I had never been the most physically active person before the system came around. I’d always promised myself that after I got rich and didn’t work 14 hours a day that I would get myself a personal trainer and get in shape. I can now confidently say that if a personal trainer was anything like Talus was, I would have just quit day one and worked out myself. This was pretty much exactly the same as having a personal trainer, but instead of taking rest days and eating right, I was working around the clock under the close tutelage of the God of Death.
Things had started off pretty slow. The first few hours were spent teaching the basic theory about auras, as well as a few more nuanced things about it. I’d learned quite a bit during this time, and a lot of the information was actually very surprising.
One bit of information I had learned was that the aura could stretch and deform when acted on by outside forces. I had experienced this personally when I had stored the titans corpse within my aura. It had stretched to be able to fit the massive body. The reason the god’s explanation stuck with me so much was because I also learned that an aura could rip if stretched too much. It was a far more difficult thing to mend than a body, though with time it could still be done.
Many more dangers of using one’s aura were also explained to me, but many of them wouldn’t be a serious concern until many levels down tahe line. I really wouldn’t have to worry about the mana within my aura having to maneuver around a mountain if I couldn’t even fit something that big in my aura.
The potential applications of an aura were far more numerous than I had been expecting. The god had demonstrated how he could condense his aura into solid objects, reel it in to act as a barrier, or even crush anything within his aura. The aura I could feel coming from him was only about as large as my own, but his was condensed to be far smaller than it usually was. According to him, I would have little hope of being able to even traverse the distance his aura could expand to within my lifetime. That was both really cool and slightly unnerving. I still really didn’t have a good reference point for just how much stronger this man was than me.
After we had covered most of the relevant theory, he had begun teaching me how to reshape my aura.
“Think of it like a balloon.” Talus says. “It has a natural size it likes to be, and generally wants to remain a sphere. You can condense it by willing the sphere to become smaller or willing just one part of it to come closer.”
“How exactly am I supposed to will it to do that?” I ask.
“Some prefer to think of it as sucking in a big breath. Others think of gripping the entire thing and squeezing. Personally I always found it similar to flexing a muscle, though that was only after I had gotten more acquainted with my aura.”
I do my best to picture what he said. I tried flexing it like a muscle, but it was like trying to move a limb that had fallen asleep. I felt like it should be able to move, but I just couldn’t budge it. I tried squeezing it like he said some people do, but that was also difficult. I did manage to make it deform into a roughly oval shape, but it wasn’t a particularly elegant attempt.
What had finally worked for me was trying to picture it like I was breathing in. I had tried to pull my aura in all around me, simultaneously breathing in through my nose to help picture it better. The edges of my aura drew closer to my body as I did so. I let out a small chuckle of celebration, but as soon as the air leaves my lungs my aura returns to its original shape.
It was a bit frustrating if I was being honest with myself. Mana control had come pretty naturally to me when I had first started doing that. This on the other hand was finicky and tedious to learn. Having a world class teacher helped, but it’s not like a math teacher who could just show you the answer and the steps to reach it. All he could show me was a recommended method, and I had to figure the rest out on my own.
According to him, learning to reshape the aura was fundamental to all magic involving the aura, so until I finished this there wasn’t much else we could do.
“How long have we been at this so far?” I ask Talus as I once more try to shape my aura.
“About 37 hours.” The god says, shrugging.
“How long did it take you to figure this out when you were first learning?”
“About five hours to get to where you are now. In all fairness, my trait did help me quite a bit, as it is heavily linked with my aura.”
“Mine is too, yet I still feel like it is taking me longer than it should to learn this.”
The god looks confused for a moment. “Your trait isn’t known for having a particularly strong connection with your aura. You have managed to steer the development of it towards an aura-based direction. Most with your trait don’t do that.”
“So others with the same trait might use it in a far different way than I do?”
“Indeed they do. For example, a crafter with your trait may make an enchantment or large scale ritual, then condense it down to a single one dimensional line that can be placed on a staff or something of the sort. You have focused on the higher dimensions, while another person may focus on the lower ones.”
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
“That sounds nice, but I don’t think the lower dimensions are going to be super useful to me for the time being if those are the types of things it’s used for.” As I speak, I finally manage to achieve what I had been trying to do for the past several hours. “Got it!” I announced with glee, excited to see that my outburst had not wrecked my control.
My aura hugged my body, not extending more than a few centimeters away. It was extremely dense now, and I felt that its presence alone could weaken an incoming attack.
“Congratulations.” Talus says, clapping his hands. “Now we get to move on to the fun part.”
