Chapter 71

The blisters on his face didn't hurt anymore. Unlike Kyon, no one else would be able to restore their original appearance. Facial burns caused scarring and deformity that would repel and disgust the opposite sex forever. However, Synergy could fix everything, guiding the process of healing. It returned Kyon's face to the original state and maybe, made it even better than before. He would enjoy the result in the evening. In the meantime, Kyon was going to practice the elements he had recently acquired. He had to be ready for the upcoming party, and there was no time to lie around. His main task was to enhance his power. His main goal was to become super-talented in everyone's eyes. Everything should go off without a hitch.

Kyon had already mastered electrical insulation. Now, he was going to focus on the movement technique and the basic grade of elements.

He remembered that more complicated elements were more impure, but they were also more powerful in a certain sense. Being the bender of all elements, he would benefit from practicing a tricky element like the heat / the cold with the 3d level of difficulty or the darkness / the light with the 5th level of difficulty.

At the moment, he could send electric discharges with a single touch, which gave him a variety of techniques and tricks. Kyon wondered what the most complex attributes were capable of.

He decided to acquire the darkness with its aura of danger and mysterious properties. The darkness was the very embodiment of evil, and evil symbolized unbridled power that could repress anyone. Kyon started to analyze neural connections responsible for the dark attribute. He was going to decipher the element and make good use of it.

It was a time-consuming process. By 6 pm, Kyon hadn't finished yet.

The bright sunny day had turned unnaturally quickly into a nasty one. Dense, gray clouds covered the clear sky. It didn't rain, but everyone could feel the electricity in the air as if the heavy rain with lightning subsided during the thunderstorm.

Kyоn frowned. Having mastered pure energy and ether, he thought he could learn any other element within minutes because he knew the principle of decoding the information. However, the darkness was too mysterious for him. He kept releasing it, changing the shape of the channel again and again. The element was chaotic and incomprehensible, creating feelings of sadness and depression. The layers of dead skin on his face made him look like an ugly maniac.

Suddenly, an idea flashed across his head. He tested it and… There it was, his first lead! He had comprehended a fragment of the neural connections. Now, he had to grow the tree of correct conclusions from the existing seeds of guesswork!

The clouds over his head grew even darker. The wind wasn't dangerous, but it sent a nasty shiver down his spine. The Stones decided that they should stay in tonight. The weather didn't look good at all.

Kyon's eyes sparkled when he set off a chain reaction. Synergy was about to master a new element!

*snap*

The characteristic sound in Kyon's heart announced that the basic grade of the darkness was entirely under his control. He had finally mastered it.

*BANG*

Before Kyon could raise his hands in triumph, a dazzling bolt of lightning struck from the sky. It created a hole in the mansion barrier and hit the enlightened guy directly in the head. Wasn't knowledge power, after all?

Everything went white. A sharp, stabbing pain struck his body like a hand of justice and threw him a few meters away, his head steaming. Kyon looked dead. His heart was not beating, his mind refused to work. He wasn't breathing.

Synergy functioned regardless of his state, though. It restarted his heart and brought him back to consciousness, stopping numerous brain hemorrhages. Vessels in his arms had burst, a burn pattern had stretched from his feet to the waist. His ears were ringing, a cloudy veil covered his eyes. Kyon was in a completely understandable shock.

{What… the heck…}

This lightning was several times stronger than before. It would have turned him into smoldering coals if there were no barrier over the mansion.

One thing was clear, he had to recover right away. With a lot of effort, he took out another tube of ointment and put it on his leg, his face, and squeezed some in his ears.

The mansion guards arrived, checking the area in case of invasion. When they saw Kyon, they exchanged glances and a few phrases and left. Burnt servants were none of their concern. Nobody wanted to have any additional worries on their mind.

Two hours later, the seemingly lifeless boy opened his watery eyes. He had stabilized all the injuries caused by the lightning and could sit up. His mind was frantically searching for answers. Yesterday's flash of lightning might have been a coincidence, but it wasn't so today. The weather had changed within minutes, the bolt of lightning was too powerful and struck him right in the head. It was fundamentally different from a natural phenomenon. The energy hadn't come from the ground but from above. Otherwise, the barrier would have been torn to shreds.

Heaven disapproved of mediocrities mastering more elements than their potential allowed. What was so bad about bending lots of elements? Kyon could only imagine his enemies' reaction when they found out that he had mastered all nine of them. If only he could master them. Heaven didn't seem to favor his dreams.

