★169
The days that followed blurred into years, yet little changed. I learned countless Mega Arts Temporal Twist, Astro Forge, Chaos Shift, alongside summoning Arts such as Divine Gates of Babylon, Supreme Gate, and others of similar calibre.
Some Arts like Chaos Shift, Wyrd Shaper, Phylax, and certain celestial Arts, had no branches at all; the Art was the whole of it, and thus posed no real challenge.
Others, however, were labyrinthine. Temporal Twist alone splintered into so many variations that I spent more than half a day tracing each path before ending the session with something simple, just to close the cycle.
Learning, to me, was never mastery. It was unlikely I would ever rely on these Arts in the future. I felt it with quiet certainty: my true power would not come from them, nor would they be what saved me when everything fell apart.
Whatever my real source was, it lay elsewhere, still undiscovered. Until then, I continued learning, not out of need, but to fill the hollow spaces within me, to give shape to the emptiness and a mask to the world around me.
Time passed and I surpassed everything set before me. I grew in body and mind, collecting Arts at a pace that soon rendered the act itself meaningless. Eventually, I hung up my boots.
There was no point recounting every Art I devoured. The day I learned gravity manipulation and mastered a Space–Time Art the next proved what had already become obvious: training sessions were irrelevant.
No matter the discipline, I mastered it in minutes or eclipsed it with something superior. Details, complexity, nature, all of it faded before the same inevitable conclusion. I was ready to step beyond training and into the world itself.
Now, I was on my way to see Lady Elara. What I needed was knowledge, not power. The crystal doors parted soundlessly as I stepped inside.
"May I have a moment of your time, Lady Elara?"
"What is it, Paragon of Transcendence?"
Ah, yes. I had attained my second Paragon at the age of four hundred and seventy-nine. That's ninety-eight years ago.
I had surpassed every boundary of learning and growth. They called me the Anomaly, a being no system could contain, one for whom a single thought was enough to make reality obey. Those traits earned me the Paragon of Transcendence.
Still, my mindset had shifted.
"I'm not interested in the Omni Tier. If I don't awaken as a Giant, I'm not going anywhere, am I?"
I answered, refusing to awaken despite possess Mega Arts in comparison perhaps beyond what a Supergod can handle.
"That's not an excuse. We can overlook the system and still choose you."
She replied lightly.
"What is it you want, Young Master?"
"Second topic. The Energy and its Fragments. It's been… three hundred and eighty years since the last lesson, hasn't it?"
Back then, I was running away form this topic. But as I grew, I realised I had to know the system that contain us.Otherwise, I won't be able to find my answers.
After mastering Temporal Twist and the Space–Time Art, the truth of the Palace revealed itself. Time within these walls was more fractured than I had imagined.
A single day could stretch into a year. Ten days might bloom into a century. Ten hours could unfold into five long years.
Each floor bent the river of time into new, unpredictable shapes. The lower I descended, the faster it raced, and by the nine-hundredth floor, it dissolved entirely. The higher I climbed, the slower it became.
From the one-hundred-and-fiftieth floor upward, time softened, shaped by the presence of newborn Young Stars and Kid Angels. Beyond the fifth floor, however, it began to lose all meaning, unravelling thread by thread until it dispersed into the clouds.
On the first floor, Lady Elara's domain, time did not exist at all. Her space flowed freely, untouched by hours, years, or any march of Time.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
To be continued...