15 Spiritual Techniques

In a room with little furniture, sat what could be considered by Rululus standard, a handsome young man.

His parents had called the young man Utopia, a symbol of perfection unattainable by simple mortals, squabbling for their own petty ideas and gains without consideration for the greater goal.

Behind him, at the entrance of one of the 2 existing doors of this room, with long brown hair arranged in a rough low ponytail and clear blue eyes inherited from his parents, stood Rune Tudor.

"So we finally meet Utopia, or should I call you Mr. Fanaru? I finally reached your level, I think I'm now worthy of becoming a part of your league of heroes," the brown-haired human said seriously with a twitching smirk drawn on his face.

"Oh, interesting… Very interesting…" Rising from his crossed legs position, the blue-haired hero didn't even glance the way the young human stood.

"You reached my level… You said?" Turning abruptly to look in the eyes of his interlocutor, two pairs of piercing happy blue eyes stared into each other.

The situation could have been a serious and dramatic theatrical encounter, if not for the smirks on their 2 faces.

"I learned to split my awareness the way you did Utopia, I even surpassed you, you have no choice but to accept me now," Rune calmly exposed the scenario while erasing his smirk as best as he could. He now looked like a proud young man who succeeded in his life.

"You only learned 1% of what I would consider acceptable, but good enough… As a fellow hero, I've been observing you for a long time, and the world, now more than ever before, needs heroes like you to save it from its doomed future!"

Looking to the side, where nothing but emptiness existed, Utopia too erased his smirk and spoke like a senior having lived his whole life sacrificing himself for the sake of the greater good.

"Then train me! My talent is even better than yours! I'll do every training you did in less time, I'll learn everything you learned in less time! Believe in the future generation, believe in me!" Like a hot-blooded man, Rune truly entered his role and elevated his voice.

"There's only a single problem that talent and confidence cannot resolve. There's not enough time!!!" Utopia exclaimed, "You are too late! The Deep Void Dimension has already opened!" He exclaimed a second time.

"Do you believe you can achieve tier 2 in one month?! Don't overestimate yourself! You're only a prospective hero!" With harsh critics flying everywhere, the blue-haired hero added as if he really believed it to be the current situation.

Despair slowly started to color the room, making even the air feel heavy.

"If you didn't believe in the new generation deep in your heart…" Rune looked directly into the eyes of the despairing hero as he defiantly continued to speak, "Then why did you release all those training videos, wouldn't it just be a waste of your time?"

Arguing logically, he continued, "If you weren't a true hero inside, would you still be in this building, the one where you've trained your whole life? The building where you did your 10 years of continuous death training without ever missing one day?"

Silence settled into the room, letting the despair emanating from Utopia fill the room like a never-ending vicious cycle.

"Am I right, president of the League Of Heroes, President Utopia?" With burning arrogance contained in his eyes, Rune kept staring intently at the pair of dead eyes staring dejectedly at the ceiling.

"Maybe… If it's you… Maybe a hundred of you could change our fate… Sigh, the young always surpass the old…" Lamenting the fate of the old people, the young rululu finally conceded.

"I'll train you, come with me to the training room, I'll teach you a variant of the legendary momentum manipulation technique, I called it the ninja momentum technique. You must never pass it to outsiders or non-heroes, its power is infinite in talented hands, be they evil or good."

Concluding on this, Utopia started walking to another door where another elevator was located, before signaling to Rune, "Come with me, we only have 2 months before the end comes. And neither you nor our civilization will be able to run away from this one."

With this serious sentence and tone, Utopia opened the elevator and invited Rune inside.

The two didn't talk during the descent, and only upon arriving did Utopia start talking again, "My information about you reports 2 close friends, where are they? Are they coming too?"

"They will, but they belong to the hybrid path of spirit and energy," Rune admitted to his friend's weaknesses with a bitter tone, "So unless they learn the new energy application of energy wings, they will not be able to climb up the building with their spirit only."

"Serves them right for being indecisive," Utopia spat out, "They would have already reached the spiritual fundamentals tier 1 medium mastery if they didn't branch out. You're the only reasonable one in your group of friends, I pity you."

