Author’s Note: 11 PM at night, no internet, nothing better to do but write. Nuf said.

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2nd Journey – 6th day

During his endless walking, Azad came across a pond. This pond, strangely enough, was surrounded by the only trees he had seen since George had dropped him here. The trees were small, only reaching 20 feet in height, and had thin trunks. Their roots were going into the pond.

Azad decided to, for once, stop walking and rest here for a few days. He was mentally exhausted thought that maybe waiting for a few days would clear it right up. So Azad picked one of the trees, which had comfortable looking roots, and sat on them.

While sat on the roots of the tree, Azad decided to practice his magic control. He did this by taking his mana and circulating it through what appeared to be veins meant only for his mana. After he did this, he realized that this probably wouldn’t really help him with his control when using it for things other than body strengthening. He continued his exercise for about an hour before he changed to another exercise.

He began circulating mana to his right hand, and moved it to float above his hand. He then tried to condense it to as small as he could. All he could do though was make it slightly denser. He then started trying to make the mana swirl in his hand, as if it was a tornado. This proved hard to do, but it wouldn’t be an exercise if it was something he could already do.

It took all of his focus just to get it to move in a vague swirl like motion. He had noticed this in his attempts to fill his mana reserves earlier, but this proved his thoughts.

“So controlling my mana outside my body is much harder than when it’s inside.”

This just meant that Azad would have to work hard so that it wasn’t so difficult. He became engrossed in trying to make it swirl faster and in a smoother motion. He did this for hours, but he never noticed. He was having too much fun trying to improve his control.

At some point it had turned night, but Azad didn’t notice. He kept going, his control improving and the swirl would get more refined and fast. Eventually the exercise was too easy for him, so he tried doing two at the same time. It wasn’t that much more difficult, so instead of just swirling them, he started making them spin in a circle while he swirled them.

This was really difficult and forced him to slow down everything to a crawl, but he could do it. He started working on this for hours. His arm got tired so he tried to put it down, but found that the mana was harder to control with his hand down, so this killed the speed of his mini tornadoes. He had to slow down once again.

It became day again, but he still continued. He once again needed something more difficult to do, so he started doing both inner and outer mana control practice at the same time. At least he tried to. It was too difficult for him and wouldn’t work no matter how much he tried, so he gave up on that.

Azad decided to take a break from practicing and took a nap. When he awoke, it was nighttime once again. He decided to practice his inner mana control while he waited for daytime.

When daytime came, he decided to take a dip in the pond to wash off the grime that had accumulated since the fish incident. This time however the water was too shallow to really hold anything dangerous.

Azad walked into the water, and began to float and relax for a bit before he began scrubbing away the dirt. He then caught sight of his reflection and saw that his eye color had changed. His eyes were no longer brown, but instead a light purple like Georges.

“So not only my hair but also my eyes? Damn, gonna miss my brown eyes.”

Azad had already noticed that his hair had changed to the same light bluish green as George’s hair when his startlingly fast growing hair got into his eyes. He wasn’t very surprised though.

After Azad was finished “washing” himself, he went to the edge of the pond, sat down and began to relax.