The fun part turned out to be more aura control practice. He hadn’t been lying though, what we were doing now was definitely more enjoyable. He would shape his aura a certain way, and I would do my best to copy the shape. It made me both practice manipulating my own aura, as well as honing my ability to sense the aura of others. He had to significantly weaken his aura to make it an actual challenge, as training with his aura at maximum power was like training your night vision by staring at the sun.
We spent our time training in conversation, passing the time as I got the hang of my aura.
“So what is it like being a god?” I ask. “I imagine obtaining all of that power must have taken a long time.”
“It did. Becoming a god is far from a quick process. As for what it is like being a god...” He takes a moment to think. “It’s pretty nice.”
“That’s all you have to say about it?”
“Yeah, that is all. I’m not one of those gods with a superiority complex, even if I am truly superior.”
“Yeah, no complex at all.”
“Oh shut it. My point is that many gods see themselves as fundamentally different, when in reality we are just a bunch of old farts with a lot of power.”
“That is a pretty down to earth way to look at it.” I say, a thought occurring to me. “Were you born into the system or did your star system get integrated into it?”
“My star system was integrated into it.” He says. “After our population crested 50 billion on my home planet, we were brought to the true universe with a D tier tutorial that barely lasted 30 days.”
“What determines the rank of a tutorial?” I ask. “I mean, this tutorial is S tier, but I almost feel like it is wasted on the seven billion people here compared to the fifty billion on your planet that could have benefited from it.”
“There are a few contributing factors, but it mainly involves how you were introduced to the system. If your star system was dragged in to save it from overpopulation or a cataclysmic event, you earned yourself a D tier tutorial. If a particular individual in your system reaches a certain threshold of power, you get a C tier. If the general population was extremely technologically and mathematically advanced, you could earn a B or even A tier. An A tier is guaranteed if you enter the true universe with the assistance of the system, and S tier is reserved for star systems that enter the true universe through no assistance of the system.”
“So you are saying that my planet managed to do it all on our own? That seems like a stroke of luck, as we were about a millisecond away from killing ourselves with a blackhole.”
Talus looks surprised for a moment, as he has several times since I met him. “Tell me, how advanced was your civilization technologically speaking? What did you really know about blackholes?”
“Well, not much. We knew what they were, the bare basics of how they worked, and how they were formed. We had hundreds of scientists who dedicated their lives to unlocking the secrets of these massive things, and eventually managed to create one ourselves.”
“Are you familiar with the theory that blackholes lead to alternate universes?”
“I am. Is it a common one in this universe?”
“It would be, if it weren’t for the fact that it wasn’t true. In some universes it holds true, but as I am sure you can tell by what we are doing at this very moment, not all universes have the same fundamental laws. In your universe, a blackhole was likely a one way trip to this universe.”
“That...” I rub my forehead. “Is a lot to think about. I dedicated my life to studying and understanding the fundamental laws of my universe, and hearing that some of them may not hold true is pretty jarring.”
“Don’t fret over it too much. Most of them should work just fine. If you really want a good example of how things have changed, what is the speed of light in your universe?”
“A bit under 3 million meters a second.” I say. “Don’t tell me even that has changed. How does everything even still work? How does-”
“Like I said, things work differently here. Light here travels instantly, and doesn’t drag its feet quite as much as it does in nearly every other universe.”
“But... wow.” My mind is just filled with so many more questions, but at the same time I don’t know what to ask about first.
The next many hours are spent with us talking about the greater universe as a whole. I probe him for more information on how things have changed, and he asks about what Earth was like. Overall it is a very engaging conversation for me, though I can see boredom on the old god’s face every time I ask a physics question. It didn’t stop me though, because I was not about to let it slide that gravity no longer relied on mass. How could it possibly make sense that the system just “decided” how much gravity a planet should have?
Eventually, our conversation came to a close. It had been triggered by me finally obtaining the skill upgrade that Talus had been waiting for me to get. It was for a skill I had gained during our time training, and had already upgraded several times.
Advanced Aura Manipulation (Epic) has become Fluid Aura Control (Special)
Fluid Aura Control (Special)
Manipulate your aura in various ways. Stretch it, condense, it or reshape it to your whim. While condensed, your aura can weaken incoming attacks. When interacting with another aura, you can push against theirs, forcing it to condense or push back the target. Provides a small increase to the effectiveness of all aura based skills and spells.
You are now level 71
You are now level 72
It was so-called base skill for aura manipulation. Everything else would branch off of this.
By this point, it had been nearly two full days of aura training. I had been annoyed for nearly every moment of it, and while my control had gotten better, I still felt like I was not particularly proficient.
Apparently, Talus felt the exact same way. Looking back, those two days almost felt like a vacation compared to what I would be put through over the course of the next 10 days.