"I'm sorry I couldn't reason with them… Your wisdom precedes you, president Utopia," Rune ingratiated himself as best as he could.

Soon enough, the elevator door opened and before them appeared a gigantic open space, empty if it wasn't for the central unit of unknown purpose sitting in the middle of it.

"This is the holy ground of momentum training," Utopia announced proudly, "Nobody with an evil heart should ever take a step here. Let me show you the basics of the momentum technique I mastered, your common sense will disappear after seeing it in action."

Walking to the central piece of machinery, he activated it with a quick vocal command. And the immediate result was that gravity ceased to exist in the room.

Without an impulsion from his right foot, Utopia floated and stopped at a height of 10 meters.

"Momentum! The mysterious power created by the momentum stat is called momentum! Don't confuse it with any other powers such as moving with the strength stat or using energy to produce an acceleration. They can of course be used to hit hard, but so can momentum!"

Like a sergeant informing the new recruit, Utopia entered the teacher role perfectly, "Momentum can break away from the constraints of the established common sense, do you know why? It's because it uses your own spirit and will to be created. Let me show you a perfect example for an amateur, don't close your eyes, attune your perception, and watch carefully. I'll not do it a second time."

Floating in the air, Utopia started to accelerate in the direction of an holographic-blue pillar that mysteriously appeared before Rune even noticed it.

Touching the floor, he used it to accelerate to a respectable running speed with his physical strength. From there, he charged head-on towards the mysterious pillar.

Rune watched raptly, even cutting off his sense of touch, taste, and other non-essential senses. His eyes could now perfectly observe every change that occurred to Utopia, with even the background support of his perception sphere to help him analyze.

Just before colliding against the pillar, against common sense, Utopia "shot" to the side, dodging a contact with the pillar by a margin of less than 1 centimeter.

In an instant Utopia executed multiple maneuvers, and like the pillar didn't exist, he bypassed, with no loss of speed, the 2 meters wide pillar with complete ease before continuing at his running speed forward, as if he had run through the pillar.

After executing this miraculous action, Utopia turned and landed in front of Rune where he started bragging, "Once you can do that, you'll have mastered the beginning of the momentum technique, a part of the spiritual fundamentals knowledge. I couldn't go further than this in 4 days."

Breaking his role at this moment, Utopia advised Rune enthusiastically, "You'll see that it's pretty easy with the reaction speed you have with 50 in perception once you get used to it, but later I'll show you videos of true momentum masters, they're just unbelievable!"

Letting a smile appear on his face, Rune answered, "What you did just now is already mind-blowing, I wonder what can blow your mind much more than what you just showed me."

With a pure smile appearing on his young white blue face, Utopia responded, "Practicing with friends is just better! You'll catch up to this level in 2 days with your talent that is at the apex of the young generation, hahaha!"

Laughing together as they started commenting on their performance, hours passed like the wind, before finally, Astride and Nelo also arrived.

…

"So you really learned to create energy wings? That's some hard work you put into it," Utopia remarked while sitting on the floor with sweat covering his body.

The room had returned to normal gravity to welcome the guests, so Rune and he had naturally stopped their warm-up training.

"That's the only next-generation spell we learned," a young kajo woman answered, "It took us 20 days to learn it after days of foundational energy training. We'll try the energy bullet spell next, but only after capping our spiritual stats and farming some EP."

Kajos weren't that different from humans, they had different ethnicities and different skin, hair, and eye colors.

More often than not though, they had platinum hair and white skin, only differing from Humans with their average heights being similar to that of the rululu's, as well as their unique clear white eyes found in a large majority of them as it was a dominant gene.

"We'll do like Rune said once we're done with getting the energy basics, try everything bit by bit and see where our talent lies," a young kajo man emanating a friendly vibe sitting next to the young woman added..

Disobeying the rule of the average kajo's height, Nelo stood at the same height as Rune, at 1m70 or so, with short platinum hair and dressed in white training clothes, similar to that of his sister's.

Astryde was the spitting image of her brother, with only an effeminated face, long hair attached in an elaborate haircut, and lower height to differentiate them.

