The training session begans with a hearty meal or so Asta tried to. He sat down, made a bonfire, put up a stand but forgot he got no pot, spoon and any other utensil.
Asta ended up making a quick trip to the village again, but suddenly rain began pouring down,extinguishing the bonfire just before he arrived back at the campsite.
Then he realises he had bed or place to sleep and not even a sleeping bag. So he went back to the village. Again. Just to find the stock for sleeping bags emptied by the visitors.
It was like the world was showering him with misfortune and his troubles continued.
He searched for an hour but found no dry firewood. His pot was almost stomped into a pan by a boar. The rain continues throughout the process and the tree he sat under to take shelter was struck by lightning just above where he sat, causing rain to once more began dripping out his annoyed face.
One problem constantly caused another, like a curse of bad luck bending reality to cause nuisances to Asta everytime he tried to relax.
"**** THIS!! WHO THE HELL IS CURSING ME!!? SHOW YOURSELF, YOU BASTARD!!"
Asta roars, his voice startling the birds above and causing a branch to break off and bonk him on the head. He immediately squats, clutching his bumped head with a pained face before he begans losing faith in his abyssal luck.
"What did I do wrong? I haven't even started training and the world keeps smacking me around like a shitty farmer abusing his bull."
Snap...?
The sound of footsteps came to Asta. His head turned to match it. In the far right corner of his vision he could see a bunch of herb gatherers taking shelter from the rain just like him.
He realised he was being self centered. He was too focused onto only his own things that he forgot the goal he once aimed to be the wizard king and felt disappointed in himself.
"Why did I want it..? Why did I want that lame title so much?"
The answer was the authority and recognition. It was a dream that he sought, a dream focused more on making people respect him instead of earning that respect. However as he spent his time helping and saving others, he realised that it was the people's smiles he wanted to see aimed towards his back not a forced respect from a title of authority. Also he was childish to expect who raised him like mother to marry him.
"I feel embarrassed just by looking back at those countless rejections. I wish I could erase my memories and just forget about them!"
The seat of the wizard king was nothing more than a net cast to catch the strongest mage. It was a trap set up to lure in the strongest mage as the nobility's guard, satisfy them with power to achieve their dreams and then backstab them when the nobility considered them turning against them.
A messed up twisted reality hidden under a facade of lies.
Speaking of the wizard king, Asta remembered someone he fought before.
"Conrad...He should out there right now, planning his move. I wonder if his plan would change since he has a golden chance to raise the entire forsaken and commoner realm after the death of this time's Asta. "
This timeline was a complete disaster. Even a kid could see the clouds of war brewing far into the horizon of the future. The fight was inevitable, even Asta knew that much, but he would still do anything to minimize the death of innocents.
Just then, when Asta was pondering how to combat Conrad and the other wizard kings. A familiar Ping sound presented itself before him with a message.
[Decoding complete. The grimoire(5 leafed) has been transformed into blank tomb of knowledge.]
[System has upgraded to stage 2. Missions tab has been added, reward redeem tab has been added.]
"Woah!! That's a lotta stuff." Asta mutters. His self pointed mumbling gave the herb gatherers a reason to believe him as a insane dude.
Nevertheless, after a quick tap on the invisible panel Asta watched the two new tabs in the menu and opened then one by one.
[Missions- 3 Available]
[Mission 1: Acquire- Elsdocia from Conrad Leto]
[Reward- World map, compass to Gate of Lord's keep]
[Mission 2: Find the original Asta's grimoire]
[Choice Reward- Scroll of Supreme Devil resurrection/ Vial of Devil's heart]
[Mission 3: Add a third attribute and reach 20% mastery on every attribute]
[Reward- Knowledge of runes and seals(4 clover) added to Tomb of knowledge]
"... I can under the second and third mission but the first..? How the heck am I supposed to get Elsd-edo-ica– Screw it!! I can't even spell that name!! What even is that?!"
Asta clamours around while clutching his head. He notices the panel changing after his words.
[Mission 1: Acquire sword of wizard king from Conrad Leto]
Asta looks suspiciously at the panel, "You can hear me, don't you?"
No change in panel...
Sigh...
Asta gives up on arguing with a sentient floating window. His focus shifts to the reward panels he saw mentioned in the notifications before and opened it from the main menu.
[Reward ready for redeeming- 1]
[Tomb of knowledge]
"Redeem it. " Asta says calmly, lowkey expecting to be smacked by a book widder than his face.
