“Dead, again.”
Azreal had wasted no time after they had gone through all of the changes and notifications. He was now sitting cross legged on the ground trying to activate his mediation skill without flooding his body with his newly acquired Death affinity and dying.
Azreal had explained that he couldn’t die here, he also explained that in here, this weird place, that they would have what felt like a year or so but in reality should only be a day in the real world. If he had reached the B grade like he was supposed to he would have had much longer, but because he was till E grade that time was severely reduced and instead of training other aspects of his body and skills they just hoped that they could get him some control over Death and his Nephilim body.
At this point he had tried to activate his meditation skill and dies as a result over a hundred times. The feeling of dying never got more pleasant but Azreal was certain that if he could manage to slip into a trance he could then explore his mana channels better and start gaining control over Death.
So far he had made no progress and every time he started to get frustrated they Azreal made him swap tasks to gaining proper control over his wings. He was no where close to succeeding in that either. He couldn’t even walk in a straight line yet without falling, let alone get to the point of being able to fly or fight with his wings. The entire thing had become a disaster of epic proportions.
“You need to enter into meditation slower, the moment you use your mana you lose control over Death and it floods your body. You need to control the output better.”
He had heard this now for the 100th time and it wasn’t helping. This was another issue he was having, his mana had increased with all of the changes he had gone through by unlocking his heritage and gaining the affinity, as well as the title upgrade. Because of the huge increase in mana he had also lost a lot of the control he had over his own output.
The increase to all of his other stats wasn’t helping, his movements were too quick and his strength was higher than he was used too. He was needing to adapt to too many changes at once and he was failing at it. His thoughts and mind processing was also going to fast for him to properly take anything in. He still didn’t give up though, but his frustration was building very, very quickly.
“Keep going, we don’t have time to waste.”
The days passed with nothing changing to the routine. He had no need to sleep or eat in this place and so he got no breaks. He made small steps of progress, but not quick enough for him to gain mastery of the changes in the year they had here.
It took an entire month before he could successfully enter mediation without dying, the moment he tried to look into his mana channels though he died. Still it was some progress. He was now able to walk properly with his wings, he could now open and close them on command and even move around without tripping over himself. He was now onto lifting himself in the air, which was disastrous every time.
He attempted to use his air affinity to help but the moment he did he was flooded with Death energy again and died. He had no choice but to do it the hard way. Azreal was patient with him for the most part but he pushed him hard, never giving him a moment to relax, always training.
He had gotten information from him though, mostly around how the Nephilim had lived before the great war, their customs and beliefs as well as some of their history with the other races. He wasn’t surprised to hear that for the most part, the Nephilim were a very peaceful people. They travelled a lot during their youth so that they could get a better understanding of their place in the multiverse and how they should treat others. They also did most of their training in dungeons and were very competitive with each other in the lower grades.
Cross race couples were also common. Apparently, Nephilim had a hard time conceiving with their own and tended to mate with races like the Dragons and Fae. No mater what though, the child always turned out to be Nephilim rather than a Hybrid. This was due to the strength of the Nephilim blood lines and that when the baby grew in the womb the Nephilim DNA overpowered all others.
This was news to him, it was never mentioned with his time with the Dragons or Fae. Probably because, as Azreal explained, if a male Nephilim got another race pregnant, if that female was not of adequate strength than they would die before ever bringing the baby to term.
It was a sad thing to hear, but these relationships never occurred without full consent from both parties, both knew the risks and it was never done without much consideration from every party involved.
It also explained a great deal about the relationship between the Nephilim and the Fae and Dragons. It also explained why the relationship between the Nephilim grew to be fractured with the other races. They couldn’t intermingle, not in the same way as they could with The Alliance, that made tensions high and cut off one avenue of forming long lasting connections.
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When Shaun did finally manage to enter his mana channels through dropping into a trance without dying, what he found was horrific. It wasn’t just his mana channels that were flooded with death, but most of his body was infused with the energy. His Basic and advanced affinity were barely visible and what he could see of them they were tinged with Death as well.
“How do I fix it? I can’t go back with all my affinity having been changed into having Death imbued into them. I couldn’t explain that away even if I wanted to.” The stress he was feeling about what would happen when he awoke was building with the passing off time, without Azreal’s calm instruction he would have cracked like an egg long ago.
