Scientists and workout freaks seem to have come to a consensus that a man’s prime, if he was in good health, took care of himself, ate well, and religiously exercised, would be around his early thirties where his physicality would reach its peak. And supposedly with careful dieting and routine exercise, that man could maintain that peak for at least another decade and a half.
Not like football players who have to face the fact that their peak is around twenty-six due to the incredible amount of abuse they sustain during their career. It’s comparable to an infantry soldier whose body has been put through the wringer going to various training camps and hard deployments. This ‘ideal physique’ only applies if those ideal exercise and eating habits start earlier than that though, like around 19.
That prescription did not include me. At twenty-eight years old, I needed a clean restart. A real one. Even though I had used my magic to put me back into decent shape a couple days ago, the years of desk job work and ice cream had not been kind to my overall health. But first, a test, cause I am not going to try this shit out on myself. I went outside, feeling secure in the moment due to Norn keeping watch as I could feel him prowling the skies near the house. Reaching out with my senses for pulses of life, I found a robin’s nest in the tree across the street, with two eggs inside.
[Perfect.]
In no time, I was back in my basement with one egg cupped in my hands, eyes closed, fumbling around my Flesh Sorcery instincts trying to see how much of what I imagined would be explained on its own.
It’s hard to describe as Sorcery is literally a part of my soul, but imagine being really good at soccer and not knowing but finding that out until someone randomly kicks a ball at you and you do a bicycle-kick from forty-yards away and score a goal.
Sorcery is having understanding and innate talent with a particular element of magic combined with preset instincts or inborn knowledge. From what I gathered from the giant humans, wizards seem to have the handicap of not having the magic work with you, but rather requiring more ingredients to get the power working. Sorcerers get a cheat in that department.
After half an hour of tuning my thoughts down to focus on the task at hand, I reached out my senses to the idling battery generator and connected to it, turning the flow on but at the lowest setting. Then, cradling the robin’s egg in my hands, I slowly soaked the egg in my magic. As the pressure began to build, I envisioned the embryo aging, the feathers growing in and the beak elongating while the body itself matured. My Flesh Sorcery invigorated the egg pushing it along its natural maturation process. I watched as the yolk sac inside shrank and the baby bird actually began to form.
[SUCCESS!] I celebrated.
Excitement almost made me lose control for a moment but the implications of this were staggering. Since I just proved that I could age the embryo, reversing it should also be possible. Visually monitoring the aging process through the lens of my powers was incredible, but trying to apply that in reverse turned out to be far harder than I expected.
As soon as I began to reverse the age, the power requirements spiked. I instantly amped up the generator to match the flow. De-aging did something different on a level I couldn’t detect as the power requirements proved to be exponential, as in orders of magnitude beyond my initial expectations. Doing it fast took stupid amounts of energy, but it can be done. Fighting my urge to rush, I slowed down the de-aging process and the energy requirements lessened but not by much. I detected far less stress in the baby bird’s body as well as I continued to slow down the speed of the working.
[Whew.] I sighed internally, not ready for that particular revelation. [That doesn’t make sense though, it’s the same thing but in reverse. Eh, whatever, as long as it works.]
Practicality is difficult to argue with if there’s a clear solution with very few visible obstacles. That’s all I really needed to know. De-aging takes an uber amount of mana which isn't a problem as I have three magic nuclear generators in my basement that can take care of that issue. Placing the egg’s age back to where I originally found it, I then returned it to the nest doing my best to clean it off with pure mana so that it didn’t retain the scent of human.
The plan was almost ready, but one idea that I’d been chewing over from my house getting attacked earlier sprang to mind. The generators are awesome with their constant outflow of mana, but what if something can put out more damage in an instant than the generator's output can manage, like a bomb or some crazy dragon that takes a liking to my setup? I need a capacitor, a big one.
In the corner of my basement sat an odd relic, an old cast-iron boiler from the early 1900s twice the size of a fridge that we had never removed due to its ridiculous width and weight. The boiler was a leftover remnant from a much earlier time and was kind of an eyesore now. Before the Ripple, the basement was dark and cluttered enough to sort of ignore it but my crystalline lights that I’d placed all around the room kept the room well lit. You couldn’t ignore it.
