“Unfortunately those suicidal battles will continue for a long time, with neither side having any regard to their body.”

He then stood up and bent his legs below him, getting ready to spring up, before saying:

“I will come see you in 2 months to take you back to your world. Just manipulate some time magic and learn the basic control of it. See ya.”

Right after he finishes stating the final two words, his legs extend quickly, and he vanishes from sight, likely flying upwards, to a higher branch of the tree. No evidence of his prior existence remains, with no branches being disturbed at all during his high-speed jump.

His speed is unrivaled in my eyes, making me unable to see the troubled expression on his face as he ‘flies’ away.

After looking up for a few seconds, I shrug off my awe at his speed and begin to slowly convert my ‘aura’ into that of the time element. After the previous meditation session, it comes smoothly and instinctively, with me only having to supply the ‘aura’ and think about the time element for conversion. However, I avoid touching the ‘battery’ in my arm and focus on only using my own ‘aura’.

As I begin to convert the elementless ‘aura’ into time ‘aura’, the same throbbing sound that I experienced earlier began to reappear, quiet at first before becoming louder and louder with the more ‘aura’ I converted. Strangely, as the throbbing got louder, my conversion speed jumped and so did my ‘aura’ consumption rate. After only a few seconds in the loudest state, the sound began to die down as my ‘aura’ capacity ran dry, with me being surrounded by released ‘aura’.

The throbbing that I felt in that short session was far weaker to the one that shook my soul in my initial session of attunement. It likely had something to do with the amount of time I spent getting the throbbing to begin. This time, in which I had only spent a minute to get the throbbing and elemental conversion to begin, I had spent far less time than before, even if I didn’t know exactly how long I spent during my first time. So I believe that just as Chronos said, the more time I spend attuning my soul with nature, the more energy I can draw out of my soul.

Moving the released ‘aura’ around I try and alter its properties; something I have never done before to any kind of ‘aura’. A few hours later, I exhausted the ‘aura’ that I was trying hard to salvage and reuse, as well as the ‘aura’ that I recovered and used again for testing purposes.

I learnt that one aspect of ‘aura’ control and usage is to have a clear imagination of what one wishes to do, but I learnt that such a thing is only one of the aspects and doesn’t deliver the greatest result. The most important thing was to have an image with a strong link to the element type and use it to assist with the employment of my ‘aura’ and what I use it on.

The basic four elements don’t require such a thing as they are quite literal, with all possible uses having significant links to the correct image that should be imagined. For example, creating a ring of fire is basically a flame, which is the most obvious, but also most effective image for employing fire magic. Similarly obvious images work with the other 3 basic elements as well; Wind element-gust, Water element-Raindrop and Earth element-crumbling dirt.

However, if one was to take a far less clear element such as Death, they would find themselves encountering problems. This is because one cannot imagine a person dying to invoke the imposing aspect of ‘Death Aura’ as the shattering of a being’s soul is different from the soul naturally leaving the body, without external influences. Similarly, it isn’t easy to invoke the reaving aspect, as other than myself not having enough ‘aura’ to do it in the first place, it differs greatly from the image of imposing or death.

A while later, I stood up again after grasping the image of ‘time’ with the strongest link to all the abilities that the vast ocean known as ‘time’ possesses.

At the beginning, Chronos did state that this location had such an influx of time ‘aura’ that one can train far faster in ‘time’ magic here than anyplace anywhere else. It is indeed true; there is far too much time ‘aura’ here that it is stifling. It is as though there is a thick blanket of ‘aura’ covering me at all times, and to make it worse: the flow of time changes so often here that it feels like a rollercoaster.

The time ‘aura’ kept on influencing this entire zone randomly by changing its proportion of time compared to the other worlds. Prior to my learning of time ‘aura’ creation, I was completely unaware of how to compare different location’s ‘time’. Everything had simply felt to be the same, regardless of place, but upon learning about ‘time’, it was as though I had gotten out of a body of water that dulled my senses and stepped onto dry land; ready for the long trek to mastery of ‘time’.

The different, easily-changing ‘aura’ that filled the location was moving and changing so rapidly that it helped one's soul’s understanding of how time works, even if the person himself isn’t conscious of it. This is exactly why the learning speed was accelerated, all thanks to Chronos.

