Learning how to read

Kalvin stood in a large room that had its insides stacked with books. Shelves of just books.

It was indeed the mysterious location spoken of in many stories. The public

library.

"It been quite some time since I have this kind of place."

Kalvin recalled his days spend in the library. While he had studied CS in College, he still had a few math courses that actually required him to spend loads of time in the library.

While he did not make the place his new place of living like some of the english majors had, he still spend a lot of time there. Some on leisure reading and some for certain projects.

Nevertheless, being in such a place gave him a nostalgic feeling.

But he was on a tight schedule like always and did not like wasting his time if there were other things that could be done.

While smelling the air that contained a slight smell of books was great, especially with his enhanced senses, that managed to capture the scent of paper even from far away, he quickly got on with his search on physics books. There were many thing's he could use physics for. Especially when he could use them to strengthen the effect of his abilities.

Just in case, he also grabbed a few books on fluid dynamics, since this may help him when it comes to his energy gathering.

Thinking back on it, he should probably have done so much sooner.

But crying over spilled milk was pointless.

He had better get to amending his mistake. It would take him further than complaining about it.

After borrowing the whole stack of books for a week, he loaded them into his van to bring them back, along with all of his groceries. An uninformed person would assume that he was probably the owner of some restaurant who was doing some last minute shopping before a big crowd of guests were to arrive, but he was just stocking up for the next week of training.

While he had decided that in the nightmare realm he would now hunt for monsters, with the energy density, that actually seemed to be slightly growing each day, he could still train his body further. Not by much, but it would serve his time better than doing nothing.

In actuality he was already training for most of the day with his Martial arts teacher. He still felt it was not enough. The rapid progress of his training had made it so p, that by now it felt like he was becoming a training addict, doing nothing but attempt to grow stronger all day every day.

But such was only logical. Without the ability to defend himself otherwise and the knowledge that this path he chose to take would lead him to become better in the end, he chose this one without any hesitation.

Driving of to home and restocking his fridge, he contemplated about a solution to one of his problems.

The problem being, that while he was trining, reading a book would be difficult with all the movement his body was doing in the meantime.

One thing he had thought of was to just hover the book in front of his face while he was doing his exercise. But this he noticed, was extremely distracting while not particularly helping him learn anything.

So another thing he had thought up, was using his powers to read the book.

He believed, that since he had already used his power multiple times for sensing thing he did not see, like when he opened locks with it, especially the big vault door, he figured it would be possible to read with it too.

Setting down his training equipment, he walked to his couch, a piece of furniture that had been recommended to him by one of Amelias contacts (and rightfully so, as it was comfortable beyond belief) and sat down before the book he was attempting to read.

Now he would concentrate on reading with his powers, as it would enable many possibility's for him in the future if he pulled it of and allow him to multitask incerdibly well.

This would allow him all kinds of possibilities in the future besides just reading, so it would definitely be wort it.

Focusing his whole one the upcoming task, he stopped using his powers for a second.

For the first time in two weeks, he stopped using his powers. His mind instantly felt much lighter. It was as if he had finally been able to relax after all this time.

With his mind newly freed, he could now focus more easily on the task at hand.

First he tried sensing the slight changes in the paper wherever there was nay letters.

The first attempt he felt nothing. The second as well, there was nothing.

Driving his senses into the thin paper, he could feel the letters if he moved through them.

Instead of seeing the letters like how he was used to, he now only felt the extremely thin cross section

of the letters. The letter A for example started from left to right, like a point moving from the bottom to the top and splitting in two in the middle, only to reunite when going back down to the bottom again.

Simply said, he could only feel only a one dimensional stripe of the letters at each time.

"This is going to suck..." Was all Kalvin said before immersing himself once again in practice.

This practice actually continued until it was finally time for him to reenter the land of dreams.

There he once again went on a killing spree, clearing out all the mist he could find, though he had noticed that there was a lot of smog, that had reformed from the last time he had cleared it out.

Though for now there weren't any orbs floating there yet.

The places he did not clear yet, were already developed further than before.

Not something he liked seeing, as that would mean, that soon the creatures would hatch, probably resulting in them running around the city. And that was with him around to clear them out.

Should the nightmare realm also cover the rest of the earth or at least the neighboring city's, the local nightmare realm would soon be overrun by them.

This should be fine for the most part, since the creatures were not too strong, it was quite unlikley that they could manage to actually harm any people.

Only the moth had shown the ability to enter peoples dreams forcefully until now. And from the scene he remembered, the little goblins should not be able to penetrate the mind barriers with their compared to the moth, puny claws.

As such, there was nothing for anyone besides him to worry about, since the things would only be able to attack him at the moment.

By the time he had to wake up, he had basically taken care of any creatures that could spawn, with the exception of the hospital and graveyard, though he resolved to take care of them in due time.

Like this, he continued learning how to read with his powers alone, which kind of reminded him of the time when he had still been a child, learning the basics of spelling and grammar.

This time lucky, he only had to relearn the letters, since the grammar did obviously not change.

Getting used to flashing dots instead of actual letters had been difficult at first. With due time however he believed that he could master this as well.

First he started with single words. But soon after, he grasped how the letters felt when he passed through them with his power. This way, each word had gotten a certain feeling assigned to it.

He did a few scans on a dictionary he had lying around and tried remembering the sensations of each word.

Surprisingly, remembering the sensations had been quite easy. It was probably a natural feature of the brain. Because even with touching something only once, it was easy to recall the specific sensation. Thus, learning the letters was not all that difficult, if he could match them to the images he saw. It was like how one would just remember how wood felt or how it felt to touch stone. Even when specific details could not be recalled, a certain texture could be matched to any object with almost 100% certainty. Every word had its texture. Thus, in just a short few hours, he could basically read the whole book blind. This was especially the case because unlike brail, he would not miss any part of the texture and could thus learn more easily. While he was still very slow at the moment, with only a few words per minute, with a bit more practice he could probably do it faster.

This allowed him to train and receive the information simultaneously.

"This is so fun. Its like the information goes straight to my memory. It feels almost as if this way of reading is more efficient. I wonder if this is caused by the energy making my body and mind better, or if it is just the way may power gives the information directly to my brain, since it is basically directly linked to my brain anyways?

In the future I may be able to just scan whole books in mere minutes and have the information saved perfectly."

Just the thought of one day just walking into a library and extracting all the useful knowledge from there within mere moments almost made him drool. What he could achieve with all this knowledge was only left to the imagination for now.

"I should definitely put even more focus on fleshing out more aspects of my power. Maybe I could try "*clap* he slapped himself on the cheeks. "No, this comes first. If I learn every ability only halfheartedly before going over to the next, I will not get far.I need to focus on the present and not jump from one ability to the next without mastering any of it."

Only properly developing his foundation would secure his future and assure a steady progression for him and he knew it.

This was an additional reason he cultivated his body to become stronger. Without a strong body, he would be unable to bring out his all in a fight. In addition, a strong body would allow him to move faster when running away from threats he could not beat.

Especially in the early phases of his development when his physical strength was still superior to his psychic, it would do him a lot of good to increase this aspect of himself.

With this thought fresh in his mind, he started his training again, having just finished the phase of recovery. Just that this time, he was also learning and improving his psychic powers at the same time.