Back at school, Linus and Nyx could again be seen training at their usual training ground. Lana and her green silk bug had joined the two again for training and they were doing their routine. It had been a month since she joined Linus and Nyx's training sessions at school. The first day had been an eye-opener for both her and her pet as she had previously thought herself to be hard working. One session spend training with those two maniacs opened her eyes that she didn't even seem to try compared to them.

She had learned from Linus that all his time was either spend on learning, training, working or meditating while Nyx was also either training her skills, absorbing darkness energy inside his contract space, sparring against other pets or recovering.

This had shocked her so much that the growth the two had experienced over a month and now two months didn't seem that exaggerated anymore. Since then she too had increased her meditation time and training intensity to the chagrin of her pet.

Its growth, however, saw a great improvement in the fact that it no longer needed two weeks but only ten days to increase a level. She too had managed to reach the peak of the apprentice rank with her contract space and was now accumulating momentum to break to the professional bronze rank and contract a second pet.

In their entire school, only one person had already become a professional bronze rank pet trainer and contracted his second pet. Both his first and second pets were of the bronze rank making him the school's idol. She, however, didn't care about him as she was a lot more interested in the person close to her, Linus Black.

An orphan who had lost his parents only a bit over two months ago, a week before his awakening. The boy was poor and couldn't afford to buy a good pet and had contracted a dark rose which was both cheap and deemed useless by most people. Many had deemed him hopeless as a future pet trainer, but against all odds had this boy proven everyone wrong.

The boy had become an apprentice pet cultivator without anyone's knowledge and gotten a job as an assistant to a low-rank professional pet cultivator. He and his pet spend all their time training instead of having fun like their peers, thus improving at incredible speeds. During the monthly mock survival tests, he always performed well above his capabilities exceeding everyone's expectations and in only two months he had caught up to the top of the school with his pet reaching LVL 8 of the iron rank while its skills and combat ability allowed it to battle any iron rank pet no matter their race being iron rank, bronze rank or silver rank.

The only pets at school that could defeat it were bronze rank pets and pets with a gold rank race who could endure the dark rose's skills with their physical might alone. It wouldn't even take a longer than a few more days before the dark rose reached LVL 9 or the peak of the iron rank. Unfortunately, that would be its limit unless it evolved to a higher rate, but no known evolution method for dark roses exists. Deep inside her mind, however, a small voice whispered that maybe he can create another miracle.

While Lana was lost in her thoughts while training, Linus was occupied with Nyx's coming evolution. In the month since she had gotten the old man's guidance, Nyx's improvement speed in mastery over her skills improved significantly. Her dark petal skill together with all other three skills had reached at least expert mastery with the sharp blossoming reaching perfection due to its simplicity and ease.

It would also not take long for her dark petal skill to reach perfect mastery due to the increase of her shadow avatar's skill mastery to transcendent. Since then, it had started pressuring Nyx again enough to swiftly defeat her. The difference between a perfect mastery skill and a transcendent skill had both him and Nyx incredibly making them hungry for it.

They also noticed that when Nyx's sharp blossoming reached perfect mastery, her shadow's avatar transcendent skill became even more profound making it clear that skills could keep growing with practice and comprehension.

Linus, however, was in a dilemma of what he should do with Nyx's evolution. During the ride back home yesterday, he had discussed Nyx's current condition with Mr Wellington and both had speculated that her evolution would be more special and resource-intensive than the other dark roses they had evolved.

This was mainly due to her absorbing the extremely high-quality dark shadow energy from Linus's contract space since the beginning of her training. This had given her incredibly sturdy power and foundation to evolve and break through her racial limits, but also increased the risks involved in her evolution.

This was only because if insufficient evolution resources were to be provided during a fairy birth evolution then all a pet's potential will be exhausted and forever mark it stuck in the next rank.

A dark rose's evolution requires a potion to stimulate its internal darkness energy and to do this for Nyx who is already used to perfect purity pristine quality darkness energy can only be done by equal darkness energy or a darkness source. The second, however, is impossible for an iron rank pet to absorb.