Banishing the aged cast iron structure with magic was the work of a few minutes. In its place, I slowly conjured a diamond-like crystal, which was easy. I remembered from school that those kinds of crystals are simply very well stacked carbon, and carbon is one of the most abundant materials on Earth. Taking my time to get it right and relying heavily on my Earth and Mana sorceries, I pulled on my Earth sorcery to grow this diamond to be unnaturally large and regular in shape: five-feet tall, four-feet deep, and eight-feet wide. This behemoth was going to function as my ‘Doomsday’ anti-nuke/anti-giant battery. If something hit my house and it was too powerful for the constant output of the generators, then this energy storage device would be where the extra oomph came from.
I took just over an hour to make another dedicated stone-cylinder generator and put it on top, linking the diamond battery to the house wards so that it could automatically be engaged if something attacked the house or World Tree. As soon as that was finished, then I rigged the new generator to the battery and put a conditional trigger on it. It was the conditional trigger and ward manipulation that took me so long. Because it was different enough in design, it took longer than expected to integrate it with my current setup. The new generator would operate at full power to charge the humongous battery, and shut off when it was full, and turn back on if it ever went below full. This may seem paranoid, but I have precious cargo in my house AND it’s the base for the infant World Tree on top of it.
With another paranoid worry out of the way, I decided to get working on checking off the last item on my mental checklist for the day. Elizabeth kept a full length mirror in the yoga room in the back area of the house. After inputting my anti-giant measures in the basement, I wolfed down as much canned protein as I could stomach then went to the yoga room with my first pocket generator in my hand. I wanted to watch this process in person; make human history by reversing my biological age to nineteen tonight, and then eat and sleep.
No human has ever grown younger before. This crazy feat of magic would serve to set the stage for tomorrow. Tomorrow’s plan was way more involved, working out with the gravity armor providing all the necessary stress while both of the healing enchantments constantly cycled to keep me in tip-top shape and bring my body to the absolute best it could possibly get to. To top it all off, I would then slowly bring my age back up to twenty-five while continuing the hellish workouts.
Ideally, this would simulate years of working out and taking care of myself and put me at a magically-induced base level of an Olympic athlete.
[Breathe in, breathe out] I thought, repeating my litany and focusing on my reflection. I stood in front of the mirror and took my clothes off, kicking them to the side. I nodded with excitement. [Yup, not great. But hot damn! The possibilities!]
Weaving the continuous effect of reverse-aging through my entire body took forty minutes as I kept checking the structure of my active Flesh Sorcery working over and over. Programming the reverse aging process to be glacially slow, I set it in motion.
Instantly, the pull of energy required seventy-five percent of my pocket generator's total outflow. My muscles began twitching slightly as a horrible smelling grayish black crud began to ooze out of all of my pores and my eyesight began to fade while my hair grew rapidly. The smell was so bad that I turned off the enchantment and stumbled to the bathroom.
I conjured water from my hands to wash and peel the filth off as it hardened within seconds. Every pore on my body had this crap in it. The smell was unbelievably wretched as I gagged uncontrollably. I turned and puked in the tub, nothing on this green earth was this gross. A hacking sound from the dining room told me that Rath was hurling too.
“What in the wretched seven hells is that stench?” He gasped, hopping off the table and peeking in the bathroom. “Only cultivators do this kind of shit, and they have the decency to do it far away from anyone else!” He puked black and green bile on the floor, adding to the putrescence of the experience. “Uhck, filthy, nasty, disgusting humans, purifying and expelling weird shit all the damn time. It’s not natural!” He muttered as he went to the basement, slamming the door behind him with his tail.
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about but I was too disgusting to care. Checking with my Flesh Sorcery revealed that the gunk was rotten, aged flesh and cells that my body expelled in the de-aging process.
[So fucking gross. Beyond gross.] I took five minutes to wash and peel everything off and conjured more water so that I was standing in two inches of filth in the tub, then banished it all. [So glad Elizabeth can’t smell this right now], I thought. [Her cleaning OCD would have her burning the house down to fix this].
Three . . . more . . . hours of this shit is what it took to peel off six years of bad living and age from my body. I was back in my twenty-two year old body.
[Good enough, twenty-two works, fuck nineteen.] I complained, barely breathing as the stench was so bad. [I can’t take much more of this shit!] I groaned, stretching my stiff body. Exhausted after another hour of concentrated cleaning up after that horrifying grossness, I skipped dinner and hit the hay.
******
“Get up boy!” A solid, scaly headbutt to the arm woke me out of a deep slumber, “Wake your lazy ass up!”
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“Whassup?” I grunted, wiping grit from my eyes, “Huh?” Rath’s giant head was in my face. I scooted back away, scared almost shitless. “What the fuck happened to you? You’re fucking big?!”
