one in question was still too young to be able to tell for sure, while in the latter he simply didn’t have a chance to witness the scope of Raphael’s abilities.

“You still should have strength left, right?” Laien inquired with a smile and sure enough, was met with an eager ‘Yes!’ kind of a response. “Nice. Then this time, let’s try making some boiling-hot steam. Can you guess how you’d need to change the image you have in mind for that?” he asked, guessing that Mikaela will be able to answer this question easily enough.

“If making ice was stopping the bubbles…” Mikaela began saying, then answered in a questioning tone. “Then making a steam is making them move like crazy?”

“Simply put, yes,” Laien confirmed with a laugh. “Try doing that and see what happens. Just make sure to use much less spiritual energy compared to before,” he proposed with a playful look on his face, causing Mikaela to grow curious.

“Let’s see,” Mikaela mused aloud. He focused on the new mental image and attempted to create some steam, keeping in mind to use much less spiritual energy than while training with ice. In consequence, the very next second, he created a small amount of incredibly hot vapor above his hand, which instantly sprung high up into the air while decompressing rapidly. Thankfully, since he had used a very small amount of spiritual energy, nothing happened to him or Laien.

“That can be quite dangerous,” Mikaela pointed out with a laugh, now understanding why Laien wanted him to use so little spiritual energy. “Both water and ice are fairly easy to control, but this hot steam is much harder. There’s the heat it creates too, right? I mean, we can’t normally be hurt by our own magic, but if it’s something like the air that was heated up by this steam, then it can be dangerous,” he pointed out and gave Laien a questioning look, seeking to confirm if he was right.

“True,” Laien agreed with a nod. “It can be a bit annoying, but in the end, it’s not all that dangerous to you as natural cold and heat can be easily deal with through the pure Principle of Energy, without the need to use more spiritual energy or Qi to defend. It just takes some training to apply it properly, especially if you want to later on use it in battle without wasting time or making mistakes,” he explained briefly and was happy to see that Mikaela was paying attention and looked interested.

“Want to try guessing again?” Laien asked wryly and just like he expected, he received a nod from Mikaela. “Then, what would be the right image to contain steam?” he questioned with a smile.

“A sphere!” Mikaela responded instantly. They had been playing the game of imagination while training since the very beginning, so he already got the hang of it. There was no way he wouldn’t easily come up with something so simple as that. “Let them go wild, but contain them in a sphere, right? That will make controlling spiritual energy easier,” he added, looking forward to receiving a confirmation from Laien.

“Right,” Laien said with a laugh. “This one was easy, huh? Still, you really figured it out very fast,” he praised, all the while enjoying the content and happy look on Mikaela’s face. “You know what to do. Once you get down this one, we will move to the last part,” he added with a playful smile.

Excited about the last part which Laien brought up, Mikaela started his attempts to create a proper ball of hot steam. This time around, since he already had the creation process down, he needed only four attempts to create it in the proper shape all at once, without any delay. Having finished, he looked up straight into Laien’s eyes, urging him to go on with an impatient gaze and a full of expectations expression on his face.

“Mhm, now it’s going to get a little harder,” Laien mentioned playfully. “I want you to create and sustain three balls at once. One of ice, one of water, one of steam. Can you do it?” he asked, fully aware this time around Mikaela would need to put in quite some effort to succeed.

“I will try,” Mikaela replied in a level-headed manner. He was excited to try, true, but he instinctively knew that having only just learned to create ice and steam, he would find it many times harder to make them simultaneously than simply to create them one after another. The amount of spiritual energy he would be using would grow too, so he didn’t dare to say he was fully confident in completing this task before getting too tired to continue.

“I can give you an additional advice if you want,” Laien proposed, seeing that Mikaela wasn’t feeling as confident as the previous times.

“I do,” Mikaela responded quickly. He wanted to learn as much as possible from Laien, so he wasn’t about to get prideful for some silly reason and say something like ‘I can do it alone!’.

“Okay, so listen well,” Laien said with a calm smile. “The key is to connect the process with the sensation that accompanies it. Image training is great for the beginnings, but you just won’t have time to do that in a real fight. So, create an ice ball while using the image of stilled bubbles, but focus on the sensation of your spiritual energy changing and try to remember it. Then do the same with the steam ball and finally, attempt to do all three at once while making use of those sensations instead of focusing on the visualization,” he explained casually and truth to be told, felt quite happy to be able to do so. Using one’s own experience to then teach someone else, it was quite fun indeed.

