Path to Transcendence

Chapter 166: Getting Used To It

He was wrong. Again. Admittedly, that should no longer be a surprise to him or anyone anymore.

The pain was definitely not temporary. The pain was very much so constant and painful. Did he mention painful?

The first couple of days were the worst. He was coming to dread the mornings whenever he woke up. It also didn’t help that the actual sleep he was getting felt amazing and refreshing.

It was kind of like taking a shower after an exhausting day, only to quickly find yourself getting a face full of mud right after you get out of the shower.

It wasn’t only the pain that was the difficult part of his new situation. The most emotionally challenging thing he had to do was to explain his new circumstances to the people he knew. While Lily already knew, he still had to tell the others the bad news.

He didn’t share with them everything, like he had with Lily but he told them enough that they understood the general gist of his problem. He gave an abridged version about how his soul had been damaged and he would have to go through some treatment for it.

Derek, Edgar, and Kyle were all very sympathetic to his issue. They made sure Julius felt supported by them, Derek even offered to ask his grandfather for help. Julius declined, of course, they didn’t know that he already had the help of two Tier 6s.

Aubrey on the other hand, was not as gracious as they were. She made sure she took the opportunity to say “I told you so” multiple times to him whenever she could. But that was expected.

Declan was a bit more problematic to explain his situation to. Julius had gone over to the guardhouse after he left Dante’s and told him the same version he ended up telling his friends. The issue is that Declan was more angry at himself than he was at Julius.

Rae and Orus were there, so it was nice to catch up with him. They also helped keep Declan from overreacting. The vice-captain kept beating himself up about not keeping a better eye on Julius. No matter what Julius said to try and appease the man, Declan wasn’t listening.

He took the entire responsibility for Julius’s soul damage on himself. It showed that Declan really cared for Julius and made Julius appreciate the man even more than he already did. The problem though, was that the man was back to babysitter duty, but dialed to eleven.

The first thing Declan did was take back the rift access card. While it didn’t really affect Julius that much considering that he wasn’t even going to use it for the foreseeable future, it still hurt for his privileges to be taken away like a parent taking away a gameboy from the child who wasn’t doing well in school.

***

He had just woken up, blinking out the sleep from his eyes. He peeled Drasil off of his face, the arm of the spirit had somehow gotten lodged in Julius’s mouth in the middle of the night, and then got out of bed. It was early so Henry was still fast asleep in the bed on the other side of the room.

Julius checked the time and it was only around six in the morning. Which meant that he had gotten almost exactly eight hours of sleep. He had found out pretty quickly that the combination of excruciating pain throughout the entire day and the soul potion Alice gave him worked pretty well to knock him out for some proper sleep.

He took a calming breath to prepare himself and activated the torture device on his wrists with a soft grunt. The pain was still just as bad, but thankfully, constantly using it got him acclimated to the pain quickly.

The familiar pressure and crushing force on his soul was becoming part of his routine. It was funny how fast he was adapting to the new pace. If he wasn’t in so much pain, he would have laughed at the irony.

Once he changed into his uniform he made his bed and left for the library for his daily morning meet-up with Grace. He hadn’t told her about his condition like he had with the others. He told her that he wasn’t doing very well when she noticed his pained expression the first morning back, but that was all. It wasn’t like he had known her for all that long.

He did enjoy her company though, so if it ever came down to it, he wouldn’t mind sharing with her about some of it. He just didn’t see the need to unload his issues on her yet. He mainly did it for others because it would affect their schedules and what they would do with Julius as a result. Whereas with Grace, the main thing they did was eat and read together, and his condition wouldn’t affect their routine that much.

He made sure to warm himself up with some fire mana as he entered the library. The mornings had been a little more chilly than normal as it got closer to winter.

That was another thing he noticed about the suppression device that Dante made for him. Since it restricted his soul, it also meant that using his skills or mana had become much more challenging. That of course meant that even heating himself up took more effort than it should have. Not only that but the amount of mana he had available to him was significantly lower.

It wasn’t like his mana capacity was permanently lowered, but being able to access it was close to impossible. He could only use a fraction of what he was normally capable of. For a person like him, who was so used to having such a vast amount of mana, having this handicap affected him more than he would have originally thought.

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But on the bright side, it would probably help him appreciate his larger pool once he was done.

***

After he met up with Grace he had to go to the rest of his classes. Grace had constantly given him worrying looks the entire time, but she didn’t pry. It was nice, the two of them pretended like nothing was wrong and continued hanging out like normal.

It was the rest of the day that was difficult. In particular, it was Applied Combat that was the most affected class from his new condition.

Physical Training was the most normal. Other than the pain from moving around too much, he was able to complete the class without much issue. Intro to Mana and Tier Advancement went surprisingly well also. Neither required much from him, he found himself behaving like many of the students he originally scoffed at. Even caught himself napping on a couple of occasions.