"If you take everything into account, then the rhythm of new dimensions opening will necessarily be faster than the training time available," Utopia interrupted and said.

As a rululu, his natural intellectual capabilities helped him in optimizing his path more than any other species in the IGS, so the others didn't dare to dismiss what he said casually.

"Of course, there's no saying what the Ether Law plans for us, but if we want to optimize our path, then there's really only one way: Take a risk, enter a dangerous ground, max your stats, then use every second to train in where your talent lies," the legendary analytic tone of the rululus was heard for the first time in person by Rune.

"Unfortunately for us, the farming becomes very irregular upon entering dangerous grounds, some have the famous 20 or 50 tier 1 stat points stones and crystals, but others just have an increased resource density, so it's useless unless you act long term in them and reduce your time between every absorption to only 10 or so seconds," Utopia exposed all the knowledge pertaining their common situation.

Taking a deep breath he continued, "If the value of each ether resource doubles or triples though, then that's the best case scenario. Currently, for example, I'm in a dangerous ground with ether resources worth 150 EP, so I doubled my EP gain."

"Sigh… Personally I'm still retracing my steps to start farming in one, I should arrive soon," Rune shared with them his current situation of investing in his physical stats while training his spirit mastery, he heavily emphasized his perception sphere manipulation training problem.

"You can't even move it a little?" Nelo reacted surprised by that situation, even he had succeeded in modifying his perception sphere a little after reading the guide from the psychic union and training for only a few days.

"I think I may have a possible answer to your abnormal situation," Utopia claimed calmly, "Do you all know what an ether soul case is in detail?"

"Ether soul case?" Rune muttered to himself before looking at Astryde and Nelo who both shook their heads, "Nope."

"Same."

"Same."

Astryde and Nelo echoed their answers and then looked at each other like mortal enemies having finally crossed paths.

Utopia didn't care about their antics and started his explanation through the basics they should all already know, "The ether soul is the immaterial center of your ability to interact with ether. Even if it's destroyed or suffered damage, it reforms in seconds. As long as your physical body lives, it will continue existing. That's its current definition accepted by the wiki."

He turned his head towards Rune as he continued explaining, "Ether soul case refers to people having special stats anomalies. You're not the first one to complain or explain about their very abnormal situations, be they negative or positive."

"Some have a perception sphere that interferes with that of others, some said they can move at maximum speed with no focus at all, some can clearly feel special resources with an increased affinity stats, things like that…"

Letting the information sink in, he then continued after a pause of 10 seconds.

"The board decided to attribute the cause of those cases to the ether soul. It's even been theorized that eventually, everyone should have a special effect applied to one of their stat. It's referred to by scientists as the soul specialization, and it should be something gained only when you reach tier 2 or gain independence. Probably."

His gaze then deepened as he looked at Rune, a slight smile appearing on his face, "Be happy that you realized your soul specialty sooner rather than later. There's necessarily an advantage hidden in your sphere being so solid, maybe this hardness is your advantage but you don't know how to use it yet."

A rululu was a rululu, ignoring his age, the knowledge Utopia had accumulated after 6 months was insane for others knowing they had the same amount of time to learn more things.

"Ok, I'll research more about it later, thank you," Rune thanked Utopia sincerely before redirecting the conversation to the momentum technique.

…

"Yes, the whole building can be used for as long as we see fit. There are rooms prepared for our forced monthly sleep upstairs. My mother is the 5th district administrative head, so I don't lack money and influence, especially not here, it's my home after all," Utopia advertised his familial situation as if it was nothing.

But while the information could have been shocking for others, Rune, Nelo, and Astryde just heard it from one ear and let it flow out from the other. They didn't really care.

"Maybe the 3 others will join us if they feel like it, I already told them I could pay for their tickets but I don't know if they will really come or not," he continued showing off.

In fact, he had continuously been showing off how awesome his life was so much that the other 3 became suspicious, maybe he was really bragging?

Or maybe he was just too used to using money, special accommodations, and amenities like they were water… Anyway, like every other shocking info he had sent their way, it was flushed from their minds in a few seconds.