Rath, who yesterday was the size of a big iguana or double the chonk of a large housecat, was now hefting the bulk of a well fed labrador retriever.
“I know!” He exclaimed, doing a little wiggle dance and spinning around. “I went to your basement last night cause I couldn’t stand your smell, and these nice stones were giving off such tasty mana, so I slept next to them and woke up like this.”
His head turned around, facing his back as his tail curled up. “Check it out! My wings are back!” Two tiny almost vestigial wings were on his back. Each one was the size of my hand and flapping hard. He cackled. “Ladies love the wings!”
Looking out the partially closed blinds covering the window, I saw that the sun had just risen. Hell time. Taking care of my morning ablutions and grabbing a small snack was peaceful all on its own, the semblance of a normal routine giving me some assurance that normalcy could be found.
The neighborhood sparrows greeted me with a song in the soft morning light when I walked outside decked out in the stone workout armor with the two pocket generators secured. Reaching out mentally to Norn who was already out and about, I checked through him that there was nothing in sight to worry about. Looks like all of the zombies in the area had qualified as perfect roadkill for this scavenger and I wasn’t going to complain.
Turning on the two pocket generators and activating the healing and gravity enchantments, I began to slowly jog around the neighborhood, cranking up the gravity in my training armor until everything started to hurt. I put in a slight pain block to deal with the soreness and continued on. Each lap around the block slowly got faster until I was sprinting at top speed, the healing enchantments wiping away the fatigue. Figuring that I could magic most of the worst parts of this experience away, I began to crank up the gravity part and kept going. I could feel my hard fibers gaining muscle while every ounce of fat on my body slowly melted away. I was condensing a 10-mile-a-day, everyday-for-a-month, workout into 4-hours, and my Sorcery made it easy.
At the end of the four boring but painful hours, I was perfectly capable of sprinting at speeds around twenty-five mph for an hour straight without additional magical assistance thanks to my healing enchantments. With my cardio taken care of, I took a food and water break, eating nothing but protein and a couple multivitamins.
[Uhg, strength time.]
Taking a few minutes to drink in as much mana as I could handle, I went through every part of my body bit by bit and soaked it with healing power just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. After satisfying my overabundant sense of caution, it was time to get back on the grind. Resolving to not be absolutely miserable, I conjured water to clean myself from head to toe and then hurled the sweaty mixture of salt, grime, and water off into a neighbor’s yard.
Gritting my teeth and cranking up the gravity setting a bit more, I began conjuring stone dumbbells and barbells and started doing every exercise imaginable, tearing my muscles to thin threads. I emphasized compound lifts to hit as many muscle groups as possible, focusing in on squats, deadlifts, shoulder presses, and bench presses. The pain block kept me from feeling the insane pain, but I could tell that that bit of magic was getting its own workout.
Stopping every five minutes to eat a few bites of protein, chug water and use the bathroom, I kept up doing various exercise circuits for four more hours. I switched between compound weight lifting and bodyweight exercises to make sure that I didn’t get uneven in my growth. Pushups, box lifts (on conjured stone blocks), power jumps with weights, and weighted sprints and mobility exercises became my obsession during that time. The enchantments kept returning me to a fully rested state and they constantly rebuilt the soft tissue thousands of times faster than a normal metabolism ever could. All I had to do was the work itself and supply the nutrients.
As night fell, I cranked up the gravity until I could barely walk; I really had no way of knowing how much it was, and then I took a step at a time, pushing the healing to the max. Every time a step became easier, I cranked up the gravity to match. When the shoes began to split from my feet, I turned it down by one notch.
[Here dammit!] I argued with my screaming body. [Here is where I build! This is where I’ll train.]
Forcing my legs to move was no cakewalk, but it was much harder to keep my heart from exploding or my veins from popping. Most of my magic was taken up by the intense need to simply keep my body from giving out. Patiently forcing one foot in front of the other, my slow walk turned into a stumbling jog. The amulet took care of all of that, the constant healing adding more power, adding mana itself to the very cells to make them even more powerful on the basic level. I conjured stone barbells to hold in my hands, my own excruciating version of a farmer’s carry.
The entire time I spent breaking down my body, the healing amulets were adding pure mana to everything they fixed, weaving an extra element to every thread that rebuilt. My jog turned into a sprint, sweat pouring from me. I conjured water in front of my face and drank it down, and then conjured more on top of me as a quick drench to remove the sweat. Every time I lapped my house, I stopped for food even though I couldn’t actually feel the pain. My pain block would work for a while and then crack, forcing me to rebuild it as pain beyond anything I’d ever experienced before leaked through. My body howled for nutrition and I had to give it the fuel it needed.
