Chapter 16: Back at the Starting Line

The next two days passed in a blink of an eye.

Throughout the entire weekend, Theo kept himself busy with cleaning the house. From early morning to late evening, he worked constantly, only ever stopping for the occasional meal and bathroom break.

He was used to rapidly switching between weapons on the battlefield. Sometimes a war hammer was simply more efficient than a one-handed sword. He experienced a similar situation, except instead of changing from weapon to weapon, he rotated between a dustpan, a mop, and a plunger.

A few times during the day, Shirley would stop by. She didn’t really do anything though. After chatting a bit with Theo, she’d return home, only to come back an hour or two later. He thought her actions were a bit odd, but he didn’t really blame her for them.

He simply assumed that she wanted to keep in close contact with him. Maybe it was because she wanted to make up for all the lost time, or maybe it was because she was afraid that he’d up and vanish again, he didn’t know the real reason why, but nevertheless, he enjoyed her company.

It was just that… if she was going to come over so frequently, then she could have at least helped him.

By the time night rolled in, Theo was dead tired.

He hadn’t felt fatigue like this since he last fought a battle with an entire legion of demons. Back then, it had lasted five days and four nights. Cleaning this house wasn’t nearly as long-winded, but this ordinary, untrained body of his really did lack stamina. Every night, he collapsed onto his bed and immediately fell asleep.

To his utter disappointment, despite being wholly responsible for the mess that engulfed the house, Aunt Lynn really didn’t help him. In fact, the first thing she made him do was clean her bedroom. Afterward, that overlord aunt of his holed herself up in her room for the entire weekend, doing god knows what, while Theo cleaned the rest of the house all by his lonesome.

If it was a punishment she was after, then this was one hell of a way to do it.

Eventually, Monday rolled in.

With a new uniform and his old backpack, Theo stood in the hallway, just outside of the school’s faculty room. A soft sigh leaked out from his lips.

One of the teachers had just given him a brief rundown on his current situation.

While his seven-month long absence was definitely an abnormality, it wasn’t the first of such cases. In fact, the school had experience dealing with even more exaggerated extremes. Because Valery Heights was a private school that completely depended on outside funding in order to keep afloat, the first thing that they needed to learn was how to be flexible.

They had contingencies and backup plans for all sorts of situations. As for cases like his, they had an organized system set in place.

Attendance didn’t really matter for a school like this, so the issue of his absence was completely waved off. The one thing that they could not simply excuse though, was academic performance.

The system they set in place was rather simple; he simply needed to come in every week and take a couple of exams. The exams were to be designed in a way to test him on the material that he had missed. Depending on how well he did, it was entirely possible for Theo to graduate on time.

If he struggled with the material, but showed a willingness to learn and improve, then the school might set him up with extra classes or maybe even a tutor. The last resort was for Theo to repeat the year, but that was a measure taken only after all other options proved useless.

Everything depended on his performance. It was the beauty of commercialized education.

The first afterschool exam was to take place sometime next month. The pressure on his shoulders was heavy, but Theo wasn’t really all that worried though.

He breathed out another sigh. Just as he was wondering what to do next, someone suddenly bumped into him. He inadvertently took a step back, but otherwise remained upright. He looked up, hoping to catch a glimpse of the busybody that had almost knocked him over, but by that time, the person in question was already long gone.

It was then that Theo finally noticed just how crowded the hallway was. A mix of students and teachers, all struggling to get to where they needed to go. Bodies lined the hall from wall to wall. It was like watching a herd of cattle at a slaughterhouse. He felt stifled, suffocated.

A variety of different faces passed by him.

A teacher with a bushy Afro and a five o'clock shadow. A pair of cheerleaders still dressed in their uniforms. A pot-bellied student whose hands were stained in orange food particles. Amidst the crowd, an unassuming janitor caught his eye.

He was a grey-haired old man with pockmarked cheeks. He wore a dark blue jumpsuit and traveled with a yellow mop-bucket. An unknown liquid sloshed around inside the bucket.

Theo blinked. For a second, he wondered whether his eyes were playing tricks on him. He could have sworn that he saw a faint bit of red inside the bucket. It was a scarlet red that reminded him of his time in Mistelhan.

Unfortunately, before he could look at it any closer, the bell suddenly rang. The janitor disappeared amidst the crowd.

Theo shook his head and quickly left the area. After carefully navigating through the tide of bodies, he finally managed to reach his first period of the day, a two-hour calculus class.

His return was not met with the fanfare that he had half expected. Instead, he quietly slinked off into a vacant seat near the back of the room, while the class proceeded as normal. Aside from a single knowing glance from the teacher, who was probably already informed of his particular situation, nothing else happened.

The teacher in question quickly started today’s lesson, which to no surprise, Theo couldn’t understand.

He heaved out a heavy sigh and leaned back against his chair. He looked out the window and stared up at the blue sky. A content smile floated to his face.

Ironically, it was during the middle of class, arguably a student’s busiest time of the day, that Theo finally found some peace.

