Thanos now spent much of his time inside his core area. Months had passed on the outside, and Turok had not appeared since.

Due to his constant internal experiments, he had not spent much time being aware externally and to his parents, it must look like he spent most of his time sleeping. Thankfully, this wasn't uncommon with babies, so he got away with it for the most part.

They had taken him to see the healer again as they grew worried after a while but were even more baffled when they discovered his essence channels cleared. He knew those locations were scarred, but they would clear up once he formed his core and they expanded.

He tried to be more alert and set aside times to be in what he referred to as the real not to worry his parents, and this tactic seemed to mollify them. He'd even had some success splitting his attention between his inner body and the real, helping to keep him acting like an average child, to their relief.

It was late into winter, with snowy days and longer nights. Either the planet's orbit wasn't perfect, or it had a tilt for there to be so obviously a change of seasons, and he found that interesting.

His parents ensured he was well wrapped up whenever he left the house, which he was thankful for as it was freezing outside.

The winters seemed more extreme on this continent, and he could already see the benefits of preparing the village in advance paying off. Such as the stockpiling of food, firewood and warmer clothing that was either made or taken from storage.

The village training sessions had kept up throughout all this, surprising him with their dedication. Come rain or shine, the villagers were working hard to grow their strength or tend to the land, and it was hard not to applaud the effort.

Since he first watched them start, many civilians and children had improved by leaps and bounds. Even the poor boy who dropped the weights on his foot seemed more reliable, if only by a little.

One of the older boys had become an adult in a ceremony celebrated by the rest of the village, and he got to see his fellow villagers all relax together and get merry again. He had not done any experimenting that night, captivated by the displays of magic and music.

Even the village head seemed to let his playful side show through as he drunkenly stood on a bench singing with some of the more inebriated people.

Being part of a close-knit community wasn't something he had ever cared about, but it was hard not to develop a fondness for these simple people he had come to view as an extended family of sorts.

Today was the day he had finally managed to perfect what he thought of as his essence filter. He had tried various techniques and adjustments of his willpower, some with success, but most were failures.

He didn't get down at the losses as he was just happy to be making any form of progress at developing a cultivation method all his own.

His breakthrough came when he studied time essence and found an underlying principle behind it and the other essences.

From his previous observations, he knew that each essence acted differently in how it flowed and presented itself. This difference made him devote more time to studying it, with intriguing results.

When he was observing any essence, he noticed that there seemed to be a pattern in how it moved. It reminded him of how energy would travel in waves, but the way essence moved was far more complex and fascinating than even that. He felt like he had just scratched its surface but discovered enough to create his filter.

He had first started by using essences with similar patterns to try and cancel each other out like two similar waves of energy might if they collided. He wasn't quite able to manage it, but he did find it interesting the patterns that closely resembled each other were the ones you would expect to be opposites.

Like fire and water as one example, and light and darkness. He had tested many more and concluded that the patterns of their opposites were most alike. He also found it interesting that time and space were supposed opposites as their patterns aligned very much.

The only accurate data he had of use involving such facts was that when forcibly converting an essence into an opposite. Using the same process as he had done with water and time essence, there was less destruction, allowing for a more efficient conversion.

There was nothing practical to do with the information currently, but he had some ideas about how it might help his future cultivation. It was in studying these patterns and converting one essence to its opposites that he had an idea. What if he used his willpower to create what he now called a filter?

He would then be able to steer an essence like time through it, converting its pattern slowly into that of space essence by filtering out all the parts that didn't quite fit.

It wasn't as simple as just thinking of it and doing it, as he still had to spend a long time developing and implementing it, but he managed it in the end. He now had a filter that took in time essence and spat out spatial essence.

It wasn't a one-for-one conversion, but as best as he could tell, it was over twenty per cent at the minimum. This still didn't allow for a mass conversion, but it was a type of cultivation in a limited sense as he could find an area with a high spatial density and convert that to time, allowing for a faster cultivation of time essence.

The way essences flowed through him also had a larger pattern, and that was in how they all interacted with each other. They wouldn't merge into each other or cross paths naturally unless it were destruction essence, but they would all follow a set pattern in how they propagated.

It's like they all moved in a pre-planned way, for example, life essence, wood essence and earth essence.

Life essence would fly along, taking a straight line, like a shining comet traversing the void. Wood essence would then spiral around the life essence in a circular pattern without fail, looking like a spiralling vine as it went. Earth essence would undulate up and down in a regular wave-like routine, like mountains and valleys.

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This up-and-down motion would always be next to the life essence as it zig-zagged up and down. The wood essence would still spiral around and, at times, cross over sections of the earth essence when it was close to the life essence.