However instead of a portal appearing to spew out the tomb, the panel itself began radiating a sort of wierd unexplainable energy that suddenly barged into Asta's eye, startling him.
"WAAHH– *slips on the mud*... Great. Just great!" He yells sarcastically after the jumpscare. " Why the hell even call it a tomb when you are just gonna toss it into my eye!?"
Asta slowly sits back up, his face covered in brown mud. He couldn't see it but information pouring into his head, information of things related to him like a memory bank accessible at will.
There was a symbol of his right eye now- a symbol of a hexagon made of two lines splitting it into two triangles and two diamonds right in middle of his pupil. (A beecomb with a X in middle)
The process was painless and invisible to anyone except Asta, However the sudden shriek he made surely worsed the impression the herb gatherers had of him.
Soon the rain stopped and the herb gatherers left, leaving Asta alone in his training zone . He set aside his curiosity, shifting his focus to physical training.
"Sigh Finally! I was getting bored doing nothing...Let's do this. "
Asta went and grabbed one of three iron weapons he bought– a 2 inch wide and 4 foot tall longswotd. He clutched it with both his hands and began swinging it in air.
First he performed 100 downward slashes while also screaming 'Hiyah!' Each time he did but stopped as he reached 80s thinking it was embarrassing even if he was alone.
He wasn't a amateur, just a returning veteran; he needed to repair his foundation not build them from the ground up.
100 horizontal swings followed, then 100 diagonals from both left to right. The process was slow, but it was the most reliable one and thanks to Asta's regeneration. Also, his body only requiring a single hour of sleep a day and luckily he had just slept for 6 hours before arriving at the village today which means he could train all night without problem.
Asta was unaware that the villagers have already began talking of a insane hermit talking to himself in the woods. The children were told to stay away and the herb and wood gatherers decided to ignore the place for a few days.
The rumors turned the forest into a silent place, no talking, no sound of axes and ultimately no interruption for Asta's training.
The basics training continued throughout the entire night, going from 100 swings to 200 by midnight and 300 by early morning.
The mana Asta devoured by his body sustained him, the constant muscle repair began piling up on his limbs in just a day of training.
But Asta also had other plans, the plans he had put mostly on hold until now, even though he made them over a week ago.
"The Soul's breath technique...I can finally began using it!" He rejoiced at the hopes rekindling his heart, the hopes of finally being taller than others.
He learned the technique in the book of the monks, a technique that compresses muscle to the highest density by using mana on himself like rice pounding pot.
He quickly finds a boulder, jumps onto it's frosty top and sat cross legged as he turned his mana back to anti-magic.
The hungry Anti-magic grabbed every manabit from his surroundings like a vortex. The maximum range of the vortex was also just 3 meters in radius and the effect was obviously weaker at the edges, yet despite the low range, the amount gathered was enormous.
Soon, Asta manages to gather a small palm's size of anti-magic, not normal but almost to the level it had began to liquify into a physical form.
"Remember, Asta. Remember those stupid instructions!", Controlling the almost liquid anti-magic was hard even through it was Asta's inherent attribute of magic. He almost failed and blew up his arm in the process but as many of people say " No pain no gain", so he persisted and kept going.
The vortex of anti-magic was firstly slowly suppressed by Ki; then it was converted into normal Mana while being seperated and absorbed into the body. It was like watching a pond get emptied after one of its banks broke towards a empty cave, slow but constant.
The mana flowed, spreading unevenly through Asta's body, gathering in his blood then eventually spreading into eventually spreading into his muscles.
Then came the last part, a part Asta called the compressor.
Screams!!
High pitched painful screams soon left Asta's mouth as he blanked out on the spot. The compressing process was hundred—No! A thousand times bigger than he thought.
He could handle a punch but this pain made Dante's hits fell like a merciful strikes. The sensation of being attacked with the smallest pinch a lady could hit was repeating on every cell of his body, like being pinched by a invisible ants on all side until his cells were on the verge of bursting.
Asta lost on the starting point, not even completing 2% of a single full compression before the excess mana in his body burst out like explosion.
"Huff...huff...I give up. " Asta painfully said before collapsing onto the boulder as the light left his eyes. For a moment he could see the gates of heaven speaking his name but then something hit him in the chest.
A impact happens, leaving Asta breathless as his eyes burst open in shock. He looked in front of him, finding a familiar face heading straight for him.
"Mim...osa? " He muttered before another impact happens, the hit sending a shock in his already overloaded head, knocking him unconscious while the noble girl that knocked him out; hugs the hell out of him will sniveling down in tears.