It was only when he got to Applied Combat that things got hard. They were still fighting against monsters this week, but this time Julius didn’t have to pretend to be weak. This time it took everything he had to just keep up with the monsters.

Speaking of monsters, he stumbled back from an overhead swipe from this mutant gorilla he was facing. It wasn’t that fast, but neither was he, he was moving like cold molasses. Even with him using [Kinetic Augmentation] as hard as he could, he was only able to pump enough kinetic energy to barely dodge it.

He had a nasty snarl on his face as he went on the offensive. He didn’t want to prolong the fight for much longer. The longer it went on, the more exhausted he was going to feel and the worse his chances to win would be.

A part of him felt so lame as he had a hard time dealing with this fat monkey. But another part of him was immensely enjoying it. Despite the crippling pain his soul was going through, he never felt more alive as the gorilla with long nails almost took his face off.

It felt like he was before he had gotten all of his fancy skills and advanced. It actually felt like a fight, a real fight where he was outmatched.

He had been so used to fighting monsters when he had superior physical strength and mana, that he had forgotten what it felt like to be the underdog again. The spars against the others and Gabriel didn’t count.

So as much as he was embarrassed to be struggling against a lowly Tier 2 monster, it was overridden by the thrill he was getting as he felt the wind from the monsterʼs claws miss his face by a hair.

He didn’t even look at his classmates who had judging looks on their faces as he barely held on He also didn’t notice that he had a frenzied smile on his face as he desperately fought off the beast.

It’s not like he had a lot of time to give it much thought, he was too busy looking for any advantage he could find.

His heart was racing through his chest, not because of fear, no, [Sage of Savagery] didn’t let fear affect him like that, it was the exhilaration that was coming through. Because at that very moment, he found his opening.

The dumb gorilla had made another huge sweeping slash, but it had already done the exact same thing twice in the fight. Julius knew what would follow it. He decided that if he couldn’t overpower it, he would outsmart it.

He neatly slid closer to the gorilla as it launched itself from its feet in the same leap from before, barely avoiding its claws.

Then with all of the kinetic energy he had been saving throughout the fight, he delivered a brutal strike to the side of the monsterʼs head. He felt something crack under his fist, but he didn’t let up just yet. The dazed monster was quickly swarmed by him and he didn’t allow it a second to get back to its feet. He unloaded everything he had.

Every strike was intended for a vulnerable place. He felt bones cracking and flesh being pummeled by his assault until eventually, he ran out of everything. He fell to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut. There was nothing left in the tank.

The most embarrassing thing was that still wasn’t enough to kill the stupid monkey. It was close to its limits too but it was still able to crawl to its feet and with a hilariously slow and weak fist, it dropped a hammer strike on his back.

Luckily, the bracelet’s automatic defense activated and protected him from any real harm. Quickly after, the monster disappeared into particles of mana and back to the circle.

The loss was bitter for sure. He didn’t like losing, he hated it. But it was also a fun fight, so he couldn’t be too upset. He would just have to do better next time.

Surprisingly, his soul never hurt that badly after these hard fights. It was as if once the fight ended, it felt almost refreshed to his genuine confusion. He wasn’t leveling up his skills or Concepts, so it kind of made sense. But he would have thought that pushing himself that hard would hurt more.

He ignored the odd looks he got from his classmates and walked out of the arena before collapsing on the nearby bench. He felt Drasil infuse some of his essence into him. Then he grunted and pushed a little life mana into [Pseudo-Phoenix Renewal] which was also much harder to use.

Originally, he had been planning not to use the soul suppression device as much as he had been. Alice had told him that he would have to use it for at least a couple hours a day in order for it to work as expected, but she also mentioned that there shouldn’t be many downsides to using it more as long as he could take it. The only big one was that he had to deal with the pain for longer.

She specifically said that as long as he didn’t use it when he was sleeping and allowed himself to recover from it, she didn’t have any problems with how he decided to use it. However, in typical Julius fashion, he took that as a challenge.

Why wouldn’t he use it as much as he could safely handle? The more he used it during the day, the sooner he would get the [Soul Resistance] skill and the less overall time he would have to wear this awful thing. Though, Lily did make sure to deactivate the device every night so he wouldn’t be tempted to use it instead of sleeping.

He definitely didn’t wear it when he was fighting because he thought the fights with it were more exciting. No, that would be crazy. He wasn’t that insane.

Lily kept a close eye on him too. Whenever he looked too worn out she had deactivated it with the device Alice had given her. But after some long arguing with her about how the pain feels worse after reactivating it following a break, Lily had let him use it for longer durations.

Funnily enough, having to explain his recent performance in class to people like Joshua and James was more annoying than the device itself. They were obviously worried about him, but Julius didn’t feel comfortable about sharing the details with them yet. Of course, that just made them more curious and pressed him for more details.

He tried his best to deflect, but he had a feeling that eventually, he would have to tell them something and he wasnʼt really looking forward to that.