“One, gasp, more, gasp, hour!”
At the end, the pain block allowed me to push myself to my very limits and stay there without dying. Incalculable amounts of mana forged my body into a prime specimen of humanity even as a bone-crushing weariness sucked at the fringes of my worn out soul.
I looked up to the trees lining the neighborhood, their leaves rustling in the soft breeze as shadows lengthened faster and faster. The sun hid its face and Norn screamed a greeting as he tucked himself into a branch far above me. I lay in my front yard, utterly done with today.
With an effort of will, I flicked the gravity enchantments off but I left the pain block on at max power and kept the healing ones going. My chest was heaving. As I recovered, I went over the implications of my Flesh Sorcery and the effects it could have on my body. The more I learned about biology, the more I’d be able to do and with greater efficiency as well. One part did stick out to me though, I probably could have done this a much easier way.
My heaving chest and shuddering body slowly calmed down as the magic did its work. [Probably could have used my Flesh Sorcery to simply fix the muscle from the inside out and then just build on that.] I thought, relishing in the unending flow of power from my amulets as it provided the relief I craved. [The option to artificially enhance everything about myself is probably somewhere in my toolset of sorcery instincts but the lack of knowledge might kill me if I don’t do this right.]
‘Body-rebuilding’ this way was a smart decision due to the fact that I intelligently took advantage of my body’s natural processes and enhanced them rather than trying to completely work around them without understanding EXACTLY how they work. Artificially creating and enhancing my body is fraught with peril but my body already knows how to do the basics. My body knows how to put on muscle and lose fat and vice versa. My body knows the step by step processes to repair itself. All I was really doing was supplying the energy and the encouragement to do so at a much faster rate.
And the other reason that it was better to do it this way is that my Flesh sorcery allowed me to expand or skip some of the limiting factors that come with being a normal human. Repairing wounds with scar tissue isn’t always a good thing, I mean, the human body repairs muscle tears with muscle fiber and broken bones with new bone tissue, but sometimes it ‘fixes’ ligaments and tendons with scar tissue. My magic allowed me to shift the focus of healing to include the concept of enhancement. I later learned that Flesh Sorcery allowed me to take advantage of creating and using stem cells to more perfectly heal myself.
And . . . the human body also has built-in limiters that my Flesh Sorcery easily worked around. Going for a run is painful if you’re overweight but if you could just block out the pain and unleash the stores of energy stored in the fat then the entire process could be made faster and smoother. And if your body had better bloodflow to areas like the knee, then cartilage replacement could be much easier.
“Oh get over it you wuss,” Rath mocked, laying on the porch swing. “It was just a little workout. You’re lucky I’m still here keeping your hungry visitors away.”
Not what I wanted to deal with right now. I was too damn tired to even feel the fear that I knew should be crippling me right now. Honestly, I just wanted to work out like this for at least another week, relax, and see just how far I could push my magic. Not deal with random threats that crept out of the woodwork every time I got an idea.
Flesh Sorcery has so many possibilities to explore, but nooooo. People just don’t wanna leave me alone. A week would be nice, a month would be ideal; but as the mana level grew denser from the Ripples continuously weakening the remnants of the Dimensional Seal, things that snacked on humans would only grow more numerous.
Still laying on my back, I held my hand up summoning Gungnir from where it was propped up on the porch. It morphed from spear to mace as the base slapped into my hand which I promptly stabbed into the ground.
“Protect me,” I groaned, letting go of the mystical weapon.
Gungnir morphed back into a spear, its crystal blade glowing and projecting a shield over me. [That’s new]. I thought, rolling over and getting to my hands and knees. Cracking my back and sitting back on my legs, mystical light played over Gungnir as I stared at it for a few minutes. I laughed out loud. “Magic is freaking cool. That was a total guess.”
Deep shadows flickered across the street, darting from tree to house to tree, moving ever closer. I breathed slow and even as my generators continued to bring my body to a painless equilibrium.
Taking the first pocket generator after a few moments, I turned it on making sure to disconnect it from the gravity enchantment and connected myself to the flow of mana. Cranking up the flow governor, I had it pumping out max power. Mana filled me and I directed it into my hands, conjuring a small stone crystal and implanting an overpowered glow enchantment on it, and then pumping that bitch full, I tossed it twenty feet in front of me.