Mr Wellington had eventually deduced that an upgraded potion of the abyssal rose potion should suffice if instead of abyss energy collected from the outskirts, abyss energy collected from the inner region were to be used in the concoction.

There were, however, two problems the first was that Mr Wellington couldn't concoct such a potion and in the entirety of White Bone City only the branch head had this amount of skill. The second problem was that enough potions had to be prepared to ensure that the evolution happens without any problems. A minimum of 5 potion doses had to at least be prepared for the evolution of Nyx's calibre while only 10 would almost certainly make sure that no problems occur.

There were, however, some other problems if they were to use such high-quality abyss energy. Nyx would at least have to master enhanced dark cells to perfection before her body could withstand the higher quality abyssal rose potion while mastering all her skills to perfection would be preferred. Another requirement would be for Linus to advance to the professional bronze rank with his contract space to both bears the consumption of dark shadow energy during the evolution while also not restricting Nyx's advancement to the bronze rank during the process.

The last problem was money. Neither Linus nor Mr Wellington had the money to procure the materials and services of the branch head. This evening Linus would head to the association to discuss the requirements and possible avenues for evolution again.

The training session also came to an end and both Linus and Lana returned to their respective classes for the last theoretical class of the day. It was time for combat tactics now and Linus quite liked this class as it had refreshed his knowledge on all foundational knowledge needed to fight against different beasts in different environments using different types of pets.

Most of the tactics used by Nyx during practical combat classes were directly copied or modified from what he learned in this class. When today's lesson started the teacher informed the students that they would be watching and analysing a recording of last year's top scorer on the National examination as every year's top three's performances would be shared with the public by the Global Federation.

Last year's top scorer was the youngest son of the current tower master of the Time tower, Idan Chronos. He had only been awakened for six months but already was both a low-rank professional pet cultivator and silver rank professional pet trainer with three contracted pets. Two of his pets had reached the silver rank and were descendants of emperor rank pets while his third pet had reached the bronze rank and it too was a descendant of an emperor rank pet.

His ability is called clock tower and it only allows him to contract time element pets, but it can change the flow of time in the contract space allowing for increased growth speed, training time and recovery of pets, it also increased the cultivation speed of the contract space allowing for faster cultivation speed.

This ability first appeared on the legendary pet trainer and founder of the number 1 corporation of the Time tower and has been passed down to his descendants' genes allowing for the awakening of the same ability once every generation.

He had swept last year's National examination by scoring full marks on both the theoretical and practical parts while his performance during the survival test had broken many records. In the end, he chose to enter the Supreme academy while also becoming the disciple of the academy's current vice president who is a legendary pet trainer.

During the lesson, everyone watched with amazement and fear at the performance of Idan Chronos. He defeated all the simulated monsters by either freezing them in time before finishing them by using his first pet, increasing the speed of his second pet's attacks or killing them through an unknown skill with his third pet. For Idan, the survival test hadn't been a test but a walk in the park which he bulldozed through by killing all monsters in his surroundings before sitting down and relaxing for the remainder of the test.

At the end of the video, the teacher took over and revealed his true intentions for showing them the video. The first was to humble them and show that their current performance wasn't anything special in the Global Federation. The second was to motivate the students to give it their all during the last month by trying to close the gap between them and Idan Chronos's performance during last year's exam.

This, however, backfired as most students became disheartened from seeing such an overwhelming display of power by a person their age. Only one person was different and that was Linus. He became a lot more driven and lost all his previous arrogance after seeing Idan's strength when he had only awakened three months before him.

The clock tower ability he learned about today was also as useful and overpowered as his shadow kingdom, while the strength of time element pets was certainly worthy of the given reputation of the elusive and special time element.

Aside from the main family from the Time tower, no other powers had a time element heritage except the Supreme academy. Unknown to Linus something changed inside his contract space, the moment when Linus compared his shadow kingdom ability with the clock tower ability, a reaction in the shadow king occurred. It opened its eyes and mouth and sneered at that moment as if it felt it was ridiculous to be compared to the clock tower ability. Then it controlled the dark shadow energy around it and started absorbing small wisps of energy inside its body before a small dark point started forming in between its two hands, formed from the absorbed dark shadow energy and condensed together.