“Got it,” Mikaela said eagerly. Now that he heard this advice from Laien, his confidence went up a level and he wasn’t feeling as lost as before. Doing many things at once was bread and butter for a spiritual practitioner, but attempting to do three completely different things at once, two of which you just learned how to do a few minutes ago? That was on a level of its own. However, with Laien’s help and with enough effort and high enough focus, Mikaela trusted himself to be able to pull it off.

Thus, with such a positive mindset, Mikaela began doing as Laien advised him to. First, he created a ball of water just one time for the sake of imprinting the well-known to him sensation in his mind. Then, he shifted his attention to ice; it took him around a dozen ‘tries’ before he judged that he had gotten the hang of the unique sensation well enough. As for the third and final type he was learning at the moment, steam, this one took more than thirty tries before he started feeling decently familiar with the accompanying sensation. Obviously, he found it to be the most difficult of the three.

“Let’s do it,” he said quietly and took a deep breath, trying to focus as well as he could. He glanced at Laien’s face very briefly, but his gaze was still caught by Laien, who chuckled quietly and smiled back at him. Feeling his face grow a bit hot from weird embarrassment, Mikaela needed to take almost half a minute more before he managed to once again enter the perfect, trance-like training state.

Still, the mere fact that he was able to accomplish a feat that normal practitioners could only hope for and not seek was yet another proof of how ridiculous the potential dwelling within him was. The ‘imagination’ and ‘sensation’ training which Laien devised weren’t things that could be commonly used, either! Only those with extremely high elemental affinity to water and superior talent as a spiritual practitioner would be able to follow this kind of a training routine. As for the vast majority of water-element practitioners? They would get stuck at the very first step, unable to link the ‘image’ to any kind of a ‘sensation’ that accompanied using magic. They would simply be incapable of perceiving the ‘sensation’ that seemed so obvious to Laien and Mikaela clearly enough, if at all.

Sitting in front of him, Laien watched how Mikaela slowly raised both his hands with a fully concentrated look on his face. His silver eyelashes covering his half-open eyes, Mikaela gathered his spiritual energy and poured it out of his body, towards his hands and to three separate spots. Water began taking shape first, then half a second later, ice started appearing and finally, a full second later, a cluster of boiling-hot steam showed up almost reluctantly. There was a visible delay between each of the balls forming, but towards the middle of the process, all three of them were being brought forth at the same time for just about a second or two before taking their complete shapes in the same order they started appearing; water, ice, and steam.

“Damn,” Mikaela complained unhappily. He had been shooting for a perfect result, but despite trying so hard, he still left such a big gap between creating those three balls. He was about to relax his concentration and go ahead with another attempt, but Laien spoke up at this exact moment.

“Don’t lose focus,” Laien said quickly, causing Mikaela to hurriedly stabilize the three balls. Creating them at the same time was very hard, but simply sustaining them once they were created was fairly simple. Thus, even though Mikaela had lost focus for a second, he still managed to prevent the magic from dissipating.

“You already did great,” Laien said with a smile and with an impressed look on his face. “Let’s make use of those three balls. Do you remember what your teachers spoke about? Focus on those three balls, look for a different kind of an energy, of a ‘substance’ than just your spiritual energy. You should be able to sense it now,” he said encouragingly. Comprehending the Principle of Energy just from watching it being used was impossible without a spark of insight, but Mikaela had now created his own three basic versions of the ‘energy’ within those three balls. In Laien’s own opinion, Mikaela should be able to sense the different energies and understand them easily enough now that he had come this far.

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“Okay, I will try,” Mikaela responded resolutely. It would be the final part of this training, so he didn’t want to disappoint Laien no matter what. It was all the more so after he saw the look full of expectation on Laien’s face; he had been looking for those ‘hot and cold energies’, as his teachers described them, for years. Today, he would definitely achieve this long-desired breakthrough of his!

He closed his eyes and directed his whole attention to the three similar, yet very different balls. Like Laien said, he started looking for something else than the pure energy that was there; he really wanted to find it! He tried and tried… and yet, as seconds passed, he couldn’t find anything. All that he could sense were three different masses of power, but the problem was that he couldn’t tell what made this difference. It was just like seeing three different colors but being ignorant as to what exactly caused the original color to branch out into the two new ones.

“He can’t find it?” Laien mused quietly, seeing how the frown on Mikaela’s face kept growing bigger. “Are we rushing things too much? No, this should be more than enough for someone with his talent to perceive the basics of the Principle of Energy. Then… is he just trying too hard?” he wondered and in the end, he assumed that his last guess was probably the correct one. Telling Mikaela to relax would be counterproductive considering the boy’s character… so only way left was the roundabout one!