“Lux!” I yelled while covering my eyes, the bright light flooding the surrounding area.
Hideous screams of pain let me know somebody wasn’t happy. I think I successfully added an element of UV in there with an altered rune, betting on sunlight to deter the hidden monsters.
“That’s right, fuck you!” I cursed, yelling to the threats I couldn’t see while channeling a ton of energy into Gungnir. Barely managing to pull myself to my feet, I closed my eyes and felt the aura of my house wards and the fledgling, yet still dense, aura of the World Tree covering that.
Back when I planted the tree on top of my house, I took a gamble on a hunch and added ground up sage and lemongrass from Elizabeth’s stores of herbs to the soil; each of those plants is associated with purity and cleansing, and I was seriously hoping that they were ingrained into the World Tree’s aura. If so, it may be protected from creatures of disease and darkness, and maybe, possibly, hopefully extend that aura to me and the house right now.
Picking up Gungnir, I slowly walked backwards till my back was at the door of my house, staring out into the creeping darkness, the deep shadows twisting and moving at the edges of my sight, frothing in anger.
“Nope, not fucking with this tonight.” Rath grunted, hopping off the porch swing and knocking me aside to get into the house. “My wings are too small and they don’t taste good.”
“What doesn’t taste good?” I whispered, pumping more mana into Gungnir and following him in, shutting the door firmly behind me, sealing it with conjured stone. “Can’t leave me hanging like that man, what doesn’t taste good? What’s out there?”
“Nightmares, nightwalkers, nosferatu, a couple bukavacs, and even you could definitely smell the ghouls. Ya know, all kinds of hungry things that love the taste of tiny dragons and mana-rich humans,” he snorted, curling up on the couch. “The night is not your friend, young sorcerer. You could threaten them if you had light or fire, but I haven’t seen you use those yet outside of weak enchantments, so I’m guessing you don’t have either.”
I didn’t want to confirm his suspicions or let him know about Gungnir’s full capabilities as I didn’t completely trust the dragon yet. I really didn't know his motivations outside wanting to be big again. Thinking back to the short amount of time we've spent together, he hasn't actually done anything except be near me and chill. The only questionable thing I could think of was being too friendly to the Centauri Elder humans. A loud collision from the other side of the house rang out, reminding me that I had no combat gear on.
“This shit is getting old,” I mumbled, stripping and pulling my combat gear on from where I had draped it on Elizabeth’s prone woody form. “Any ideas on what it’s gonna take to keep these assholes away permanently?!” I yelled, shaking my ass into clean clothes and gear.
“Light and fire, I just told you! What’s the matter human, fear made ya deaf?”
I mean, I knew that. He did just say it. My problem is that I don't have Sorcery over light and fire. Gungnir’s enchantments of the offensive elements are great but because I don’t have Sorcery of those particular elements it means that I won’t be able to use them optimally. I’m going to have to build my personal understanding of those like a wizard, which would take tons of time according to Reeanth. But, I could build some things to work with those elements for me.
Gungnir on the one hand is completely different from me as it works off of embedded shards of pure Chaos that do the magical heavy lifting and manipulation for me in terms of the elements not of my stripe: fire, wind, and lightning. But back to the problem at hand though, I need creations of fire and light but they’re still outside my wheelhouse. I could do that, maybe, probably. My gut feeling poked me a bit harder to ponder this more.
[Gotta reduce my overall risk. Why go gung-ho with Gungnir? How would a druid handle this problem, or better yet, how would a Sorcery-soaked druid handle this problem?] I schemed, rubbing at my temples. [Play to your strengths man! Work with what ya got.] I looked around. [Well, what do I have?]
Various bits of memories flowed through my planning session as I walked through the events of my day. I noticed during my run earlier that one of the neighbor’s front yards had a little garden with azaleas and sunflowers and some weird little blue flowers as well. I probably could alter the sunflowers to actually emit UV light, or maybe a kind of UV aura.
Strategic planting of mutated SUNflowers could keep all the freaks away from me, and I could also plant the thorny vampiric rose vines combined with essense of garlic along with sage and lemongrass all around the house too. That would deal with the unclean fuckers and make the area smell nice. The main problem at that point in time would be that my house would smell like an Italian kitchen 24/7. I really didn't want to be constantly hungry. Also, it did piss me off a bit on the inside to think that my life had the potential to be the most gruesome version of freaking kid’s Iphone game. Ain’t nobody got time for that.