After he spent a few minutes absentmindedly spacing out, Theo shook his head and once again tried to pay attention to the class. It didn’t take long for him to learn that it was immensely difficult to suddenly jump into a subject, especially given a seven-month long absence. Actually, technically speaking, it had been a little more than twenty-five years since Theo last dealt with anything relating to calculus.

He was more than just a little confused.

In the end, he straightforwardly gave up. After coming to such a decision, he suddenly found himself with a lot of time to spare.

“Well, I guess I can always start on that…” He muttered to himself.

Now was as good of a time as any to finally investigate the runic circle that Theo had created last Saturday. He had been so busy with cleaning during the weekend, that he hadn’t gotten a proper chance to experiment with it prior to today.

A serious expression masked his face. Theo sat back up, while his hand moved towards his lower abdomen. He did not touch his stomach. Instead, his hand hovered over the area where he had previously drawn the rune. He sat in silence and concentrated.

Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed, before he felt something. A tiny spark, just barely noticeable. If it was anyone else other than Theo, then they probably wouldn’t have noticed the change. In fact, the only reason why he had been able to identify it was because of his past experience.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

A slightly numb sensation snaked its way through his abdominal cavity. It felt like a sudden burst of static electricity.

This was it. This was the thing that he had risked his life to attain.

Since ancient times, the best way to familiarize yourself with manipulatable energy was for said energy to be inside you. The introduction of a foreign substance into a host body. That was how many of the warriors and mages of Mistelhan were first introduced to the arduous road of self-strengthening.

All people are born with a hidden force inside their body. Unfortunately, it was infinitely harder for a person to sense their own inborn essence. Hell, some might even claim it was downright impossible. The reason for this was because a person grew side by side with their essence. Something like that was impossible to notice, just as how it was impossible for a person to notice each shift and movement of their organs.

The essence of life was incredibly sneaky. Pure and unadulterated, it was like the oxygen within the atmosphere, ever-present, but not something one can easily distinguish.

The electricity that he had forcibly shoved into his body was different from that. It was violent and chaotic. Destructive in nature, yet still capable of producing life. It was a different form of essence, much like how mana and life force were two different, yet all too similar existences.

Mana that came from the world, life force that breathed within the body, and electricity that powered the batteries on a television remote, they were all different, yet the same.

In Mistelhan, the colloquial term for all the various energies and essences that existed within the ever-expanding universe was Prana. Prana possessed an omnipresent existence. There was no one true form of Prana. Instead, it was divided into several variations. The energy of life, the essence of the Earth, the celestial light of the stars, the moon’s ephemeral glow, even the fire in a hearth, all of it was essence, all of it was Prana.

In Mistelhan, the main area of focus was on the conversion of Prana into something more. They sought for something they considered a higher existence, something above, something that they could truly call their own. That was the ultimate goal. That was the purpose of Inner Circulation, to convert Prana into a malleable, manipulatable essence that acted as a part of one’s body. They called such a thing Ichor.

A human’s capability is born finite. It was only through the production of Ichor that one can detach themselves from that finite possibility.

Mana, Ichor, Prana, all of those terms originated from the first Hero. Argus the Conqueror King, the man who single-handedly created the Inner Circulation technique. Ironically, he was also an otherworlder like Theo, although Argus had not been summoned, but rather, he fell into a spatial wormhole and ended up on Mistelhan.

In fact, those words came from his old world.

Argus lived in a time close to the beginning of civilization. He practically created everything from scratch. More specifically, the thing that he created was not the modern-day Inner Circulation technique, but rather, its predecessor. Back then, it was called the Argus Enhancement Method or Argus Method for short.

In truth, embarking on the path of Inner Circulation was not yet possible for Theo.

For that, he first needed to go through the prerequisite. The prerequisite was something that the third Hero had created.

In all, Mistelhan’s history consisted of four great Heroes; Argus the Conqueror King, Carmine the Pheonixborne, Arlie the Saintess, and Theodore the Champion. All of them contributed to the evolution of Mistelhan’s complicated magic system in their own little way.

Argus was the father of Inner Circulation, Carmine single-handedly created Outer Casting, while Arlie devised of a way to circumvent a human’s natural weakness.

The Conqueror King represented the transition from common birth to the divine. His existence represented infinite possibility, but that wasn’t really quite accurate. For his era, that might have held true, but not for modern day Mistelhan.

In actuality, the people from the ancient era and the people from the current era were innately different.

In Argus’s time, for one reason or another, everybody was born with a strand of Ichor. Talent and resource distribution were determined by how strong or how weak their initial strand was. To them, the complicated and dangerous process that Theo underwent with the runic circle, was completely unnecessary. In fact, if Theo had lived in their era, then he would have been dismissed as a no-talent scrub with no prospects of ever becoming strong.

It was only natural. The ancient era was a simpler time. They simply needed to grow and cultivate their existing Ichor. It was sort of similar to watering a flower within a field, completely unnecessary, but nevertheless, it helped.