“Ignore your other affinity for now. You need to bring the Death energy under control first. You need to pull it all back out from the rest of your body and create order among the chaos first. Like with your other affinity you need to bind all the energy together and form it into your mana channels in a complete vein of Death. Once you have done that you can start cleaning your other affinity.”
The process of pulling the Death affinity form his body was difficult and painful. More times than he could count he ended up losing control and dying. At the moment he was just taking all the energy from his body and shoving it into his mana channels. Once it was all there, he could start trying to organise it. Azreal informed him that doing it this way was longer but when tried to organise as he went, he always ended up making a mess of everything and dying.
More time passed like this and before he knew it he only had two thirds of his time here left. He had managed to separate the Death affinity from his body and force it all into his mana channels but now when it came time to organising it and condensing it down he felt like he was fighting a losing battle. Before this, his basic affinity were the size of string compared to his advanced affinity which could be described as the thickness of a decent sized rope. But the size of his advanced affinity compared to a Divine level affinity was like comparing a drop of water to a lake.
It wasn’t until over half of his time here had passed that he had managed to condense the Death affinity down enough that it was passable in Azreal’s eyes for him to be able to add in another layer of training into their regime.
“As you would have read in the upgrade of the Legacy, affinity are not set at a certain level. Although this is generally the case until you reach the B grade, for Nephilim we are born with the ability to train our affinity to higher levels. This isn’t an easy process and takes patience and time to do. As you are aware though, the higher level of the affinity, the more space it takes up in your mana channels. There are set minimum grades for some affinity, usually this is Epic but can be higher. However, you can train a basic affinity, like fire, up to ancient with enough time, resources and talent.”
“If the Nephilim can train up their affinity to higher levels from birth, how did we lose the war? Someone with multiple Ancient affinity would win any fight.” Even the powers from the factions wouldn’t be able to take down a Nephilim if that was the case, so how did they lose?
“If you waited and listened you would already know the answer. The body has a maximum capacity for elemental magic, or you may better understand that there is only so much room in your mana channels and when they are full you can add any more. It was discovered by Nephilim older than I that there are maximum amounts of each level you could possess if you wanted to max out the highest levels first. Your body can only handle one Ancient rarity Affinity, two Divine level, 3 Transcendent, five Mythic, 10 Epic but when it comes to advanced and basic you can squeeze in as many as you wish, although they are limited in quantity.”
He thought about this for a while ”efor’ asking the questions he had. “So, I now have one Divine already, so I only have room for one more? Can you decrease the level if you wanted to?”
“You do already have one and yes you can downgrade the rarity. It is done easy enough. You just need to pull the affinity out from your body and place that power into an appropriate vessel. You can do this when you reach a point that you want to downgrade the rarity of Death, but I would advise not doing it until you are ready to move another affinity up to that level.”
This was all thousands of years down the track, if ever, but it was nice to know he had the option if he ever did reach that point.
“Now what we will train now if your basic affinity. Pick one that you feel closest too and we shall start with that.”
He knew which one he wanted to train immediately, fire was the one he used the most in a fight and he enjoyed using it in most of his skills. It was also an element that he was able to use without suspicion as everyone already knew he had it. “Fire, I want to train fire.”
“Summon a ball of fire then, but be caref…”
He hadn’t finished listening and pulled fire from his mana channels, the moment he did he felt something go wrong and he died. Again.
He awoke on the ground again, this time though he was able to get up using his wings. He had done a lot of training with them over his time condensing the Death affinity and had grown used to using them.
“As I was going to say, be carful of pulling too much too quickly, the Death affinity had corrupted your other affinity, until you clean it all up you will be pulling Death along with fire.”
If he had stopped and thought about it for a moment he would have come to that conclusion himself. This time around, when he summoned the fire ball, he used the smallest amount of mana he could possibly use, using the same method he did when he was training to be able to use meditation.
He had hoped it would work the second time around, it didn’t though. It didn’t work the time after that either, or the time after that.
“This may take a while.” Azreal sat down in his chair as he tried again and again to get it right. He thought he had been making progress but now he felt like he was right back at the beginning. Azreal was right, this was going to take a while.