Therefore, if you wanted to filter wood essence, you would need to find life as it would continuously be circulating nearby. If you knew where the essence was, setting up a stationary filter at the correct location in your channel was possible.

A simple circular filter the same diameter as the spiral-shaped wood essence would be all that was needed to catch it as it passed. The main issue was that the filter would have to have a gap in the centre to allow life essence to pass through, as a filter for wood essence wouldn't work correctly on it and cause problems he found.

What blew his mind was that even if no life essence were flowing, wood essence would still spiral in the exact location. He had tested this on various essences by blocking them from entering naturally with the help of a willpower barrier on his skin and observing any changes in them within his body. None moved locations, and they still followed their set paths as if a higher power ordained it.

The whole collection of essences seemed weaved in some grand tapestry that put him in awe the more he observed them. The only one that didn't fit that mould was destruction essence, as it went wherever it got sent from one destructive explosion to the next.

He couldn't see any enter his body naturally, so he wasn't sure if it was created only through artificial means like forcefully combining essence.

Even though he didn't understand destruction essence, he felt it had to have its purpose. The way they all interacted and existed with one another made him think of how the laws of physics existed.

Turok had said that the way things worked back on earth was just an expression of essence at its very basic. He wasn't sure if a similar law of essence existed here; perhaps someone here may have already quantified it in that regard, but as he was not from this world, he felt like some kind of pioneer exploring its mysteries. It was a very addictive feeling.

He stood looking at the newly created essence filters he had set up at the entrance to his core, at the side the essence came from. There were several issues he had encountered, even with them working correctly.

The first was that it required constant mental effort to maintain. He had improved at keeping the filters up even when he wasn't actively focusing on them. They still collapsed and failed when he went to sleep, so he had to create them every day, but the more practice he got, the less time he took.

The second issue was that his willpower was not an infinite resource. He had created half a dozen filters but hit a boundary when he tried to build more. It felt as though he couldn't construct any more beyond that point, as when he created his seventh, it caused some instability in the rest that ended up with them in total collapse, and even building that was a massive strain.

They would stay without issue as long as he remained at six, provided he actively maintained them. Since he couldn't convert every essence, as there were too many of them, he decided to work on efficiency instead.

The most bountiful essences in his surroundings were what he thought of as the elemental ones, like water, air and earth, along with the others. He then tapped these streams for conversion, getting a better return on his investment than if he had used something like death essence instead, which was present in trace amounts.

What he needed now was some way to train his willpower. Creating and maintaining his filters did seem to affect it slightly, but it was relatively slow for his tastes. He didn't realise his fellow villagers would want to beat him half to death if any had overheard that comment.

Many people struggled to improve the control and power of their will, and even a slight gain over the years was hard to get for the average person.

He decided this was something he would ask his parents when it was time to talk, having decided to remain mute for now so as not to raise suspicion.

A small part of him wanted to blurt out all his unanswered questions, but who knew how people would react to a baby who started asking the meaning of life-type questions?

His main point was to prove that he could form a cultivation method as proof of concept, and in that aspect, he felt he had succeeded beyond expectations.

Now that he proved he could convert other essences into time and space, he felt condensing a matching core wasn't beyond him. He was confident he could create those essences to cultivate a core, even in an area without access to either.

Finding such a location would still be optimal, but that was something he could do once he was stronger. What he needed to do now was focus on the type of core he wanted to form.

There was one essence he hadn't considered yet, as he felt that he was too focused on time and space.

Putting all his eggs in one basket was silly, but he would be lying if he said he didn't want to be a time and space wizard or cultivator, as they're known here.

That overlooked essence was the essence of illusion. He shared the same bloodline as Turok, so he felt some latent talent should exist with it. When he searched for it in amongst the other essences, it took him days to find it as it seemed to like to move around and disguise itself as the essence it was the closest to.

He found it fascinating but also a little frustrating. It would be practically impossible to filter it into another essence as it randomly jumped around.

It was the second essence after destruction that didn't seem to want to play by standard rules, and he wondered if there would be more as there were still many he had not been able to categorise yet.

Thankfully, changing another easier-to-find one into illusion essence didn't cause any problems, and there was no reason to convert this flighty essence into another type.

His success in creating a crude cultivation system without a core gave him hope that he could also create attack skills one day. However, he didn't know how to start and needed to study some examples before beginning his research.

It was kind of silly, in a way. He had just spent a great deal of effort figuring out a way to create more time essence, but time was the one resource he didn't seem to have enough of at the moment with so many things he wanted to do.