I wonder how long it would take for me to have learnt about ‘time’ had I not had access to this place.

Feeling as though the answer was: ‘a long time’, I knew that I had to take advantage of it as quickly as I could so that I could use the benefits for as long as possible. The only problem I had right now was my lack of ‘aura capacity’, which restricted me from training for long at all, and if I tried to stretch the duration of usage out by lowering my ‘aura’ consumption, I would end up not getting many benefits. After all, one has to gamble a lot to win a lot.

I was very adamant about not using the ‘aura’ in my arm for anything other than the creation of ‘Death Aura’, as although I felt like it was possible to change it to create other elements of ‘aura’, I was worried that I would lose the pure ‘aura’ of death that my arm currently possessed. But that wasn’t the only reason. I had a horrid feeling that was so prominent that I just had to listen to it. I thought that using the ‘aura’ in my arm would eventually kill me. After experiencing such a baseless fear, I thought of many theories that could work with the theory but alas, they were still unproven theories.

The realisation of how beneficial this environment is for training came with the realisation of how much time I had spent asleep/unconscious. I wonder how powerful I would be right now had I not lost consciousness during this period of time. Well, what is passed is passed, nothing can be done about it. I still had one thing that I wanted to test; specifically the ‘pocket watch’ that I had created with incredible similarity to Chronos’s one.

During its original creation, my ‘aura’ was drained and overdrawn, forcing my loss of consciousness, but that was because I had wildly used all of my power without paying any attention to what I was doing. Because of this, I wanted to try and replicate the ‘watch’, even if it was a hundred thousand times weaker, and if it drained too much ‘aura’ to create it, I can stop the creation at any stage, dissipating the ‘aura’.

I try and recall my past creation of the ‘pocket watch’ replica whilst standing. Luckily, my photographic memory came in handy for moments such as this. However, whilst browsing through my memories of the moment and remembering exactly how my ‘aura’ worked during that moment, I realised exactly how complex that moment was.

I have no idea how I could’ve executed such a complex sequence of orders to my ‘aura’ unconsciously when I looked back on it. All the particles were controlled individually in groups of 100 each, which although seeming like a lot, was a miniscule amount, one far exceeding my capacity of ‘aura’ control. Not only that, each particle group had an incredibly dense amount of ‘aura’ in it.

Every one of those groups had to be located in a predetermined location amongst the pack and they also had to move in a preordained path. Although the creation of the ‘watch’ appeared far out of my current control and ‘aura’ capacity, there would be no negatives in at least attempting it. Right?

I initially tried to replicate the movements with far, far larger groups of time ‘aura’ infused particles, but I found even that difficult. I understood that absolute precision was the aim of the creation here, always restarting the moment I missed the correct location by a millimeter.

However, although my mistakes were many during the ‘creation’, I made far less than expected. Whenever my maximum mental capacity was breached, and I couldn’t pay any attention to a certain group of ‘aura’ controlled particles, I would unconsciously make the perfect manipulations. I realised this after scanning through my memories after the first few attempts and after running dry on ‘aura’.

This continued for the 30 days of the month, with me strangely enough not requiring any sleep, perhaps because of my previous long ‘sleep’ or some other reason. At the end of the month, although annoyed at my inability to create the ‘pocket watch’, I wasn’t too disappointed as the long hours of attempting to recreate the watch’s creation sequence rewarded me with improved control and a further understanding of the time element.

The image that had the greatest link of time that I could see was in fact a pocket watch, or more specifically; a clock face. If slowing just slow down the second hand, if accelerating do the opposite and if trying to just change your ‘aura’ to the time element, just focus on the illusory ongoing second hand of time on the clock face.

This image was of course born of my constant imagining of the pocket watch that I was trying to create. During this period of time Chronos never visited again, seeming to have his own things to do.

Phew. Sorry for not releasing yesterday and yes, I am aware that this chapter is boring, but some chapters simply need to exist, regardless of boringness. On another note, everyone keeps talking about harem like everywhere: reviews, emails, comments. Let me get this straight, there is not gonna be a harem, although romance is likely. Sure he may be attractive to the girls, but I don’t want to spend any time on a harem. Forgive me you harem-lovers, but that is ‘how the cheese will cut’ (I just made that saying up).

-Waffle Fluff