A week has now passed. Volkarin was with Uehara by the stream. He was evaluating Uehara’s abilities in fusing two or more basic elements with a conceptual element. Right now, Uehara was in his sage mode weaving hand-signs.
Volkarin stood next to Uehara like a drill instructor.
“Again.”
[Monkey-Bird-Monkey-Tiger-Monkey-Snake-Pig]- [Concept-Air-Concept-Fire-Concept-Darkness-Fusion]
After weaving the hand-signs, he brought two fingers to his mouth while one hand still maintained a half-pig hand-sign.
[Sage Art: Darkness True Fire!]
A blaze of pure black flames gushed out like a torrent from his mouth, covering a wide area like a blanket of dark flames.
“Stop.”
Uehara cut off the chakra supply and the flames vanished into thin air.
“Add the hand-sign for goat again.”
“Yes father.”
[Monkey-Bird-Monkey-Tiger-Monkey-Goat-Monkey-Snake-Pig]
Volkarin sighed in defeat when he saw his son mess up the order. Uehara put two fingers to his lips while the other hand laid loose on the side.
[Sage Art: Darkness True Fire!]
As the flames came out of his mouth, they suddenly became unstable and vanished. Uehara kept his awkward posture of blowing for a few seconds in confusion before he stood up straight and frowned. While he was pondering what he did wrong, Volkarin finally decided to help him after six failures.
“You’re botching the order of the elements. Watch me.”
“Monkey-Bird-Monkey-Goat-Monkey-Tiger-Monkey-Snake-Pig.”
Bringing his pointing and middle-finger to his mouth, he blew out dark-coloured flames but this time, they exuded a chill that froze the stream solid.
Looking at Uehara, he repeated the hand-signs again.
“It is supposed to be Concept-Air-Concept-Temperature-Concept-Fire-Concept-Darkness-Fusion.”
Uehara understood what he did wrong but he didn’t understand why it was wrong.
“Father. Why does the order matter?”
“Order must always be maintained. This is the order of the elements. Air, Sound; Water, Temperature; Earth, Gravity; Fire, Lightning; Light and Darkness. Whenever you utilise hand-signs, it must always be in that order. This functions on the basic rule that Air overcomes Water, Water overcomes Earth and Earth overcomes Fire. It doesn’t work the other way around. If put in the same conditions, fire can never overcome earth and earth can never overcome water.”
“Then what about the elemental deviants father?”
“The elemental deviants can be called advanced versions but their roots still belong to the four basic elements so the cycle will still remain valid. If put on an equal scale with a strong master at work, sound will overcome temperature, gravity users would be in a disadvantage against temperature masters and lighting attacks become next to useless against a master of gravity since the bolt would curve. Are you understanding, son?”
“Yes, father. But if I freeze the temperature enough, wouldn’t sound be unable to move.”
“The conditions to lower the temperature to such an extent are extremely hard. That’s why nine out of ten times, sound will always prevail against temperature.”
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“I see, father. But what about the conceptual elements? Is light stronger than darkness.”
“No. On the contrary, darkness is stronger than light but since there are numerous entities with physical bodies (yang), it becomes balanced. Although darkness covers the cosmos, light is concentrated into tiny areas like stars and planets. Adding the numerous ‘living’ existences, it becomes balanced.”
Uehara pondered for a while before asking.
“Since dead entities are yin, wouldn’t there be more dead people than living people?”
“That would be the case normally but dead mortals are usually devoured by death gods, keeping the numbers low all the time.”
Uehara frowned.
“So all it would take is for the death gods to abstain for the balance to be broken?”
“No son. That isn’t how it works. Death gods are called death gods because it is their job and basic instinct to eat souls. Even if they were to stop, the primordials would intervene in order to keep the balance of light and darkness.”
“Primordials?”
Volkarin patted Uehara and chuckled.
“You’re still too weak to be knowing about the primordials. But as my son, I’ll give you some advice. If you want their attention, destroy ten galaxies within a millennium. If you want their ire, destroy a universe like I did.”
Uehara’s mouth fell open.
“D-destroying a universe is…possible?”
It was the first time he ever stuttered. Volkarin laughed at his son’s shock.
“Of course it’s possible! When I destroyed a universe, I was at the 12th Gate. I’ll never forget how the primordials chased me around for a thousand millenniums.”
Uehara immediately pictured Lazarin, the old man who reincarnated him.
[Could he destroy a universe?]
Immediately, a thought he’d been having took over.
“Father. What about time? Can time be controlled?”
Volkarin’s expression turned serious.
“As my son, I will explain it to you. But as a god, I will tell you. Do not tamper with time. Besides the primordials, even other gods will hunt you down because time is a very sensitive matter, especially for gods with descendants and I will explain why now. First of all, anyone at the 10th Gate and above cannot be affected by time. This means, if you were to create another timeline, the ancestor who is a god cannot be cloned into that timeline. This means, that god will have to see a timeline where his descendants were possibly wiped out because in that timeline, they never had his backing. That is the main reason gods will hunt you.”
Taking on a teaching posture, he began teaching.
“There are three ways to tamper with time. One is in the mind, which is harmless. The second is the one where you create another timeline and the last is where you reverse the time of the current existing timeline.”
Touching, Uehara’s head, he spoke.
“The one based on the mind is very simple and is divided into two parts. The first is, you change how you perceive time. By increasing your reaction speed, you can experience time at a much slower rate. That is a method that can be trained naturally. The second is a little bit more complex. This time, YOU change how time perceives you. By creating a minor-dimension based around you with a time-dilation of your choosing, you can make time treat you as a separate existence that belongs on a different timescale.”
He removed his hand from Uehara’s head and drawing his finger in the air, the surin script for “coward” written in flames floated in the air.
Ignoring Uehara’s strained smile bordering on laughter, he spoke.
“This is the timeline method, also unanimously known as the coward’s method. I won’t get too into it since it involves a lot of spatial elements and concepts that you can’t use yet due to you being a lower existence. To explain it fundamentally, you tear open a crack in time-space and hop back to the point in time you want to go to. This will create another branch in the tree of time, which will come to the attention of every single god and the primordials, meaning they will destroy that timeline and destroy you as well.”
Uehara listened in wonder as he processed what he was being told. Initially he had an interest, but now, he was thoroughly convinced to never try messing with time. Seeing his son regain his composure, Volkarin continued.
“The third method requires the most power and depending on how far you turn back time, will garner you a certain amount of ire from the gods and primordials. Now, to turn back the time of an entire universe, you will need an immense amount of energy and an insane level of comprehension into all the elements and their concepts as well as knowledge on ki and its deviants, dankai and hakai, which are respectively the energies of creation and destruction. If you turn back time by maybe three minutes, you will slightly annoy the gods, especially those who were alchemists when they were mortals since you’ll disturb the time-dilation spells they put around their herbs. This method won’t get you much trouble, only a certain amount of annoyance At my peak, I could at most turn time back by an hour, and the more destruction there was in the universe that you had to reverse, the more power you had to use, resulting in a shorter duration.”
A proud smile formed in his face.
“Remembering when I destroyed a universe, I caused so much destruction that the universe I destroyed couldn’t be restored through time and had to be recreated from scratch.”
Uehara was awed at his father’s power. But a critical point came up in his mind.
“Father. If you turn back the time for one universe, won’t the other universes be affected?”
“Now that, my son, is a very good question. The answer is, every universe is completely separated and independent from the other because of a realm of complete emptiness between them. So no matter what happens in one universe, the other universes will never be affected.”