With a smile sneaking onto his face, Laien raised his hands and placed them above Mikaela’s, above the two lateral balls of ice and steam. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, releasing his aura as to make sure his control would be perfect in order to not harm Mikaela. Then, he carefully pulled onto his insights into the Principle of Energy, causing one complete and one illusory golden rune to appear within his soul. If Mikaela couldn’t sense the subtle difference and was only seeing a tree and not the forest due to how hard he was trying, then he would make this difference more apparent to him!

“?!” Raphael rose up to his knees from his cross-legged position the second he sensed the almost absurd purity of the energy Laien was beginning to release. He had insights into the Principle of Energy of his own, but during that brief fight half an hour ago, he hadn’t been able to tell how far ahead of him Laien was in this regard. After all, back then Laien’s spiritual energy contained a mixture of many insights; it was extremely hard to tell them apart, much less discern which one’s influence was the strongest! But now, as the mass of deathly cold energy descended from Laien’s left hand, the difference became as clear as the skies.

“He’d better be careful,” Raphael said while gritting his teeth, looking how the mass of energy produced by Laien kept falling down towards the ball of ice and Mikaela’s hand. With this degree of insights contained within it, even though Laien released no spiritual energy at all, one wrong move would still result in Mikaela’s hand and forearm being frozen to the bone in an instant.

“Don’t worry about it,” Yin commented quietly. “Control was always Laien’s strong suit. He wouldn’t do something like that if he wasn’t confident,” he reassured with a smile.

“I hope so,” Raphael murmured almost inaudibly, He had a very favorable opinion of Laien, but that would change in an instant if he caused his best friend to suffer because of his overconfidence.

“I wonder when I will become that strong…” Meanwhile, Arslan stayed relatively quiet, without joining the brief conversations that were going on between Yin and Raphael.

At the same time as those three were having their own thoughts, Mikaela was heavily startled. He didn’t even open his eyes, but he could ‘see’ the ridiculous mass of cold energy engulf the ball of his created by him and a few seconds later, even cover his hand. He could tell just how frightening the innate power of this energy was, but for some reason, his instincts were also telling him that it was of no danger to him; that it was being kept at bay with incredible carefulness and with a great deal of skill. He didn’t worry about being hurt and instead, he could sense how this strange energy was beginning to resonate with the same one contained within his ball of ice. This, could it be…?

“!” The next second, when he sensed yet another powerful energy appear, Mikaela almost withdrew his hands and his magic. The ‘cold’ energy that appeared first was still tame enough despite being so powerful, but this ‘hot’ energy was so wild and seemingly uncontrollable that he couldn’t help getting a bit nervous. However, he suppressed his fear. “It must be Laien. He’s trying to help me, so I need to focus properly! He wouldn’t let this energy hurt me. Focus, focus!” he told himself and quickly discarded all the unnecessary thoughts, committing his attention to those strange energies and the way they were both resonating with his own spiritual energy.

From the moment the positive energy fully engulfed Mikaela’s left hand and the ball of steam, just about ten seconds passed before the two balls shook in joy. A bright smile appeared on Mikaela’s face as he finally spotted what he had been unable to perceive before; the existence of those two energies within his own spiritual energy! It was there, plain and clear for him to see! It took but an instant for him to familiarize himself with the two of them and understand how they worked; from this point on, he would be able to create both ice and steam almost as effortlessly as water! With a few days of training, he was sure that his skill in those two areas would reach a level comparable to the one of his water creation, too!

“I’ve finally gotten it down,” he thought with a bright smile sneaking onto his face. “The cold and hot energies those stupid teachers were blabbering about like idiots. So that’s what they are!” he mused excitedly, as a result of what he began losing his focus. However, he didn’t mind; he thought that the training was already done, but contrary to his expectations, he heard Laien say otherwise.

“Not yet,” Laien said strongly, though not in a reprimanding tone. He indeed had one more thing he wanted to show Mikaela.

As for Mikaela himself, he didn’t know what Laien was planning, but he didn’t ask either. He trusted that Laien had his reasons and simply reinforced his focus, forcefully returning to the trance-like state he was in. He waited patiently, trying to guess what Laien wanted to do in the back of his mind. Hadn’t he already taught him everything there was to the Principle of Energy? Did he want to use this opportunity to deepen his insights into it, perhaps? Either way, it should be revealed soon enough.

Thinking in such a way, Mikaela was surprised when he sensed the two energies created by Laien move all of the sudden. “They are heading to the center? Won’t that cause an explosion? What is he…?” he questioned worriedly but didn’t lose concentration for even a split second. By this point, his trust in Laien reached a level where he wouldn’t doubt Laien just because he didn’t know or understand something. Thus, he continued paying attention to those two energies as they got closer and closer… then held his breath when they intersected. Yet, to his complete shock, the two opposite powers didn’t reject each other and instead merged into something entirely else! The third type of energy…!