In Mistelhan’s history, something happened and eventually, humans stopped naturally producing Ichor. While they still possessed life force, it was not something that they could easily manipulate.

The Era of Loss, the darkest time in Mistelhan’s history.

The second Hero had lived within that time period. In his quest for power, he abandoned the theory of self-strengthening and focused his attention on the usage of outside forces. The end of Loss was ushered forth by the third Hero, who rekindled Mistelhan’s obsession with self-strengthening.

She devised a method to make the body more receptive to prana, and for it to eventually produce its own strand of Ichor.

She called it the Severance Method.

Her theory stated that a human body existed in its natural state with shackles placed on their potential. The humans of the ancient era also had these shackles, but they possessed far fewer shackles than modern-day humans. Essentially, ancient era humans possessed great potential, to the point where their bodies naturally produced Ichor all on their own.

Break a shackle and unlock your potential. Once a person reaches a certain threshold, then their bodies will naturally start producing Ichor.

Theo discovered that the body of a human from Plume was actually quite similar to the modern-day bodies of Mistelhan’s citizens. It lacked naturally produced Ichor. Without a strand of Ichor, then Theo was incapable of absorbing any of the existing Prana that circulated Plume.

Liken everything to the creation of a ceramic vase. Severance was all about digging up the dirt. The more you gather, the bigger the vase you can make. Inner Circulation was about adding in the water, forming the vase, and filling said vase with even more water. One cannot do the latter without first accomplishing the former.

To ‘gather the soil’, Arlie identified three components of the human body. She called it a trifecta, consisting of the mind, the flesh, and the spirit. In other words, the brain, the heart, and the pit (abdomen).

Each point represented a facet of a person’s existence and all three points were sealed by an invisible, intangible force. The source of one’s potential.

Break a seal and evolve beyond your past self. Break enough and reach the threshold for self-strengthening. Break even more and become someone infinitely closer to the divine.

Severance was the creation of the foundation. It was an important step that one could not take lightly.

The number of shackles that one can break was inherently limited. The human body was not built for infinity. It was simply not suited for continuous breakthroughs, at least not until it evolves past something beyond human, beyond even superhuman.

Break the heart and strengthen the body. Break the brain and enhance the mind. Break the pit and widen the breadth. No matter which shackle you choose to break, you are still restricted by your mortal coil. For instance, back on Mistelhan, the maximum number of shackles that a person has ever broken was nine. That was only the limit though, most individuals stopped before that.

The Severance method represented choice and crossroads. An individual can break whichever source they prefer, but after each subsequent break, regardless of the type, progressing becomes more and more difficult. The limited amount of breaks a person can perform was the reason why most people usually focused on one or two sources. For instance, warriors mainly stuck to the heart source, while mages split their concentration between the pit and the brain.

In the past, Theo had broken nine. Three brain shackles, three heart shackles, and three pit shackles. He became known as the well-rounded Hero, not the strongest in a particular field, but well versed enough in everything that it had allowed him to become the eventual victor.

In order to reach such a height once more, the dancing electricity that rattled around in his stomach was the key.

The runic circle forcibly locked the energy within his body. It was contained within a self-created cage, one made out of dancing electricity. The cage itself was the remnants of the runic circle. Basically, a small portion of the electricity restricted the rest of the electricity.

Of course, this runic cage was far from enough. Theo had no way of directly tweaking with the cage. He could neither regulate it nor reinforce it. All he could do was sit and wait. Eventually, the cage would break or deplete itself, and when it does, the stored energy that it had kept at bay will do far more harm than good to his body.

In that time, he needed to completely deplete the electricity and use it to sever one of the three sources.

Right now, he needed to make a choice. Which point should he break first, the mind, the heart, or the pit? In the past, he maxed out with three shackles per point, but this time was different. He felt that this old body of his could surpass that once long-standing rule of nine.

He didn’t know where such a feeling came from. It was sort of like a gut instinct. Fortunately, he trusted his gut more than he did his rational mind.

After some brief consideration, he decided to prioritize the shackles of his mind. It held the greatest benefits to the current him. The mind shackle, once severed, will increase a person’s computational speed, memory, reaction time, and sensitivity.

Not only would it help his future training, but it would also make school a hell of a lot easier.

Theodore was not an overly optimistic person. He honestly didn’t believe he could catch up with seven months of missed lessons purely through grit and hard work. He knew that if he wanted to pass the year and graduate on time, then he could only rely on such otherworldly methods.

With that, he grabbed hold of the electricity and guided it towards his head. After a few minutes, he located the brain source and quickly started the grueling process of severance.

There was only one way to break a shackle and that was through brute force. A strand of electricity struck the point.

Almost immediately, a splitting headache assaulted him. It was like a thousand migraines rolled up into one. Unfortunately, this was only the start. Still, Theo did not plan to give up. He simply refused to stop at the starting line, especially not on a road that he had already traveled across.