Then they continued on with the casual conversation.

"I always wanted to try and have a discussion with people after cutting my energy loop, make a contest about who can resist and be the last standing, I'm sure I'll win," Nelo said, with Astryde affirming they already did it, but at 4, the ego stakes would be much higher and more motivating.

…

'Training in magical things with other people in a completely serious manner… Really a new era thing I'd have never thought would ever happen…'

Rune spent 6 days training in, and mastering, the beginning of the momentum manipulation technique as defined by the psychic union. Being accompanied by actual friends had an overall motivating effect which had pushed him to show his best.

Universal soft background music was being diffused from somewhere, not causing any reverberation even though the room seemed to be made only of hard materials that shouldn't absorb sound very well.

On this point, Utopia was very similar to Rune: Music could boost their motivation to do anything.

This general friendly and relaxed atmosphere had ultimately led to the current situation where he was sharing a part of his plan he had kept hidden deep inside his brain.

"At the same time, it really makes my determination overflow, what if I really pull it off? If I succeed, it will have a gigantic impact on how I'll develop and everything…" With a purposely mysterious tone, Rune breached the subject he had been hyping up for a few minutes.

"I think I trained with awareness the most in our group, you agree, right? And my plan of splitting 50% of my awareness to be able to both farm and explore on one side and train on the other side is becoming more and more likely to be possible."

Utopia wasn't optimistic about his plan of automated farming however, and he didn't hesitate to show it and say it, "Even if I followed your way of doing it… It's a bit different from the one advised in the psychic union guide, they don't manually transmit it, they just slow down the transfer so much that it effectively stops,"

"And with only 50% of your awareness, your avatar would be like… 50% more useless right? Equally divided awareness… It really looks bad," he concluded on that.

But then, Rune showed a mysterious smile as he told him something, "That's only if this 50% was used in the normal way…"

"Wait, did you succeed in finding the different senses of the avatar?!" Exclaiming in surprise at insinuation, he stared straight into Rune's eyes.

"I only have a very primitive idea, but at least I got to the starting line. The only unsolvable problem is momentum, it's not a problem of enough awareness or not with it, as even with my full awareness it takes close to 70% of my focus to reach maximum speed. Of course, I never expected to have the same yield with less involvement…" Rune finally exposed everything.

"But if I can cut everything apart from perception, then 50% of my awareness should be enough to have somewhere around 45% of my usual yield. And that's considering I already doubled the absorption time of resources," Rune's careful planning impressed Utopia, and upon hearing it, they started to discuss the problem linked to the fine execution.

20 minutes of Utopia adding info and details to the plan later, they only had to do what they were currently doing for momentum but with awareness: Training. A lot.

"The plan to dominate the dimensions is complete Sir Nelo and Ma'am Astryde, we can go at it again," with a simple word, the 2 kajos were on their feet and ready to go again.

…

2 weeks passed by quickly, making it the end of the 7th month since the awakening of the Ether Law.

Isolated in their training building, the 4 friends were having a contest. A contest to decide who was superior in willpower. A contest where everyone had a chance to become the metaphorical alpha of the pack.

"Rune, why are you closing your eyes? If you want to sleep, just go to bed, no worries, just relax…"

The one talking was Nelo. In real life, he was always hiding his intentions behind a simple smile, but his smile became terrifying once anyone realized he wore it all the time.

"The revitalization spell isn't a necessity for me," Rune said, completely sleep-drugged, fatigue making him talk like a chuunibyou high in the seventh sky dimension, "I trained my will during long gaming nights, as long as I don't want to sleep, nothing will make me do it,"

"Utopia, are you sure you don't want to go to sleep now? I'll even accompany you and sing you a little lullaby so you can go in peace, hehehe…" Astryde having become crazy wasn't that different from her usual self, and everyone knew it.

"You bunch of masochists! I'm too young for my spirit to be strong enough! You cheaters!" Utopia surrendered in outrage and departed to go to his room located a few doors away.

Followed by Astryde.

Followed by Rune.

Followed by Nelo, walking to his attributed room's door at the speed of a drunken turtle with a limp.