Sorry that this chapter is a bit shorter, and that it took he like 10 days to write it. I wasn't home for a few days so now I'm going to have to catch up. Expect another 1,500 word chapter tomorrow and a 4,000 word chapter on Tuesday.

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Chapter 9-True Power

            A day had passed and still Herj had made Sear do nothing. He just had to wait while staring at a wall. He questioned Herj as to what he had to do.

            “How much longer do I have to stare at the wall?” He received no reply. “C’mon, why am I wasting time here justing staring at it, tell me what to do with it.”

            He had attempted to practice magic, but every time he had Herj would come up and bash him. He repeatedly reminded him to not practice magic, and to not fall asleep either. He had done that once, and woke up to a wooden pole being jabbed into his stomach.

            He continued to look randomly and decided to do something he hadn’t done in years. One thing he had learned early on, was to meditate. He sat on the floor and folded his hands on his lap. He cleared his mind of everything but sound of his heartbeat.

            He concentrated on that ever growing pulse, and at a certain point he began to feel something else. He felt as if he was being dipped into a large bottomless pit. Or at least, almost bottomless. He knew it had a limit, but he just couldn’t see it just yet. The further he stayed in this state, the harder it became to go deeper. It went from feeling like he was moving through water to moving through maple syrup.

            HE was exerting more and more force to go deeper, but was slowing considerably. This continued until he hit a wall, literally.

            It felt as if he had collided with an object at high speeds. From his mind, he could feel that past it he could be able to finally find the pit of this lake he was in.

            No matter how much he tried, he couldn’t get through it. He tried applying force over a large area, applying it on a small area with great force, even to try to connect with it.

            This continued for a few minutes before he gave up. In his mind what he saw was the layer at which an iceberg went below water. He was still only on the very tip of this unknown entity, power. He decided that instead of going deeper, he wpuld try to understand it more.

            He went further back up and when he felt at ease, he began to move the energy. At first, it felt like he was trying to mix a bowl of rock, but slowly he began to move it faster and faster till the point that he had to stop in fear of messing something up.

            He continued to move it before he realized that he had been doing this wrong the whole time. He had been trying to pry into this “energy” when he should have been moving with it. He was trying to punch a hole through a wall of water instead of just simply going with the flow.

            He concentrated once more and began to move deeper, until he once again came to the wall he had grown accustomed to feeling at this point. He began to go through it, into it.

            He felt his body come out the other side and was met with a feeling of pleasure. Never in his life had he felt something as great as this. Once through, he had also realized what he had been doing.

            He was moving through his own magical energy. The barrier he passed was the first level of magic, the only one he knew, but now he had begun to move deeper and deeper into it. He felt as if he could fight against Herj now.

            He commanded the energy around him, and begun to propel himself further downwards faster than ever before. He continued moving deeper and deeper into his true self while getting stronger and stronger as time passed. He didn’t know how long he had been here, only that it was the best thing he had ever experienced in his life.

            He continued further until he came face to face without another barrier. His mind reeled with thoughts. If he could have such pleasure at only the second level, what would happen if he went to the third? When he tried pushing against it, he realized it was much, much easier than the second, and was plunged what felt like miles deep into it.

            The only difference, was that there was no energy, no pleasure. All he felt was searing pain. Pain he had never felt in his life before. He felt like his body was being torn apart, molded back together, and ripped apart once more hundreds of times in a matter of seconds. He knew that the pit of his energy was still far away, but there seemed to be something much stronger than he keeping him from it.

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            He tried to push himself back up, only to feel more pain. He had nothing to control here. All that was around him was pain. He was sapped of energy, and could do nothing but be tormented by it.

            Finally he gave up and reopened his eyes. He was sweating like never before. It was like he had been dipped in water. The area all around him was covered in his sweat. When he turned to face the candle, he found that it had burned all the way through.

            “That’s impossible>” He thought about how much time had passed. It felt like minutes, an hour at max, but the candle had burned through 15 hours. Not only that, but there were 8 other candles near it, the last of which was down to one hour.

            “So, how was your trip?” He heard Herj behind him, and jumped up startled.

            “How, how long have I been gone?” Sear’s head felt like a brick. While physically he felt fine, he was mentally exhausted to the point he was about to go unconscious.

            “It’s been a full week since you began.” Sear took that in. He thought it was impossible that it was a full week. It had to be a joke. He didn’t even know what he was doing exactly, but he had been doing it for an entire week. With his head feeling like bricks, he blacked out.

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            “Uhhh.” Sear couldn’t form any words at his current state. His head still felt like bricks even though he had woken up hours ago. He had slept for another full day after blacking out.

            While laying, he realized he somehow knew more about magic than he did before. He realized how to enchant himself to a whole other level, how to control his magic with pinprick precision, and how to create being that would follow and listen to his every words.

            After looking through everything he had gathered, he began to get up. While his head still hurt, he knew that after a week of doing nothing he should atleast move around and use his muslces to some point.

            He felt much weaker than before and confirmed it with that fact that he couldn’t stretch as far as before and that his entire body felt sore. He walked around the village a few times and after began to work out the rest of his body, wanting to get it back to normal.

            He walked back home after a few hours, and greeted Herj once more.

            “Hey.” He could finally talk again and his head felt somewhat better. He had many things he wanted to ask Herj, and he began to bombard him with questions. “Was making me stare at a wall your way of teaching me to meditate? Why did you have me meditate? What is all of this knowledge and power I’ve suddenly gained?”

            The last question made Herj’s head come up. “You breached into the second level?” Herj looked surprised at this.

            “Yes I did. I also went into the “third level” but all there was, was pain.” Sear commented about how he had figured out how to move through the energy, and about everything he learned.

            “Well, you are a much faster learned than I expected. Way too fast for my own liking.” Sear was surprised at this. For once he had gotten a compliment, or atleast he thought it was a compliment. “It took me over 30 years of experience to get to the second level, and you did it in a matter of weeks.”

            “And also, the third level of energy doesn’t exist. It is the space between mortal energy and god level energy. Only one person reached that, and he suffered so much pain that his organs all collapsed onto themselves once he awoke. Stay away from it if you prefer to live.” Herj stood up, and began to walk towards the door.

            “From now on, I will go out. It is your task to master everything you learned, for I can’t help you with that. It is specialized to a single person, and what you learned is different from what I learned. I will go out into the word, and when I return in a year, if you haven’t learned it will be my task to kill you.”

            He turned back towards Sear and said one last thing. “I’ve already had to kill one apprentice, don’t make me kill another.” With that, he walked out of the room and closed the door, leaving Sear all by himself.

            Once again, he had been abandoned.