{Am I so incompetent? In any other situation, I wouldn't have mastered the second element. As far as I know, the element gets acquired through enlightenment, but I have never had it... However, Synergy doesn't need luck, fate, or approval of any higher power. Heaven clearly doesn't like that, does it?} - The former ruler of humankind had never had these insane ideas before. He had never imagined that heaven had a mind of its own! It was pure nonsense, but he did not have another explanation. This world was full of mystery and worked according to the local laws. The energy in this world had an internal memory.

{Does it mean that even more terrible lightning will strike me and tear me apart when I am working on the 4th element? Fuck...} - Kyon cursed angrily to himself. He wasn't destined to become infinitely talented, was he? Anyway, he wasn't going to give up.

Kyon caught himself thinking that he didn't know a thing about the world he was living in. What if he did something that would finally destroy him? The library! He urgently needed to study that hidden library and find out everything that he should know. He might learn lots of useful things. At the same time, he would understand how to evolve further and which unique body to choose.

Two hours later, Kyon struggled to his feet and staggered to his room. At this hour, he would meet neither servants nor the maids. There would be no unnecessary witnesses to his miserable waddling.

Punished by heaven, the poor fellow had slept for about 20 hours. The whole day was erased from his life because he needed to restore the internal injuries after the lightning strike. However, there was some good news, too. Synergy had finally completed upgrading his eyes.

What benefits did it give to him?

* It fixed the blind spot inherent in everyone, eliminating the defect of the inverted retina.

* It enhanced his peripheral vision, which felt like his whole eye could absorb the light. Being a lucky Synergy owner, he had enough computing power for image processing.

* He could see in the dark like cats, only his eyes didn't glow.

* He could perceive a wider range of electromagnetic waves from infrared to ultraviolet.

* He got a new feature of the lensing effect of a decent binocular pr an ordinary microscope.

* Pigment glands were created. Now he could change the color of his iris in a couple of seconds.

* Among other things, he could quickly repair any eye injury.

Kyon's eyesight had become so sharp that he could see a needle hundreds of meters away in the dark of the night. The eyes sensitivity was so high that he began to distinguish not only colors but also many thousands of their shades.

The quality of his vision and perception had increased, mainly due to the inverted retina.

All people have an inverted eye. The light goes through many tissues until it finally reaches the photoreceptors cells upside down. Animals like octopus and squid have no such thing. Their vision, respectively, is much better and more sensitive than that of people.

Kyon went to the window and looked around. He had opened his eyes for real for the first time in this world. He was no blind chicken now. His new vision was an indisputable advantage in the battle. Kyon could easily see a sudden attack in the blind zone, spreading poisonous gas, air techniques, and any other possible tricks.

His Synergy had nothing to do at the moment. It was time to give it a new task. Kyon decided to upgrade his hearing, that is, his ears.

He stretched himself and left his room, feeling great. His face had already recovered, his pretty looks restored. He had peeled his dead skin like a dried rind from a tangerine. The burns on his leg had almost healed. It was no problem to restore his brain and nerves with his upgraded nervous system. Without it, even his wonderful Synergy would not have saved him.

And yet, he was shaking with pent-up anger. The "gift" from heaven was unexpected and very unpleasant. Anyone else in his place would have died. Was it a failure, or did the higher ban really exist? He had to find it out. Kyon left his room and went straight to the storeroom, heading for the hidden library.

Kyon was so eager to find out what had happened to him that he had completely forgotten to experiment with the darkness. He had plenty of time for that.

Kyon approached the Social Science section. All he needed was to leaf through the book and it got entirely imprinted in his mind. Synergy would absorb the information later and sort it out in his mind.

Soon, Kyon felt a bit peckish. He hadn't eaten all day and needed a good meal. He called Juno and ordered her to tell the servants to bring him dinner to the "secret" library. In fact, there was nothing secret about it. He could get knowledge in any other library, but this one was locked by an ingeniously clever mechanism. However, anyone could find it with scanning.

Kyon could hear someone coming quietly downstairs.

He put down the book. Was Anna so impressed by her defeat the day before yesterday that she decided to pay a visit to him? What if she wanted to get her rematch?

Kyon turned around and, to his utter bewilderment, saw Dinah, the tall, slim maid who radiated the assassin's chilling aura so familiar to him. Her sexy, relaxed gait could charm any man. Add to that her charming face and the cold gaze of her bewitching gray eyes... How could he stop staring at her most indecently?