At this moment, it wasn’t only Mikaela who was astonished. Raphael was looking at the two extremes merging with his mouth hanging open. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing! He had been taught that the Principle of Energy contained two aspects, the ‘cold’ and the ‘hot’ one. He managed to comprehend the Principle of Energy and apply it to his skills, then further his insights into it… and yet, he had never, ever imagined that there was something so big about the Principle of Energy of what he had been completely unaware!

It was almost as if a hidden door opened in his mind. Suddenly, the empty spot, the ‘something that was lacking’ had been filled in, pushing him into a prajna-state of epiphany, allowing his comprehension of the Principle of Energy to shoot up by many levels at once. In fact, his original insights into the negative and positive aspects of the Principle of Energy had been so great that now that the empty spot in his insights had been filled, a golden rune started taking shape within his soul! And judging by the speed it was forming at, its completion would happen in just a few seconds, a long time before Raphael’s epiphany ended!

Similarly, it wasn’t only Raphael who was reaping the benefits of the clear display of insights that Laien was performing. Mikaela, who was directly exposed to the third type of energy, the ‘Primordial Energy’, as Laien had named it, obtained the benefits like none other. With Laien’s meticulous aid, he had not only come to understand how to create and use the Primordial Energy, but thanks to the resonance of the three aspects of the Principle of Energy of Laien’s and of his own, he was beginning to gain new insights at a staggering rate! Although it couldn’t be compared to the process Laien and Yin went through in their Combined Soul Realm, it was still miles beyond what one would normally obtain by watching someone more skilled use an ability for him to study.

“Lucky bastards,” Yin murmured playfully, watching Raphael and Mikaela with a lighthearted smile on his face. Both of those guys obtained great benefits this time around, but he wasn’t envious of them nor was he frustrated to see them improve. He was simply happy for them without any ill feeling lingering in his heart. He could tell that both Raphael and Mikaela were good people, so he saw no harm in having Laien help them train and grow stronger in one way or another.

Around fifteen seconds later, Raphael opened his eyes, exiting the prajna-state of epiphany. He smiled to himself, feeling greatly excited. It was the first for him, but now there existed two golden runes within his soul, both of which seemed to be enhancing the power of his Principle of Energy. If he were to once again be placed in front of those two guards of Elder Sophie’s, he would be confident in killing them with one blow each! Since he didn’t have a chance to try it out he couldn’t tell for sure, but he had a vague sense that his combat prowess improved by two qualitative levels. Now, he would be able to fight on equal footing not just with a strong martial master of the third rank, but even with a martial master of the fourth rank!

“What a great lucky chance,” he thought quietly, trying to calm down a little as he was getting a bit too excited. “I need to find a way to repay him. I wonder if there’s anything I can help him with in his training? And if not, then what else can I do?” he wondered with a somewhat awkward look on his face. He had benefited unintentionally and as a bystander, but he would feel terrible if he couldn’t pay Laien back for this great chance in some way. After Laien would finish his training with Mikaela, he would surely bring this matter up to him.

“Congratulations,” Yin said quietly and exchanged a meaningful glance with Raphael, who in turn blushed slightly and nodded a little. It must have been pretty obvious that he suddenly gained new insights from watching those two, eh? Well, he wasn’t planning on hiding this fact either way, so it was good that Yin knew.

“I will pay it back for sure,” he assured, not wanting Yin to think that he had been trying to keep his breakthrough a secret or anything like that.

“Mhm,” Yin nodded with a smile. “Knowing Laien, he will probably say that he already sees you guys as friends and doesn’t need you to pay him back anything,” he said in a low voice and chuckled at Raphael’s surprised and slightly bewildered expression. Personally, he was of the mind that favors needed to be properly repaid, be it between friends or not; only Laien was an exception to this rule of his! However, maybe it precisely because of this differing attitude of Laien’s that he found it so easy to make everyone around have a favorable impression of him.

“Whatever he says, I will do as I think is right,” Raphael assured with a smile. His conscience wouldn’t allow him to take without giving. It would be a different matter if the other party was an enemy, but Laien fell into the exact opposite category to that. Thus, he would repay the favor no matter what.

With Yin and Raphael coming to an easy agreement, they returned to staying quiet and watching Laien and Mikaela train. Arslan didn’t try to strike up a conversation either, so almost ten minutes passed in the blink of an eye, in an almost complete silence.